The SFFaudio Podcast #771 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Pirates of Venus by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The SFFaudio Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #771 – Pirates of Venus by Edgar Rice Burroughs, read by Phil Chenevert for LibriVox. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the book (6 hours, 12 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Alex (Pulpcovers.com), and Evan Lampe

Talked about on today’s show:
Argosy in 6 parts in 1932, the scanning community, go by date, somebody didn’t renew it, sticklerish, The Mad King, The Girl From Hollywood, fantasy oriented, dedicated to the craft of pulpwriting, cranked out words, do 700 episodes, he’s really good writer, Evan was shitting all over this book on Twitter, quibbles, not his best book, let’s start with the poo, my thoughts on Pirates Of Venus, meme with Sorpanos, listen to yourself you sound demented, the attack is…, high on its own supply, its a fantasy, very fantasy, riding the line on self-parody, cutting lose and veering into self-parody, playing with the tropes, Burroughs is demented, what are your problems, strawmans socialism, the same communist revolution from The Moon Maid, wink wink to the KKK, the birdmen, the treemen, they’re simps, unless he’s being ironic, a really bad take, during the depression, escapism?, escapist, his politics, my entire reaction: “really?”, what a freak he is, four books in this series, a fifth book, the ending on this, you’re going to have to read the next book, John Carter books, wrapped up nicely, I’ve got gold here, at least 7 books in that series, signed up to write a bunch of books, see about the politics, gets his money from his great grandfather, soldier in India, continuing the colonial project, Will [Emmons], somehow doesn’t motivate me, why this series doesn’t get the attention that Barsoom does, the takeaway, written as a retro piece, 1912, sword and planet, closer to Leigh Brackett, Weinbaum, a sop to the older readers, Asimov is coming up here, closer to Foundation, we’re moving in that direction, deliberate throwbacks, Burroughs wrote this, no one else, Philip Jose Farmer, no one could do it like he did, these are Burroughs’ sentences, a really fun book, really interesting, there are merits to A Princess Of Mars, same plot, kidnapping dekidnapping, lots of animals and creatures, weird alien not quite monster, anybody there?, crab monster!, kind of annoying, not much happens at the end, she says I love you, there’s no more time in this episode, read the next book, flown away by a birdman, various art, pretty cool, treading water with a sword, pirate ships with no sails, powered by endurium or plutonium or handwavium, a sailing ship with masts removed, in order to recognize it, I’m vaguely familiar with this piece of tech, starts typing, his non-science fiction books, not enough pirates, not enough piracy, the third third of the book, too much trees, earthlike tech, a lot of gun-polishing, that Graeber book, paying close attention, when the revolution happens on the ship, our hero is in charge because he planned the revolution, yeah and if you don’t like it, obey me, that is never how a pirate ship, pirate ships are democracies, communist democracies, a takedown of communism, the Thorist are supposed to be communists, presented so weak, in 1930s America?, the communists were the badasses, he’s wrong not to like them, point to the mountains of skulls, the skull counting, once we start attatching names to particular skulls, 100 million counted Nazi soldiers as victims of communism, the parody of Victims Of Communisms, look at all those guys he killed, Carson Napier, Burroughs is in this story, via telepathy which he learned from a hindu, never uses his telepathy on Venus, only a mechanism to communicate the story, I got it from my uncle, you can go visit his tomb but he’s not really dead, great opening line, he’s not really again, master of illusions never pays off, framework to get it back to earth, astral projection, Spider-Man 2 (2004), Octavius is inventing nuclear fusion, AI controlled arms, a neuroinhibitor chip, build the fusion thing faster, invests 7 different groundbreaking fields of technology, I forgot the moon existed, silly, very instinctual, put the girl in, I need more girl, Sikorsky Amphibian, only left in the world, not a cheap peice of kit, became a stuntman because deathwish because his mom died?, rich and bored, built rocket cars in German, rocket spaceship, Mars is the ceiling, books and a year’s worth of food, Venus is fun, trying to see the Russian revolution, the narrative was so different back then or…, it’s not in the text, am I stupid?, socialism or communism, economic systems, violent revolution, that’s the core of it, everyone becoming equal and level, no more kings, complete leveling, giant dormitories, children will be raised by the state, strains of that, communal kitchens, the history of cooking utensils, the ideal city of the future, westerners writing about it, writing a place they’ve not, everybody eating in cafeterias, H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, what drove people to socialism, socialist agitation, socialism in the 1880s, economic necessity, suffering in the streets, I don’t want to live in a tenement, the thinkers of socialism, William Morris, an idyllic and pastoral future, freed from stupid work, how pirates work, a great scene, I’m not giving up my weapon, if he’s really critiquing socialism/communism, that’s a parallel of that, prisoners aka slaves, clean guns all day, prisoners with jobs, seize the weapons, important officers, a new officer class, I’m not going to give up my gun, another guy laughs and the revolution is over, if I’m just handsome dashing main character, the NPCs fall in line, the pirate campaign, Pathfinder, the PCs: we’re gonna kill all of them, treat people as people, a lot of people operate their lives that way, some bureaucracy, denying someone a kidney, the United States is worse at than most countries, so many levels of bureaucracy, University Of Kansas, Uncle Remus magazine, these are really bad we don’t endorse these things, a 600 word essay, we hate racism, we don’t endorse racism, are you sure you want to click on this?, trigger warnings, a button on google: I feel Lucky, the whole point is they want to curate your experience of reality, a piratical revolution, the jongs and the thorists, the royal guy has a cute daughter, the extent of my thoughts, a serious critque of communism, you don’t know what you’re talking about, you can choose your master, choose me, some other boss you can work for, the surplus army of labour, Carson Napier doesn’t because he has inherited money, it’s been washed, his mom was perfect, extracting value from Indian colonialism, that’s not the way to make money, an absolute spendthrift, hire the Mexican government, rocket sled, sitting on an omnibus in the 1930s, that’s me one day, peak pulp era, when the Shadow was big, Batman, am lift, Doc Savage, independently wealthy, inherited wealth, found gold mine in South America, he owns twitter now, on the Wikipedia entry, it’s just not that, the main thing they do, separate class systems are a bad idea, each is respecting each other, when there’s somebody from the lower classes, bullshit statements, no such thing as marriage, also no infidelity, a fantasy of humans and how they, sword AND pistol, shoot your enemy from across the room, had I known this guy was so good at swordfighting…, once again sheer dumb luck, literally astronomical odds, living in the ewok village, a shared balcony, this is your big security system, the mansion can only be so big, absolutely required, this has a recipe, they’re always princesses, he is never a king, he’s an up and comer, I’m officer class, I don’t even believe in presidency, I believe in royalty, very successful businessman, hyping things, let’s make a movie out of it, Tarzana at this point?, WWII happens, I’m going to be a journalist now, put on military officer uniform, his own fantasy life, soup kitchens, moving from state to state, horrors of being superpoor, like Stephen King he has a knack, on the back of letterhead, compared to Robert E. Howard, always poor, he’s got a car, didn’t try to sell to Weird Tales, he has magic fingers, Max Brand, such a huge hit, $100,000 or something, WWI deserter to wealthy man right into WWII, he bought that whole part of southern California, maybe it was the movies, he was the #1 selling authors of the 20s, and those movie serials, Johnny Weissmuller, Sheena is sexy, everyboduy thought he was the greatest thing ever, later Tarzan, really crazy real fast, arab shiek, hunting lions, too close to the daughter, lost Atlantean colony, sexual dimorphism gone crazy, shipwrecked, where Tarzan’s parents died, lost Roman legions, hollow earth, Pellucidar, weird ghost letter, marriage, line marriage, should’ve been a line marriage book, obsessed with monogamy, whoever Mrs. Burroughs was, life extension, amazing laser tech, amazing medical tech, radios, effective maps of their planet, all fun, the NPC handwaving problems away, he has an explanation that’s bad, low fertility, the Thorists want both, secret recipe, the scientists, such a strawman, not recognizable, and Marx starved two of his own children, they were so fucking poor, we don’t have enough food, an immigrant, that can’t be true, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he was sad about his kids dying, infant mortality was really high, terrible service, he may have said that, other people may have seen that, the pop culture view of communism, people say lots of bad things about Putin, that’s the character your making in your head, The Efficency Expert, The Mucker, Tarzan Of The Apes, cringey because of the hanging, we’ve done this before, fishmen, Lost On Venus, not enough time with the birdmen, Heinlein’s 4 years away from this, Heinlein’s Time For The Stars, twins shows up every once in a while in Heinlein, indistinguishable twins, Space Cadet, his plan for the UN and nukes, the intro part, joining the army, going through basic training, when you nuke your own city, very aware of his audience, you’ve got to close your eyes and drop marbles into a beer bottle, proprioception,, arbitrary tests, you’re a grown boy, the female princess daughter of Duras, green screen, darker skin, green skin space babe, Star Trek, hot alien, sometimes she’s brunette, vaguely Arabic looking, pretty, the trees are not green, presumed pink, in contrast to Mars being the red planet, green being Venus, in the injury to his buddy, the wounds, Shelob, this is a fantasy book in almost every respect, rocketships to the Moon before this, gun to the Moon, Cavorite trip to the Moon, an anti-gravity, Weinbaum comes in, well actually, she lives in a