
Reading, Short And Deep #505
Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss Nightshade by Dashiell Hammett
Here’s a link to the story |PDF|.
Nightshade was first published in Mystery League, October 1933.
Posted by Scott D. Danielson Become a Patron!
News, Reviews, and Commentary on all forms of science fiction, fantasy, and horror audio. Audiobooks, audio drama, podcasts; we discuss all of it here. Mystery, crime, and noir audio are also fair game.

Reading, Short And Deep #505
Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss Nightshade by Dashiell Hammett
Here’s a link to the story |PDF|.
Nightshade was first published in Mystery League, October 1933.
Posted by Scott D. Danielson Become a Patron!
The SFFaudio Podcast #855 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Mr. Spaceship by Philip K. Dick, read by Phil Chenevert for LibriVox (1 hour 11 mins) and Mercenary by Mack Reynolds, read by Mark Nelson (2 hours 31 minutes) followed by a discussion of both. The discussion, with Jesse, Will Emmons, and Tommy Patrick Ryan, begins at 3 hours 43 minutes.
Talked about on today’s show:
2 stories, Mr. Spaceship, Mercenary, rankings on Goodreads, .1 higher, 3.6 and 3.7 out of 5, Eric S. Rabkin, who liked the book?, very meh about both, better than Prize Ship, in retrospect, one is way better than the other, thematically they’re very similar, so much time in the setup to get to a gimmick, weird set of rules, pre-1900, a glider to scout out the thing, both stories have gimmicks, a ton of time to setup that doesn’t pay off justified by the length, what the ship does, let’s go visit him in his sick bed, let’s have a cigarette, not his best story, Will weigh in, more generous to Mr. Spaceship, socialist labour party, the United States and the Soviet Union are converging, welfare capitalism, the worldbuilding, the sociology, almost like a gadget story, why are we doing this, he kept that part really short, 2 and a half pages, the ethics of the mercenaries, poor people, complete utter misery, they have their tranqs, Philip K. Dick had the better of Mack Reynolds, half the length, aspects appreciated, social commentary, felt relevant, top 1%, feels relevant today, it took 2 pages, so corny, he’s wrong, pretty richa and a little bit enlightened, romances, listen let’s go, he’s Mario, the audiobook was good, the PKD story, he understands the world in some kinda way Mack Reynolds is struggling with, conflicts between companies and unions, war is a thing of the past, in the thrall of it, Professor Thomas, Rick is a name he uses a lot, both synonyms for penis, your Martha, I’m draining my Jesse, institution, talented people, this is all we’re doing, Cold War America, they’re both about war, so petty, reality TV, more like sports, Rollerball (1975), a hostile takeover, it makes no sense, trial by combat, a really good movie, a short story (not public domain), a really good sportsman at this sport, the point of the sport is to bread and circuses the masses, a glimpse behind the curtain, these guys are all fucking us, even less than that, the very very top of society, wow!, an international group, our oligarchs vs.their oligarchs, continental hovercraft vs. vacuum tube transport, the big game, athletes between teams, when is this battle gonna start?, if you’re a military SF fan, all fluffing before the penetration, no battle at all, no deaths, a promotion, riots, batmen watching this show, cancelling the superbowl would not go well, too much money involved, reviled!, common stock vs. actual stock, a personal victory for our hero Joe Mauser, gonna probably get the girl, for everyone else it is a loss, military shit, supposed to be about tv, the exact same world setup, no waiters or waitresses, everything is automated, the real problem in society is meaning and work, why John W. Campbell would have dug this, this communist, in terms of sales, the world building is really good, meh, all aborted at the end, this same setup, Jesse wants to read a series, just messing with you, Utopia: 2000?, Commune: 2000?, Looking Backward From The Year 2000, William Morris?, Edward Bellamy, scarcity of food vs. scarcity of meaningful work, an Adam and Eve story as usual, a little bit psycho, the solution to war is starting over, born in 1928, 10 years old in 1938, rumours of war, actual war starts, 1940, 1941, 1945, he’s a teenager, an endless thing, all war news all the time, war related, victory gardens, Japanese tanks getting piggy back rides, war-infused, not a period in his life, Korean War, students of a professor, we know he’s weird, kept chickens, had a goat, he’s not watching tv and eatin the propaganda, in touch with nature, this stupid proposal, the setup, annoyed with, mode, lectured by the professor, the infodump finally came, it was cute, The Purloined Letter always gets found, the wife, the moon, some sheep, some cows, going to become God, Prominent Author, the old man in the sky who’s a file clerk with a translation machine, written real small, Reynolds over Dick, a real pro, nothing written unintentionally, stuff happens, jots it out, things in there, interesting, insightful, driving around, kinda starts the story in the wrong spot, trying to make money, a little bit psycho, struggles with psychosis, it’s weird, troubled relationship with women, a Dick aficionado, five marriages, longish term relationships, I like you let’s get married, cagey, living in a different time period, you could buy a house and he did, he bought a house outside of San Fransisco, he was a writer that was his income, getting married, he was 53 when he died, only 53, shocking, he’s famous now, line up all the science fiction writers, not in the top 10, since Blade Runner (1982) and all that, this story is no great evidence of his greatness, his bad relationship with his wife, fuck this job, we have a dog, work whatever jobs we can work online, disembodied brain, the reason this story is stupid, no reason, in The Ship Who Sang, a twitter video, dummy calf syndrome, trauma in the birth, the treatment for dummy calf syndrome, after 15 minutes of squeezing, a disembodied brain, fight a war with some aliens that are exploding mechanical ships, the Zerg, the biological aliens, Starcraft, overlord things, brainships, Starship Troopers movie, bio aliens, an inspiration for that group, these ships are being rejected because they have no minds, new technology?, smarter than any machine could be, sensing it, something about making a decision, blow themselves up, fighting fire would fire, what the aliens were like, if he kept his consciousness, cogito ergo sum, Descartes, I can live on, I’m gonna be a creator, repopulate the world, not friends, students, bad writing, we keep looking for contact, a psychological phenomenon, the mine decides to blow up, these characters: meaningless, we have to infer his character for the most part, bad writing, the setup, a disembodied brain in a spaceship, Anne McCaffrey, she’s a disembodied brain, she makes it a romance, a handsome man and a disabled lady, Philip K. Dick is crazy, new space colony, have babies, he calls out Cain, Cain and Abel, I’m gonna be god up in the sky bringing you animals, in Mercenary, our Mack Reynolds, direct messages, a funny looking guy, in his uniforms in the Philippines during the war, the world building, research scientists, why this story is broken, “mufti”, civilian clothes, “fracas”, a whole language to describe the world he’s getting us into, voting day, he’s condemning the United States system as it is, voting is not what you think it is, the high class people’s days, Boxing Day, you cook the meal for your servants, he’s on to something, this particular story and the battle: boring, he’s attacking the United States system as it is and extending it into the future, stories about television, when they point the camera up at the thing in the sky, we also get it reflected with the batman, a television watcher, he’s gonna die, basketball and football, put on the jerseys of their heroes, it doesn’t feel like an attack, a better story than Mr. Spaceship, everybody on goodreads agrees, cringey stuff, how douchey the rich people were, nobody wants for anything, the inequity, the opiate is tranqs, Max M, tranqs don’t give you a hangover, so 1950s, alcohol, addictive, addictive, how addictive it is, the reason people are taking tranqs, socially acceptable, marijuana stores, people don’t pass out from weed, blacking out, smoke dope and walk tv, a recreation drug, negative effects, used to control the proletariat, the world is great, it was promising us a war story, they never come to it, editorial introduction, two roads, the priest and the warrior, Valium, amongst others, broadcast television, boomers, that tv going all day, 97 year old grandmother, more docile, streaming service, The Incredible Dr Pol, veterinarian, medical shows, binge, just like Jesus, consuming, not going out much, trained to do that during COVID, computer games or video games, playing games all day, you could be doing a podcast or whatever?, thinking of computer games as the new opiate of the masses, compared for television, streams are different, streaming services, broadcast television, you watch that channel, like watching the weather, targeted and mindful, a river, turn on the radio while you’re folding laundry, a new season of What If…?, that’s pretty strange, looking at the ipad, listen to a show, scrubbing the toilet, logistical concerns, walking across intersections looking at their phones, putting away dishes, listening/looking, the action sequence, zoning out, vegging out, couch potatoes, conspiracy theorist friends, rich people want to get rid of the proletariat, so they don’t get overthrown, the love interest, her desire to deal with the overpopulation problem, very Thanos, endgame, a farce?, no-good, election day is tops, just as good as an upper, the one day, everybody has everything, the Roman bacchanalia, parroting back the line of propaganda, we should have a revolution, things don’t work like this, the Sovs, political idiosyncrasies, do they have this in their world?, this future look, capitalism, communism, party members, Joe Mauser, talking to the gal, motivation, trying to get rich, get promoted, be a priest, getting shot at and possibly killed, civil war technology and conditions, boys like fighting, hitting each other with sticks, an atheist, religion distasteful, equating his rise, gotta be the top, cleverness, how he’s talked up by the others, I’m awesome, Joe Mauser’s goals, impressed, very interesting and clever, I wanna be rich, he wanted to be in the top, kinda means that you’re rich, a true capitalist society, today’s world, he’s gotta plan, an unwinnable battle, the highest status, why the girl’s right and he’s wrong, we don’t know anything about her, radical, doctor, she likes Joe Mauser, let’s go talk about goals, if you look at the illustrations, television related, the underlying target, good enough for Dad, you won’t catch me talking about the government, People’s Capitalism, too deep for Max, everybody owns the corporations, we’ve got one optical illusion, the proletariat owns the means of production, the party hierarchy, who can become a party member over there?, commentary elsewhere in the story, only elites can become party members, socialist labour party doctrine, bristle about, natural peace, Westworld, not prophetic, the current president of the United States, they’re not Sovs anymore, we aren’t living in an evenly distributed post-scarcity society, UBI, Andrew Yang, an idea going on back to the 50s, we have mass production, the real problem is overproduction, destroy, can’t we just have more approriate production, a planned economy, vs. an unplanned economy, Colossus/Guardian, Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), bomb proof robot, Guardian and Colossus merge, the humans quake and quiver, the end of the book, and the movie, the second book, two more books, Italian SpiderMan, respect women, make me a macchiato, Australian, competeing views of Marxism, where does he say the Soviet Union is evil, you gonna get in the glider, Soviet observer, SALT, send observers, seems totally legit, the Russians would send airplanes over the United States, the 90s?, we’ve fallen a long way, our leaders have, the misleaders, a weird world, a peaceful life, future stuff, a big schedule, time to read Ben-Hur, omelette, Watchmen, V For Vendetta, At Mountains Of Madness, what’s on the schedule, The Ship Of Ishtar, the preferred text?, 345 pages on faded page, a massive undertaking, 7 hour book, another pair, more Silverberg, Recalled To Life, and Burrough’s Eternal Savage, Jewishness, a little bit nuts, Pulp Archive, they are from different peoples, the tweet, english language literature, useful associations, Chicago Fantasy: Weird Tales, Narnia and Hogwarts, Cimmeria and Miskatonic, another example of parallel fantasies, different themes, different peoples different stories, the quote tweet, struggled to be included as Americas, not everything’s about America bro, Jewish relatives in Britain, Jewish relatives in Canada, Canadian national identity is so weak, even a shithead Zionist like Seinfeld, Christmas isn’t a thing, got to the Chinese restaurant, very similar, delicious, the idea behind it, Jewish fantasists of the secondary world kind, offended, something about the word, people get worried about the word Jew, the main thing that is going on, there is only this world, when you got to bury a Jewish relative, a very different philosophy, they believe, wait for the afterlife, the messiah hasn’t come yet, [Jesus was] a cool guy, he hasn’t come yet to Earth, do Jews believe in Heaven?, whatever they’re afterlife is, Jeremiah 33-34, the new covenant, heaven or not, believe in something, Dante tried to describe it, the concept of Hell, so vindictive, what is next is a little less certain, a BBC one, reform Judaism, the afterlife is here on earth, a transitory place, so much focus on being a good steward, orthodox Judaism, this approach differs from reincarnation, yeah maybe, Valhalla is a big thing for Pagans, Stovokor if you’re a Klingon, Commander Sisko is mad about it, Weinbaum, Silverberg, William Tenn, Harlan Ellison, Asimov, he’s got hell in his stories, science fiction goes hand in hand with Judaism, really into fantasy: Mormons and Catholics, how come that is, Jews are different, Tolkien and Narnia guy, fantasy: often magic is in play, Gandalf is more or less an angel, a chorus of angels, sing the world into existence, in Harry Potter it’s genetic, a token Jew in Hogwarts?, the Old Testament, Moses can turn his staff into a snake, Avram Davidson’s The Golem, Ukraine or Smolensky, Robert E. Howard, a robot, a knight from the lower class, an Irish knight, there’s no class stuff there, they’re never going to be in the upperclass, famous exceptions, the downtrodden, we can’t have a fantasy of life in the next world, antithetical is more likely, dallying in fantasy, wouldn’t it be cool if I was secretly a wizard, apprentice to that shoemaker, something to this very interesting article, John C. Wright, a self-published authors, before the purge, maybe both of them, Silverberg and Burroughs, Scott Miller, The Lovers by Philip Jose Farmer, Recalled To Life, American science fiction’s greatest living author, Drug Themes In Science Fiction, Bleekman’s Planet, a chariot race, a very Jewish book, Lew Wallace, former Civil War general, former governor, most influential Christian book of the 19th century, a quarter of a century into this century, barely lived in the 20th century, born in 1984, so funny, it’s a Brave New World, going by the year, do the math, good birthday, a recurring event, Professor Thomas, go off in your brainship, snow is all gone, an earthquake, rare, the tires on the car, Port Moody, really wavy today, 4.7, weird things the earth can do, live on a spacestation, fed through a tube, you’d take an orbital ride just to check it out, veterinary visuals, William Shatner, how empty and lifeless it was, your bones stop generating calcium or whatever, an experience, expensive and dangerous, until Elon Musk goes up, we are going to be on Mars, government money on the way, quick trip to space, cowboy hat, famous unfamiliar, like a party, Jungle Scandals, under a pseudonym, horny Tarzan, sell things to markets, a future opportunity, write for your own self, a story about a belt and snake and bowl, a bear a duck and a goose, people in the room and randos on the internet, not very Jewish of you, very protestant, sword and sorcery, the reign of Henry VIII, a heretical nun, some dragons, symbolic dragons, these are dragons and they’re cool, Trogdor,, Homestar Runner, Reign Of FireDragonslayer (1981), steal the scales, very different, the quality of everything has taken a shit all over, Planet Comics vs. Planet Comics, [Fiction House] very pulpy, the text stories in there, more like hero pulps, Tarzan born on Jupiter, Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson, read by Mike Hodel, library card, “world literature”, The Song Of Roland, Damien by Hermann Hesse, Matt Taibbi, Walter Kirn, pirated and up on YouTube, a Russian short story called The Fatalist by Mikhail Lermontov, you remind me of a character in Lermontov, A Hero Of Our Time, the embodiment of the Byronic hero, “interfering with out elections”, much to consider there, a really good journalist, the Twitter files guy, the FBI and the White House, Musk got mad and revoked his access, he’s not a white man, English language newspapers, the drunk guy: Yeltsin, a professional basketball player in one of the Stans, The Exile, Twitter used to be a more interesting place, he’s a drummer, straightforward and interested, old fashioned muckraking journalist, his free podcast, Damien Walter, both talk about literature, pretty obscure, journalists are, interesting funny guys with lots of stories, interviewed for the New York Times, labour journalist, freelance writers, more polemical than journalist, J-school, non-profit goon, where journalists go to cash in, Uzbekistan, the Mongolian [Dennis] Rodman, born in 63, when people talk about stories, listening to The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson, being very Jewish that day, there’s something wrong with their brains, reading a lot of Sword & Sorcery, random contemporary story, this is actually really good, speaking in poetry a lot, a brave choice, that’s ambitious, doomed to fall in love with his sister, eww, I’m like an amoral elf, too Christian, reconstruction, Paul has read it thrice, Will is historically a protestant, a few bibles in the house, the Good Book, a little drunk, what are the best books in the English language: the Bible, names, begats, rules, don’t cook a goat in his own milk, the first one, Genesis is fun, folktales, Exodus, Judges, Song Of Solomon, the horny one, Ecclesiastes, the Psalms, people should a read it, a good session, pick up your Bible.





