Jesse and Scott talk about Destiny Doll by Clifford D. Simak
Talked about on today’s show:
a prediction, cut you off, “liked” and somewhat similar to “Special Deliverance”, Shaun D. Standfast people, stopping watching, second read, liked it even more, about a year ago, felt familiar, much more into it, one of his better ones, it’s great, some theories, what’s going on, Way Station and City, casual search through twitter, new audiobook, this is my favourite novel, that’s really odd, I like it too, even if we made a list of all the Simak writings, the top slot, really?, what is the phenomena, objectively, not particularly cohesive in terms of being an original sort of thing, Philip K. Dick, short stories vs. novels, designed to be a thing, aim at a target, which is the best Philip K. Dick novel, Evan Lampe, psychedelic feeling novels, Galactic Pot-Healer, fairly similar to this, Tin Men and Cowardly Lions, another Oz book, really spoke to people who read them at a certain age, you can’t disabuse people that those books are bad, why you can love this book, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, the message is more of a question, what is our relationship to the artifical rather than the real?, it’s a what if?, what if America was occupied by the Japanese, mind expanding ideas, work and meaning, this is about art, your relationship to higher meaning, there’s a god, restoring the sunken cathedral, it has everything, what is it about?, I have no idea, it’s great, a starship captain, rich big game huntress, mixing of fantasy and science fiction, hobby horses, very Ozish, talking toys, don’t you say they’re robots, Star Trekish, triggered captain Kirk in me, finally found Lawrence Knight, fawning over the guy, the “tomb world”, not the person but the skull behind their face, steppin through doorways, what makes Simak so special, didn’t discover him earlier, almost no exception, he has this quality, more things in the universe than we understand, an unorganized religion person, there is a God, mythical layer, keeps appearing, appreciate it a lot, a line in here, the doll itself, Friar Tuck, like this book for some people, near the end, the captain guy, the only one left, back in the city and just thinking, philosophical thinking, they built this city, there’s something even older here, they built stuff, the carven plains of that saddened face of the doll, another race, the church-like edifice at the city’s age, the carving of the doll, the planting of the trees, that’s beautiful, this item, this art, a greater feat than all these buildings, calling out to the darkness, speak to you, old fantasies, Lord Dunsany and older, this quality, a quest novel, on a trek, a mythical quality that simak brings to the discovery, Rendezvous With Rama, a much more sterile book, an awe there, a mythical depth, it has that, they’re looking at the city, landscapes, who did this?, an emotion in here, touching something that’s transcendent, thinking for pages, he’s alone, amazing the thought that he has, pushed along by destiny, throw some facts down, kinda serialized, in one issue of Worlds Of Fantasy, Spring 1971, a note explaining it, a piece of an interview, 1978, 1971, Simak himself, the problem with Destiny Doll, a companion magazine, Worlds Of Fantasy, condense Reality Doll, cut it half and ruined it, what had had to be done, nominated for a Nebula, Destiny Doll was never nominated, interesting note, strictly for money, Westerns, spent the weekend reading them, cowboys as heroes, other people out west, I had things to say, 1949, this genre he’s writing, 5 fingers on it, Shakespeare’s Planet, whatever qua means, guy, girl, robot, weird monster, alien planet, no plot, roll the dial back, The Fisherman, plot driven telepathy, magic is real, the tin, man the cowardly lion, the scarecrow, an alternate dimension, they stop at an inn, they meet some creatures, some possibility of danger, quickly dispensed with, Simak is against conflict, where’s the conflict, the neighbours are a bit worried, spying on him occasionally, gets out the laser gun, centaurs, thousands will die, dude chill, the superior version according to Simak, unless included in anthologies, huge difference, one would presume, Lester Del Rey’s title, turns toward the Philip K. Dick aspect, shifting realities, Small Town, making changes to reality, outside the borders of his yard, the little model of it, takes out the bars and puts in libraries, look at this objectively, meet the characters, the blind guy and Friar Tuck, hobby horses run up to them, let’s