Intrinsically Dumb

Hi again. Been a while.

It would have been even longer, except I recently received an email telling me I really should announce my appearance on the latest installment of “Tales From The Bridge”. In my defense, I didn’t know it was out yet; I’ve done four podcasts just this month and a few more are currently under negotiation, not to mention the occasional interview and maybe a personal appearance if you happen to be in Toronto come September. I didn’t know any of it was actually out yet.

Kasey Lansdale, overall Renaissance Woman and Tachyon’s PR person, is really on the ball with this. She’s managed to elicit some effusive blurbs for Fold Catastrophes—suspiciously effusive, even— and a lengthy rave review in an upcoming issue of Locus that apparently everyone but me has seen. I’m not used to this. Tor would’ve just stuck an ad here and there and left the collection to sink or swim. The down side to all this promotion is that I have to, you know. Promote.

So here’s the scoop. Fold Catastrophes is coming out in late September. (Wait, have I even officially mentioned that here? No I have not, with the exception of an offhand footnote in my “Project Hail Mary” review.) Okay, so: Fold Catastrophes. New collection. Previously-published stories for the most part—only one original to the collection— but “previously published” includes stories that otherwise only appeared in obscure Slovenian art journals or German game-culture omnibi, so unless you’re some kind of Annie Wilkes stalker-fan there’ll be a fair mix of old and new material on offer. The collection serves as a foot in the door to aforementioned podcasts, but is by no means their focus. The ones I’ve had so far range all over the place. My old buddies at “Tales from the Bridge” are apparently first out of the gate; you can find us here, or here, or here. (Pick your poison. All those platforms are pernicious in their own way.)

Other podcasts, in various stages of post-production, include Recombination Nation with Shane Simonsen (a post-collapse agricultural ecologist—basically Australia’s answer to Liet-Kynes); Wizards and Spaceships, hosted by poet David Clink, Rachel ‘Sleep of Reason’ Rosen, and several bottles of wine; and “F’ing Up the Ineffable”, cohosted by fellow SF scribe and IT maestro Brian Hill along with Mike Deese (a man about whom the Internet has strangely little to say). None of those conversations really focus on the collection; over on W&S we probably spent more time interrogating David Clink’s taste in women and whether he had any restraining orders against him than we did on Fold Catastrophes. So you needn’t worry about a lot of cringey chest-thumping if you choose to check any of them out.

On the other hand, given the number of appearances and the commonality of their subject matter, there’s some inevitable content overlap. If you’ve heard my stock talking point comparing The Handmaid’s Tale with The Left Hand of Darkness, there’ll definitely be spots where you want to hit fast-forward.

So there. I’ve done it. I’ve promoted.

I hope everyone’s happy now.