bottle, a jellyfish floating in the clouds, that’s your gene pool, you can romance it, laid eggs, women have breasts but they lay eggs, the element of the KKK, not a condemnation, why does he bring it up?, a thing that’s popular, making these alien names, Olthar, Camlot, taking sounds, Amtor, fiddling around, he is so not J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien goes to farm, elfish poetry, where elfen poetry was once read, he enjoys himself, nobody asked for this, Tolkien is the anti-Burroughs, noodling around in his own head, my books should not be lowered [to paperback], pirated in the United States, Evan making a defense of The Lord Of The Rings tv show, the orcs, the orc stuff was really based, the Galadriel stuff was really good too, just a woke cuck, Jesse doesn’t know what a simp is, you gotta watch more streamers, why do these guys come up every three years, Vaush, Matt Christman, Evan likes both, he’s like a troll, he’s pretty good at that, most of what Vaush says is on point, there’s something wrong with Evan’s brain, and yet I have not murdered you, these should all just be podcasts, Jesse doesn’t need video, playing Elden Ring and just listening to it, are people still Elden Ringing, we’re all boomers, we all live in the age of US supremacy, I’d have a boat, consumer republic, less and less relevant, 26 Tarzan books, lost colony of Atlantis, a James Bond figure, where Tarzan was seriously assigned, is Tarzan a book about empire?, a really good insight into this period of time, maybe My Little Pony is comprehensible, I’m a dude, I wouldn’t say no to a loincloth and a knife made out of stone but 26 books, L. Frank Baum, 14 Oz books, basic language, generational, coming out every couple of years, Harry Potter, the Glinken country, the Yellow Brick road is about the gold standard, William Jennings Bryan’s cross of gold speech, 100 years later, is it the fact that this is supposed to be a critique of communism, blatant, the state’s controlling you, as opposed to the king, it wasn’t a libertarian revolution, more parallels to the French Revolution, that’s what was happening, something racist about Oz?, all of it was racist, pay not attention to the man behind the curtain, the emperor’s new clothes, useful concepts that come out of literature, people knowing them, a psychological defense, a psychological arm-bar with concepts, a series of images, a girl away from home, all on a quest, place everybody’s talking about, going to Hollywood, that’s exactly right, the Emerald City is a complete lie, to keep the emeralds from blinding you, a good concept, as a young person, in a different way than Encyclopedia Brown, the sword that says awarded after the first battle of Bull Run, the Battle of First Manassas, the only kid with Wikipedia on his phone running around solving crimes, The Only Man On Mars With Wifi, detective solves with chat GPT, list the clues in chat GPT and it will tell you who did the crime, a telephone chat GPT that uses spam callers waste their time, Hello Mrs. Blah Blah Blah, if you’re in India or Pakistan and your name is Simon or Stephen, this person’s a little weird, oh there’s a bee on my arm, an elderly person who can’t hear very well, the chat GPT salesperson, email and phone calls have been destroyed by spam, this was a fine book, direct messages, Burroughs Sucks As Does This Tweet, an ideology that has killed millions of people, it’s not an argument, not even a satire, I need some bad guys, what do bad guys look like, the sequels to The Moon Maid, so he could get to the totalitarian communist future, Red Dawn-style, let’s not do that, they’re Moon communists, when Will read about, protestant emotional repression, her brows knit in thought, what is that?, love, it is wicked, is love wicked on Amtor?, whatever her name is, without sinning, the daughter of a jong, Korean word for king, what are the odds he knew that?, not good, he believes everything he’s writing, not a construction, but an explication, not a lot of ideology, the win condition is marrying the princess, a storytelling technique, little girls want to be princesses, its okay for the dude to marry up into a princess family, the girl wants to marry into a competent family, Edgar Rice Burroughs is a fantasy men, Cinderella is a fantasy for women, Prince Charming is faceblind, spicy foods for everybody to enjoy, laughing about him, laughing along, they’re not set aside, The Mad King, in all of these books, it can’t be just a regular girl, it has to be , even the one about working at Sears (The Efficiency Expert), daughter of a high class person, romance for men in the same way that Conan is, Conan’s class consciousness, American men have always been incels, Jesse doesn’t use that language, dreaming of marrying up, how the incels talk, chads get all the girls, left miserable, but they can read Burroughs, hypergamist, the men always marry up, marrying up, he’s not, Zenobia is not a queen, Conan makes her a queen, she was a harem girl, she was not a virgin princess, a class thing there, Howard would have been wealthy had he lived longer, he wasn’t in bookstores, Lovecraft would have been wealthy, the demand is high, when reading Robert E. Howard, different kinds of games, sometimes he says “what is the nature of reality” and then he stabs the wizard, satisfied for a moment, showing up on LibriVox, we’ve seen it before, Howard is capable of much more on this guy, he’s not substantive, YouTube podcast, frothy and fun and light, compared him to Stephen King, a different cast, Burroughs never talks about kids, King talks about kids, kid protagonists, he has a lot more to say, most writers have more to say, space em out, adventure, avoid execution, marry the princess, The Girl From Hollywood, a female finding a man?, none of his popular stuff, no Tarzan books need to be Jane centered, Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen comics, Superman’s girl friend, Supergirl, Jungle Girl, everything is about Superman, she’s always sexperving on Superman, is this what girls want?, Cambodia, stories for boys, a female protagonist story, he was a brand, you don’t want to piss off the audience, what the romance writers do, hardboiled detective under another name, The Cave Girl, a lost world novel, 1913, Dolores Claiborne, chain people up on beds, Gerald’s Game, domestic abuse, Misery, Rose Matter, Lisey’s Story, Outlaw Of Torn, relaxing rather than engaging, a society made out of tree people, other criticisms?, Donald E. Westlake, Killing Time, territories respected, a fine place to live, an anti-corruption investigator, 210 pages, still working on a couple, Mating Center by Frank Belknap Long, Hay Ibn Yaqzan by Ibn Tufail, guys raised by a gazelle, time next year, not that great, Paul will be upset by it, too much mating, specialized job, we’re there, reproduction is also a specialized job, horny people out in society, a frightening view of life in 2061, hey, we’re guarding, that Ninteen Eighty-Four cover, Winston Smith and Julia, lesbians in prison, encourage Evan to finish, he’s andalusian, Andalusian Aristotelian, Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson, Rima The Jungle Girl, Green Mansions, a primitive girl, Abel, Tarzan from South America, Sheena, The Jungle Book, another Kipling thing?, Citizen Of The Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein, reading the writers who read stuff, it isn’t super-literary, reading material, Rocket Ship Galileo, Jack London would have made it the center of the book, the counter to Burroughs, fantasy strawman, fantasy animals, life is mean, let’s have fun, how much did Burroughs read?, hold my beer, he probably read the newspaper and a few pulp magazine, rips off Prisoner Of Zenda, today we have a lot of writers who are writing to make movies or tv shows, what’s so amazing about a good book, using the medium what it’s for, it is what it is, assigning a bunch of Ted Chiang stories, psychology, assign these short stories, grumble at first, they’re simps, they’re boomers, he’s short and he hits, they’re not designed to be adapted, Burroughs’ Tarzan is easy to adapt, some plants and a rope, Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker, how we use language, so psychologically relevant, substantive, that’s what you get for giving a historian the job, not your thing?, he marries a princess who’s an orangutan, like Robinson Crusoe, Rousseau would’ve loved this book, noted father, how to raise children to be free, Plato is wrong but he has amazing ideas, we can use those things, bad maps give us maps to territories that we can get to and give us better bad maps, commentary on education, the point of education, bye kids, I gotta go write about being free, Jesse is tryna be free, make the most of their freedom, what does Alex do about this, a weird high school, very lucky and happy, worry about college, college can be fun, top schools, Asians are the new white people, University of Minnesota Duluth, homeschooled, you’re going to horse school, you’re going to be a farmer, locked in, my cheques are going over there, homeschool, something to do, big college tip, under recognized as a great place to meet a spouse, just marry a princess at your college, this is the person I really like, Midwest cow college, with cows, between Indiana and the Rocky Mountains, north of the Ohio river, Brown, first major boss was a Brown Phd and a major dick, he really wanted to be a manager, he was right about that, fun trouble, save your anger up for the show, provoking Evan, the first 2 hours, the ideology that killed the most, this boring shit, Burroughs took quite a dump, he can go fuck himself, oh come on, not that much more to do, he has a lot of sequels, maybe if youre in a factory job, you’ve got a big commute, your escape on the way to work, 6 hour podcast, 8 hour podcast at work, putting up with a lot of shitty shit Jesse says, the secret to his success, doesn’t explain Stephen King that well, he knows people, brain mashing, Burroughs isn’t a character writer, both are incredibly smooth in transferring thoughts into your brain, there’s no difference, they’re blank slates, Carson is a lot less competent, incredibly stupid mistakes, he’s a sloppy researcher, John Carter was hypercompetent, he’s like The Highlander, hypercompetent, has superpowers, he’s Superman, gentleman adventurer, luck saves him again, coulda used a Woola, alien companion dog, an inversion of The Star Beast, explicitly just people, space tiger, Weinbaum’s a genius, he’s jokey, why the genre moved on, this is kinda retro, The Mysterious Island, the wish fulfillment engineer story, building the ship, inventing the thing, Black Priestess Of Varda, rawer, Erik Fennel, near the end, he’s just a romance guy, really, how do they even have the concept of a year, they don’t even have the sun, Farscape.