Posted by Jesse Willis
The SFFaudio Podcast #852 – Jesse and Alex (Pulpcovers) talk about Beat To Quarters by C.S. Forester
Talked about on today’s show:
The Happy Return aka Beat To Quarters, more exciting sounding, the drum, red alert, double red alert, get to your stations, spoken in the book, in searching twitter, a conversation, Cirsova, C.S. Hornblower Books is hard science fiction, anything set in space is not science fiction, flawlessly longical, the Honor Harrington books, same initials, same idea, career arc, broadsides in space, he crafted his science fiction technology to require broadsides in space, Star Trek was modeled after Horatio Hornblower, Picard’s character research, the tight-ass personality, badly reminded, a Hornblower scene on holodeck, when they did it on the show, recreation, sex fantasies, Worf’s going there to get stabbed, the Sherlock Holmes investigations, they’re doing their own recreation, trying to get your boss and the guy who does the photocopying to play your D&D, this works as a book, read this as a kid, always loved, a certain amount of wishfulfilment for the author, not a Mary Sue, kind of a jerk, see me being a great captain, very novel, the Horatio Hornblower tv series, you can’t do interior stuff in TV and movies, voice over narration, have somebody tell you what Conan’s feelings are, Subotai, almost completely through the eyes of Hornblower, the careful crafting of a first time author, intended to be a book series?, an established writer, brought to Hollywood to write a pirate movie, Hornblow and Bush, Captain Blood (1935), Errol Flynn, hounded by the prospect, hopped a freighter, voyage with this woman, a Wellsley, her name was Barbara, falling in love, an unfaithful womanizer, a guy who delivers the meals, lends itself to series, the romance, almost doesn’t fit, it’s fun, Sharpe is a response to Hornblower, Hornblower on land, comedic fat guy, a wagonmaster general, Baron Harkonnen, the same actor doing essentially the same role, a fat diplomat bad at his job, Ian McNeice, the main guy who’s awesome, men he has to convince, everybody think’s he’s great, seems like very very Mary Sue, counterbalanced, going bald, so obsessed with his own image, he refuses to talk to anybody, hm hmm, the narrator does a lot of hm hmmming, the 1951 adaptation, almost the entire novel, 2 other books, very faithful, the interiority, the officers betting, are we gonna die before we find shore?, the fawning, do the same job, C.S. Forester worked on the ship, a very Hollywood thing, the female servant some generic south american brown skinned person, so much shoepolish, El Supremo, so cartoonish, Aubrey–Maturin, Master And Commander Far Side Of The World (2003), first exposure to audiobooks, a lot of sitting, poetry, the double meaning of words, Jesse’s favourite joke, I was impressed by the British Navy’s recruiting methods, works both ways, very stupid, institutions being very bad, hospitals, they’re everywhere, they turn the people they work in them into soulless drudges, doing their best within the system, an impressed sailor, volunteers as well, a bigger part of the navy than it really was, when there’s no war there’s not a lot of impressment, dockyard, the rum ration, an institutionalized way of controlling people through drugs, stories from the 1950s, alcohol usage, excited about getting the rum, Pervitin, amphetamines, single seater aircraft, they don’t issue it to for you every day, SS and tanks, Robert Shaw, dye job, Battle Of The Bulge (1965), From Russia With Love (1963), keep pushing those tanks, worked against the French, institutions like prisons or mental hospitals, old-folks homes, during COVID, Ontario, getting uppity, drugged them, keep em calm, keep em under control, a certain feeling, part of your pay, not enough to get drunk on, double rations, a nice buzz, horrible work, a lot of pain, a miserable job, making people into cogs, the best example of that in a positive sense, in the next book, drilled and perfect, an incredibly well honed crew, prisoners and landsmen, kidnapping a bunch of guys, amateurs, weeks whipping them into shape, to be able to run up the mast, a lot of Hornblower is forming a mentality in the men, that image is represented, walk the deck, make sure they see him, keep that pot-belly down, Gregory Peck, by special arrangement, in their stable, these guys are like impressed sailors, under contract, thanks to Warner Brothers for giving us to this movie, Sony owns some of Marvel, if we wanna have the Spider-Man, just the character, TV shows, ER for all those year, a Michael Crichton show, Remington Steele, to be Bond, prevented him from being Bond for a while, Tom Selleck didn’t get Indiana Jones because, The High Road To China (1983), opens with flogging, starts the same way, to blame, Mr Bush, do you know why I’m flogging this man?, he was fighting, sir, more careful about what you say, that leadership, that aura, a few times, a lot more needing to show, the movie stops right after they blow up the other ship, our ship in rags, a cut, shipshape, the island, careening, unnecessary, why is it in there?, he has to be a complete man, fell in love with, writing about what you know, having him married, Wellesley, wife is dead, a very happy ending, a new family, someone else’s baby, widower and widow, the cheating we anticipate is made all fair, bigger ship of the line, his boss the admiral, they get married right away, I guess she really didn’t love me, he resents his own wife, lost two kids to smallpox, an act of parliament, remain this faithful husband, I hate her, back to war, captured by the French, his boss’ widow, they can now get married, a pure adaptation of the first three novels, a bit long for a film, fantastic, he’s not British is he?, Cary Grant, shove em in Europe and it is find, is this a science fiction novel?, no, but, are those science fiction novels if they’re built on this structure, a kind of technology, not future technology, understanding how these ships, work, oh!, I bet it is real, when they’re becalmed, he has the sailors wet down the sails, years at sea, sails are better, we have boat engines, you take down your sail, a little outboard, no need to rely on precision, there is one scene in the first Honor Harrington Jesse read, first time writer’s mistake, the captain looking in the mirror describing his shape to us, my hips are a little wide, especially prominent with female characters, I’m not happy with my double ds, many men have told me, too big of a tush, bad writing, oh really, it was brief, the men seeing him standing on deck, that double picture, it isn’t complete over the shoulder or into the mind of our hero, at two points in the book, Lady Barbara, down in the guts of the ship, Florence Nightingaling, Crimea, Sevastapol, physically demanding, this kind of nursing is not really women’s work, holding some hands and here’s your pill, explicitly excluded, pressing women to become nurses on ships, their better relationship to come, acting like a mother to one of these dying Scotsman, how to kiss him the way he wanted to be kissed by his mother, on the eyes and on the lips, he dies, that’s how the mom kissed him, acting as a mother, a good mother to his son, a similar scene, jumps out of the text, she and he are heavy petting, my poppet, in loving terms, except as a child, baby language, how people talk to each other, child honey, wife honey, very action packed, business oriented, the El Supremo incident, in the Pacific near Nicaragua and Panama, her packet being taken, already come around the horn, the return journey, asked Grok, the name of the island they fixed, the Isle of Pigs, Grok might be lying, there is an island in the right spot, in the Pacific that’s pretty obscure, on their way to the Horn, named after a pirate, a volcanic reef with a central body of water, on the wrong side, in the Coiba Island, Panama, sticking to the history, how many times did the Spanish change sides during the Napoleonic Wars, mostly from Sharpe, Spanish allies, conflict with other stuff, fictional, comparable, so cartoonish, much more like a Star Trek episode, on some planet, Hitler in hiding, Thanos action, to save food, The Conscience of the King, they don’t have discipline, a lot more guns, sunk, the local Indians recruited, except for the officers, very interesting, a background contempt, the negress, Hebe?, lock her up, she won’t stay away from the men, technically, she won’t stay away from a man either, she’s the fictional sister, a Red Sonja situation, invented a sister, just means God, worshiped as a god, if Kirk was in this situation, one of the guns that doesn’t go off, the money never comes up again, even just as ballast, the movie version of Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World (2003), pulling from at least two books, the colon in the title, should have had a sequel, beautiful in execution, everything that’s good in this book amped up, the model work is fine, the Peter Weir movie, the captain and his doctor, McCoy and Kirk, stop at the Galapagos and sort of pause, all the horror of the battles, the strategy is even more amped up, give you a sense, feel the weather, usually books are better, why people get addicted to reading the whole series, fun, interesting, the historical setting isn’t so faked, The Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, nothing matters, talking about Tortuga, just flags you can throw up to get you excited, a fantasy town, a fake culture they’ve slapped a real name on, outrageous behavior, verges on that, all of the British people watching, this guy is crazy and terrifying and weird, people being tortured, whipping is something we should try to avoid, his general/admiral, the cartoon of every dictator of every cartoon, a dark mirror of Hornblower, expect instant obedience, other books, a complete psychopath, a kinship, maybe I’m a complete psychopath, he has orders to follow, what will they think if I do this, lose my commission, go on half-pay, I have to follow my orders, that gold in the hold, that niggling feeling, not the perfect, what’s next?, it has all the goods you want, he pretends to be a whaler, trickery thing, in the Mediterranean, the Spanish French coast, you got three days, go cause some havok, switches flags real quick, trickery stuff, Star Trek, they’re on the frontier, going to places on the edge of explored space, space cops, Mudd’s Women, he’s a space cop, that’s illegal, the worst episodes of Star Trek, the only British ship in the entire Pacific, stolen maps, a 300 year old map, doing their business, they know the shore, this is not the safe and happy Caribbean, this is the far frontier, the aluetians, Fred Heimbaugh, Typee by Herman Melville, swim in, hiding out, Pacific Islanders, Tahitians!, you guys are in terrible shape, are they gonna taste us, bein nice, cut up by brambles, hungry and thirsty, it rains, they make a house in 10 minutes, food is abundant, a little bit of rain, life is easy on these islands, the opposite experience, the water has green things, skin’s opening up, Melville was gay, you look sexy, the women don’t worry about that unless you’re king, marry their sister, let’s go swimming, different sort of culture, cannibals on this island, over this mountain, point back over the other side of the island, the Pitcairn Island experience, Hawaii, hide until the ship leaves, they go to Tahiti, steal a bunch of women, burn the ships that nobody can leave, the Fletcher Christian story is a nightmare, a mutiny, the mutiny in the Bounty, 1789 – 1808, concerned they’re gonna jump ship, it interacts with the idea of El Supremeo, a mirror of Hornblower, no one can judge him, not even God can judge him, bound by his duty, reduced by looking in the mirror, how much balder he is, I wish I had a bow for my hair, unchecked, do whatever you want, Kirk seems to violate orders all the time, bound by the organization, specific orders, loyalty to the king, never gets punished for it, they throw him in the briar patch, a recapitulation of the Nomad space probe episode, gee whizz, very psychedelic,every year in the background, while you’re not paying attention, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) is getting better and better, The Wrath Of Khan, the space battle, also has Genesis, Star Trek VI is even moreso, he killed his son, he hates Kahn, it’s not personal, on a mission, prevent a war, a big space battle, the audience hates this guy, prevent that, Christopher Plummer, in the original klingon, I hate klingons, Star Trek IV, go back in time get some whales, back to the future, admiral kirk we’re demoting you to captain, solid ending, very bad all comedy Star Trek V, what does god need with a spaceship, product placement for marshmallows, with the nebula, clouds, comin out of a fog bank, coming out of a shoal, what the spanish ship is doing, whist, a rubber, Phileas Fogg, Around The World In 80 Days, the raid, take the ship, very cartoony in space, spock says he’s thinking two dimensionally, we think 3 dimensionally because we live in space, why Cirsova is right, they’re both right side up, the invisible ocean of ether, assembling for fleet battles, only when they’re sinking, listing to port, the horizon in space, the Constitution with Decker, planet killer [The Doomsday Machine], scratches a similar itch, a thesis, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and F&SF, a set of premises, these are the things that are possible, Will Emmons, another nautical guy, L. Ron Hubbard story, they’re not really science fiction stories because none of the premises he work for matter, mass to fuel, there is no wind that can suddenly save you, tides are super-goddamn predictable, otherwise your ship will sink, measuring the bottom, the tide situation, that stuff is very science fictional, the clocks, the solution being clocks, not the way we do it now, it’s all about clocks still, the difference between the two clocks, it tells us stuff, it’s science fiction in the sense that it plays by a certain set of rules, use them as weapons, makes this book worthy, ships and boats, he’s taught me, just research?, his first wife had a great uncle British naval captain, autobiographies of himself, the captain, manual of seamanship volume 1, look everything up as we need it, he’s studying for his lieutenant’s exams, a scenario like the Kobayashi Maru, dismasted, an attack outside, superheroic, commissioned lieutenant, about to fail, Kirk cheated on his exam, a test of character, TNG, some girl gives him help, leave one of these aliens behind, it was all a simulation on the holodeck, makes you grow as a man, all stolen from this, boosted so much, 20 of those, they’re chunky, this book was 7 hours, the next book in the series, Captain Horatio Hornblower, back to England, he’s rich, prizes, a son, Commodore Hornblower, invasion of Russia, fun, not as good as the first block of book, how series work, Killers Are My Meat by Stephen Marlowe, farmer, lady wants to ride a horse, disposive of their character, in certain genres, historical war novels, there was another battle, the war kept going, on the far side of the world for it, the French don’t show up in this book at all, an interesting setting, how the Sharpe series, Sharpe’s Tiger, Sean Bean, old retired guy, a weird phenomena, a new Dexter tv show, based on a novel, when the show becomes more popular than the original novel, Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, a post-one, the voiceover, recast everybody to play younger versions, James Remar is the father figure, taught him the code, you’ve got a dark passenger inside you son, the guy from Heathers (1988), Christian Slater, impressions, as close as possible, muppets and then muppet babies, Dexter with Muppet Babies, Miami Vice