Category: Online Audio

SFBRP #152: Time Travel Special, part 2 – Isaac Asimov’s – The End Of Eternity

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast Episode #152 of The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast is a discussion of Isaac Asimov’s The End Of Eternity. It’s also a follow-up to the previous time travel episode (#151). Luke and I discuss the book and related time travel tales.

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Podcast feed: http://www.sfbrp.com/?feed=podcast

Discussed on the show:
A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain, a flexible chronology, Luke’s first Isaac Asimov review for SFBRP, Robert A. Heinlein, Nightfall by Isaac Asimov (and Robert Silverberg) is bad, Isaac Asimov has ideas to spare, the Wikipedia entry for The End Of Eternity, “what clever idea can I use, in time travel, that hasn’t been used before”, time loops, time barriers, “are you your own grandpa?”, Poul Anderson’s time corps, bureaucracy, how does time travel work?, time travel is discovered, eternity is a place outside of time, powering a time travel technology is easy if you can time travel, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, the “kettle”, Ray Bradbury’s A Sound Of Thunder, A Gun For Dinosaur by L. Sprague de Camp, time lords?, Adjustment Team by Philip K. Dick, Back To The Future, remembering the works of culture and developments in realities that no longer exist, 13 different versions of the complete works of William Shakespeare, the academic background of professorial jockeying, are there two different endings for The End Of Eternity?, being outside of time, “the outside of the inside of eternity”, the malleability of reality through time travel, a limited butterfly effect, the inertia of history, killing Hitler, William The Conqueror vs. King Harold Godwinson, Genghis Kahn’s descendants, computers (the vocation) vs. computers (the devices), technicians don’t get any respect, “They feel an unspoken collective guilt which causes them to scapegoat the ‘Technicians’, the experts who actually execute Reality Changes by doing something that will alter the flow of events.”, a caste system, Minding Tomorrow by Luke Burrage, making changes by setting your mind to it, Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Harlan is a bit of a dim bulb, Demolition Man, time travel as a secret (paralleling magic as a secret), The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman, mutable realities, the grandfather paradox, unmanipulated reality, alternate history, Sidewise In Time by Murray Leinster, later Heinlein novels, unrestricted freedom in multiple realities can be extremely disheartening, Groundhog Day, infinite universes are boring, By His Bootstraps by Robert A. Heinlein, All You Zombies by Robert A. Heinlein, making a knot out of your own timeline, giving a young William Shakespeare a copy of The Complete Works Of Shakespeare, motherless objects and motherless ideas, giving your younger self an object (or advice), multiple timelines, “if that’s possible then that’s not possible”, time traveller’s convention, BoingBoing’s time travelers (I and II), European Juggling Convention 2003, Time Travel #2 Advanced Time Travel Techniques, Paradoxes For Beginners, Harlan Ellison, Murder At The ABA by Isaac Asimov, Darius Dust (dry as dust), Tales Of The Black Widowers, sexism, women are not suitable time travelers, an apocryphal tale of the Obamas, energy bodies, sending a message from the past to the future, you have an energy body but paper magazines?, a future vs. the future, The Door Into Summer, Escape Pod’s recording of All You Zombies, Asimovian characters, The End Of Eternity is about Earth, House Of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, something so big and so mind bogglingly complex, SFFaudio Podcast #073 George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides, “Gregg Margarite and that other guy (Jesse) are losers”, batshit theories, Eric S. Rabkin, Adam and Eve, fairy tales, sex, “the unconscious does exist”, Luke’s original fiction, “we do these podcasts for ourselves”, interesting bullshit, Luke’s Creative Podcast (with Gregg Margarite), “make your own podcast if you don’t like one.”

Ed Emshwiller cover illustration of Isaac Asimov's The End Of Eternity

FAWCETT The End Of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Twilight Zone Podcast: interview with the creators of Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Twilight Zone PodcastBack in August 2011 Tom Elliot, of the terrific The Twilight Zone Podcast, posted a wonderful interview with the makers of Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man. Jason and Sunni Brock talk to Tom for 45 minutes, it’s great stuff!

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Podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheTwilightZonePodcast

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

Posted by Jesse Willis

SFBRP #151: Time Travel Special, part 1 – Mark Twain – A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast Episode #151 of The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast is a special episode on Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and similar time travel tales. It is both special and strange. First it’s strange because it’s the first part of a two part discussion of time travel and not a regular book review. Secondarily it is special because I participated in it!

Or as Luke puts it:

Time Travel Special part 1: Luke and Jesse discuss A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain as a jumping off point for the topic of “A being out of time.”

