Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

And here are your hosts.

John Joseph Adams and David Barr-Kirtley.

Hi, this is David.

And this is John and welcome to episode 69 of Geek's

Guide to the Galaxy. Our guest today is Tad Williams. He's the author of several

novel series including Other Lands, The War of the Flowers, and the Young Adult

Series The Dragons of Ordinary Farm.

His latest book, The Dirty Streets of Heaven, is about a cynical angel named Bobby Dollar, who gets caught up in a conspiracy involving missing souls.

And then stick around after the interview as guest geek Gene Gene Vallentine joins us to discuss angels in heaven in fantasy and science fiction.

All right, so let's get to our interview.

All right, so we're here with Tad Williams.

Welcome to the show.

Well, thank you for having me.

Okay, so first of all, just tell us about your new book, The Dirty Streets of Heaven.

What's it about?

The initial idea was about the sort of similar nature between the standard version of heaven versus hell, you know, the kind of classic

Western Judeo-Christian idea that has developed and the way that the Cold War was actually run

where the whole thing was sort of happening under the surface and all of the struggle was to an extent not noticed by most people most of the time.

The main character is an earthbound angel.

He is at the beginning of the story of fairly, you know, he's

familiar with things. He's part of the process of earthly souls being judged

...