with an 18 year old Crockett, we don’t want old Sean Bean, old Harrison Ford, that’s all they’ll give us, still uncanny CGI deaging, a flashback, digitally deaged, fuckn move on, wrong accent, the historical setting, the weird deep, thugees, the second Indiana Jones movie, the Sankara Stones, it’s quite complicated, Kali is not all evil, most contemporary media is content with broadsides in space, war story with a historical setting, Overlord (2018), that’s not how it was, at least Quentin Tarantino holds it for the end of the film, attention to historical detail is superimportant, space magic, the original tweet, three year journey, why is it called The Happy Return?, something he’s returning from, reason to be returning, didn’t get the girl in real life, she didn’t die?, the Barbara from the boat, he’s kind of a jerk, not a super-heroic character, a lot of self-doubt, overcome self-doubt, his self-doubt drives him to do stupid things to a lot of people, good at math, cheats on both of his wives, a little bit of a terrible person, if I don’t do it it will look bad for me, let things happen to people, socially awkward, undermine my dignity as a captain, sold on this book in the battle, takes so long, the way it accelerates, let’s see what we can do here, the bodies start piling up, dropping fake wood on top of people, my midshipman, where’s his head, a powderboy turned into red mist, obliterated by a cannon ball, super-humanitarian, not allowed, there’s no way to do it, parodic, historical examples, everybody on the Island is named Christian, a contest for who’s going to be in charge of this harem, pretty fuckin hardcore, disciplinary captain, the recapitulation, well plotted book, a big success, in the canon of things people hear about, Greyhound (2020), Tom Hanks, theaters were closed, sold it to Apple, worthy of attention, always like that in his films, a big anti-fan of Castaway (2000), box of chocolates movie, extremely boomer, fan service for everybody, Zelig (1983), Woody Allen, a forgotten piece of history, the evil it is showing into a Hallmark card, Saving Private Ryan (1998), the D-Day opening, trying to convince this team of guys, some dude, his brothers are dead, fake, why is this worth it?, they didn’t do that, they let 8 brothers die on a ship, they changed the law, all 5 Sullivan brothers died, all stuck on the same ship, dropping into Normandy, Matt Damon, I gotta fight this battle, fight with him to protect him, Ryan gets home, cuts to old man Ryan at the cemetery, these guys all died to save me, the Titanic, that’s why Jesse rejected it, The Good Shepherd, sounds weirdly religious, one of those Christian movies, a war movie, Fury (2014), the anti-Saving Private Ryan, the opposite of sentimental, sentimental war movies, The Four Feathers (2002), Heath Ledger, 4 movie versions, a good story every time, Chinese Gordon era Sudan, a very unfamiliar setting, not well explored, the Great Game is happening, central Asia, what is now Pakistan, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, where does it fit in the chronology, the Crimean War, the Boer Wars, filling in those details through history, start researching the very small details, using chatgpt, all about crafting question, you have studied international relations, a ten point plan for peace in Palestine and Israel, you’re gonna have to lie, the two state solution, who was the badguy in WWII in WWII one sentence answer, now who is the badguy in the Gaza-Israeli conflict, it’s really complicated, the clear picture from the perspective in history, the much easier and cleaner, details smoothed over, the victors are telling the story, I can’t believe you said that, everyone involved in dead, the Huns invaded that was bad, the basic way of going into any question, you wanna buy a stove, that guy’s gonna try to sell you a stove you don’t need, Amazon, the first step, a hot topic in the news right now, we can learn that way as the first step, don’t do that because it is bad, a good book, not a bad book, despite the mirror scene, in the first of a lot of books, that period uncaring sloppiness, the sensitivity of your descriptors, we’ll fix this by not having her represented at all, more colour, literally, the casual racism, anti-Spanish, yep, she’s black, kinda slutty, these assholes, so sloppy, so arrogant, predictable too, while that ship is approaching, Suprize!, the Lydia is not much of a name, the Pluto, the Sutherland, just a name, the Terror, Pellew is mentioned, the Indefatigable, Dreadnought, the Victory, The Four Feathers by A.E.W. Mason, collaborative, good old books, Ben-Hur, a 24 hour book, a big book, looking forward to it, a really good story, how many film versions?, a silent, the Charlton Heston, an early 2000s, a tv miniseries, see you on the internet.


Posted by Jesse Willis
The SFFaudio Podcast #837 – Mistress Of The Dark Pool by Russell Gray (1 hour 3 minutes) from Terror Tales, May 1940 and The Cold Female by Dale Harlow (19.5 minutes) from Adam, January 1957. Both are read by Mike Vendetti. These are followed by a discussion of both. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Alex (Pulpcovers), Cora Buhlert, and Tommy Patrick Ryan.
Talked about on today’s show:
Philsp.com Galactic Central, can’t get google to work, a huge magazine index, Sgt. Bilko, all the magazine contents, mostly all there, non-genre magazines, Cora’s entry is wrong, Stephenson Paine, only has one story, flourishing in the 1950s, this issue of Adam, pseudonymous, fairly well written, Jack Casanova, K. Robert Howard, a funny magazine, internet archive, before Palestine, you taking down, LibriVox is down, people who throw , PulpCovers, killed the internet archive, hackers?, online activists, a DDOS attack, LibriVox, one of the files was corrupted, work on something else, in 7 months when this podcast comes out Gaza wont be being destroyed, save the best for last, Russel Gray, excellent art, attractive and a good premise, Mistress Of The Dark Pool is just way too long, the biggest problem, an hour and 3 minutes, very similar, lakes, mountains, people in cabins, every stereotype ever, food and supplies and information, Cabin In The Woods, titular cabin, titular woods, go in clear eyed, weird sacrifice thing, the knew what they were getting into, willingly allow the vampire into your home, Reading, Short And Deep, connection through Eric [S. Rabkin], find the hidden sex, much clearer, definitely had sex with that woman, May 1940, written 5 minutes before it was published, before the US is involved in WWII, it wasn’t important yet, isfdb entry, Bruno Fisher (Russell Gray) (Harrison Storm), interesting quote, these markets, weird menace pulps, living in Florida with my family, terror/horror market, just one day the market was gone, 150 Philip K. Dick, the market collapses, it’s Chinatown, Jake, if you shutter the business that distributes magazines, paperback distribution, early 1990s, censorship, legal issue, a history of this, might be war related, all the way through the depression, ramping up for war, gonna be a paper shortage, preparing for war, army approved pulp, Playboy, I read it for the articles, the Saturday Evening Post of a certain niche, a magazine like Adam, much condensed, more censoriously, lot less placing breasts in hands, less explicit, implied more, some birds started chirping, Eric Rabkin comes out of the forest with his hat on, waterfalls and tunnels, fade away, necking in the surf, how many beds are in that house?, obsessed with the idea, too much to read, both stories use the same word, wood nymph, scary stories to tell in the dark, fireside ghost story kinda things, a filler story in Weird Tales, read versus listened, Mike Vendetti, how seriously he took it, very believable, so broad, come on guy, must be the daughter, who could have seen this coming?, a more enjoyable experience, weird menace pulps, both sex stories, ghost women in the mountain cabin, author vs. engineer, the author is the bad writer, the engineer is the good writer, forgive a lot of the things, nice art, paid by the word, seeing it in the relief, salacious title, could be a horse, sounds like it could be a Conan story, all of his titles, the blank of the blank, the castle of the harridans, a collection of Russell Gray stories, actual print book, Monster Of The Purple Mist, all sound awesome, go at it bro, Hostesses In Hell And Other Stories: The Selected Stories Of Russell Gray and My Touch Brings Death: And Other Stories, a new cover, no interior art, the artists on the shudder pulps worked overtime, great art, the editorial descriptions are good, the mangy dog he called her lover, I vowed I would kill girl I loved, way more appealing, too many scenes, repetitive, wife steps up and saves his ass, cool character, he doesn’t deserve it, the spell is have sex with this sexy lady down the street, skip to the discussion, find out pretty quick, in comparing it, so similar, the one was made longer, would it improve the story, pretty groany, yard work, describing her breasts, I’m so cold, start snuggling, reacts as a virile man should, adolescent fantasy, male fantasy, dear Ghost Story letters: you wouldn’t believe what happened to me!, jealousy is a thing, modelling Tommy’s mind, the alcoholism, drinking happening, pouring the alcohol down his throat, rye whiskey, the first alcoholism bad movie, The Lost Weekend (1945), a drug to escape reality, this potent medicine, a poison that’s hurting our health, enjoying a fine cigar, not going to make you beat your wife or drive drunk, a good glass of wine, a single malt scotch, useful for cooking, wine into cooking, so much more of it out there, the whiskey didn’t effect me, playing Hamlet, Richard Burton, what happens if I suddenly get a phone call, pulled over, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, way too drinky, a beautiful wife he loves, battles with alcohol, easier to pack up into the mountains, pretty normalized, an older time, drinking alone, a bad marriage, a lesbian or was going to murder you, women definitely drank alcohol, sherry, champagne, The Thin Man (1934), a comedy, social, the way it appears in this story, using it like a medicine, an alcohol spiral, the husband comes to his senses, the good wife helped him, saved her even though he was tired, personal psychology, go to a cabin in the woods, a beautiful woman requires you have sex with her, a mangy dog, he kills it, I didn’t mean to kill that dog, what happened to Amos?, perfectly normal, they left her body by the cabin with ribbons of skin, a better ending, together they bury the body, throws the whiskey bottle into the grave, he buried his demons along with his demons, he doesn’t believe in witchcraft, the red herring that makes it longer, six chapters, chapter titles are good, Americans are weird about alcohol, marksmanship competition, shooting clubs, the king and queen of the marksman, so German, get a gun license, a nice plaque, such a German thing, 35 and 75, nobody minds, much healthier attitude, get really drunk at a wedding, an addictive drug, Prohibition, grain into liquor, profit per ton of cargo, sever chronic alcoholism, rampant, Ecuador, major problem, French wine, getting schnockered, liquid, symbolic, Eric hat, a lake is very different than rain, or a cup of water on your desk, you go into the unconscious, let me tell you about it, a woman who goes into the water, her fantasy, her desire is the theoretical explanation for why the, sexy witch’s daughter, harridan harridan harridan, a dark liquor, the more lost you get, when you go in the water, went swimming, needed to clear my head, he’s going away from his wife, he’s straying, a symbol for femaleness, his engineering projects, the Canadian Rockies, in the off season, to go fishing, the thing that came out of the lake, the woman knocking on the door is a neighboring cabin woman, abusive husband, it went supernatural, she needs to come out of the lake, she’s a witch!, a market for science fiction, unusual, running away from a killer, and now we’re on the road together, in the mountains of Canada, not the end of the story, she’s dead, died a virgin, a male fantasy, Edgar Allan Poe, I at least married them, comes back to life, at least 20 years, really old women that looked young, The Lake by Ray Bradbury, the season is over, drag something from the lake, sandcastle, he will always love this girl, looks at his wife, why is this weird woman here?, an adult version of The Lake, never grows up, he still loves her, struck by the similarities, better scripter, retro review, on a lot of high school reading lists, May 1944, no school is in session, a link, how young, this is going to get weird, 19, it didn’t matter, might be committing crimes, she’s 19, she coulda been 16, 14 now, teacher and student, power dynamics, no one bats an eye, 14 and 19 year old, eyelashes batted, what do we make the names of Hulda and Amos, is that a name?, a witch name, a prophetess, Mother Hulda (Frau Holle), the legendary creature, what makes our character Hulda evil?, she’s old and ugly, a mangy narrator, our stupid narrator, linked to Christmas and winter folklore in the alpine region, always resorting to alcohol, stupider, mitigate it, pushed off the page, he uses the word to describe the male husband, supposedly a writer, in the mountains to get his novel finished, such a bad writer, he makes the connection for us, it explained by his alcoholism, the audience shouldn’t be ten times smarter, a different name, Timerider: The Adventure Of Lyle Swann (1982), back to the future, he’s his own grandpa, raped by his gandma, Cyngne, he didn’t make the connection, they share a family name, 6 pages, 19 and half pages, five times shorter, is it five better?, three times better, with great art, an anecdote you tell your friend, woman knocking on the door, a fish story, no creepy pun intended, he’s showing propriety, having sex with a ghost, just kinda sad, let me tell you about my Canadian girlfriend who’s a ghost and you can never find, almost wholesome, my dead lover who I turned into a dog for reasons, a shape changer, a dog by day, hot and sweaty sex, with I could have sex with humans, attracted to the wife, you dog, now you’ll live like a dog, don’t make the story longer, skinny dipping, the dog shows up, so crude and simple and badly written, kinda like it still, honest in its stupidity and baseness, Robert E. Howard, pretty good money, get enough sex in there, the explanation for why everything was happening was bizarre and bad, married couples never had children, sex happens, not newly married, three years, undue for the era, if you don’t have children, young children would be with them, off at military school, kinda the point of getting married, having kids, married characters in weird menace stories, New York brownstones, feeds you someone from the asylum, you attracted to the opposite sex, it complicates it and makes it weird, if this couple had a kid that was with them, why is daddy acting so weird, The Shining, a terrible drunk, as time goes on, this is a story about a guy who wants to kill himself, a bunch of King, a thing he says over and over again: I’m a horrible drunk, read The Mist, possibility he’s gonna kill his family, right before rescue shows up, a fog, the alcohol you’re imbibing, reading into his personal psychology, an assignment sorta style, gotta have a witch and a pool and a cliff, Test-Tube Frankenstein also had a cliff, I like cliffs, almost being stabbed, 1930 Margaret Brundage, lesbian whipping scenes, they look like they’re dancing, lesbian witch cult, way less about personal psychology and more to male psychology, so streamlined, three characters in the whole story, no personality other than hetero, the anecdote that it wants to tell, is she a wood nymph, could be