THE LATEST NEWS

I’m happy to report that Galápagos Regained, my eccentric historical novel about the coming of the Darwinian worldview, is finally in production. The road was long and tortuous, paved by forces not under my control-my beloved agent, Wendy Weil, passed away in October of 2012-but this past autumn my new representative, the estimable ( Read more... )

A FOOTNOTE TO THE SECOND AMENDMENT

It is a little known fact of American history that Ezekiel Isaiah Huckabee, venerable forefather of erstwhile Arkansas governor and eternal Christian gun aficionado Michael Dale Huckabee, attended the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia. Acting in his capacity as a nascent white-male voter residing in ( Read more... )

RAPTURE LITE

I recently picked up a copy of the New York Times bestseller Heaven Is for Real (Thomas Nelson, $16.99), in which Nebraska cleric Todd Burpo recounts his preschool son’s life-threatening peritonitis and subsequent surgeries, an ordeal during which young Colton allegedly enjoyed an audience with the God of Christian revelation.

Sensing an ( Read more... )

Along with forty of my colleagues, I shall be autographing at the Washington Hilton on Friday, May 20th, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM, in conjunction with the Nebula Awards Weekend (1919 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington DC). The signing event is open to the public. Many copies of “Shambling Towards Hiroshima,” one of last year’s losers in the novella ( Read more... )

THE MANICHEAN EXORCIST

As part of our annual Halloween film festival, my wife and I screened the recently released Blu-Ray transfer of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. I hadn’t see the thing since its premiere, and I’d forgotten what a nightmare it is-not in the Gothic sense, but in the sense that the movie seems engineered to give bad dreams to ( Read more... )

I recently had the opportunity to hold forth in cyberspace, the occasion being my interview with the estimable Eric Mays on his internet series called “The Author Speaks.” Being the sort of person who is of almost continual interest to himself, I was struck by some my answers - ideas I didn’t know I had until I attempted to articulate them - and I ( Read more... )

This year’s Nebula Award for Best Novella went to The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, a triumph that obviously meant a great deal to the family and agent of the late and much lamented Kage Baker.

For the past two months, Kate Milford’s blog, The Clockwork Foundry, has featured a series of posts called “The Informed Nebula Voter Project.” Here’s an ( Read more... )

A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by a curator at the New York Public Library, Alice Boone, who is conducting a fascinating cyber-experiment in conjunction with the NYPL exhibition Candide at 250: Scandal and Success.

A Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature at Columbia, Ms. Boone has gathered together a community of scholars and artists and ( Read more... )

I wanted to share an audacious Washington Post piece from Richard Dawkins, in which he makes an interesting point concerning the Reverend Pat Robertson’s recent attribution of Haiti’s pain to an alleged ancestral Satanism. Dawkins avers that, throughout this eschatological donnybrook, it is actually Robertson who has behaved as the legitimate ( Read more... )

THE INVENTION OF THE INVENTION OF LYING

For the past several months I’ve been receiving e-mails from fans of my novella, City of Truth, asking how I feel about the recent Ricky Gervais comedy, The Invention of Lying.

The parallels between my novella and Gervais’ movie are many. Both posit societies in which mendacity is unknown. Both sport plot ( Read more... )