This morning, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday broadcast a piece by Rick Kleffel of The Agony Column on economics in genre fiction. In addition to snippets with authors T.C. Boyle, Jeff VanderMeer, Charles Stross, and Amir Aczel, the piece also features about 30 seconds of Yours Truly talking about how Infoquake is “the dot-com ’90s turned up to 11.” (You can listen to the whole thing in RealAudio or Windows Media on the NPR website.)
The interview is just one small piece of a 32-minute interview Rick conducted with me at the NPR studios in August 2006 on the first morning of WorldCon. If you follow the aforementioned link, Rick summarizes the morning pretty well, although he omits two crucial details:
1. The photo of me is actually cropped from a shot of me posing with Anne McCaffrey. Yes, that Anne McCaffrey, the Anne McCaffrey of Dragon Riders of Pern fame. The reason I look sort of hunched over is because I was hunched over with a hand on the back of Ms. McCaffrey’s wheelchair. I read several of the Pern books back when I was a kid, and my wife is a huge fan of her Crystal Singer series, so walking out of the sound booth after my interview to see Anne McCaffrey waiting for her interview to begin was quite a surreal experience.
I don’t mean to imply that she was rude. To the contrary, both her and her son Todd were perfectly lovely, and they gave me a whole stack of signed bookplates to deliver to my wife. The interview Rick conducted with them after I vacated the booth is quite a treat as well.
2. Not only did Rick chauffeur me to the NPR studios and give me exposure to tens of thousands of potential new readers, but he and his wife took me out to lunch afterwards. Seriously. Do people get nicer than that? We went to some fabulous Mexican food place that served burritos the size of my arm — I mean it was literally the size of my arm, from elbow to base of palm. I’m probably twice Rick’s size and I didn’t come close to finishing one of those things, while Mr. Kleffel polished the whole thing off with a smile on his face.
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In other news, the 2006 Philip K. Dick Award short list is out. Alas, I’m not included on it, but Elizabeth Bear is, and Justina Robson is, and Chris Moriarty is. I have to admit that I haven’t read any of the seven nominees. But I’ve heard many, many good things about Chris’ Spin Control and seen my book compared to it many, many times (usually in a context like “Infoquake is okay, but if you’re interested in economic fiction, you really need to check out Spin Control”). So if that book isn’t already on your “to buy” pile, well, it should be.