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Podcast feed: http://www.sfbrp.com/?feed=podcast

Discussed on the show:
The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, Smoke by Donald E. Westlake, romance and time travel, science fiction’s hold on time travel, the process of time travel vs. the man out of time, Army Of Darkness, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is totally political, retellings and abridgements of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, framing stories, “a dispute with crowbars”, the LibriVox audiobook edition, 1889 illustrations on Gutenberg.org, the Blackstone Audio audiobook, Stuart Langton, Yankee vs. English accents, the Arthurian characters, Idiocracy, taking the piss out of the British, a very thin satire, The Marching Morons by C.M. Kornbluth, The Ugly Little Boy by Isaac Asimov, The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein, The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman, the effect on electricity on progress, Thomas Edison, dynamite, SFBRP #100, Then End Of Eternity by Isaac Asimov, comparing the 19th century man with the 21st century man, smartness man and the most moral man, democracy, “what we really need are newspapers”, the tyrannies of monarchy and religion, pick your own oppression, the man from the past comes to the present, adventures, “the Vulcan project”, great insults, Sandy’s reproach, “Mark Twain is fucking hilarious”, the characters bamboozle each other (and the reader too), attributed to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Will Rogers, Groucho Marx, “he is his own target”, occupy Wall Street, Ray Nelson’s Eight O’Clock In The Morning, John Carpenter’s They Live, the 1%, the Robber Barons, Carnegie and Nobel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is an essential adult read!, “you think you might know this book, but really you don’t know this book”, Luke gives it 4 out of 5 stars, sfbrp.com/episode-lists, feedback from #150 (ebooks, audiobooks and paperbooks)

After The Explosion

Protection / Capitalism

The Chruch, The King, The Nobleman, The Freeman

Blackstone Audio - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain

Posted by Jesse Willis

Dan Carlin’s Common Sense #217 – The Big Ketchup Show

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Common Sense with Dan CarlinThe latest Dan Carlin’s Common Sense episode, #217 – The Big Ketchup Show, has Carlin asking tough questions and proffering incredibly reasonable answers. |MP3|

Podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/dancarlin/commonsense?format=xml

Carlin’s take on SOPA is both surprising and insightful. He also talks about the latest U.S. presidential jockeying and a number of other recent items in the news. But the most enduring takeaway, at least for me, was his argument with regard to the “mistreatment of enemy dead by U.S. soldiers” – As Carlin points out the reasons for the controversy and compares it to the Collateral Murder video promulgated by Wikileaks and then wonders if:

‘First person shooters offered the chance to piss on a virtual enemy’s corpse?’

Now I love a good FPS myself. I’ve played quite a few of them. Many deliberately offer controversial sequences. Modern Warfare 2, for instance, has one sequence in which you can act as a terrorist, shooting innocents in a Russian airport. And while the body count is incredibly high in these games, I’ve virtually killed more than 51,000 times in Battlefield 2 alone, most game companies actively discourage swearing, racism, and such from their servers. I haven’t yet seen one yet that officially offered desecrating an enemy corpse as an option.

But where there is humanity there something just as human, and similarly disrespectful: I refer of course to the rampant teabagging of enemy corpses!

The Wikipedia entry on the subject describes the virtual act as “done to humorously imply domination or humiliation.” And The Giant Bomb website has this to say:

“Tea-bagging is primarily used to make one’s death a more humiliating experience and provoking the other player. This action is most commonly performed in video games found within the first-person shooter genre; however, every game that has a crouch button and dead bodies is susceptible to this phenomenon.”

The difference is, the worst of human behavior in computer games is all virtual, and generally not mean-spirited. Going to war should be a big fucking deal. And to make that clear we’d do better to show the reality of it, and to do it in high definition.

Posted by Jesse Willis

CBC: Nazi Eyes On Canada

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Relic RadioThere’s one segment of Nazi Eyes On Canada, episode 5 “Alameda” (Saskatchewan), available via Relic Radio’s Orson Welles: On The Air podcast.

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This is one of the strangest and oldest alternate history radio programs I’ve ever heard |READ OUR REVIEW|.

Posted by Jesse Willis

CBC Radio One: ReCivilization

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

CBC Radio - ReCivilizationReCivilization is a new five part CBC radio show, by Don Tapscott one of the authors of Wikinomics and Macrowiknomics. The show is podcast and I’ve subscribed. I heard its first episode on the radio a few minutes ago starting about half-way through. It looks to be a pretty thoughtful show. There was an interview Sue Gardner (of the Wikimedia foundation) and Leo Laporte (of TWiT). Like CBC’s Spark the producers of ReCivilization are adding extended interviews to the website and blog.

Here’s the description:

In the first installment of ReCivilization, Don looks at the media and how the industrial-age model of mass production is giving way to new, collaborative and citizen journalism, enabled by the web. Under the old model, newspapers and broadcasters delivered the news to passive listeners and readers; in this new, digital age, anyone can be a publisher or a broadcaster – and traditional media is being forced to adapt. The episode also introduces Anthony D. Williams, Don’s longtime collaborator and a regular contributor to the series.

Podcast: http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/recivilization.xml

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

[Thanks mom!]

Posted by Jesse Willis