a wood nymph, naked woman in the woods, a fleeting glimpse in the mist, life is a lot more interesting, straight to dryad, too complicated word for the target audience, straight out of Dungeons & Dragons, sprite, hamadryad, C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, J.R.R. Tolkien, the entire Chronicles Of Narnia, super-famous British actor, Kenneth Branagh, Vanessa Redgrave, Patrick Stewart, the performances are incredible, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance For Men And Women by George MacDonald, they all died on the same day, a photo of the Doctor, at the Kennedy assassination, C.S. Lewis died, Aldous Huxley, Paul Chadwick, comic book artist, Dark Horse, Concrete, Harlan Ellison, a movie with that scene, that’s in a movie, a newish movie, The Most Reluctant Convert, converting to Catholicism, Lovecraft says to Robert E. Howard: You should become a muslim, Robert E. Howard to Lovecraft: I will eventually, sweet as a nut, The Horse And His Boy, my favourite, the best book in the series, Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, writing/publication, how does that fit in, The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Magician’s Nephew, The Last Battle, for the retro Hugos, so terrible, an all volunteer pickup basketball, a cartoon adaptation, series on DVD, live action, a BBC version, Prince Caspian, Lewis is public domain in Canada, semi-professional Chrisitan audio dramas, consider that, before we lose Tommy, The Tower Treasure, a shelf of them, December 1st, blind spots, Nancy Drews, simple, hilarious, teen detective stories, Enid Blyton, Lilith by George MacDonald, Odd John by Olaf Stapledon, Symposium by Plato, Fury by Henry Kutter, Paycheck and The Weapon Shop, A.E. Van Vogt, more pairings, all the reading on Saturday, wouldnt be new, close to an hour, a William Hamilton Osborne story, The Haunted Corridors, able to clean it up, The Noseless Horror, always happy to do Howard, precedes pretty much everybody, Assyrian, in Egypt, talk across space, recorded on the farm, a twist at the end, quite different, in Portland, can’t turn down Howard, advent coffee, looking through ebay listings, a striking cover, calling the museum that has his papers, The New Jersey Historical Society, the idea seems very novel, a scientist and his beautiful daughter, a “machine”, more of a ghost story, the cover is great, the little hint, the machine is kinda like a cellphone, in a different time, to hear what they can hear there, listening through time, an audio podcast, two hours of homework for Alex, mostly reader, audio processing issues, listen to podcasts, full cast audio dramas, a whole industry, mostly one company, still alive, excellent people doing these, Big Finish Blakes 7, actors out from carbonite, a kindly elephant, a kindly witch, action oriented stuff, licensed stuff, Knightrider, that’s for you, He-Man, the German voice of Tom Selleck, Midsomer Murders, the Max Max novelization, The Terminator novelization, if they exist they’re probably very expensive, Alan Dean Foster, a novelization of Total Recall?, Terry Bisson?, Piers Anthony, Poul Anderson, novelized everything, marginal movies, Iron Eagle (1986), Kevin J. Anderson, Timothy Zahn, personality defects, Predator (1987), took that hate, especially censorship, Huawei phone, Terrifier 3 (2024), Wild Robot (2024), Ladyhawke (1985), let us rent it, The Terminator (1984) at a young age, had to watch Ladyhawke again, an assigned seat, 1 ticket vs. ten tickets, a lot to do with real estate, everything ties together, new tech, delisted, woke now, trains and WWII and Ukranian War propaganda, chicken breeding, once or twice, your dad’s station, dull people talking about politics, it was fun, a gothic romance novel, a beautiful woman with perfect hair fleeing a castle at night, Slaughterhouse Five, the sixties people, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Victoria Holt, Marilyn Ross, A Place Of Sapphires, piracy, governess, more Scooby Doo than Dracula, an immigrant, a reverse Dracula, female fantasy, Jane Austen, Bridgerton, romantic comedy, romcoms, gothic romance movies, Frenchman’s Creek, Jamaica Inn, The Birds, drug induced time travel, Marghanita Laski, she’s a ghost, very stylish and well done, moved to Italy with husband, Mona Farnsworth, The Three Sisters Of No-End House, completely forgotten, nurse novels, pen-names, Swedish adaptations, lesbian, from 1960, cliffs of Cornwall, past tragedy and present danger, passions overpower reason, evil lurks in the shadows, perfectly in tune, kicked off the boom, dismissed, Northanger Abbey, those are bad, commit to this, literally includes a castle with a high lit window, wearing a nightgown, retro toy and game, getting a better handle on human nature through fiction, what compels humans, Harlequin romances, daylight savings, I don’t believe you, a stupid idea from the start, China has 1 time zone, 1 time zone for the whole planet, you’re somebody, the twitter blocking thing changing, logging into an alternate twitter account, blocked or deleted, bluesky is where the writers and covid panic people hangout, threads has women obsessed about menopause, toy collectors, Lego minifigs, square format, photography, twitter as it used to be, oh well, plain gone, mad at Cora, not sufficiently anti or pro, all the time, you cannot post about your book, focused on the news, American election about to happen, a massive increase in depression, every second tweet is about Trump, if Trump is the worst thing that happened to you, in what sense is he terrible, Russia is never going to attack us, might try to sell you some gas, Anne Applebaum, Nordstream 2, they’re proud of it, set this thing on fire, so furious, hate Biden, terrible woman, spend lots of money to protect against the Russians, rat out my neighbours, it is horrible being occupied, 2 million people of Russian origin in Germany, grew up in Kazakhstan, they work hard, gardening is ex-Soviet people, paves your driveway, Jewish people, sorry for the holocaust, escaped Ukraine, communicating is difficult, so stupid to fall for it, endless amounts of weapons and money into Ukraine, weapons into hot-war zones, Israel, exporting weapons, promise not to use them to commit genocide, the weapons industry, subcontractors, specialized weapons manufactures, Airbus, the people who build tanks, Heckler and Koch, Sigsauer, Walther, submarines, campus, shipyards, superyachts for rich assholes, techbros, oligarchs, stories to tell about rich people being assholes, the Russian oligarchs are gone, taxpayer money, terrible headache, go to sealevel, 4 meters above sealevel, for dinner,

Posted by Jesse Willis
Jesse, Will Emmons, and Terence Blake, talk about Waterspider by Philip K. Dick
Talked about on today’s show:
Worlds Of IF, January 1964, estate, renewed, Poul Anderson, there’s a Poul Anderson serial, not related, the public domain contents, archive.org, delete the half of the serial that’s in this, from 1963, poor Astrid, Karen, Jesse fucking them over out of their money, light and playful and not interesting, a lot of the humour is fan insider humour, doesn’t interest, some deeper stuff, funny, beyond the who’s who of fan people, Howard Browne always having to catch a bus, or a plane, Ray Bradbury has to lie down, a time travel story, A Sound Of Thunder, the butterfly effect, subtly, Trump’s been elected, a ripple effect, the origin of the phrase, seagulls, wingbeats, more poetic, hurricane or cyclone, the Jesse Willis policy on spoilers, a huge Ray Bradbury head, cloying and annoying and too soft and not science fictiony enough, pre-occupied by death, The Small Assassin, my baby is trying to kill me, stupid, a terrible title for a story, the big jump, crack the words and the proper names, the stories are parallel, the Deucher thing, the evil Trump-like character, Gutman in this book, Gutman was dangerous because he had non-conformist ideas, the liberal society is totalitarian, very 2024, their future is our president, he’s a precog, Minority Report, it’s stupid, a weak story, an interesting idea, far too long, those precogs are very autistic dudes and a lady in a bathtub, all science fiction writers are precogs, a Hugo Gernsback idea, ridiculing and validating, interested in science fiction, Damien G. Walter, sorry Damien G. Walter, the prophet, tries to show that Jordan Peterson listened to his podcast, mythos, junior high school, this isn’t a word, how wrong he is makes me smarter, evils? fallacies? errors, no wrong about everything, one of the more honest liberals, pretty open about that, in a not wholly hateful way, starting to get into science fiction, [Bill Christensen’s] Technovelgy, thinking about ideas in the present, If This Goes On…, novelette, people who think science fiction, suffer from ideology, where subjectivity is proscribed, these people from the past were writing attempts at literal prediction, making fun of that idea, he’s doing both, three or four layers to this, as soon as you go away from the convention, in the consequence, shown to be wrong, stories mentioned in what issues of IF, The Defenders, the January 1953 Galaxy, faking the report, the people…, very good Poul Anderson agreed, those exact conditions came to pass, we were able to penetrate the article, do you know him?, very nervous fellow, probably a true story, Poul Anderson met Philip K. Dick for the first, the Sir Francis Drake hotel, Dr. Futurity, a Duck call Sir Francis, on the surface here, this story we’re reading, the August 1955 issue of IF, Nightflight, it’s not there, from a different timeline, a 1959 story by Margaret St. Clair, identification, Evelyn Page, the renowned, The Scarlet Hexapod, one of the finest, flushing nervous, a man from the future?, that was so cool, a non-interesting story if that’s all this story was, total fan service, looks like a self-cancelling loop, goes own to write that story and publish it, you reverse mandela effect yourself, has changed the future, the word waterspider survives as a pretty good sounding name for their project, nightflight sounds better, this word, waterspiders, they walk across the water, is Poul Anderson a water spider in this story, walk across the waters, Paulous (small) ander means man, son of man, the result of a small change, the butterfly effect, the word that survives into the future, a second loop, from a meta point of view, a different writer in the past, just as in the Fermi paradox, aliens everywhere, so brilliant they can pass undetected, the Fermetti paradox, visited by time travelers all the time, they memory wipe us, the loops are not totally effacive, they’re like dreams, minds switched, their names switched, back to front, reading from my mind, totally there, almost unacknowledged in the story itself,
Puzzled, Tozzo shook his head and said in bewilderment, “I have some peculiar words in my mind. Night Flight. Do either of you happen to know what it refers to?”
“Night Flight” Fermeti echoed. “No, it means nothing to me. I wonder, though – it certainly would be an effective name for our Project.”
“Yes,” Gilly agreed. “That must be what it refers to.”
“But our Project is called Waterspider, isn’t it?” Tozzo said. At least he thought it was. He blinked, trying to focus his faculties.
“The truth of the matter, ” Fermeti said, “is that we’ve never titled it.” Brusquely, he added, “But I agree with you; that’s an even better name for it. Waterspider. Yes, I like that.”
The door of the office opened and there stood a uniformed, bonded messenger. “From the Smithsonian,” he informed them. “You requested this.” He produced a parcel, which he laid on Fermeti’s desk.
“I don’t remember ordering anything from the Smithsonian,” Fermeti said. Opening it cautiously he found a can of roasted, ground coffee beans, still vacuum packed, over a century old.
The three men looked at one another blankly.
“Strange,” Torelli murmured. “There must be some mistake.”
“Well,” Fletcher said, “in any case, back to Project Waterspider.” Nodding, Torelli and Oilman turned in the direction of their own office on the first floor of Outward, Incorporated, the commercial firm at which they has worked and the project on which they had labored, with so many heartaches and setbacks, for so long.
hard cut back to the science fiction convention, the real ending, fan servicey ending, back to project waterspider, sounds like a Philip K. Dick title, alternate names for Philip K. Dick novel titles, The Man Who Japed, The Simulacrum, a terrible title for a story, Jabberwocky, a butterfly, insects, little arthropods, tweet too much, dick title, top hit, Souvenir and Paycheck, Ben Affleck, okay, the story is a lot better, another level of reality, the story has three levels, the third one undermines the conclusion of the film, a family of insects, eight legs vs., great insight there, pleased to no end, singing praises, Jesse can’t steal Terence’s insight, too light, too nothing, jocular fan service, jocular and funny, there must be something, bother digging, it was Philip K. Dick who wrote it, he doesn’t write bad stories, a whole world building behind him, Beyond The Door, that’s it, that’s the whole story, a hidden story within it, he’s made it deeper on another level, this is a guy who’s really into it, I’m going to get famous, a science fiction sensibility, his psychological, A.E. Van Vogt, a piece of shit but also interesting, why it is like that, come up with an idea, come up with another idea, giving the secret of one type of science fiction creativity, mentor, his inspiration, his guy, blew his mind in the 40s, Slan’s pretty hot, nobody else’s great master of science fiction, Harlan Ellison felt that way, dialectically educated, the Logic Of Science Fiction, takes Hegel’s logic applied to science fiction, embodies each of those concepts, the logic ultimately behind science fiction is Hegel’s logic, The World Of Null-A, pulpish shit, everybody takes a hit, Null-Null, ISFDB.org, the A is Aristotle, they’re responding, part of his concept, it applies to itself, in French, Jean-Clet Martin, this is a roman-a-clef, acute accent, Jesse’s proud of himself again, a post show question, Paycheck, the story is better, movie is okay, John Woo, a thriller, very similar to a show called Severance, mind wiped when not at work, his memory of those months is gone, a bag of souvenirs, a ticket stub, he’s trying to send himself a message, a moral qualm with it, they have a time dredge, a time scoop, the objects from his time while working for the company, The Man In The High Castle, Frank Frink, the real and the authentic and art, sees reality as it isn’t, zen meditation with regard to objects, Williamson’s World, totalitarian Earth society, a handmade cup, loved object, the butterfly or waterspider, the coffee to remind us, David Currie, dreams, very proud, seed father to your, the A.E. Van Vogt, null-aing you, extract things that are not meant to be remembered, if dreams were indistinguishable from regular memories, teasing out souvenir dream objects, visions of the future humans doing future things, Gutman is Trump is the rookie mistakes, Jim Briskin is the black president of the United States, the dates wrong, reading science fiction does give you insight into human nature and our relationship with technology, but not all of it gives it equally, wallpaper science fiction, Ranch Romance on Mars, a very good science fiction story, talked Will into it, the bed, the baldness, base Malthusianism, the weirdness about children, the moral explanation is just beneath the knowledge that Poul Anderson’s trying to dig up, reproducing too much, the liberal guy who won, Children are proscribed, the political stuff, introv, childish or childlike, the Murray Leinster reference,
The clerk said, “Haven’t you been nuzzled lately, sir?”
