Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 108 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Today on the show Bible Scholars Robert M. Price and Richard Carrier

will be joining us to discuss the recent Darren Arinovsky film Noah.

But first up, we've got an interview with best-selling humor novelist Christopher Moore.

His latest book is called The Serpent of Venice.

And now here's our interview with Christopher Moore.

All right, so we're here with Christopher Moore. Welcome to the show.

Thanks.

Okay, so your new book is called The Serpent of Venice, and it features the return of your character

Pocket who first appeared in your 2009 novel Fool. So tell us about Pocket.

Well Pocket base is based on the fool from King Lear.

Anybody who's familiar with King Lear knows that the fool sort of just disappears

more or less in the middle of the play.

But otherwise he's pretty prominent and and of all of Shakespeare's fools anyway he sort of is the one who speaks the most truth to power

You know he's the in the most actual danger for being a fool which was what I was going for and I had originally just wanted to do a book about

Any fool a generic fool because of that very reason, that truth to power.

And my editor, I met with her in New York and said, look, I want to do a book about a fool, but I don't know whether to do just any fool or

leers fool. And she said, oh, do leers fool. Which, you know, sent me into three years of learning Shakespeare's

canon. And Pocket is sort of he's tiny he was raised in

a nunnery and he's extraordinarily foul mouth and and so not as he politically not very powerful, but he refers to himself physically as a bit of a soggy kitten.

So he's, there's that contrast of him being very, very articulate and sort of the master of any conversation because he's so witty

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