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

Hello and welcome to episode 212 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Jeffrey Ford, author of novels such as The Girl in the Glass, The Shadow

Year, and The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuke.

He's also written well over a hundred short stories,

which have been collected in books such as the fantasy writer's assistant,

the Empire of Ice Cream,

the Drowned Life and Crackpot Palace.

And we'll be speaking with him today about his new collection a

natural history of hell and now here's our interview with Jeffrey Ford.

All right so we're here with Jeffrey Ford. Welcome to the show.

Hi, how you doing, David?

I'm good, good, thanks.

Okay, and so your new book is called A Natural History of Hell.

So just tell us a bit about how this book came about.

Well, it's a collection of stories and, you know, that I've written over the last few years,

and they all deal a little bit with, you know, the devil, evil, you know, hell, basically the hell of living, you know,

what I mean? I set the story into the small deer and they decided to publish

it and I was casting around for a we had a title one of the stories is called the

natural history of autumn and they said look we love the book book, we sent it to the distributor, they really liked it and everything, but the title, it sounds like people going to visit like New England when the leaves change, you know?

So we said we should come up with a different title for it or use a different story as the title.

So we thought about it for a while and I don't know exactly who it was,

...