The promised episode of SF Crossing the Gulf focusing on Derryl Murphy’s novel, Napier’s Bones is now available for download. It is deeply spoilerific, but as usual Karen Lord and Karen Burnham have a fascinating conversation and I’m delighted to hear that the book is as cool as I thought it would be. Go have a listen, or maybe buy the book. People who like Tim Powers’ more modern-day novels should love this too.

Towards the end of the podcast, for reasons that will be obvious once you know a bit about the story, our hosts get into a discussion of the relative merits of cricket and baseball from the point of view of a stats geek. They cast the Summon Cheryl spell, but Karen Lord did a good job of channeling me so I didn’t really need to respond. My basic point is that baseball, because of its limited field space and fairly fixed fielding positions, has a more simple set of statistics to work with, which probably makes those stats more powerful.