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Pirates Of Venus by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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The SFFaudio Podcast #762 – READALONG: Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #762 – Jesse, Paul Weimer, Evan Lampe, Terence Blake, and Jonathan Manfred Weichsel talk about Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Talked about on today’s show:
get people to believe he’s Terence, J stands for Jonathan, Manfred sounded cooler, just change your last name to Scalzi and all the blessing will come, you can replace Heinlein, this John Scalzi book called Sixth Column, serialized in Astounding, not based on a Heinlein idea at all, the original idea was Campbell’s, all the problems it has are Heinlein’s fixings, Jack Vance shitting on Campbell, psychics and telepathy, well done for a bad idea, not one of his best, major works, thought experiment, opposite thought experiment, Revolt In 2100 in reverse, theocracy, make people believe, If This Goes On is Revolt In 2100, revolts against people in power, revolution, fighting against the forces of prophet, pan-Asian tyranny, motives of the character, technomage weapon, falls for a girl, the movement culture makes the ideology, the change in him, less emotional growth, learns to become a rebel, how people get radicalized: through women, against god, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, the conspiracy element, the secret society within and a false leader, Adam Selene, Mike, the disciple is coming, enjoyed the book, one of the strongest competency fantasies, this Ledbetter effect, what a Campbell move, they’re genetically different from us, isn’t the US filled with other than white people too?, race is a thing, in the original texts, the whites vs. the pan-Asians, setting from Asian to not Asian, tone down some of the binary, unfixable, Anson MacDonald was racist, tiny brain – galaxy brain, old Heinlein, troll way you want to do it, changes, some city has been atom-bombed, considering the year, it starts when the war was over, we’re the werewolves of this Nazi empire, individual stories were fighting, you can make the argument they’re still there, on the Moon?, still guys in the mountains, people being killed into the late-1940s, ideological true believers, a hand that touched them to make them military, an uprising, a prison revolt, start a religion to solve a problem, a very American move, the turbans and the staffs, the beards, he stacked the deck, pan-Asianism, this less is less bullshit, the pan-Asian movement, Noble Drew Ali, Moorish Science, fezzes, little Hitler mustache, if this was happening in your community, government did stuff, the Black Muslim movement, Nat Turner, a movement out of Japan, the Black Dragon Society, take over Asia, Pan-Asian Orientalism, they’re trying to create a force against European colonization of Asia, unequal treaties, China, an attempt to unify counties under threat, nationalism, a congruency there, civic nationalist ideas, anschluss, an Ottoman identity, Pan-Africanists, Sun Yat-sen, the Asia for the Asians idea, largely a creation of the Japanese, the Japanese Empire, we have to fight the imperial power, they’re bad like us, as a way to avoid war and fight the west, Manchurians, national ambitions, disconnect between political realities and what unites us in people’s minds, post-colonial African, a pan-Germanist, a pan-Europeanist, subject to the master race, propaganda to that extent, not serious about pan-Asianism, Savage Headhunters, Shinto, edge out the other religions, atrocities, the Rape of Nanking, they weren’t being altruistic, the psychology of creating this book, it’s the Japanese, a god emperor somewhere in Asia, they conquered India, this pan-Asian government, the Soviets, Korea, set in the future, flying vehicles, The Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard, 1940, the end of the world, Europe is off the map, Beyond Thirty by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the South Pole, a similar setup, blackout and curtain, blackout curtains, they’re out of the game, a country knocked out of the Risk game, right before the novel begins, the United States is washed up, a plothole in the book, buildings, people walking around, it wasn’t bombs, a electromagnetic weapon, Washington is gone, the last flight out, Cheyenne Mountain, where NORAD is, Colorado Springs, tentacles, a fun book, the swami hats, the halos, he can sell it to Campbell, Heinlein operating at the Anson MacDonald level, early Heinlein comedy, the great God Motar, it got the cover, the conversation with the prince, the Divine Hand, silly and racist, funny dialogue, if Japan wins, states make nations, a national identity, folklore, flags, constitutions, anthems, winning in Asia, controlling this vast empire, give it enough time, a white republic became multi-ethnic, the original illustrations, the troops look Japanese, the Hand looks Manchu, scholar hat, more Chinese than Japanese, Mongolian, mongoloid, the five races theory, they’ve got a religion too, a divinity aspect, they don’t understand American religion, just use Christianity, Japanese spies, Francis Xavier, Commodore Perry, the Non-Intercourse Act, Trinity RPG, why can’t you close yourself off, capitalism won’t let you, the Khmer Rouge, the 1st world, the 2nd world, and the 3rd world, unequal treaties, you’re trading with us now, we set the terms of the trade, gunships, they are really good at this colonialism, free trade, snuggle up, after a war, more unequal than others, Cuba is not allowed to trade with the United States, open up countries to trade, many port cities, everybody get their own port, a lot of dissatisfaction, you are the slave class now, protectorate, brutal, this isn’t as racist as it could be, these two groups think race is a thing, you have to buy in, a biological fact, what the theme is, defeated by your prejudices, binary racist skeleton plot, what leads to decline and downfall is a set of prejudices, a native American born Asia, subject to the ray, Heinlein doing his Heinlein thing, I’m different from him, so about racist, police are the same everywhere, will they stay bribed?, pedagogical motifs, people are prejudiced, the summary of the first 2 parts, the Blitzkrieg of the United States Empire, the Citadel, military research, Ardmore works hard, Colonel Calhoon, believes himself to be Mota, or Motak?, he’s John W. Campbell, complete atomic power, selective death ray, a general solution of unified field, well behaved slaves require religion, encouragement and disencouragement, render under Caesar, African American religion, religion is a delusion, Stranger In A Strange Land, so much time focusing on religion, it’s a fake from the beginning, he’s Jesus, the disciple depicted, black and a thousand feet tall, Joseph Smith (not Jesus), doing more than one thing, Valentine Michael Smith, the disciple of Jesus, vanishing people, he dies like Jesus, stoned to death, but didn’t come back, the Mormons get a very favourable mention, a good version of religion, practical, the business aspect, they’ve got good business sense, an infinite money generator, Robert Heinlein being a gold bug, a DC superhero character from the 40s, Doctor Fate, The Flash with a WWI helmet, Babylon 5, not for religious purposes, a Mormon-like branch of Christianity, mumbo jumbo, invent and remember, a short novel, people offended by this, an evangelical branch of Christianity, ripped from daily headlines, slot-machines in their megachurches, come die with us anyway, people die for Christianity all the time, there is a third rail in the United States, American friends, there are Canadian religious people, tied to the land in the U.K., writing for a very secular Science Fiction magazine, make up a Christian religion and say it’s all fake, people would be very offended, when the Beatles compared themselves to Jesus, Dungeons & Dragons, third hand worried, when the panic came out, an American media thing, spill-over, the one with Harry Potter, if it gets to be a big enough interest, having fun, all the names, the other aspects of Mota, reading this in the 1940s, smile slyly inside, he’s being sneaky but I get it, it works as an anti-religious polemic, what makes this a lesser book, if Evan got his away, people would think about it in a different way, tying Americanism to Christianity, John W. Campbell’s All, racialism, using the dopey religion, so religious they’d be wrong about using Christianity, the conversations with the Christian believers, wrestling with using this fake religion, so contrived, For Us, The Living, just ignore Europe, the religions of Iran or Turkey, Chinese didn’t know that Americans were Christian, an Iron Curtain around the United States, closed off from the rest of the world, Donald Trump, build a wall around America, consume itself in war, Heinlein has no interest in Europe, Hitler, Medieval European, a feudal Catholicism, like monks living in cells, armour, nuns, charismatic Christianity, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, literalist, the Republican party, living in Job’s universe, atomic power, the serial we are about to read, fair probability, the effectiveness of invention, plausible, the whole setup is wholly implausible, invasion literature, if we had this setup, so many coincidences, they just happen to…, so constructed so as to be not one of his best book, whoever that is, definitely Heinlein, biggest problems, general acceptance of drugs, magic, the drugs only have the effect they say on the label, you have to take sleeping pills, also I don’t you getting up, konking you out, a naivete about drugs, good healthy skepticism, what happens right after these pre-WWII books, a think tank to help win the war, L. Sprague DeCamp, commissioned as an officer, pressure suits, Astounding [by Alec Nevalla-Lee], is the tech ripe, tech-bro, is there government funding for this thing, Larry Niven and Benford, rods from god, beat the Soviets, same thing, let’s think up scenarios, now everybody has to take their shoes off forever, you could combine liquids and make a bomb, endemic and super dangerous, the Slan effect, reading a Philip K. Dick novel, now I can run the world, that guy is weird, what maleness means, maybe children are smarter than adults, principles, all you have to do is take your hypnodrugs and you can learn languages, he can’t see it about himself, spin-up, he’s wonderful, it’s hokum, man can he write, criticism of Heinlein, sexual politics, the collapse of America, not for the betterment, to undermine things, the society of Friday, Balkanized, royals have moved to Canada, California, Ottawa, never a threat to world peice, a planetary society, the beanstalk in Kenya, she’s the James Bond working for a secret organization, tied to Gulf, in the future of Gulf, a take that at his own work, takes his own piss, time travel pussy one: The Door Into Summer, why Evan needed to do Heinlein for his podcast, he’ll mention other countries, he’s trying to bomb America, bombing the Taj Mahal, mostly he just cares about the United States, practically the United States, he’s so smart and good at spinning up, no impact with working at the navy yard, the Edison trust goes on, like G.E. or Bell, Bell Labs, their existence is there because they’re a trust, wild speculation, you’re given the monopoly so you have to give back, he’s got transmutation, lead into gold, poison gas into oxygen, there’s a change in energy, win WWII with alchemy, a broad comedy, very comedic, forgettable Heinlein, religion as a mask for science, power-play, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, Dune, is the religion fake in Dune?, planted, a psychology of the masses, staff officers, soft sciences, planted the seeds for that chapters, precedents, Orphans Of The Sky, Universe, the science became a religion, gravity as a metaphor, a secret society, long and too big, the concept is really cool, he takes the long view, six months?, how many years are they at this?, couple years at most, he has only three issues to write it, where did this idea start in