go, suspicious, they go elsewhere, customs inspection, some gnomes, chapter 2 is the backstory, our Han Solo style roguish, back to our planet, that’s the whole book, adventures continue, they never leave back to go to earth, similar scenes, Cemetery World, the building are all white, robots, telepathic rhyming robot, what is this if not, the Final Frontier, checkbox, Shakespeare is in here, maybe she has a tattoo, check, religious elements?, check, strange planet, check, a place people go to and don’t return from, they’re all dead, Humans leave earth, dog starts to arise, The Faithful, religious elements, revisits, refines, The Visitors, Project Pope era, this is Simak, a lot of writers don’t have that, this is a Clarke novel, the perversity, got to put his perversions in there, you didn’t know I was a nudist?, let me drop some nudism in there, theses, at some point in every novel that’s a good novel the novelist reviews his own novel in the text, chapter 3, chapter 23, chapter 24, the DAW paperback, not synchronicity it is special attention, near the end of Chapter 3, the dune was no longer there, in it’s stead was silence, an insane crying, my friend is back again, super mysterious, the whole purpose in their journey, a venus fly trap, a honey trap, ships that come to this planet do not leave, is this God?, is this the sweet call of death, unusual for a Simak character, aggressive and yelly, shut-up!, that silly sickening look of ecstasy painted on his face, a creature from out of the desert world, that night that had lain over the white world, blocked out, no sign of the hobbies, earlier in the chapter, all good stuff, reading text, near the end of chapter 23, page 177, wispy filaments, wind whispered overhead, campfire smoke, something was chuckling softly to itself (that’s Simak), Shakespeare?, had it been Shakespeare?, how had Roscoe known of Shakespeare?, carried his knapsack, Shakespeare is a book, actual Shakespeare you have to read the actual Shakespeare, writing with an outstretched finger, also Simak, here’s the review: blue and high, stars ahead, and blue, blue laughter, think unhard, slowly I picked the words apart, blue foreverness, runners after nothingness, talk is nothingness, nowhere comes the answer, it was gibberish, worse than gibberish, the gibberish went on, page 52, far is distant, neither short nor long but deep, no stick to measure with, purple leads to nowhere, there is nowhere to lead to, to prevent the pages getting out, strange enchantment, Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, even if she knew, page 181, near the bottom, totally unintelligible, an utter moron, why my thesis is so true, laughing at himself, seemed to make some sense, blue and purple knowledge, all spectra of knowing, lonely planets, far lost in space, in the blue of time, trapped it is, a time of golden harvest, another tomb world, great orchards of mighty trees, down at the city, up at the city, the whiteness of the sky, the whiteness of the ships, as other planets soak in the golden sun, seeds trapped with knowledge, fruit is many things, sustenance for the body and the brain, it ripens and it falls, nonsensical rambling, thinking about his own thing, you can’t have that it the short story, a short story is like a device, like a pencil sharpener, it can be elegantly put together but it is not a dress, … a novel is like a wedding dress, why their stories suck, why does this guy have 6 brothers, the best stories, 1 character is enough, 2 is more than enough, in order to write a Simak novel you have to have a bunch of character, squid alien, Hoot, seems like a threat, immediately not a threat, are we not friends?, I sucked the poison out of you, what is he doing on this planet, we needed a cowardly lion, the man behind the curtain in the end is always Simak, let’s go, another Oz adventure, a formula that works, sit around a campfire, gets angry, calms down, a group on the road somewhere, one guy and a mystery, The Canterbury Tales, very similar to a lot of Simak, people on a pilgrimage, progress down the road, it’s ancient, told 1st person, and yet, when people disappear they disappear from him, lots of quest books, Nebula Grand Master, one of the fist ones, audio at an awards, dentures, 1977, a Stoker Award, Fritz Leiber, Frank Belknap Long, 1987, died in 1988, The Grotto Of The Dancing Deer, Hugo, Nebula and Locus, an early start date, before everybody, Murray Leinster, first short story, The Cubes of Ganymede, Campbell rejected it, many such cases, The Cosmic Engineers, Empire, a LibriVox version, not