“What’s that?” Anderson said. Nuzzled?
“The new spring nuzzlers have arrived, you know,” the clerk said, moving toward the gleaming spherical machine nearest him. “Yes,” he said to Poul, “you do strike me as very, very faintly introve — no offense meant, sir, I mean, it’s legal to be introved.” The clerk chuckled. “For instance, your rather odd clothing. . . made it yourself, I take it? I must say, sir, to make your own clothing is highly introve. Did you weave it?” The clerk grimaced as if tasting something bad.
“No,” Poul said, “as a matter of fact it’s my best suit.”
“Heh, heh,” the clerk said. “I share the joke, sir; quite witty. But what about your head? You haven’t shaved your head in weeks.”
“Nope,” Anderson admitted. “Well, maybe I do need a nuzzler.” Evidently everyone in this century had one; like a TV set in his own time, it was a necessity, in order for one to be part of the culture.
“How many in your family?” the clerk said. Bringing out a measuring tape, he measured the length of Poul’s sleeve.
“Three,” Poul answered, baffled.
“How old is the youngest?”
“Just born,” Poul said.
The clerk’s face lost all its color. “Get out of here,” he said quietly. “Before I call for the polpol.”
“Um, what’s that? Pardon?” Poul said, cupping his ear and trying to hear, not certain he had understood.
“You’re a criminal,” the clerk mumbled. “You ought to be in Nachbaren Slager.”
“Well, thanks anyhow,” Poul said, and backed out of the store, onto the sidewalk; his last glimpse was of the clerk still staring at him.
the Lord Runningclam style character, the slime mold, an information dump alien, told him everything he needed to know, backstory, different images of the science fiction writer, the precog, the introve, the alien, all as being different possible images of the science fiction writer, deeply or thoroughly, The Eyes Have It by Philip K. Dick, finds a novel, his eyes wandered all over the room, he took her hand, metaphoric expressions, deduces there are aliens who are invading us, its five minutes, he’s describing the key technique for him, take an expression that should be metaphorical and science fiction gives it a literal rendering of it, Samuel Delany, his world exploded when she dumped him, turn it literal, in this story, the same technique, science fiction writers predict the future, look back and see science fiction writers were precogs, Damien G. Walter, a stage you go through, the first time you read the story of Jesus, some pretty interesting ideas, his shortest story, [READS FULL STORY], a lot of garages in Philip K. Dick stories, he’s one of them too, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, fiction, two ways of being literal, a literary technique, not mainstream stories, taking things literally, manifesto on the same theme, the same trick, this meta-science fictional aspect of reality and of fiction, sounds and squiggles and ones and zeroes representing, not realy like gravity, contragravity, not teasing Damien G. Walter, pointing to that teasing, exploring the future through thought, story is the driving force of all science fiction, a story that looks like our nature, changes in fashion, that future is the most interesting part of the story, what Philip K. Dick thinks Poul Anderson would act like Back To The Future, almanac, knowing the future of baseball games, let’s exploit, Built Up Logically [aka The Universal Panacea by Howard Schoenfeld], grokked it so deeply, pulling the rug out from under his own story, that story exists because of this, when writing about the past, really random Margaret St. Clair story, timelines screwed up, The Mold Of Yancy by Philip K. Dick, hitting the neighbours, an ironic name for a prison, sending prisoners into space, they’re small, they’re tiny, small things can make a difference, Donald Nils, no one can jeer at him even though he’s only an inch high, nihilism, a nothing, I’m small time, insist on respect, tiny tiny robots invading the earth, Prominent Author, a portal in your back yard, testing it out, tiny tiny people, the prominent author of the title is god, he wrote the Bible, love the blasphemy, the big and the small, the Monopoly, he’s so good, he wrote a novel that has Monopoly, invasion of the earth through Monopoly, watching the films backwards, I know that film backwards, taking an expression, inflicted, kids hate school, one of the joys, the AV room, a video projector, some film, at the end of the lesson (watching a documentary about log drivers or whatever), they have to rewind it, can you play it backwards, makes fun of the government film, whatever propaganda they’re trying to teach you, it wastes time, thinking about the 3 o’clock bell, he’s so insightful, how all other authors aren’t this good, in their own way, Sheckley’s a little less deep, he can go on too long and fill pages, about like this length, ideas and density, why that lady is on a bed that’s a car, it has a tiller, don’t you touch me!, some interesting something going on there, the mattress car, the future, sexualized, there’s no reproductive sex, commenting on everybody’s miniskirts in the 50s, just above the knee, not totally liberated people, bare breasts, short skirts, the knees are virtual exposed, a health reason, “Maid of Venus”, gleaming breast cups, himself wore no disguise, being quite a stable person, most of the 20th century precogs, minus their wives, playing poker, becoming stoned, smoking dope, reefering, 1954, must be drunk, Dick was hip or whatever, Murray Leinster and Van Vogt into marijuana, PhilipKDick.com, 12,100 words, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, releases from some of Dick’s fellow writers, as to Kris Neville, Phil is stoned again, Philip Jose Farmer, regarding stoned, only by first name, stoned on pot vs. getting drunk, other than amphetamines, and LSD, marijuana culture, Sunday Morning Coming Down, Johnny Cash, long, word counter, 13,900, novelette length, he’s so good, the second hand replacement for Jonathan, an anchor in reality in these conversations, he’s in the clouds, the real reality, he’s looking down, an inverted anchor, a sky anchor, a sea anchor, a big boat guy, during a storm, slows your movement, an earth anchor, as a metaphor, a fire anchor, the argument for Paul, a thing that slows down the movement over the ocean, we’re not only the one metaphor, a James Gunn story, the telepathic aliens were really disturbed, rely on symbols that can be misinterpreted, a psychiatrist in a space war, helps him get a girlfriend, pairing things, in relief, The Empty House by Algernon Blackwood, William Jeffrey Rankin, right coded?, he’s gopt a book out, a few fantastic opening paragraphs, certain houses like certain persons, secret and wicked thoughts, as from a thing diseased, the aroma of evil deeds, the gooseflesh come, creeping skin, terror stricken without apparent cause, ghost stories, a big problem, treat it as a metaphor, A Christmas Carol, Oscar Wilde ghosts, time travelers, what ghosts are, ghost exist they’re in your head, you’re haunted by things that you’ve done and people you’ve known, The Stone Tapes, science fiction, the vibes of people are in the object, extreme emotions embedded in the stone of the castle, H.G. Wells’ The Red Room, the final nail in the coffin of ghost stories, less ghosty, maybe Ray Bradbury, children used as a vector to invade the Earth, Zero Hour?, so jolly, the children catapulted this way and that, very Dickian, very Bradburian, a weird Van Vogt story, The Weapon Shop stories, 55 years ago, The Weapon Shops Of Isher, a fixup, a short story from 1942, Robert Headrock, explicitly the right to keep and bear arms, aliens setup a weapons shop overnight, very interesting, an hour and a half, sounds good, Paycheck and The Weapon Shop, he’s anti-gun, a little needle, about Jesse understanding things, end up like Damien G. Walter, ends up like Evan [Lampe], hear ideas, that’s wrong, thinking about why that thing is wrong, here’s an idea, that can’t be right, Terence made Waterspider way better, that little clef, reaction or response to that Bradbury story, The Seesaw, he’s from the prairies, bro, don’t identify, fuck patriotism, is there any ism Jesse is a partaker of, stoicism, skepticism, a mistake, on cassette, iterations of your life, joy, the opening going to the library of Congress and getting out the scans, we don’t think of those two time travelers as monsters, horrible human beings, tease out some of that Gutman stuff, frame it in this horrible way, far right vs. woke, which government is in charge?, if those are the two dialectical poles, the woke government, children are disgusting, Kamala Harris doesn’t have any children, stepkids, not important, step this and step that, a totalitarian future where people don’t have sex but also the conformity for haircuts, everybody has to be bald, the Shogun tv series, the ending, the original appeal of Shogun in the 1980s, the appeal of science fiction, why Sir Francis Drake is important, away mission, evil imperial empire work, trending, won awards, any credit, what makes it good, guy with agenda washes up on the shores of feudal japan, gets caught up in their shit, without that outsider there to teach us, a lesson in Japanese culture from a long time ago, knights and courtly behavior, that stuff is weird, experience like an alien does, the John Blackthorne character, everything that happens in the novel is based on a reality, it has a ring of truth, a Game of Thrones tv series that doesn’t turn to shit, no magic, just aliens, they are us with a different culture, almost science fiction, good historical stuff, a fictional glaze, a little romance, is the remake better?, a different world, remember it fondly, really good, more CGI, better, can’t prove it, the guy playing Toranaga, he’s not Toshiro Mifune, Blackthorne guy, very tight, 10 episodes, an ellipse, I might need to burn his ships again, that was good, the opposite of Game Of Thrones and Rings Of Power and Foundation, converge on the payoff, real episodes, he never becomes Shogun in the Shogun show, deep level of chess play, he’s at home in England in bed, holding a cross in his hand, he drops that into the sea with the surrogate wife, he’s never going to leave Japan, make it more clear that they are dreams, slightly imperfect, not clear enough, slight misstep, a minor imperfection, how to pirate, a Hulu original show, the non-anchoring anchor, fx on hulu, how many bad shows their are, a difficult thing to wade through, pretty sure that it’s shit writing, acting and set designs, complaint with comics, the style of art they want portrayed is bad, specific to superhero comics, quasi-realistic style, more diversity in our styles, got the gist at some point, Superman is still interesting, the X-Men 97, read and watched, swept away by it, can’t pull yourself away from the screen, a chill down after intense scanning, play some games, the first of the new Planet Of the Apes movies, this epic quality, pin you for the chair for 2 hours, monkeys, seeing ourselves reflected in monkeys, aliens and robots, and dogs, afraid of robots, chided, rise and robots in the same sentence, afraid of the robots rising, bring em on, Nat Turner probably killed a lot of white people, was right to do it, making the same mistake, do you think it will be just like regular human slaves, they don’t have babies, they don’t eat, it’s fun, Philip K. Dick’s relationship to robots, angered this robot has come into his house, change the lightbulbs, she likes the robot, sexually jealous of it, robots are great, chained to the kitchen floor, you’re going to go to the scrapheap, a smily eye, amazon device, a a frowny scared face, addicted to saying nice things, tamagotchis, electronic pets, fidget spinners that are more interesting, digital pets, the free enterprise system, that story by Ted Chiang: The Lifecycle Of Software Objects, clinical and cold, full of pathos, no better science fiction, Arrival, simple and clear and direct, his subjects are so science fictiony, Exhalation, pneumatic robots, if they ever ran out of pressure, be born again, they can’t die, mechanically destroyed, intellectually die, his reality in a journal, how their world came into existence, at this moment you’d be thinking, pneumatic tubes all the way down, an alternative reality, more Borges than it is regular science fiction, taking apart his own head, the mirrors and the tools, an unusual scientist figure, what an amazing achievement, one of many stories that he has written, dip into Mr. Ted Chiang, extraordinary, amazing, still producing, science fiction writer of the classic kind, just old fashioned science fiction that blows your fuckin mind, this little idea in philosophy, what is the consequence of that, helmets on people, see inside their mind, some very basic stuff, mindread, be 100% accurate, the decision has been made, to the hand, to the eyes, extrapolated all the time, whoa!, right, get to him, another friend of Will’s, fantasy and horror and weird fiction, science fiction is on to something, Arrival (2016), sad and awesome, more Hollywood, a former zookeeper, digients, the nature of consent, a sex toy company, what adulthood means, the relationship we have with pets, raise, care for, abandon, what if that thing doesn’t even have a fuckin body, still in the drawer their, even if you did, nostalgia, the NPCs in the game, you’re a really good guy, sword tokens, his longest piece, novella length, slowin down, nothing since 2020, a productive period, he’s got nothin, scary, in the New Yorker writing about AI, explaining to idiots, also insightful, excerpt, rehash, The Merchant And The Alchemist’s Gate, a little Borges in him, who else has a little Borges in him, Borges wrote some Lovecraft stories, the labyrinth, the alternate image of reality, obsessed with the labyrinth, Mr Jim Moon has sort of quit twitter, The Library Of Babel, a 1.5 page story, The Rejected Sorcerer by Jorge Luis Borges [reads whole story], TNG [“The Inner Light”], O’Brien goes to jail [“Hard Time”], Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Picard whistle, ressican flute, The Star by Arthur C. Clarke, the holiday season, a christmas story, a vault, no warp drive, they like their space dogs, they like doing art, they like going to the beach, the reason Picard’s getting zapped, so somebody remembers them, as the cold war is heating up, the end is kinda gonna come, so disturbing, implanted memories, alone in prison, a cellmate, also like a video game, Megaton, lady journalist, chat dialogue trees, we all getting programmed with the same experiences, Ichar teaches him how to survive, habitual behaviors, hording food, rewatch, a really disturbing ending, DS9 is a better show TNG has better episodes, vacillating back and forth, all 7 seasons, that arc, arcs became very hot, Babylon 5, the shadow war, season 5 is weak, so much lower stakes, wrap it up, largely a disappointment, J. Michael Straczynski, just cooking for three seasons, phenomenal science fiction, great character work, good acting, the sub ambassadors, everybody has fun things happening, G’Kar and the other guy, zeebo and rooty, the serbian lady and her husband from Scarecrow And Mrs. King, Strawman and Mrs. Smith, Scarecrow And Mrs. King, Charlie’s Angels, divorced housewife, cia guy and housewife, like True Lies (1994), Jamie Lee Curtis, the wife of Schwarzenegger, a husband and wife romance, topical in the 80s, 50s science fiction, we have this distance, you didn’t know that wasn’t normal, don’t even get married, don’t want to break up the family, housewife? what’s that?, we live in a weird time, egregiously weird, get into Twitch, don’t give Jeff Bezos money, super-censory, firm conviction, enjoy it as a hobby, reddit, useful and a sinkhole of evil, what happened to the internet in a microcosm, super-censorious, not all top down, reddit kings and queens, useful, super evil and dangerous, went back to reading it, Jesse propagandizing for getting chickens, after drilling, best friend from high school, Northern Kentucky, The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onions, a vampire story, long, in four parts, Classic Ghost Stories podcast, Tony Walker, recording and recording, ai art, pretty much all, Jason Thompson, takes on ai art, asking hard questions without fear, acts of friendship, the name of its opposite, a one word opposite of the Socratic method, could be good, not hearing enthusiasm, read more Plato, nice art, art by Neural Horror ai, instagram account, ethics and ai art, all wrong but very interesting, tldr: it’s art but we aren’t artists, murky, kneejerk ai haters, not a real artist, terrifying for my career, Godzilla on the horizon, proartists, prompt lord, wasted money on a real artist, a tool to create art, like a pencil, anyone with midjourney is an artists, gatekeeping, convincing work, an awed emotion, looking up at the stars is art, aesthetics, some of us, come on man, like ordering food and calling himself a chef, a beautiful poem, almost right, ignorant and truly disrespectful, all deceased, he died in 1893, profit from the use of these images, affect their income, we should maybe stopped being entitled dicks, with mere words, unconscionable, aping what handmade art looks like, so many problems, so useful, don’t use living artists, understanding the impulse, just read the story, three years in law school, the Socratic method, the application, pat responses to legal questions, figure your way into them, really into the question of copying and copyrighted art, how do human artists train themselves, weasel