American literature, Mark Twain’s criticism of the Christian scientists, diet books, Extract From Captain Stormfield’s Visit To Heaven biblical justification, post-apocalyptic, what’s the name of that story?, many different satires of religion, hardly anybody there speaks English, they jailed his corpse, are they believing their own shit, Theosophy, L. Frank Baum, you can’t say I’m an atheist, having an argument ready, what’s a Christian, take you to their temple, what’s that?, judo flipped them, join someone else’s services, soul-searching, doing good, whatever names doesn’t matter, unity of all faiths, a scientific based version of the theosophical ideology, Muslim cleric in a Jewish temple, the audiences take it, the scientiologiston the street corner, we welcome Christian, play to whatever, they don’t start with you’re wrong, I worship Mithra, The Altar by Robert Sheckley, Two Dooms by C.M. Kornbluth, half-colonized America, a very C.M. Kornbluth story, if Weinbaum had lived, could have been bigger than Heinlein, nobody’s trying to say Scalzi’s the new Weinbaum, Zelazny death anniversary thread, google nGram, his works aren’t in print, locked away under copyright, H. Beam Piper is bigger than it ever was, the evidence is huge but Paul is not convinced, Scalzi wrote a reboot of the public domain book, after 1963, sinecure, go to youtube and look at all the views and compare to sales on audible, it’s huge, I only read free, free as I can do anything I want with it, a certain racial slur against African Americans, the good stuff rises, peter want the better stuff, the bad covers on Amazon are commercial, excised, taking offense by being babied, flatfaces, yellow monkeys, aliens, slanty-eyes, slanties, made that up for this book?, made up slurs are less problematic, thought experiment, Farnham’s Freehold next, pan-Africans invading the United States, The New Sun, we’ve got some white guys we need to hate, the token guy, Heinlien is anti-racist, the character is in the serial, who would die from their beam, the antidote to the racism in this book, lifeboat rules, a prejudice you have to overcome, just take this pill, go in with a ray and kill cleanly, soul-searching, get over your prejudices, promoted instead of fired, took the black pill, have you ever butchered a hog, Heinlein wrote these lines, pages and pages of dialogue Heinlein talking to himself, walking down the street of Des Moines, roll tanks, you’re a slave now, handing out gold, one foot in the Great Depression, soup kitchens, poor relief, Beyond The Horizon, in this era of his career, the changing nature of the stake, ambivalent, biases, dismissing female priests, can’t wear the beard, the oppressor, comfort women, mobilizing the women, traditional, burning the past, no research in it, hara-kiri everything’s to do with face, white women turned into comfort women, we need to liberate women, all hands on deck, salable chattel, 1911, anarchist feminist Chinese radical, comfort stations, a discussion in Japan about the new woman, changing the roles of women, the audience for this, written real fast, writing so much, chronological read through of Heinlein, the development of ideas, not an issue in 1941, the future history stories are under Heinlein, a rule throughout magazines, whole issues written by Robert Silverberg, we need more L. Sprague DeCamps, guess Caleb Saunders is getting a cheque today, recruiting guys, almost every issue, one year of Astounding, off magazines, a quarter of the way through, a future history laid out, And He Built A Crooked House, competence fantasy, Elsewhen, if I was running the war, Civilization with infinite gold or tanks, fun but weak, a pressor beam a sucker beam, the stacks were stacked against, the chess move, god damn them, enjoyable but a weak book, Paul didn’t enjoy reading this book?, the gun one, compare, by Paul, going at it on Twitter, it’s about guns, head and shoulders above this one, silly, a paycheck, I have this story here, unsalable, doesn’t stop him, Campbell’s writing was never amazing, maybe you could do something with this, more ambitious, social credit, post-scarcity, honor culture, a gun controlled society, cultural regulation, also not one of his best, one of the best of his early works, The Green Hills Of Earth, the novels that go down hill, crackin little ideas, he excels at novels, Friday is a really good book, bulky, falling in love with your rapist, a relationship with the guy, some mitigating fiction, your puritan locked down guy, a bit strange, a minor bug, Heinlein is at his best when he’s challenging you, shallow appreciation of Starship Troopers, the classroom stuff, arguing against, engage, come to an agreement, some candidate for the evil party, raise the age to 25, as a platform, get more people not to vote, does the Army vote for Biden?, the cultural perception, officers vs. non-officers, pro-war vs. anti-war, what’s the purpose, explicitly telling you this is for engagement, that speaks very well to the society, indoctrinate, in comparison, to write about his present, a veteran teaching the class, teacher pay, anything that will disrupt, learning things, conformity, marks are a way of controlling, we gotta do way more of that, a weird book, a classroom setting, a very complex book, a poll before the election, the 2020 election, the Army voted for Biden, go talk to the people, 2016, a choice between warhawks, Paul needs to flee, Clark Ashton Smith, a google ngram, you see the spikes, Edgar Allan Poe compared to H.P. Lovecraft, work it to make it work, Silverberg’s Downward To The Earth, 1981, Majipoor, throw in a contemporary of both of them, his presence doesn’t drop like Zelazny’s, H.G. Wells, pushing people’s buttons, not as controversial, challenging, Harlan Ellison, mostly a TV guy, mostly essays, Edgeworks, really bad press, full of typos, shoulda been smarter, reprint rights, number one is Ray Bradbury, he’s part of the curriculum, book guy, if you wanna be big you have to be mandated, Bradbury is safe and tame, he’s not great, he’s good, he’s got real good stuff, The Martian Chronicles, The Veldt, A Sound Of Thunder, he’s all about the feeling, he’s nostalgic, his ideas always have to do with feelings, what makes Fahrenheit 451, books are good, he’s in the slicks, his novels come later, his first movie is so flat, Rocket Ship Galileo, the worst Heinlein movie is the one he was involved with, was he smoking, Waldo, Magic Inc., a messy publication history, a lot of fixups, The Penultimate Truth, the Virginia Collection, full of typos, archive.org, The Unpleasant Profession Of Jonathan Hoag, at a certain point, I love Heinlein, I hate him, I love him so much, wow!, the market is drying up a little bit, that furious pace, that was his job, he was a fiction writer, Hal Clement was a teacher, Searchlight, All You Zombies, he loves the drugs, By His Bootstraps, how can he be so trusting of drugs?, he’s a tech bro, isn’t it the same worldview?, they’re the problem solvers, COVID on the brain, ivermectin, Jesse gets credit for something?, not that long ago in the 1970s and the 1980s, Alzheimer’s vs. dementia, cancer’s an old one, cancer is fundamental, the chances get greater and greater, a Whiggish view of science, revised or updated, why be so arrogant about our own views, historian, Heinlein: Tech-Bro by Evan Lampe, disrupting systems, taking government funding, the French Revolution, Enlightenment tech-bros, how about a 10 day week, the Temple of Reason, we got some good stuff out of that, Silicon Valley, they’re lighting, disruption is good, computer miniaturization, making things small and faster, multi-threads, a legit improvement, it doesn’t scale to non-hardware very well, running cooler, can do more at a faster pace, the software is magic on top of it, your monthly subscription, a Philip K. Dick story, Cory Doctorow, Australia has month, you will own nothing and you will eat bugs, funny on slack, mass resistance to the policy, why do students have phones with them, the Cory Doctorow explanation, the Evan Lampe explanation, Douglas Adams, cell phones looks like crumpets, a mainstream guy, the zoomers have revisited the Karl Marx line, my cell phone is trying to kill me, William Gibson, hacking the gibson through my cortex, Transmetropolitain by Warren Ellis, Neal Stephenson, because they’re geniuses, after whuffie, how good my camera is, how fast the wifi is, how come i don’t have a clip tray in my Windows, better and better then real bad, Mark Twain, the Civil War, avoiding poetry, 100 page poems, take a break from Mark Twain, both very Americans, traveled a lot, wrote for a living, Innocents Abroad, Life On The Mississippi, A Tramp Abroad, a short story that’s an anecdote, A Literary Nightmare, Anthony DeSimone, the story of a meme, feels relief, an early example of a meme, a little rhyme to remember ticket prices, so fuckin good, so clear but also has stuff to say, started out very optimistic ended cynical, gilded ages, everything travel, The Number Of The Beast, sick in bed, bedridden, trails off into nonsense, veers into the wrong direction, To Sail Beyond The Sunset, episode 103, Time Enough For Love, gonna explain something in Methuselah’s Children, he’s his own grandpa, very Heinlein, maybe that’s a different book, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, upcoming slots, Paul’s not available, the first Carson of Venus novel in on LibriVox, it’s different, builds a rocketship, crashes on Venus, a parody of the competency narrative, wrong way Carson, read it as a self-parody, Bison Frontiers of Imagination, Pirates Of Venus, unusual for Burroughs, Lost Of Venus, do the Heinlein, Black House, Logan’s Run, Clifford D. Simak, a VR novel, Lord Dunsany, Michael Crichton, Progeny by Philip K. Dick, (Alex) Pulp Covers, bother Paul, totally racist, still really good, the mom’s an alcoholic and the dad’s a lawyer, the drama of it, the family relationships, mixed African race, enslaved all the white people, all good, he’s experimenting, The Puppet Masters, people in a certain class, different shades of skin, being extra-specially sensitive to this stuff, they’re just people, people are people, they’re all Americans, he thinks men and women are very similar, Heinlein’s sexual politics, screenshotting, raping his own daughters, sexy Heinlein books, they go to the future, skinny dipping, he likes lookin at ladies, missing in Sixth Column, a similar scene, the rebels are all nudists, Heinlein got over it, being comfortable with his body, marriages, he’s right about that shit, people bang more, abolish gender?, nudism in Nazi Germany, body culture, ready for the military, read the back of the comics, if this goes on, many different body types, the cat one, Nudist Camp, gold wire, David Ashton Walsh, just a fascist who wanted to fuck his mom, Mike B. Young, his twin daughters as well, who is going to stop you, Lazarus Long, these are his fantasies, The Roads Must Roll is anti-union, the Canadian truckers protest, as a guy, a guild, not what unions are after, they’re not for solidarity, eugenicists want to take over, create a master race, what the engineers are after, Starman Jones, without joining a guild, stowaways on the ship pick it up by doing it, Lester Del Rey, Badge Of Infamy, be a guild member to use Chat GPT, a class of people, they’re tv writers, movie writers, Professor Coolbreeze, a rich tapestry, who still fucked babes, they’re puritans, strawman the guy who’s a writer of books from a long time ago, do some raping, why does he have rape in his stories, all the libertarian sci-fi, libertarian tendencies, he’s thinking things true, people can’t win an argument with a dead guy without strawmanning him, a skill that people lack, what people read, formulaic stories, maybe challenging, Jonathan is a writer who breaks a lot of rules, accidentally vs. intentionally, intent, appreciation of popular fiction and literature, people say they read Heinlein then can’t believe how racist he was, the party discipline requires denouncing, you gotta say this now, a very twitter phenomenon, party conformist, people who still watch actual broadcast television, two