New Interview

On the Supernatural fan site Morgan's Maniacs, dedicated to actor Jeffrey Dean Morgan (who will also be familiar to the Grey's Anatomy viewers among you).

In other news, belated Happy Birthday wishes to Cheetah, of Tarzan fame. He turned 75 this week. Really.

New Story Online

"Europe." Scroll down about two-thirds of the way.

Also make sure to check out the rest of the creative writing on the site...and if you're into phenomenology or continental philosophy, you'll need to spend the day there.

The Supernatural Book of Monsters, Demons, Spirits, and Ghouls

And a cover for the upcoming Supernatural book, which will take the form of a guided tour, courtesy of Sam and Dean, through their dad's journal, and also through the myriad legends related to the creatures they've tangled with on the show. Also, the Winchester boys talk about some of the other folklore they've investigated during the course of their initiation into the family business. Look for detailed sections on revenants, demonology, herb lore...all kinds of stuff. Ever wondered what Oil of Abramelin is? Look no further. I've just done a couple of interviews about the book and related topics, and will of course put up links to those when they're available.

Ultimates: Against All Enemies

Here's the cover of the Ultimates book. Looks pretty fine, I think. Far as the story goes, here's a selection from the flap copy:

The alien shapeshifters called the Chitauri were defeated in a decisive battle, but suspicious activity leads the Ultimates to believe that not all of the aliens were destroyed in that cataclysmic attack. Stark Industries has developed a means of quickly and easily detecting Chitauri DNA, but the federal government refuses to adopt the technology, claiming that if the tech is widely available, the Chitauri will find a way to fool it.

Frustrated by the government's actions, Captain America takes matters into his own hands, leaking the technology so it can be manufactured and distributed throughout the country. His radical actions sow discord among the Ultimates and within the highest levels of government, raising a troubling question: Could this disunity and chaos be playing into the Chitauri's hands?

Look for it at the end of summer.

Clash of the Myopias

So The Road has won the Pulitzer Prize. Congrats to Cormac McCarthy. And now, cue two parallel processes: literary critics will break the spines of their thesauri, and their sentences, trying to describe the book without using the phrase "science fiction" -- and science fiction fandom will spontaneously combust from a combination of anger that nobody calls the book SF and geekier-than-thou validation that an obviously SFnal text won such a swanky prize. Everybody ties themselves in knots. It's great. Few things are more fun to observe than the collision of myopias.

Unleash the Kraken!

(And yeah, I know that some critics have mentioned the book in the context of SF. Don't curdle my generalized glee with the pedantic application of specificities.)

'God Damn It, You've Got to Be Kind'

Kurt Vonnegut is dead. And because one of the things we do when people die is remember our interactions with them, I'll offer this brief story of failure of nerve. In 1995, or maybe early '96, Vonnegut came all the way to Orono to give a speech at the Maine Center for the Arts. Afterward, a few of us English grad students were going to meet him for a while, maybe have a drink. I went to the speech, which was very funny, as well as very crabby and predicated on the idea that every kid needed to be in a gang...and then afterward, I met the man himself and shook his hand. Then there was going to be this little get-together, with glasses of wine and no doubt Pall Malls (mmmmm, Pall Malls) but I never found out where because I lost my nerve. I got shook. I think what I wanted more than anything else was to talk to the guy without a bunch of other people around, or maybe I was just more afraid of saying something stupid than excited about hearing him say something wonderful; but either way, I shook his hand and made some kind of excuse to the faculty member organizing the group, and then I kited out of there to Pat's Pizza and wrote for a while.

Don't know why I did that.

The Greatest Movie Review in the History of the World

Well, maybe not, but it's the dearest to my heart, now that I've read it (two years after its publication, and now only because Paolo Bacigalupi happened to mention it). When I walked out of the theater after seeing the last Star Wars movie, I had this tremendous feeling of liberation, because at last--after almost thirty years--George Lucas no longer had any hold on me. Anthony Lane, in the New Yorker, puts it more eloquently than I ever could.

Trust Your Feelings, My Ass

I knew it.

New Stuff

In addition to "Wizard's Six," appearing in the June issue of F&SF, my story "Semaphore" will be one of the multitude of attractions in the anthology Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories, out any second now from Bantam...

Also, "Snapdragons," from the Vestal Review a few years back, was recently republished in a Chinese anthology I almost certainly will never see, and will appear in a flash anthology coming from Ooligan Press sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Retro Pulp Tales Wins Stoker

The Subterranean Press anthology Retro Pulp Tales won the Bram Stoker Award for best anthology this past weekend. It's a swell collection of pulpy goodness, with a contribution--called "New Game in Town"--from yours truly. If you haven't checked it out already, the added luster of a Stoker is certainly reason enough, don't you think?