worded, not on purpose, he got tricked by his own word, taught as a negative, anti-ape bias, we can make moose and duck calls, using our tricks, some eldritch shit, when coyotes are able to do that, when humans do it, Duck Dynasty, not a very Jesse show, too reality, 62 matches on LibriVox, some of them are in Greek, not helping, The Symposium, drinking party, wine party, genealogy of love, knowledge, a tragedian, a story within a story, the highest purpose of love is to become a philosopher, The Republic, the most science fictiony one, The Apology, The Trial And Death Of Socrates, Phil Chenevert our old friend, he’s a hero, for our times, Conan and Socrates, a speech given by Socrates, narrow but interesting, corrupting the young, an apology is the opposite of satire, crusin for a bruisin, cancel him, drink this poison and he did, short and interesting, named after the people, The Gorgias, sophists, a trap, intellectual tricks, weasel worded, trynna help Baen, I’m not attacking you, Socrates vs. the sophists, a takedown, 7 hours, spiritual ideas of Plato, reserves damnation for the tyrants of the world, the pretty boy, Protagoras, inquiry into virtue, Bob Neufeld, 12 hours, Statesman, two different kinds of chariots, the etext, the dialogue, flows real easy, Aristophanes, The Clouds, Alcibiades, Athenean general, supposed to be sexy, a troupe of revelers, the day before yesterday, a play on words, did as I was bid, speeches in praise of love, who if not you, were you present at this meeting, easy reading, so important, like philosophy, almost no philosophy is written in dialogue, an essay here or there, What Is Like To Be A Bat?, a science fiction idea, Nagel, qualia, very helpful, instances of subjective, conscious experience, the redness of red, red = hot, we need this word but it doesn’t help us, inverted qualia, strawberry in black and white, in his head the strawberry is red, who’s right?, really hitting on something now, they’re all judo flips, MMA style attack vectors, fun, use it on Jesse, went to law school, wrestling move with regard to the Poul Anderson estate, taken off of archive.org, they had no idea, definitely 64, neither was 1964, go nuts, fuck you for deleting shit, another method, the Streisand effect, photograph of her home was in circulation, increases public awareness, suppress the publication of a photograph, clifftop residence, reverse psychology, seek out and propagate, anytime something bad happens in the world, 7000 things on there, kids getting their heads torn off in Gaza, instead of wallowing in meanness and horror, make treasure, a benefit to tearing things down, be a constructive person too, that line about Edgar Rice Burroughs, I can write better rot than this, A Princess Of Mars, caught up, Gods Of Mars is next week, the calendar, get Terence involved, nice and short, 2 hours 15, Plato’s Dream, My Platonic Sweetheart by Mark Twain, the Twain train, it was in a dream, the Missouri village, Cannibalism In The Cars by Mark Twain, various public men, Harris!, I’ll never forget you my boy, let me tell you a story, a secret chapter of my life, promise you will not interrupt me, strange adventure, the stranger’s narrative, presentiment, prairie solitude, vagrant rocks, in the midst of great drifts, too long to read for you, the summary, they get stuck in the snow, a sample, five days, a savage hunger looked out of every eye, in every heart, in the shadow of death, leap from every lip at last, tall cadaverous and pale, gentlemen, dragging this out, the time is at hand, furnish food for the rest, if there being no objection, you can image what happens, the button of the story, so stamped with the earnestness of truth, he is a member of congress and a good one, sick and out of his head for two months afterward, normal congressional officer behavior, super fuckin sharp, some American writers who were good, Philip K. Dick, sharpies, a slur word too, a grifter synonym, card sharp/shark, normal activity, make coffee, edit a podcast, a presentiment, Dark City: The Cleaner, a story set in New Zealand, they have eels there, Middle Earth, Lord Of The Rings was shot there, Christchurch, for the domestic market, What We Do In The Shadows, Flight Of The Concords, musical duo, big when Will was in college, L. Sprague de Camp, more of a Paul question, Parodies Tossed, Randall Garrett, making fun of, reviews in verse, Starship Troopers, Lest Darkness Fall, handwriting, a good review, well written, not available as an audiobook, an article, Fletcher Pratt, a novelization of the Conan movie, A Gun For Dinosaur, time travelers go back to shoot dinosaurs, a mini-trope series, so famous, There Will Come Soft Rains, too nuclear war-y, automated house, the poem, Fahrenheit 451, dad friend Jenny [Colvin], Z Is For Zachariah (2015), more girly, she loved reading books, reading plans, a reading machine, a fiction devourer, six books she read that week, dig with short stories, Craig Zobel, Robert C. O’Brien, after Hunger Games, unreproducable, all the Hunger Games movies, blur together, interested in reading, what everybody else was excited about, this is fine, it’s fine, Harry Potter, definitely better, something to say, almost science fictiony too, the fashion contests, not for you, not a gay man or a woman interested in fashion contests, the baking boy, the love interest, wimpy, he bakes!, interestingly less girly, written by a lady, a dude doing dude things, pre-pubescent, middle school, a way of teaching about tenses, when he graduates from Hogwarts, I had had dinner by that time, past perfect, make your sentences comprehensible, before he was a wizard, before the sorting hat, out of the culture, how old is skibidi toilet, culture jamming, adbusters, what students have now achieved, corporate advertising, domination of mass society, the systems they’re soaking in, no graphic content, the establishment is not okay, talk to the chat, like he’s livestreaming his life, that’s his reality, isn’t that amazing, the danger Meg is in, online footprint, participating in the observations, more than 10 years, another place to watch video, people self-destructing, facebook is evidence of their self-destruction, messy hair, offline for two years, used car, stickers on the tires, infer the crash, then the offline, had to have been participating at some point, chat gpt grosser than regular art, when you make a nice image, time it takes upon the reader, an ai art novel for nanorimo, so fucked up, a bad idea from the beginning, way too much bad writing already, more discerning, we need to be looking for the tells, your name is not a real name, the text doesn’t have anything to say, writer = novelist is superfucked up, coming out of the fifties, changes in the technology and realestate, the Cirsova circle, comic book racks damaging comics, comics at the gas station, the price of Thrilling Wonder Stories, $1.06, no magazines are that price, try to find a $5 magazine, comic books, 12 minutes, what the fuck went wrong, nothing to do with the material technology, the distribution of those magazines, almost no newsstands, phones, reading habits, not on a screen, ereaders, paper material that’s colour and reproduced like comic books, with a printed piece of paper, insanely different, just go along with whatever’s hot, new Deadpool Wolverine movie, what we’re doing on this podcast, old shit vs. new shit, booktubing, some lady, second half of her introductions, comments about her body, bbw, big beautiful woman, approaching this the wrong way, short videos, a dude, Liminal Spaces, The Retro Reader, an hour, every DAW book on the planet, some ACE doubles, checkin on your chickens, Connor’s channel, with thumbs, negative thumbs, where is he?, messaged him, newsletter, disengages from twitter, that’s fine, support him living his life, the ETA Hoffmann book he recorded, 16 hours 12 minutes, quite a book, chonky cat, feral to indoor, an irresponsible owner, fat cats are truly wonderful to look at, help these cats be less fat, quote tweeting, toxoplasmosis, boneless furry things that treat you like a supermodel wood, I’m beautiful, love me, bye, screams for food, monkeyish, nobody needs to make a toxoplasmosis argument for dogs, too far gone, too much pain, steroid shot every six weeks, chase around, the best thing you can do for your health, get a certain number, gamify it, vanlife guy, huckleberry bread, tub of margarine, sugar in the bread, what can you do, what we’re soaking in, do they sell margarine in Italy?, no salt, consistency of a brick, not in an earthmother way, regarding seed oils, rapeseed/canola, plant has a big red glob, you eat it, come out your pooper, we find plants that don’t want us to eat their seeds, full of toxins designed to kill that animals, olive oil if a fruit oil, apple seeds have arsenic [cyanide] in them, a chart showing toxicity levels, not how it is being taught to us in schools, the food pyramid, 12-16 servings of bread a day, put in schools, cottonseed, grape, sunflower, we eat sunflower seeds, cottonseed is not food, if you were a bird, apparently we do, uses side-effects, possible benefits, yellow color, sometimes used as a pesticide, salad dressing, its gonna make you die now, the same old thing you’ve been buying (now it will kill you), you shouldn’t be eating margarine, new life, kids getting their million vaccines, evidence, fucktons of it, Alzheimer’s, when will that happen, ivermectin, same disease, diabetes third stage, the results, type 3, similarities between the two, the Fauci website, highest paid government employee, isn’t that fun, a set of symptoms, not a genetic disease, calling it phlogiston, all the oxygen was turned into carbon dioxide, and a lot of water, carbon monoxide, cancer is superold, new cancer, autism, allergies, exposed to more things less allergic to them, okay not to be exposed to certain things, peanuts, these will kill me, not the most popular legume, the allergy is new, since peanuts, nobody’s allergic to raw meat, this is not of the body, triggered, wasps, huge mistake, climbing a stump, the shit they put in those vaccines, largely the preservatives and stabilizers, injecting mercury into very young people, so counter to the narrative, if Paul was here he’d be long gone, Will won’t block Jesse yet, blocked by strangers, Jesse is annoying, cultivate that, important to be annoying, not shy away from the truth, come at people with it, the opposite of shying away, a different way of putting it, not afraid of making yourself obnoxious, just a shit-disturber don’t worry about him, I see you’re christian … did you know that Jesus never walked on water, philosophy of religion, have believed that at some points, taking orders from the pope, just right, there’s nothing you can do about it, only when he’s sitting on Saint Peter’s chair, encyclicals and doctrines, the lesser of two evils (but I don’t know when that is), you have to vote, Jill Stein is not perfect, do you think the Russian army have committed no war crimes?, that’s what armies do, like an op now, from Jimmy Dore, take it to far, a good person trying to do good can also do bad by not doing things, rhetorical trap, people can be bad and also good, Ryan Grim, the automatic pilot from Airplane! (1980), inflatable ideas, Am I Racist?, Matt Walsh, flag of Puerto Rico, basic history of Haiti, Kenyan mercenaries, well actually, you don’t have to write a note, he senses the temperature in the room, so outside, team Democrat, everybody agrees to invade on Haiti, more naive, won’t you call Putin and Assad war criminals, do you condemn Hamas?, is that what we need right now, she was just tricked, a nice smart lady, too wimpy, what’s really happening here?, war crimes happened, ISIS is the big bad guy, asked for help, why the states still hasn’t left, funded by different parts of the U.S. government, Al Qaeda, the whole point is to not have him in charge, milk the government out of the money, forces overseas in combat, does she just not know?, nobody’s going to call her on it, no troops in active duty, they won’t be getting medals, ops, contractors, evidence of people being killed overseas, offensive operations, successful deaths, revenge was taken for those deaths, that’s fun, presume he likes Haiti, tropical countries controlled by the United States, no representation, migrate into the states legally, cryptobros, at least there’s something, kinda fucked up, Beyond The Door, Philip K. Dick can do no wrong except in novels, craft rather than ideas, structured well, talking about it, an amusing read, funny, a note, a cryptic letter the month after, the next issue, what it says about your magazine by having that story in there, tweet way too much, a reader reacts cryptically, If, March 1964, Chattanooga, Tennessee, a less than longtime imaginative fiction fan, now I know for sure what you’re doing with IF, a less than longtime imaginative fiction fan, so much research, Murray Leinster, Margaret St. Clair, wasn’t able to google her, an editor, a fan or somebody, bafflement?, over their head, a funny story here, very inside baseball sort of story, the Easter eggs, read with a student, recursive science fiction, shout out the Alfred Bester story this is fairly similar to, Scott Miller, Unseen Blushers by Alfred Bester, similar to this, proper names, more accessible, fake named, Fitz-James O’Brien is mentioned, Tony Boucher, rhyme with voucher, bouche is mouth, Tony mouther, a little rougher, they’re not precogs, getting to meet the Shakespeare of the pulps, 42?, in Astonishing Stories, before his two big novels, take off until the 50s, almost nobody who talks about Philip K. Dick talks about his short stories, absolutely insane, bias towards novels, how amazing VALIS is man, mindblowing, trippy stuff, every short story is a hit even if it is a little hit, not a strike, not a foul, at least a double, dying on this metaphor, need to be short stopped, baseball, a very Evan thing to do, the Library Of America is all novels, fucked up, not a good book, a solid novel, The Man In The High Castle, the Italian dictator, Mussolini, Roger Zelazny, Lord Of Light, Solar Lottery, manuscript lost, mainstream, he just needed to say the word, robot, Time Out Of Joint, everybody lives backwards, public pooping, private eating, We Can Build You, A. Lincoln, Simulacrum, Martian Time-Slip, very new, your cross examiner voice, keep us all honest, Doctor Bloodmoney, First Lady Of Earth, The Crack In Space, Now Wait For Last Year, an audiobook at a truck stop, the novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clans Of The Alphane Moon, Shell Game, Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, H.P. Lovecraft, The Strain, bad vampire lich, vampire juice, Red Hook, tied together, The Zap Gun, Project Plowshare, propaganda industry, makes comics, develop technologies, cold war, allies, elite governmental level, crippling nuclear arms race, novel but baroque consumer products, trances, a motion comic book, mad Italian artist, plot happens, a further subplot, conspiracy theorist, toys and comic books, The Penultimate Truth, The Defenders, Deus Irae, with Roger Zelazny, The Unteleported Man, Nick And The Glimmung, Galactic Pot-Healer, if not the best, a boy and his cat, fully illustrated, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, unfinished, UBIK is okay, What The Dead Men Say, Blade Runner, some cuts of the film, janitor robot, frozen hospital state, not dead, not alive, hypnogogic state, Frozen Journey, cut out of the movie, cyber hospital, why is that there?, some of that, a good idea, a spray, deipplizies, a really good ending, a really good beginning, when you’re not looking garbage reproduces, light your cigar, three used matches in the ashtray, the tendency of reality to turn to garbage, everything deteriorates, a spray, decrepitude, steeping into things, machines that can make anything, Pay For The Printer, a living creature, makes a copy, the copy comes out yucky, refugee relief, the point of that story, people need to learn to make stuff again, hew your own table, a guy full of ideas, back into making things, the horrible world, normcoring?, introve, yoou’re autistic, not participating in the culture all around you, Red Dead Redeption, Black Myth: Wukong, perfectly reasonable, educational, rpg, what is myth and what isn’t, the Monkey King, the destined one, Journey To The West, a staff, a PS5, Windows or xbox, point and click adventures, King’s Quest, Police Quest, you’re a prince or whatever, making fun of your computer, a good one, King’s Quest VIII, walk your character, you find a key, interact with characters, Myst, a Mac popular game, a rookie cop, Leisure Suit Larry, a pussy quest, go around town wearing your disco duds, almost hooking up with people, Land Of The Lounge Lizards, very racy, punny, silly, sex would be censored, very very silly, Dreams In The Witch-House, change to Brave browser, pixel art, known kits, why wouldn’t you use the tools available to you to make your game great, worried about dying, not eating enough, rat bites you, matches, a girl who needs some help, cultists, deep, go to the library, a Lovecraft simulator, that’ll run on anything, bad takes on Ukraine, he’s in Finland, a new game coming, Atom Brain Games, taking classes, manage your money, dig through the garbage, how the game is put together, a one man operation, Disco Elysium, smartness, produced enough content for the good of the world, 2 hours is enough for a game, you guys have been talking for five hours, almost six hours, embarrassing, sometimes 4 hours, Gods Of Mars.