different worlds, far right far left, a maga hat on, keep a sun out of his eyes, BCIT hat, visible maga people, hand painted signs, Trump flags, being visibly breaking decorum, rainbow pin on their lapel, Ukraine flag on the lawn, a laptop class, political people on twitter, very political most days, how is this processing, something Paul tweeted to Evan, there’s something wrong with me, how come I don’t get this, Elon Musk was defending him limiting some traffic in Turkey about the election, especially in right wing countries, hearing Erdogan is pro-Putin, not conforming with NATO, ethno-nationalist, continuing policy, he caved on that one, did you lose your brain, Evan is against ethno-states, always thinking about the people of the United States being white, projecting 100s of years in the future, doesn’t fit into his future history, should have worked harder on the re-write, the Americans fighting against eh pan pan-Asian, fundamentally flawed, you can’t really fix this, a thoughtwave pattern, those kind of experiments, a magic wand that kills all the women and Dylan Mulvaney is still alive, servicing John Campbell’s position and needs, I’m selling books here, kills only Asians, why not just disperse the death ray in a wide beam, the recruitment, what stupidness that it is, a very minor work, more silly than anything else, goofy, enjoyable, character heavy and painful and a transformed world, very engaging, the character of the alcoholic mother, he recycles them a lot, the mother-son relationship, allows him to be castrated, never before explored before, doctor my balls don’t work, insert some glands in yeah, some pain down there, okay doctor, drugs work perfectly, did he tech bro himself out of babies?, if he had had babies, he would have petered out, they’re all about children, childbirth is the goal, Lazarus Long has hundreds of children, what’s the point of life, I may be awesome, life is kind of absurd, reading writers who have these problems, Edgar Allan Poe, going to the ladies, Zora Neale Hurston, girls, yes, invented everything, for an American audience at least, much more than that, literary criticism of his, this is shit, here’s why it’s shit, a lot of context, his novel is rich, interesting nested, figure out what mode he’s in, he has to fill pages, writes a story to a piece of art, William Wilson, for the present volume, written for a book called The Gift, doppelganger and debauchery, Evan’s plan, Gertrude Stein, ambitious, 2 a week, 895 episodes, Lovecraft and Dick readthrough, Civil War, the American character, the American spirit, it came from those authors, Twain is much more of a common man, the great American author, America made its historical context, feed into later works, American culture made something distinctive before it went into massive decline, the anarchist socialist communes, counted out America, right after the Civil War, an alternative that doesn’t suck in the world, Jesse’s pitch, being America’s bitch sucks, do it in Canada, oppression but not much, basic government service, Colossus will get things done, getting the temple built, Mary McCarthy, Willa Cather, Margaret Atwood, the Canadian education system, Canadian literature is not the best, 10 times the population, extremes that Canadians don’t suffer, have your literature imported, the CBC’s job, other countries’ literature, Poe and Dick and Lovecraft, Stephen King, great literature exporters, chains, people claim there is, Mark Fisher, good history being written, new history vs. new fiction, Neil Gaiman, wonderful scholarship, self-aggrandizing, Jesse’s argument, a smart way to do it, nice microphone, quiet time, Jesse’s a terrible narrator, come to some arrangement, focused on audio, evangelical for it, audible [the website] didn’t exist, a growth industry, good product and great covers, listening while walking, from a commercial standpoint, only still on the rise, Jonathan has been converted, somebody is listening to this five hour show, gab in the background, nope, Tommy Patrick Ryan audiobooks, he wants to help out, not a money relationship, a wheelbarrow with a big hole in it, wheelbarrows are expensive, cover that hole, Jesse was right the whole time, publishing tasks, corporeal, orgy, divan, figures out the voice of the narrator, the Bronson Pinchot vs. Tom Weiner, straight reader vs. performer, a female accent, speech impediment or style of speaking, nobody has any inflections, there is a spectrum, transparent narrators, the elephants are very calm, he’s from Brooklyn, you’re never going to hear the end of it, people think they can reinvent the wheel, profits in new markets, used bookstore project, who doesn’t want to own a used bookstores, when 9/11 happened, homeland security, the US Postal Service, you’re fucking with me, street traffic vs. online only, a good location without a bookstore, buy a bookstore, you get the market, an inventory, people bring in free stock, pandemic rules, the pandemic was a very good thing, jubilee, she gets a prize you get nothing, wait until Kamala is your queen, reelected for the 2nd time, carrying his corpse around from press conference to press conference, Canadian foreign and domestic policy is largely dictated by US foreign policy, a demented guy in charge, the institutions, Bryan Alexander, speech impediment, its not on the news, shaking hand with butlers, juice him up, the clips are out there, that’s the scenario, brings nothing to the table, rumblings, Megan Markle, Oprah, renounce her royal title, a bad book, pan Atlantic country, H2O (2004 CBC miniseries), plausible scenario, a reverse coup, as sequel too, David Cronenberg, James Cameron, Marilyn Chambers, early controversy, a movie industry, set in Toronto, The Fly (1986), A History Of Violence (2005), Scanners (1981), filming there, architecture is Canadian, brutalist, a fetish for him, Canadian actors who never leave Canada, any kind of traction, just move to the states, William Shatner, where the work is, pass yourself off, Deadpool guy, aggressively Canadian, Ryan Reynolds, big weird country, kinda fake, founding myth, the North-West Passage, this big thing that was in the way, French Canadians, teach the controversy, two big companies, 54:40 or fight, break the line at 49, take up to Alaska, war with Britain, Vancouver, Washington, Hudson’s Bay, two business men go into a meeting, fuck the people who live on either side of this line, the black exclusion laws, Oregon has a racist foundation, escaped slaves, the problems that that entailed, no black people allowed, weird behavior, weird politics, every year Jesse goes with boats with clubs, Jesse puts his skins in a warehouse, all Americans live in California, a very arctic thing, more into salmon and cedar, three day festival and everybody goes clubbing, almost like a J. Manfred Weichsel story, satire, Heinlein and all of them went to the government, Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee, there’s an audiobook of it, using science fiction ideas, Giants Of Eternity by Manly Wade Wellman, like in The War Of The Worlds, dig up all the super-scientists, Marie Curie, this is amazing, Charles Darwin, Thomas Alva Edison, Louis Pasteur, Isaac Newton, make fun of their personalities, got a big beard, the jokes write themselves, a cult of Edison, Edison skepticism, very important and also an asshole, a patent troll, a copyright troll, self-promotion, a machine that talks to the dead, break that out of the old dusty lab, Alfred Bester, telescopist, a baby seahorse nebula made out of anti-matter, wax cylinder, Ray Cummings, The Girl In The Golden Atom, super-science, a huge effect on science fiction, for a pulp author, still writing in the same mode, second pass at Edison, 1887-1957, the opposite of The Girl In The Golden Atom, our galaxy is an atom, just needs to fill pages, he had an idea about science, old fashioned for his time, Fitz James O’Brien, he’s sparky, What Was It?, dope smokin fiends, an invisible creature, while they’re smoking their hash, super racist, The Diamond Lens, a little lady, The Lost Room, Edgar Allan Poe, hoping to be sent to the front, lingered until April, died of tetanus, the biggest insurrection in U.S. history, 1/6, hundreds of people died in New York, The Wondersmith, nice big mustache, Guy De Maupassant, he’s in Weird Tales, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Vanity Fair, Atlantic Monthly, died at 35, he really did cosmicism before Lovecraft, a cosmic point of view, some tech, 100% down with science fiction, Mary Shelley, Margaret Cavendish, travel to other planets, it has to be Wells, Edward Page Mitchell, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, Jack London, 1899, The Clock That Went Backwards, The Chronic Argonauts, ancestors in Amsterdam, their aunt is immortal, one of them stays and makes her, Back To The Future, that’s like Heinlein, Travel By Wire by Arthur C. Clarke, The Man Without A Body, this new fangled technology called telephone, a teleporter or a transporter like in Star Trek, didn’t charge the battery, Victorian era science fiction, Sam Moskowitz renewed all his copyrights, Science Fiction By Gaslight, Under The Moons Of Mars, scientific language, carbon emissions are going to kill everybody, coal heaters, the air becomes solid, heavy stuff, an idea that is science fiction vs. feels like science fiction, this is science fiction, looking back from our perspective, writes it off, A Corner In Lightning by George Griffith, electricity is a finite resource, a battery in the Arctic, her non-fiction, the Royal Society, arguing against the scientific method, giant like a lobster, tools to examine the world, distorting the view of the world, her major argument, being facetious, people took it like I was serious, hyperbole, aka he’s evil, an over-reading, trying to enact political change, excluded, utopian fiction, women in power, all we need is Hillary and everything will be all right, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, he makes fun of himself, liberal positions, made Britain a very powerful science, the science, peer reviewed then it’s science, a 30 page essay, coherence problems, doing science, replicate it, that’s science, holy shit I did this thing with electricity, this Ben knows what he’s talking about, spoilers, trained not to care, peer reviewed scientific study on whether spoilers spoil, subsequent studies, they don’t want to hear it, they believe that spoilers spoils, hearing about a good science fiction novel makes me want to read it, who dunnit?, Twin Peaks, Glass Onion (2022), getting triggered, incorrect view of books, shipping, relationshipping, root for the two character get together, have they not seen Moonlighting?, lotta dumb people appreciate things because they’re dumb, people wanted to watch adult things, Are You Being Served, Yes, Minister, I like Scooby Doo, still stuck in the Scooby Doo phase, unable to put their pants on, they’re not thinkers, Dune, just gave a Hugo award to, they didn’t do the banquet scene because they’re making it dumber, Lady Jessica is crying every three seconds, no voice over narration, no whisper talking, the miniseries, Dune is a smart book, they’re reading it wrong, they’re reading it shallowly, jumpin on Heinlein, it’s literature, think critically about it, some guy wrote a fiction book, Kittycat Massacre, Cat Killer by Donald E. Westlake, the death of a fake cat, basically The Cats Of Ulthar with a juvenile delinquent in New York, Donald E. Westlake, The Balloon Tree, Nolan and Simak, slow/fast, new to audiobook, first audiobook last week, coming into something new in this format, Motar/Mota/Motak, page breaks, chapter titles, you gain your eyes back, ebook bumps (braille), feeling a book, so hardcore, half-assed job, oeuvre, exercise, Jonathan is not ready for this, never go back, Aftershocks to Shokz, they screw on your bone?, sits near your ear canal, transmits through the skin into the bone into your ear, vibraty, implants?, Open Run, Open Comm, one ear free is the rule, this tech is ripe, proprietary but magsafe style, big long charge, soon…, bluetooth doesn’t work underwater, swim while listening.

