RICK KLEFFEL ON NATIONAL NPR--AND FLOTSAM AND JETSAM

Just a few little things to catch up on, that are either amusing or of interest.

Rick Kleffel (Agony Column) will be heard on National Public Radio, on the national show All Thing Considered, tomorrow. If you want to hear more about SF and Fantasy on national NPR programs, visit the link and email the story to your friends using NPR's email story option at the bottom

Somebody thinks that Shriek would be good reading for a character from Lost.

My Ambergris gets name-checked in a general definition of "Ambergris." (And thus it begins...)

Catch a quick look at the rough of the City of Saints page Mark Roberts is creating for me and Bantam. (It's being re-organized quite a bit--the final will be up in February and I'll blog about it officially then.)

Rajan Khanna proves he wasn't hallucinating when he mentioned this to us in a bar the night after the KGB reading....sorry, Rajan, we believe you now.

Clark Ashton Smith lovers beware: I have written two introductions to books of his, including Out of Time and Space, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press. Here's a short excerpt:

I would offer that there are few writers who seem to write so wholly for themselves, who seem so enraptured in a vision only they can see that they sacrifice accessibility for that vision. Smith, it seems to me, is an outsider precisely because, in pursuit of his own gratification, he makes the reader an outsider, looking in. This is what attracts readers to Smith's writing—that voyeuristic sense of peering in on a world and worldview never meant for us—and at the same time can repel us from it. I do not believe Smith cared one way or the other about the reader, so long as he could write what he wanted to write, in the way he wanted to write it. His visions may thus be incomplete, sometimes cloudy, but they are also to readers today, ironically enough given his pulp origins, undiluted by any appreciable commercial taint.

Finally, I am reading and LOVING George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Yes, I know I come late to this series, but I am just so happy that the Martin of "Sandkings" and "Nightflyers," an incarnation of Martin that I really learned a lot from, has, in the heroic fantasy genre, done something quite extraordinary.

Jeff