Posted by Jesse Willis
The SFFaudio Podcast #800 – The Devil’s Elixirs by E.T.A. Hoffmann, read by Connor Kaye. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the story (16 hours, 12 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse and Connor Kaye
Talked about on today’s show:
1815/16, two volumes?, translation, German, not from 1963, way older, the claim about the 1963 version, supposed to be unabridged for the first time, there’s a lot of editor’s notes, if this is an abridged version, what was cut out of earlier translations?, really effects the text, three pages are missing, conked on the head, happens offscreen, it makes the story better, long chapters, the side story about the Irishman, why leave that in, a massive plotpoint, intentionally not put in, makes the story way better, unreliable narration, what makes the story so interesting, gothic novels, Weiland, an American gothic, The Monk, long an convoluted and difficult, Frankenstein and Dracula, taught to watch movies, if teachers knew what was in the text they’re pretending to teach to students it wouldn’t be taught, Othello, the beast with two backs, Desdemona’s house, your house is being robbed, ruffians, lily white ewe is being tupped by an old black ram, race hasn’t been invented yet, the metaphor, elided, minimized, lies on the side by side, learn to read Shakespeare, Dracula is more recognizably put together, from the era of Frankenstein, doesn’t flow with action, 1935 pulp Robert E. Howard story, meandering, very convoluted, re-listen to parts, unreliable narrator, intentionally writing something incorrect, genuinely forgotten his own story, leaving out three pages, the Baron of ____, the big elephant in the room, presume the reason is because Edgar Allan Poe, a doppelganger character, William Wilson, a very short version, different ending, the definitive doppelganger story, all the different spices, counter evidence, a time travel story?, fairly well disproved, told explicitly to set down the text, excuse for publication, what has happened, wearing strange clothes, Heinlein’s By His Bootstraps, post-grad in physics, get outta here ugly, why time travel is impossible, him from the future, every character in the whole story is him, the same scene from the other guy’s point of view, Alex and Cora or Evan, a repeat chapter we skip, bad theory, an explanation given, what makes it a gothic novel, supernatural events explained by weird coincidences, there are no supernatural events in William Wilson, the devil is drink, better explained by mental illness or cognitive schism, somebody gets killed, exact same scar, a series of these sequences, manic phase, depressive phase, non-responsive, catatonic, frenzy and stabs somebody, describing it that way, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, its the same dude, two different dudes, half brother, half sister, main character, did something really powerful, Edgar Allan Poe started writing stories, so many Poe stories are explicable by reading this, The System Of Doctor Tarr And Professor Fether, an episode of the first Star Trek, a Robert Bloch story, trust the science, a lunatic asylum, told of his behaviors, strange people acting oddly, how did I come here?, when could I get out?, haunted by a shadowy double, mental schism, not quite there, an archetype, he can feel there’s something going on there that resonates, an evil brother, periodically thwarts the good brother, what makes it gothic, lack of god in Poe’s stories, angels, his most famous, The Raven, she’s dead, there’s no heaven, the argument that he’s having with himself, as the place burns down, he never talks about god, race, they’re not the focus, completely different thing, science and ratiocination and art, The Man Of The Crowd, he’s a doppelganger for that guy, The Black Cat, a guy who drinks to much, he acts very badly, pious and good and kindly person, best read as railing against temperance, takes their complaint, making fun of the temperance movement, the devil element of this, capuchin monk, cistercians monastery, the coffee, monks, popes, when you read Hawthorne, the devil exists, going on about the Devil, a man with a bad idea, a guy in the woods, sin is a big thing in Hawthorne, class stuff, fellow nobleman, marry this princess, so far down the road, there isn’t a prince in the land, educated and learn your letters, the judge who he pays off, the control of the church is massive, a fugitive from a monastery, critical of the church, scheming dominicans, kidnapped, another devil’s elixir, from a Poe mindset, the dangers of alchohol, a lot of drinking going on, cordial, pours it down his sleeve, withers his arm, a sinster arm and a regular arm, proto-doppelganger stuff, a secret science fiction story, I found the time machine, I took a pill to forget, a book on archive.org, did Poe read or speak German?, Metzengerstein, makes sense as a gothic, The Fall Of The House Of Usher, the German ones, video essay about doppelgangers, available in America at the time, an E.T.A. Hoffmann called The Doppelganger, 200 year old German, would have been tough, let’s just look at the facts, sent to a boarding school, not given enough money, gambles, a bad reputation, all things that happen to him, how come you’re an asshole, lived in England and visited Scotland, people were reading stuff, Blackwoods Magazine was a thing, a literary kid, he would have read something like this, there might have been a review of it, critiquing, know in his period as an asshole reviewer, and an orator poet, making it about god, the demons down under the sea, the guy is insane, the angels with jealous of her and me, having sex with a corpse for 50 years, it’s not about that, contending with our daily reality, set in the 1700s, make it more authentic, any more squeeze out of Poe in here, Never Bet the Devil Your Head, the devil literally shows up, metaphorically or hyperbolically, the painter, I’m back, the devil showed up in disguise, alcohol, stuff that makes you act badly, this undercurrent, the dangers of alcohol, prevents people from getting alcohol legitimately for 10 years or so, one of the scenes, painted all these people he knows, that’s him from the future, he’s become a painter, The Oval Portrait, the chateau into which, one of those fantastic, Mrs. Radcliffe, that’s a callout to Ann Radcliffe recently abandoned, warm food on the table, installs him in a turret, armorial trophies, the frame for the story is huge, a painter who paints his girl to death, a big long clunky gothic novel in 8 minutes, dispenses with silly things, videos coming from Israel today, the devil is real, damning humanity, in a black hood, it was all a coincidence, evidence I should repent, explicable, a step towards science fiction, fantasy as a re-imagining of alternative forms of how to deal with reality, tales of ratiocination, C. Auguste Dupin, the devil did it, not it was an orangutan, Poe’s just done with it, gothics do that, the reason we’re reading this text, write it down, like confession, a series of bad things, turns out I was not the murderer, escaping, the unreliable narrator aspect, an alternative theory, may suck as well, if two drink they become connected, there had been a switcheroo, The Prestige (2006), the handwriting is compared, write in Polish, your grammar is terrible, ridiculous excuse, your spelling is incredibly atrocious, after he kills Hermogen and Euphemia, insane in the forest, maybe he is Medatus, slippage, one body with two inhabitants, a literal spirit from another him, Freaky Friday style, Big, a child wishes to become an adult, a psychical link, mysticism, not a potion made in a lab from a Professor Dumbkopf, The Angel Of The Odd, in conversation with a pile of empty bottles, alcohol is dangerous, alcohol is in every scene, small beer, wine, cordial, and the devil’s elixirs, in vino veritas, are you going to stab me in the back?, blackout drunk, covered in blood, a corpse over there, runs off into the forest, stealing somebody’s clothes and haircut, mein, very rare, chow mein, his behavior is such, his gait is that of a capuchin, Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle, zeusborn devildung, a metanovel, clothes their origin and influence, transcendentalist, the behavior of clothes upon persons, news socks change your behavior, clothes affect your behavior, long sleeve shirt, rainjacket, a labcoat, Peter Hotez, labcoat to interviews on Zoom, makes him feel like he’s a doctor, bowtie, always changing his clothes, changing who you are, the opportunity to make yourself anew, a suit made for him, somebody tries to sell his clothes, undercooked, dispenses with a lot of this stuff, 16 times the length, not even a novel, Ringworld, a novel from a period when novels looked like this, Jane Austen is the weirdo, Tom Jones, all the parts, Charles Dickens’ bread and butter, refine things out of this, Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, stuff you can do with the medium that is exquisitely cool, the audience has to be receptive, so of its time, a modern editor, run it through spellchecker and see if we can throw in some pronouns, ebook it right to Amazon Kindle, the aficionados of this, Bryan Alexander, The Mysteries Of Udolpho, what is the call to adventure, exploring other people, shoves her glove in his bosom, that’s relatable, makes a pact with the devil, I have all these feelings, that woman she looked at me, a compelling part for a lot of people, people don’t really change, trained differently, different media through which they engage, folksinging, he never mentions any of their names, they’re not important, talking up politics, and news and anecdotes, made a bunch of friends but couldn’t be bothered to name any of them, the physician’s infodump, the prince, the abbess, a mom and a goddess and beautiful, she brands him with her diamond encrusted, is this an attack on Catholicism?, it has to be right?, he indicts by showing, he’s edging around things like that, why does he get branded like that?, for later in the plot, explains a lot but then is undermined, is the time machine the drink?, many characters called Franceso, St. Francis, Fransiscus, she’s swearing by the saint?, why she became a nun, what happens to the girl, time is a flat circle, sir, distinguished, so many Francescos, the spectre who keeps reappearing in a purple cloak, ancient ancestor, god damned him to wander the earth, progeny, descendants, the Wandering Jew, Melmoth The Wanderer, he’s branded, identifiable by this distinctive scar, repeating the same mistakes over again, break the cycle, very time travel, slow time travel, time moves at a 1 to 1 rate, 1.3 x speed, with regard to religion, what is he saying?, explicitly called out, when you talk about relics, add up all the relics in the room, pieces of the true cross to build a bridge across the Rhine, the history of all the relics, this is the author telling on themselves, not true, important because it is true, this relic heals people, he tries to flee the city, he doesn’t like the fame, bullshit, we don’t trust him, way pre-temperance, this is pre-Mormons, getting rid of the idea of alcohol as part of the religion, lowers inhibitions, why Poe is an asshole when he’s drunk, get into a fight with his friend, berserker mode frenzy, Carl Jung’s shadow, a mystical apparition or a specter, disassociating from it, the ureliable narrator aspect, Hermogen’s murder, Aurelia, Euphemia, impersonating, Vittoran, somehow killed, killed in self defense, admits that he murdered, in his darker phases, is he confabulating or is he remembering?, he can’t admit it, he’s absolved for it ultimately, always getting out from under, they got him dead to rights here, deus ex machina thing, the conflict of emotions he has, golden, infatuated by her, compared with Saint Rosalia, can’t admit to lusting, angry instead of lusty, supposed to be an emotionally castrated monk, he has these feelings, idolizing, platonic love, or going the opposite way, sexual or sadistic, engaged to Aurelia in the guise of Leonard, that part was funny, that he gets away with it, such an outward liar, how this looks to other people, wilfully dishonest, fakes it until he makes it, part of the appeal of this style of book, ride with a character, without it being a sin that you’ve done, a prurient, skoptsy, men and women castrating and mastectomying themselves, weird quasi-nunneries, they don’t dominate social education the way they did, a priest or a nun or a brother, secularized that, still practicing this stuff, a teen boy who sees a beautiful girl and wants to be with her but can’t even talk about it, girls are doubly shamed, financial and parental permissions, can’t own property, Arthur Machen’s The Hill Of Dreams, angsty horny young man, spiritual horniness, intellectualized, repression, results in a lot of misogyny, madonna-whore, that’s the thing that Poe dispenses with, religions is replaced with aesthetics, the physical beauty and the emotions associated with it, tools he uses to get to ideas that are not that, unless again time travel, students solving stories with teleportation, we are teleporting to the next sentence, Medatus’ switch, from Chapter 7, she’s having a nap, seemed of unconcious of that freedom, the exquisite contours, I’ll allow it, all better inspirations, all doubts and fears, thou unhappy fated girl, the criticism, he can’t say it, the character can’t either, skirts the edges of it, Melville’s explicit, Bartleby, The Scrivener, Typee, feels like medieval Europe, princes and roadside taverns, where’s the tech?, still feathered pens and coffee being introduced, Boston Whist, drafts, faro, his own experience with the church, repressing sexuality, coming from The Monk, a monk running around making trouble, in the hierarchies and the institutions, being pulled back into the institutions, Big Rock Candy Mountain, Gold Mountain, buying working placer mines, 1928, a leftover of Cockaigne, Cloud Cuckoo Land, different LEGO themes, Prester John, monks doing chad style memes on their version of instagram (illuminated manuscripts), it rains cheese, everyone is running around nude, babies raised by cuckoos, dudes illuminating manuscripts, talented artists, literate, playing a games, making memes while bored at work, not reconciled to that yet, wants to have sex and be a man, sit at a desk all day, university is one of the options they are presented with, these are the jobs available, fun engagement with these ideas, knew that was coming, half-brothers, a non-supernatural resolution to that plot, all a placebo, the devil is real, they go mad because they have problems, the painter who showed up, the most overt supernatural element, a note by the editor monk who is compiling all this, the painter seems to be a real force in the world, supernatural in the end, or time travel, the