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Paul Rivoche art for Sixth Column

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The SFFaudio Podcast #756 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Crawlers by Philip K. Dick

The SFFaudio Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #756 – The Crawlers by Philip K. Dick, read by Scott Miller (of The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast). This is a complete and unabridged reading of the story (22 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Paul Weimer, and Evan Lampe.

Talked about on today’s show:
Imagination, July 1954, a month ahead, how the editor describes it, was this the end of mankind?, maybe, given the ending?, no, may be, how humanity is being defined, playing with posthumans, The Golden Man, sex-up our human ladies, A World Of Talent, early mid-50s, tamed, The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, predict consumer behavior, sad, pathetic, a break, pre-cogs, Captive Market, make a buck, more pessimistic, what are the crawlers doing?, what are humans doing, living in suburbs, come down from Washington, farming land, driving trucks, a taxi driver, chickens, farming, radiation lab, Vanuatu or wherever they nuked, dark, homo regular, homo superior, homo slow, homo snail, very different, the least humanlike in shape, Big Noodle, essentially different, not like The X-Men, peel off their powers they still feel love, half of the juice of their stories, doesn’t work as a metaphor for racism, X-Men is about racism or gay people, we are people too, government’s involved, schools for them, the Philip K. Dick fan’s archive blog, the original title, Philip K. Dick wanted to call it “Foundling Home”, harder to see without that title, a throwback to the 19th century, orphans, radiation fears, Bikini, people getting radiated, Iraqi children getting birth defects from depleted uranium, what do parents do when their children are mutated?, somebody said something, go have a beer, he went to his typewriter, Doctor Bloodmoney, something real happened to Philip K. Dick,

if u start digging around in the storys PHILIP K. DICK actually rote, rather than the 1s his rep among novel readers &Hollywood present, u’ll find he rote storys nobody wants, ugly little tales with strange extensions &human faces, storys u’ll want hidden away or smashed & buried

nobody says we should all go read…, watch the movie with Nicholas Cage (who can talk), a weird guy in a government cage, weird roles, you would never guess, doesn’t work as an action film, your protagonist is a subject, The Pre-Persons, not a massive market for this kind of fiction, a low end market, the island that they put the kids on, back into the minds of one of these crawlers, inside that mind, the breeding center, strange foreshortened bodies with rigid limbs, the Gulf of Mexico is a big empty, the last two lines, somebody had mashed the throwback, a regular human baby, an abortion story, a communism story, they do cooperate, socialism, the next political stage of humanity, supplant capitalism, will resist with all its efforts, straight Marxist dialectic, Marxist theory, capitalism to communism, prevent the next one from being born, a physical embodiment, they build, a communal society, eventually the work would begin in earnest, what work?, supplanting the previous society, a Cold War story, smash the regular baby, what would the commissars do?, the revolutions in 1968s, as of Dick’s writing, when it comes springing up again, uncompromising terms, a baby capitalist, support Paul’s thesis, the Standard Oil station, Joe Jackson cracked its head with a two by four, Martians Come In Clouds, fearing the other, insect-like, Evan’s 2017 podcast on this story, undercooked, stinging humans, if you’re incredibly slow like in The Day Of The Triffids, running over with trucks, the illustration, an incredible images, flipper arms, a farmer beside his truck, the pasteboard box, through a white painted door, the grandmother, hiding, their own reservation, move all the people away from the radiation plant, they eat plants and leaves, they build nests, like cocoons, from caterpillar to something else, never got any schooling, abandoned, the older ones are darker in colour, institutionally, not from an educated point of view, build or built, toiled joyfully, the material, some juice that’s inside of him, a practice model, Roog, telling a story from a dog’s point of view, curled up inside, he oozed binder fluid, his edifice, almost dust free, drowsy, extended a part of himself, that part watched and listened warily, conscious that from a distance, nobody would guess what lay beneath, very good subtle writing, “taking care” of them, the euphemism, a mom, the large breasts she has, is she suckling this baby, grass in the pasteboard box, not humans but are humans, they do exactly what we do, an autistic son you might say, mothers would just kill their babies, mother animals reject their babies, only two teats, find some other mother with only one baby, cruel nature, infanticide, reflects back earlier on what the teenagers and the adults were doing, an infanticide story not an abortion story, who asked for that?, fallout from WWII’s end, Astounding and John W. Campbell, give me more mutant stories, stories that were variation, variations on Weinbaum stories, people took it literally, Slan is the prototypical example of that, an early Robert A. Heinlein novel, the one with guns [Beyond This Horizon], Lazarus Long’s ancestors, immortal mutants, how’d they get there?, Methuselah’s Children, eugenics, talky in the second half, Sixth Column, They, If This Goes On, Blowups Happen, so much in 1941, pseudonyms, Anson MacDonald, Lyle Monroe, half of the issue would be Heinlein, are these Humanity+, part of progress, hold it a minute, these aren’t humans anymore, instinctual killers, neanderthals, a throwback, infanticide and eugenics, culling carp, sending kids to the pound, animal rights, how humans treat animals, Roog, from children’s pov, otherizing children, control naturals, duels and carrying firearms, armed society, polite society, give me a world where people are brandishing all the time, Sixth Column, fixups and edits, a slippery guy, for our story today, no editor would say…, a story about infanticide, more of a new wave thing, sparking me, he has a problem, infanticide exists and that shatters him, knows a kid, has a kid who has autism, all its hooves, fingers and toes, assessing intelligence, a calf will walk on the first day it is born, ultrasounds, its not infanticide anymore, slightly related, autism, reading Philip K. Dick, perhaps autism overrepresented, had to deal with it somehow, a lawsuit, this [class action] lawsuit, Tylenol, over the counter drugs, the flipper baby in the illustration, thalidomide, limits blood vessel growth, make limbs, huge international story, caterpillar man, no arms and no legs, an economic space, a concentration camp, experience of the mid-20th century, no child left behind, ready for the workforce, obsession with standards, diversity, homogenizing in public education, 80% chance of having Down syndrome, the justification is economic, not a moral choice your making, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker, high rates of infanticide, about the little ice age, monasteries overrun, instinctual, for fun, almost like the Japanese, isolated them, creatures, not getting nursed, not getting dressed, organs in the back of them, pseudopodia, they look like babies, little bit of hair, “moist”, my god!, it’s like a human, are they supposed to be like this?!, essentially butterflies, the stingers, evolution into something else, milk, 20-21 minutes long, a response to Judith Merril’s Only A Mother, 1948, the replacement, no more normal kids being born, a few normal kids, physically deformed by mentally precocious, says the mother, I Am Legend, Richard Matheson, child locked in the basement, diary entries, doesn’t know what mud is, the cruel parents come down and beat the child, oozes green, can climb on the ceiling, Born Of Man And Woman, no social communist implication, working together in a community, not prioritizing one person’s success over another’s, a breeding chamber, are they mammals, are they bees?, humanizing things that are inhuman, showing that we are inhuman in the end, a human being killed by monsters, standard good Philip K. Dick, 1950, fears and worries, all her fingers and toes, pops out and you clean it up, smart, good at drawing, you gotta be a genius to read Philip K. Dick, the best Philip K. Dick, Time Out Of Joint, if she doesn’t like Galactic Pot Healer, kipple and the people left behind, is Harrison Ford an android, not only based on media properties, any duds?, his juvenile, mainstream novels, in the Hugo illuminati, working on the Heinlein thing, N.K. Jemisin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ayn Rand and fascist themes in Heinlein, talking people down on twitter, you want to fight him, that’s not the book, read the book and then you’ll know, Verhoeven turns the dials to 14, trying to solve a problem in the United States, in that book, what he’s arguing, non-war service, peace corp of shit like that, leaders whove never been in the army or navy, the guy with the eyepatch, Tulsi Gabbard, An American Utopia: Dual Power And The Universal Army by Fredric Jameson, universal conscription, use the military, how short WWII was, a 4 year job, put the pacifist in charge of weapons development, reckless wars and foreign adventures, the green transition, everyone has a job, everyone has healthcare, Starship Troopers it’s still a choice, his proposal and commentary, people challenge him, edited by Slavoj Žižek, that shitlib?, neolib?, Exiting The Vampire’s Castle by Mark Fisher, upcoming things, Robert Silverberg’s Down To The Earth, the comic, still wrapped in plastic, inspired by Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer, Heinlein mines Kipling, Silverberg mines Conrad, Mike, libgen (Library Genesis), why you have to have a vpn sometimes, 2 CBRs, it still hates Paul, quite useful, people who want their book promoted this month, the Hugos There podcast, pretty good, David Brin, such a fuckin trainwreck, Seth Heasley, a philosophy podcast [The Partially Examined Life], this is a comedy show, still popular?, Kiln People, why Paul hates Amazon sometime, anything but David Brin, how broken this reality is, Startide Rising is a bad book, stories told from control panels, exhaust the idea superquick, David Weber, Paul needs to have an adblocker, goes to paperbacks, Existence by David Brin, Evan challenging Jesse in direct messages, when feeding animals and dog walking, Jesse is a bad Marxist, a Marxist book, Marx For Beginners, a comic book, not bad, does a pretty good job, what Evan really means, we need more material conditions, Evan wants everyone to be a historian, trends of history, context, greyer, more complex, like this story, a way of looking at it, not a communism story, what’s happening under a woman’s shirt when she’s breastfeeding: that’s communism, not supportive of irredentism, Evan’s middle name is Brinksman, self determination, Taiwan as a neoliberal hellscape, perfectly reasonable, Jimmy Dore thinks Taiwan is part of Taiwan, peace based on national self-determination, countries being occupied by the United States, Richard Nixon made peace, a third of Syria is under US occupation, South Korea, Germany is not be occupied by the United States, black and white, at what point was the Philippines no longer occupied by the United States, Iceland, Italy and France, is Canada occupied by the United States?, not really, NATO is the superstate, if you’ve got foreign troops in your country that have a base, Saudi Arabia, the people vs. the government, Columbia, if you don’t like it they change your government, that’s the problem, if there actual bases, Djibouti, China and the United States, you coup the government, that happened in Australia, probably hasn’t happened in Canada, weak indications, none of this applies to the case here, Taiwan was abandoned, in exchange for peace with China, Taiwan was a security council members, one country doesn’t want that, WWIII, war yes, Jesse is not being consistent, Donbass, Ukraine is a hot topic, if the Scots want independence, Scotland is more competent than England, UK was running the US for a while, you can’t say either countries are in charge, meta empires, military base, dead people from wars, caring about the veterans, farm people go off, Vancouver Island vs. New Caledonia, regional disputes, an intercontinental fight, it’d be bad if China forcibly took over Taiwan, who’s stoking that up, who we talking about, a southern NATO, basically Australian and New Zealand and Japan, the base in Okinawa, Japan has some interest in getting its feet wet, Afghanistan, the Japanese Empire still is, fucking ridiculous, the SDF, constitutionally mandated no war ever again military, waifus, get some vigour back in their loins, if they cross the ocean, we’ll Golden Slave next week, history!, David Milch’s proposal to HBO before he did Deadwood, a police drama in the early Roman Empire, fine I’ll do it in America, the most casual person, Caesar’s Column by Ignatius Donnelly, what a populist is, he was from Minnesota, 1890, not on LibriVox, the Atlantis guy, the Ancient Apocalypse guy [Graham Hancock], CBC Radio Ideas, things you should know if you’re an archaeologist: it’s potsherd not potshard, they’re related, Edgar Cayce, Madame Blavatsky, leads into Lovecraft, early science fiction America, the scholarship on the populist, The People, NO: A Brief History of Anti-Populism guy [Thomas Frank], What’s The Matter With Kansas, Lawrence Goodwyn’s Democratic Promise, silent generation, before the boomers, the new deal generation, lost his contracts, Listen Liberal, you let this happen, a lot of Democrats, Evan is not a Jimmy Dore fan, Russell Brand, Chapo Traphouse guys, ten minutes of knocking it out of the park, he’s absolutely right about the democrats turning, a rejection of the working class, it was open, not well advertized, no problem, Hillary’s gonna be our girl, the original Clinton, back to Carter, maybe 1968, Humphrey or McGovern, Clinton finished the job, Evan likes the thick bois, ignoramus who doesn’t read much and yet, nobody should make stupid mistakes, most people are not historians, withholding judgement, China content, when Nancy Pelosi went over there, unless you’re a little child who doesn’t understand how the world actually works, implying, the vast majority of Taiwanese, remove the China threat, independence, under the Taiwanese government, however Hong Kong’s working out, a second tier city, the housing crisis is worse that anywhere, Singapore, a hot war with nuclear armed countries, whoever starts it is bad, an international movement to recognize Taiwan as a country, Czech or Lithuania, to see what happens, cut relations, how many people wanna leave it, Australia, kinda fucked up, look at England, New Zealand, moving to escape other places, fucked up in different ways, London, live in a cubicle for 4000 pounds a month, more impressed with Paris, trying to make it look like a modern city, French immigrants to Canada, get away from this nuclear testing country, hippies, how you build cities, safe for cyclists, good subways, people had time to enjoy life, worked to death, no garbage cans on the street, the tragedy of the commons, it’s harder to build traditions than it is to make a stupid law, a culture that doesn’t do that, costing too much to clean it up, this excuse, neoliberal cutting the budget, win win, create jobs, China cares about making livable cities, done in authoritarian way, pride, nationalism, its ours, playing a lot of PUBG, matched with a rando, China number 1, China’s the best, a counter to America first, anytime now China’s going to surpass the United States, the population projections, this tictok thing, white women saying they’re Ritalin was being faked, I can’t get the house clean, get their Starbucks, early 2000s shows, The Sopranos, we should all go to therapy, it felt like a throwback, its role is to validate tony, narcissism, all this autism, Jesse gets weird people, this is not from a brain that works properly, a conversation with yourself, maybe it’s schizophrenia, I believe them when I read their tweets, Jesse has different kind of problems, chemicals in general, ingested, capitalism driving us to various disorders, when you start it when you’re 2, people in their 20s are zoomers, ensconced by this solipsistic existence, triggered [by Heinlein’s] They, Common Sense is the bleak one, knock the wifetooth out, the scientific revolution fails, five people escape with five wives each, don’t non-they them shame him [Joe-Jim], hims, the one time he [Heinlein] could have used at they and he didn’t, damn hims, damn they, animal wrangling, chicken crazy, an egg plague, eggs are cheap here [in Canada], Jesse petted three cats at all the feed stores.