terrific, Project Mastadon, Mastadonia as the novel, Grotto Of The Dancing Deer and The Big Front Yard, when doing multiple stories, contrasting authors, H.G. Wells vs. Robert E. Howard, Conan vs. Conan Doyle, The Adventure Of The Cardboard Box, the one story that’s more interesting, they both have merit, having contrasting food, some real salty fish, some sorbet, completely, sherbet, sorbet, playing with ai (Gemini), notebook LM, 9 Simak interviews, ask questions, source documents, to make a podcast, one of the options, what it is useful for, a learning tool, make me a podcast and focus on his religious views, the NPR people, more interesting than good, people learn that way, ancient Greece, some aspect of ancient Greece, food in ancient Greece, educational mentors, BC Civil Liberties guy, [John Dixon] advisor to Minister of Justice, promoted to Prime Minister, politicians are good at shaking hands, they’re not geniuses, getting elected, they need smart people who know how to understand the world, all of them have them, dumb people as their advisors, he was not dumb, thoughtful, good taste in movies, write up something, write up a paper advising, busy gladhanding, what should be done, what should your policy position be, they’re not people, solve a bank problem for me, they’re untrustworthy, you don’t know who they are, a super racist Robert E. Howard story The Last White Man, a race war story, collaborated with the Asians somehow, one last man on the hill, as a man in a racist world, go max on Irishness, they say great things about it, there’s no sense of how stupid it is or how funny it is, no personal reaction to it, all the worlds associated with religion, a large language model, grey NPC character, that’s true of these products, which is Clifford Simak’s best novel, it really spoke to me, not what the tool is for, is Simak a religious person, testing this tool, list things that he talked about, here’s where you find that, a position paper, people are doing that right now, use data in some way, this group rated, Goodreads, pointing to the Shaun Standfast show, every book on Goodreads is 3.6, no one has read, the finest book I’ve ever read, modern stuff, it’s a thing, picking 4s, 4.5, gamified, to read a 3.5 would be absolutely not, movies and tv shows that are new, bots, work on the show, the corporation itself, there can be a rerelease, the same on utube, likes subscribers, in the end, I like to read Simak, he seems to reward me, I believe it, John W. Campbell, overrated, shit on him right now, good at coming up with ideas, go with Simak, go with Donald Westlake, part of their equations, the only other time, a journalist, a newspaperman, many such cases, strictly for money, pumpin em out, sounds familiar, feature length, super well produced documentary, Linotype, the business of paper and ink, answers so many weird questions, tears books apart, little marks beneath the page, an artifact, publish coordination mark, very kind of key, trays, electrical, you type a letter, a tray full of dies, negative dies, every line of the column, page 83, one column across, all a magazine styles with two columns across, this is the amazing thing, the letter that got inked were made of lead, the letter as you need them, every size every comma, that makes a slug, lead castings, same lead bucket they came from, like a printer that prints one line at a time, astounding, incredibly complex, the kinda training that nobody else will ever get again, just happened to come at the tail end of it, no demand for it, xeroxing, this is what made newspapers possible after the time of Benjamin Franklin, changed the world of knowledge and knowledge production than anything else, the machine the size of your kitchen, it’s big and you sit at it, hot lead spurtin out of it, Pay For The Printer by Philip K. Dick, a being from another planet, it copies the cup, very tired, the colour is faded, for making newspapers, every newspaper had one of these, technical people, superinteresting, people who run trains, not this job, bigger, every city that had a newspaper, every book publisher, guys, Mr. Pulpcovers, how well produced, I watched the whole thing, nice to learn things, thank you, a happy new year and merry xmas and a bruiseless boxing day, go Cowboys, which team is kicking the ball better, some kicking, throwing, running, some carrying, can you make a novel out of it?, some deeper purpose, too fun, cheerleader with a tattoo on her breast, collected fiction, spread out his best stories, sell em all, kindle, audio.
Posted by Jesse Willis