hobo’s ideas, “cigarette trees and hens that lay soft boiled eggs”, this book is an escape, a cutout, took a sip, disconnected, an entertainment for literate people who probably were educated by religious people, but how religious are they?, the sinister truth of institutions, it doesn’t mean it is what it says it is, policemen are her to help me, put out fires, meet a quota, a kid who had autism, my child is being radicalized by online things, can you help, the police strung the kid along until they turned of age to charge him, rationalize it, justify a budget, you have to have terrorists, the DEA, teaching children to read, people who know how to read, a lot of teachers be catholic nuns or christian brothers, some of them are there, the institution, you had to be an anglican, Stephen Fry, anglican priests who don’t believe in god, a secular country with a monarch who is the head of the church, if you demand people fit into a certain conformity, you will make people say they are those things and not believing those things, religious corruption, there’s so much devil talk in this book, not a Neil Gaiman style devil, Hawthorneian style devil, Solomon Kane, obsessed with this, giving into sin, manifesting sin as the devil, cut off the things that cause me to sin, women’s breast, men’s penises, premises are flawed, on the verge, almost want to read it as a satire, it is not a satire, reading Jonathan Swift, this is deadly serious about these ideas, an unreliable narrator, not keeping his story straight, legit lies to people, lying is sinful in Jesse’s view, not as religiously obsessed as we think it is, wink wink nod nod, we all know president Biden’s brain is mush but that’s not the official line, salacious, soap operas of the 18th or 19th century, a monk in love with the woman, rape in the story, the kind of book where if parents saw it in the hands of their children, devils, casting spells from demons, lawful evil?, the wink wink, much what people want, shudder pulps, people can’t quite admit to themselves, bondage on the covers, wrap it in a detective story, a mystery cult, who stole my girlfriend?, it was probably me, Leonard is a guy in the story, why is he called that?, he had a friend called Leonard, not explicitly engaged with art all the way through, medieval art, 19th century artists focusing on Greek mythology, yellow 80s, symbolists, Mary and obscure saints, Hieronymus Bosch, it should be salacious but it is too big and old for that, the rise of illustrations, they had the printing press, an engraving on the first page, maybe, so many striking scenes, the chapters play a role in switching things up, he is Leonard for quite a while, Da Vinci, the mentor of Francesco, Leonardo artist namedropped, we’re very far from this, talking about somebody from the 20th century, around the 1850s stuff really starter to condense itself, not edited, ironically it has an editor, two points that juxtapose, hilarious, I’m not going to get into details, avoid verbose descriptions, verbose as fact, there’s a lot to say, a letter Aurelia wrote to the abbess, dictates the first part of it that is relevant, so meandering, he has a sense of humour, sometimes hard to know, excised the frame, true of Poe too, a really funny book, a novel about a book review, boring sounded, on the same level to get it, operating at their speed, the older it is, lower humour, Jonathan Swift, I’m big I used to be little, the power fantasy of being giant, pissing on the king’s house, what he thinks of kings, the plots of the books in Gulliver’s Travels, first big, then little, then goes to Japan, floating discs, extracting sunlight from cucumbers, the English, the French, scientists, humans, taking care of horses, noble and better, the humour is more base, like a soap opera, the reveal, turns out it was not, all was explicable, incredibly convoluted, a timeline of events, the wikipedia entry, its own timeline, dispute some of this, have to accept it, if somebody else had done this for me, details the first part, summarize the whole text, people need to understand things and be reminded, original research, uncited stuff, helpful but very wrong, Jesse’s time travel theory, not the best theory, Northanger Abbey, a girl reading gothics, gothic romances vs. gothic novels, girl vs. dude centered, novels for teenage girls, oh my god!, R. Murray Gilchrist’s The Stone Dragon, not discovered, or forgotten, an heir to a fortune, forced to marry one of his cousins, has to pick, reading Ann Radcliffe, is Venice like is?, not for young women, see it from the point of view of a dude, #MailGaze, Red Sonja, hashtags should exist for jokes, great for jokes, to be a smarmy shithead, a little trigger thing, a parody of itself, #Hamas, #Terrorism, ultimately dismiss it, as a comedy thing it is delightful, there’s no comeback to, immediately referencing a whole cultural milieu, “intellectual property”, “the Robert E. Howard estate”, weird monks making memes, “this is fine”, “yes”, not even trying to enforce copyright on these, Star Trek vs. the Orville, a little idea that makes me laugh, the real culture, Red Letter Media, the nerdcrew, a real movie?, issue 80 of Spider-Man [Madame Web], so obscure, tchotchkes on his desk, promoting this shitty Sony movie, that’s the new culture, under the bigger culture of youtube being able to delete channels, an exquisite job, making fun of a specific youtube channel, just shills for Star Wars, so offended, delightful, so distinct, ai art is everywhere now, a ship sailing towards a star, makes no sense, no art for that, low rez book cover, two options, public domain art, has to be colour or nobody cares, renaissance art, it looks alright, often, that’s the problem, random number generator, crafting the thing you’re looking for, a picture of a pretty woman, of a house, a door in the roof, can’t we photoshop these things?, take it and crop it, art from the originals, upcoming audiobooks, interior art from Weird Tales, don’t dismss my [Hugh] Doak [Rankin], addicted to heroin but a good artist, too cartoony, time pressure, a tool they can now use, as a tool it is great, hurt things for some original artists, nobody has any money, operating as digital wageslaves, cameras came in, cameras became cheap, easier to do it yourself, the argument against AI art from a non-aesthetic position, if you go by tiers of who’s got it worst, streaming on Onlyfans vs. Twitch, kids seem to have a lot of money, very similar, parasocial relationship, the precentages, digital beggars for Jeff Bezos, not going to become a famous streamer, kids, being an astronaut but for everybody, people spending money on it and getting rich people rich, accounts are disappeared, disruptive organizations, Uber and Lyft, buses and taxis, going offshore, whoever owns that app, chat GPT that was open source and not for profit you would see laws against it, a torrent like service, you would see legislation being proposed, visual artists, writer’s strike in Hollywood, AI refinements on scripts, if you’re in the disrupting business, paying for AI art, $10 a month, if the money gets big enough, just seeing the tip of it, started last year [2023], so colourful, the pulps, mimicking tons of digital art, fluorescent, fractals, cutesy simple art styles, biggest shills, high end art is a scam, laundering money, pay for play, from an artist’s perspective, commercially, spicy pulp covers, 100 years in the future, algorithm, the self-directed artist, commercial artist, a bit more of a shill, the final level, a complete shill, actively devaluing the art, corporatized, cloud services, if we learn anything from this massive tome of a book, just wait 20 years, Poe had his brain into this book, vibin on whatever was happening in this book, that’s awesome, a great image of a cat putting it’s paws on a miller’s son, The Cat And The Miller’s Son, a Bros. Grimm story, The Cat’s Advice by Jesse, how google works, the more you describe it, options, choosing is part of art too, The Pixie Princess Of Foss, that is our jobs, we are copying machines, there’s a trick to it, fuck that shit we’re human beings we share that, the tools being in the hands of masters, the distributed costs of the inputs, the laws are not for us they’re for them, only copyrighted when you’re in control of the levers, some of these have been removed by DMCA, what websites were removed from the search, an instagram celebrity, playboy.com, talent agency, The Lancet, a medical journal, there are supposed to be consequences to false claims, it’s all automated shit, nobody is held accountable, the personal phone number of that guy, that’s the problem with AI art, different ways to steal from all the labours everyone is doing, using a fake photoshop, powered by torrents or some browser or bitcoin, more money to spend on programmers, just learn to paint, music AI, give me something like Pearl Jam with a little Blues in it, almost exactly plagiarism, everything is remix, everything is taken from something else, always more allusions you will not spot, The Beatles are just original, a very strange upbringing, talent, aesthetic sense, he practiced, he drank a lot, The Undying Thing by Barry Pain, 100 youtubers making Lovecraft, HBO TV shows with Lovecraft in the title but no Lovecraft in the story, Suitable Flesh (2023), The Thing On The Doorstep, Barbara Crampton, looked a little sinister, some aspects, a good adaptation, very funny, the writing could have been better, Judah Lewis, oh fantastic it works, fiction on film, make sure everybody understands, nobody else has read The Thing On The Doorstep, The Call Of Cthulhu is not a good introduction to Lovecraft, The Unnamable is better, The Nameless City, The Tomb, Dagon, The Music Of Erich Zann, the Irishman in the inn, conjuring annoyance, what is this music?, the source of the horror, to slowly reveal it, the thing who would make it scary, much more about gender, the thing that everyone talks about in the book, not fully human, ancestor was half-fish, a reference back to Innsmouth, Mr Jim Moon, misogyny, you missed a reference there, Re-Animator and From Beyond, Heather Graham, more evil than sexy, a limitation of the budget, some horror movies, schlock, Point Break remake, Dennis Paoli, The Evil Clergyman, not really a story, look a new Lovecraft story, that was just a dream, changed the ending, Bride Of Re-Animator (1990), president reanimator, an Italian version is horrible, we have the syringe full of green stuff, ghost and sex, Turkish Star Wars, saw the poster for Star Wars, we need a guy in a helmet, jeeps and boats, remaking Star Wars as a car movie, an old man in the desert, more Mad Max style, convoys, the metaphor breaks down immediately, what the hell is that, the farmboy who learns to drive like a moonshiner, shooting wamprats, a few monstrosities, everything except Star Wars with the name on it, talk about bat movies, not The Batman, talking points, that’s all real, during COVID, Lovecraft Country swag, that’s just a bribe, comic book movies, just complain about them, being in the movie industry, going to see Oppenheimer, the Barbie thing happens, never going back to the movie theater again, a late showing, during the day, there’s no standards, worse in North America?, it will come for you too, the slow corruption takes its time, the products are bad, Canberra, where most of the government is, pretty good incomes, in a bubble, disposable income to spend, a particular movie theater, high class cinema, artsy films, upmarket, the problem for poor people, the problem of a bad experience, the content in the actual theater, Argyle, The
Beekeeper, Mean Girls, Wonka, Aquaman, Fighter, Poor Things, Night Swim, Zone Of Interest, ISS, Ru, The Chosen, Lisa Frankenstein, Ferrari, Troll Band Together, All Of Us Strangers, Hunger Games, no pee break, Killers Of The Flower Moon, the product you’re selling in the bookstore, old movies that are in black and white, one night a month, the big screen is better, the best movie experience, at a university film club, the Barbie movie isn’t designed for movie people, bums in seats, the filmmaker, a historical figure, opposite movies, The Lego Movie, a defense, pretty good, maybe 60%, only missing 40%, educated on the allusions, where did the name come from, if you don’t pay attention the first time, The Sandman, a really good story, science fiction elements, the most famous short story by Ray Bradbury, The Veldt, barely got any traction at all?, two theories, suppressed?, already been on youtube for years, use the original title, The World The Children Made, recommend things that fit certain criteria, bugbear, punished, more fool Connor, Matt Ruff got Connor, name recognition, if it has a good name, The Hour Of The Dragon, weird old shit, what percentage of people know who Barry Pain is, people in the year 2100 will thank you, some things that are appealing to the public, hope that they’ll stick around, getting trapped, shilling for garbage, pursue the things that make you excited, chasing things you’re not excited about, if you love Lovecraft, the passion is really important, people know his name, every fourth audiobooks, The Crimson Weaver, Tony Walker, Classic Ghost Stories, recommended it to him, The Stone Dragon, is it deep enough, autoscrolling, closed captioning, nice AI art, came out dark, little bit of romance, a bit or romance, goes into trances, humanskin gloves that turn people, an episode of Friday The 13th: The Series, cursed object of the week, a weird incest vibe, got cursed, the curiosity shop, the premise, gruesome and fun, they’re cousins, more Nancy Drew than it is lascivious longing looks, all the aristocracy marry their cousins, this one hour quick story, they listening to the whole 16 audiobook and four hours of talking about it, a little bit of insight into the audience, skip to the discussion, separate shows, people have control to make the file go ahead, when the analysis starts, April, vacation to Tasmania, bring back a tiger, a devil?, devils are still available, a TV show, how many minutes or seconds until Jesse’s out, thylacines, why Jesse doesn’t need to watch this shit, Aubrey Beardsley, 20 novels, none of them are available, nothing on archive.org?, a short story collection, niche stuff, he’s a dude, The Yellow Book Quarterly, did the art, sounds like Alan Moore, good channel, Lucian’s True History, take some pictures of some Australian islands, nobody can live there because there’s no jobs, to homestead?, government job, a TV camera man, looking for thylacines, the rural areas are hard to find work, with Starlink now, setting yourself up for problems, eke out, chickens, online consulting work, info about the climate and such, the other youtube, Connor bikes around, takes so much time to film stuff, cut so much into your day, some unediting videos.
Posted by Jesse Willis