The Crawlers by Philip K. Dick

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Reading, Short And Deep #401 – The Advent On Channel Twelve by C.M. Kornbluth

Reading, Short And Deep

Reading, Short And Deep #401

Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss The Advent On Channel Twelve by C.M. Kornbluth

Here’s a link to a PDF of the story.

The Advent On Channel Twelve/strong> was first published in Star Science Fiction Stories No. 4, 1958.

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The SFFaudio Podcast #732 – READALONG: Black Priestess Of Varda by Erik Fennel

Jesse, Paul Weimer, Alex (pulpcovers) and Cora Buhlert talk about Black Priestess Of Varda by Erik Fennel

Talked about on today’s show:
Audiobooksnow.com, 500 other websites after Audible and Downpour that sell audiobooks, this books exists only out in the world outside of Audible and Downpour, Brian K. Fitzgibbon, the story itself is , foliage, otherwise a good narration, the ultimate book, a hard intro, all of the negative stereotypes of pulp science fiction, Planet Stories, not the literary science fiction, the luridist, fairly strong, this is fun, this is good, it fell apart, the middle doesn’t make a lot of sense, the ending is good, extending psychedelic floating, pregnant at the end, twins, this woman raped him while he was in the bacta tank, when Luke is in the bacta tank, Mark Hamill had had a car accident, injuries explained away, hand chopped off twice, disabled protagonist, crippled is offensive, a pain in your phantom arm, Gil Hamilton, a crippled protagonist, disabled war veterans, missing a hand, a scarred face, a blind eye, a missing eye, a plus for the story, three strong female characters (two of them are the same), he’d been betrayed by his fiance, clearly a villain from the beginning, a good setup for a story, mid-20th century telepathy, not a good exploration of the topic, monkey squirrel lemur thing, also telepathic, something out of 1980s kid’s cartoon, would make a great cartoon, should be adapted as a cartoon, a pretty cracking story, gets his abilities, it would be better if he didn’t have abilities, I’m the best telepathy, immune to telepathy, who’s on the cover, a scene from the story, Allen Anderson reusing the same image, lady with a sword over her head, also a Leigh Brackett cover, Black Amazon Of Mars, an axe, grey lumpy things, he’s not disabled, he has two arms (one is hidden), it is Crasna, but she’s a redhead, the interior art, the vat scene, the lavender liquid, his girlfriend Margaret getting all stabby, cutting off all of his thumb, lost in the mist, missing an arm, very accurate, page 25 art, totally missing an arm there, a scratch across his face, with a savage bellow, the pasty gray features, sluggishly back, prostrate form, soundlessly, a blue black fluid gushed from the wound, Erik Fennel is not a famous person, as Planet Stories pulpy as Jesse has read, a Gardner F. Fox, returning to Mars, returning to Barsoom, a portal fantasy, very Edgar Rice Burroughs, he’s an inventor, The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein, time travel, freezes himself, she’s much older, she’s fat, she’s been drained of sasso, very Lovecraft, Dwellers In The Mirage by A. Merritt, vikings at the north pole, squid god eating virgins, pregnant ladies are delicious, his source for the material, monolimbed, monohanded, blood gushin out of him, repainted by Anderson, Sargasso Of Lost Starships, Bettie Page haircut, yellow foil-age, a little blue city, under the text, what do you think, people talking about sensitivity readers (both pro and con), a panel of sensitivity readers, some subject they’re not an expert in, Chinese and something else (maybe Vietnamese), an expert on Japan, makes sense, a double amputee, bloody offensive, bipolar is not the same thing as an amputee, probably pretty different, gay and a minority skin colour, the writer, an expert witness, a thinking chain that’s not encumbent with the title “sensitivity reader”, immensively important to the book, not collaboration, later Elmore Leonard novels, his 90s stuff, getting up there, he had a professional researcher, professional diving, interesting facts, wow that’s amazing, it really sucked, the dialogue was the same, you could see the hands of the researcher’s work, the particular setting, civil war reenactors, “farbs”, modern underwear underneath, bringing a zippo lighter to the battlefield, hanging out with those guys as a first person person vs. having your researcher do it for you a year before you, that’s the difference, a real sense of place, a real sense of dialogue, he knows the places and he knows the cultures, this is actually why sensitivity readers are working, writing about stuff they don’t know anything about, a researcher magic wand, like Wikipedia, an inkling about something about something, Erik Fennel was disabled, an engineer, an inventor, Fall 1947, Beneath The Red World’s Crust, a dude with a blaster and a dagger on his hip, holding a blonde, blue aliens, a rocketship, a vampire bat, P.S. Feature Flash, Atavism, during a childhood spent barefoot in Hawaii, prehensile toes, Eve and Lilith, the dog insists, a propeller, 2:47 am, a model-T sparkplug, molten lead and cold water, just short of atomic, studying co-eds, Heath Parasol, a kitbuilt aircraft, a truck driver, bootlegger’s assistant, riding the rods, amateur boxer/goat wrangler, structural steel work, born without a fear of heights, one day there was a very nasty mess, a retread job in my skull, 4F, arrested development, Science And Invention, Hugo Gernsback, a housetrailer, a portable basement, used oil wells, deep auto-hypnotic research, the editor of Galaxy [Planet Stories], Nichevo, Russian for what can you do?, that’s how it is!, makes you like the story more, makes you like the art more, the art informs the story, the art of the writing, texts should stand on their own (but also they don’t), everything is connected to other things, give a kid Shakespeare, another essay from 1950, utopianism, Nobody Wants Utopia, Science Fantasy Review, Winter 1949-1950, the slave system they have, zombies, they treat them, they give them the pill, a culture that has declined, the superiors had roads, there were always two races, more primitive people, benevolent, H.P. Lovecraft with Zealia Bishop, The Mound, an underworld utopia, the closed world, creating a setting, the author insert returns to it at the end, I’m going home, she’s having my babies, genocide these poor people, kill orcs because they are elves turned by Sauron thinking, utopia, dry and hot summers, cold winters, he’s given himself a fantasy world, he chooses to go back into the fantasy, helpful to understanding the story, it’s a real lump, The Goddess Of Atvatabar, mental powers, they create an island, that happens in this too, a Leigh Brackett, The Moon That Vanished, mental powers, lost in their fantasy world, suicidal drug addict, picturing his girlfriend, he grabs the other woman, quite a common theme, also Inception (2010), WWII, trailer, not super-negative, creation of a world inside of a story, roads and a car, he’s an engineers, mid-20th century engineers knew everything, that fantastic power is the power to be a writer for Planet Stories, a product of it being a longer piece for a magazine that cranks out a lot of pulp, not a classic, snap up the IP, the She-Ra: Princess Of Power cartoon, a planet besieged by aliens, drains of energy, rebels lead by a brave woman, twins, Hordak, not impossible, why you can’t read anything out of context, all the Shakespeare plays are historical pieces, the pulp, Star Wars, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, inform, time spent looking for the literary roots of Indiana Jones, drawn from the vibes, a smell, an aesthetic, the suspension bridge, cliffhanger, quite literally, movie serials, magazine serials, wait 30 years, not inspired by the original sources, the new Andor series, notably good, a guy on a planet trying to find his sister, mall cops, corporate security, too much content, there’s way too much stuff, its very hard to know if anything is good, everything is lying to you all the time, they’re all being gamed, people mention things in twitter threads, increasingly required to ask, I can’t watch all of that, not all of them have the same taste, big long reviews, consumer reviews, you have to dig, drowned out, ignored, the latest thing, a culture war fight, American Gigolo, The Punisher, how can I know if it is good?, it’s exactly what you’re interested in, lot’s of airships, bread and butter cop dramas, cartoon dinosaur show, periphery, The Rogues In The House podcast, this is great, our serious problem, an experiment today, too deep into the story, not the ideal story to start their pulp fiction experience, Robert E. Howard, some Leigh Bracketts, C.L. Moores, higher quality pulp, this isn’t that bad, Werewile Of The Crystal Crypt by Gardner F. Fox, they all look down at Planet Stories, bad stories in Astounding Science Fiction, mid to low level Planet Stories, mediocre Weird Tales is entertaining, The Ghost Table, fun adventure, fast paced, what we got, a slower pace in the middle, lots of action, what if the speed of light changed by 3 percent?, what bad Astounding often looked like, bound charges, almost skipable, if your assignment was to fix this story, spend a lot less time recovering, three months later, drama, go with the interesting opening, lay around a little less, more time with the badguys, she’s a bad girl but a lot of fun, more from Victor’s point of view, Margaret’s catspaw, boy toy, Sin and Wor, very subtle, on the nose, Axis and Allies, written in reverse, Matson, Sasso, a fad dance from the 1950s, The Wizard Of Wor, Wor’s military tunic, Faith, Elvedon, a pocket universe, The Elf-Trap by Francis Stevens, a tradition he’s slipping into, Stanley G. Weinbaum, there’s no rocket ship, it is a portal fantasy, transports him to a world, closed worlds, thin world, like Cthulhu worshipers, A Night In Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny, the lavender liquid, that sloshing, some kind of acid, absorbs their energy, a convoluted system, as a priestess, all the best cults are sex cults, Superiors, the gross gray bodies, they utterly refused to remain dead, lacking sufficient converts, Faith, Superiors, the hunted folk, thought was a tangible force, a stand in for the author, more things cut off, will the wall to light, a wish-fulfillment fantasy world, maybe we have to genocide these monsters, the little lemur guy, weak, but not that bad, the connection, Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, what’s the scene that Paul and Cora don’t like, leprosy, white gold wedding ring, his rape daughter shows up, not real, absolutely annoying, he’s also a whiner, extremely unlikable, he doesn’t think any of it is real, half excuses the whole thing, The Gap Into Conflict, space opera, blink drives, The Real Story, an asteroid miner, roll a d100, turn people into remote control zombies, policewoman, he’s not supposed to be the hero, very gritty, well told, incorporating other people’s researches, what they’re thinking about, writing is thinking, he’s not a raw power, perfectly serviceable, problems selling, Chinese Filipino, Hawaii, that experience is his experience, a story that hasn’t sold yet, he blames that on gatekeepers of editors, half-naked, Valeria, Dark Agnes, Jirel of Joiry, Farnsworth Wright, he never got really old, oh, it’s a Howard story!, non-white protagonist, The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey, thalidomide, magically healed, he lies around a lot, to hide his superpower, his mind is broken, the cover does not participate in LegCling, whips, a chain whip, BrassBra hashtag, just assumed, clinging gowns, a lot of nudity, a lot of sex, disabled sex, sex orgy cult, remarkably horny, more explicit, is it less horny when it is explicit?, a shudder pulp story, the ultimate shudder pulp, the covers and the titles, the story premises, Lovecraft plus sex and humiliation and racism, Dime Mystery, not easy to find, they didn’t sell well, pricey, The Spider, the lurid stuff, Terror Tales, E. Hoffman Price, there must be something in there, the pinnacle of the shudder pulp, still fun, unique, a little lemur thing and whips, lavender acid, revealing something, Genndy Tartakovsky, a Planet Stories animated series, you’re doing Heavy Metal, technothriller science fictiony compared to this, The Rocketeer (1981), why aren’t we having more like The Rocketeer, Batman (1989), The Shadow (1994), The Phantom, Dick Tracy, Nudist Camp by Orrie Hitt, 4 hours, read by Evan Lampe, the back cover, they worshiped nature in the raw, scathing novel, where she came from, swim or subathe unclad, so lovely, so innocent, began to love nature a little too passionately, a she-devil had entered paradise, her own glorious body, having sex with a tree, a tree fucking contest, Germans love their nudity, naturalists, nature worship, airbathing, skyclad, a nudist beach, of course I looked, Wreck Beach, the communist had no clothes they were so poor!, they saved them for the winter, they weren’t wearing a wire, Evan Lampe: “it’s a good book”, Evan’s female voice, not a Paul book, Brother And Sister by Donald E. Westlake, The Black Stranger by Robert E. Howard, Roger Zelazny, Blaze, Cosmic Computer/Junkyard Planet, Innocents Abroad, Grave Descend, sell Easy Go to Alex, in Egypt, the last tomb, scam archaeologists, a heist story, a really great sense of place, written by someone who’s been there, Greece, Amsterdam, nice and short, Topkapi (1964), Korean War vet captains, journalist/writer, especially him, a very solid very readable book, very impressed by early Michael Crichton, he’s no Erik Fennel, write to the market, slim volumes, 160 page books vs. 700 page books, mainstream thrillers, measured by inches or by weight, Heads Of Cerberus by Francis Stevens, Vietnam, communing with the communists, a communist wedding, a half communist wedding, salvage, communist babies, The Thrill Book, after inhaling a grey dust, totalitarian Philadelphia, perhaps the first science fantasy to use parallel time track, dated and old fashioned, parallel worlds, one of the classics of early pulp, cynical anti-authoritarian, a fine anticipation of Philip K. Dick, stand in for the expertise, Fran Wilde and Chuck Wendig, definitely not a communist book reading, cool name, the cheese, a big city, skyscrapers exploding, school atlas, natural resource cards, coal and steel, pre-internet, Benjamin Franklin was president (of Pennsylvania), not a fake job, the supreme executive council, Rocky Balboa, a good writer, violent American trash, Rocky (1976), Rambo and Conan, a very good movie, he’s got heart, Carl Weathers, Dolph Lundgren, the cartoon aspect of it, this super-genius, Red Scorpion (1988), Masters Of The Universe (1987), not The Punisher (1989), Rocky IV (1985) was his best movie, Universal Soldier (1992), The Expendables movies, airplanes, Jet Li, riffs on their Hollywood personalities, speaking six languages, they’re making fun of the fact, tall and apparently smart and handsome he did very badly, Bloodsport (1988), not really a great actor, Schwarzenegger is charismatic on screen, they didn’t have the budget, Soviet Rambo, an American production, the first half of Red Dawn (1984), The Death Of Stalin (2017), American Ninja (1985), The Delta Force (1986), Iron Eagle (1986), she doesn’t understand what a podcast is, needs to grok, you don’t have to do the show nude.

Black Priestess Of Varda by Erik Fennel - cover art by ALLEN ANDERSON

Black Priestess Of Varda by Erik Fennel - ILLUSTRATION

Black Priestess Of Varda by Erik Fennel

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Reading, Short And Deep #372 – How To Write A Story by Robert A. Heinlein

Reading, Short And Deep

Reading, Short And Deep #372

Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss How To Write A Story by Robert A. Heinlein

Here’s a link to a PDF of the story.

How To Write A Story was first published in Spaceways, Volume 3, Number 2, January 1941.

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