The SFFaudio Podcast #196 – READALONG: A World Out Of Time by Larry Niven

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #196 – Scott, Jesse, and Tamahome discuss the Blackstone Audio audiobook of A World Out Of Time by Larry Niven.

Talked about on today’s show:
Tamahome is a third, Ender’s Game, 1976, Rammer by Larry Niven (1971), a fix-up novel, Infinivox, Pat Bottino, “his most perfect short story”, the novel ruins the short story (sort of), the anticipation is more interesting than the resolution, chapters 2 and 3 nullify the power of chapter 1, Corbell, Peerssa, the Clouds of Magellan, “a fuck you ending”, interesting social systems, a sciencey vocab, cryonics, Bussard Ram Jets, ergosphere, Protector, Beowulf Shaeffer, The Soft Weapon, the Technovelgy website, biological package probes, the bubble car, the empty man, gravity assisted subway, poster TV, RNA shots “don’t read Cliff Notes, eat Cliff”, planaria (flatworms) experiments, humans are wired for language, birds are wired for flight, young forever, Star Trek, null field, consciousness transferal, continuation of consciousness, Robert J. Sawyer, Rollback, Identity Theft (or Shed Skin), your robot body, we care about will, Four Worlds Of The Diamond by Jack Chalker, “there’s a mystery that needs to be solved, cloning, Lilith: A Snake In The Grass, Audible.com, The River Of The Dancing Gods, The Identity Matrix, Demons Of The Dancing Gods, G.O.D., Inc., Dancers In The Afterglow, Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley, “who are you when you’re just some ground up hamburger?”, he’s treated like a criminal, why don’t the citizens want to make this trip?, a certain kind of person, Louis Wu, “a special sort of breed”, the two CBC Ideas shows on James Cameron, manned spaceflight, Playgrounds Of The Mind, “my favourite characters are all tourists”, “I demand to be a tourist”, The Integral Trees by Larry Niven, a whole world in zero gravity, “this guy is Mr. Physics”, Arthur C. Clarke, Hothouse by Brian Aldiss, Ringworld, The Ringworld Engineers, Robert A. Heinlein, Dan Carlin’s Common Sense, David Brin, passing a planet, “something on the order of that”, moving planets, Uranus, mathematically logical (but with non-existent materials), the air is full of the oceans, the null-rooms, a null-box, zero-entropy space, better sandwich storage, transporting the garbage out, Doctor McCoy, quantum communication and quantum teleportation, Think Like A Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly, Seeing Ear Theatre, Dream Park, Oath Of Fealty, The Mote In God’s Eye, Inferno, Lucifer’s Hammer, Luke Burrage, Escape From Hell, Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, an alien invasion story, Scott has a signed copy!, elephantine aliens with twin trunks, the audiobook of Footfall is available, a book written by people who care about science!, a septic tank full of books, Robert A. Heinlein, Dan Carlin’s Common Sense, David Brin, the DHS vs. the U.S. military, what would Larry Niven do as the head of the EPA?, a Death Star, Obama’s unemployed geekishness, Newt Gingrich, moonbase!, he loves himself because he’s surrounded by idiots, the idea of an idea man is fantastic, Douglas Adams, a thousand or ten thousand year project, focused on the current and the recent past, the deep time issue, time capsules, the Long Now Foundation, cathedral building, pyramid building, “on the cosmic scale”, the space race was motivated by military competition, Space X http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX , a private moonbase?, the ultra rich, science isn’t for profit, human existence isn’t for profit, space probes, hydro-electric dams, where is the Moonbase Kickstarter?, maybe we could have just one guy and his clone up there, Moon, real Science Fiction, Crashlander, Neutron Star, Peter F. Hamilton is an ideas man, Great North Road, five pages describing a weather change, another fix-up novel, Neutron Star, the animated Star Trek, Kzin, Alan Dean Foster, World Of Ptavvs, Algis Budrys, telepathy, Charles Stross, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Community, The Big Bang Theory, Dan Harmon’s keynote.

A World Out Of Time by Larry Niven
A World Out Of Time by Larry Niven

Posted by Jesse Willis

Occupy Eugene: Bridging Occupy and the Tea Party, with Dan Carlin

SFFaudio Online Audio

Getch of Occupy Eugene talks to Dan Carlin (of the Common Sense and Hardcore History podcasts).

Also available in a handy |MP3| version!

Podcast feed: http://occupymedia.libsyn.com/

Posted by Jesse Willis

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History: #42 Logical Insanity

SFFaudio Online Audio

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcastPowerful podcasting, that’s what Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History was. Carlin used to put out the most powerful podcasts I’d ever heard. With episodes like Punic Nightmares, Ghosts Of The Ostfront, and Steppe Stories (now available as audiobook downloads). Half-way through them I’d be calling up friends and telling them “Hey, new Dan Carlin is out!” and then start telling them how awesome the show was.

And over the years I can’t say the show ever went bad – because it really never did – it just didn’t consistently hit the incredibly high highs that it had earlier. That is until just before this point this morning…

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History - #42 Logical Insanity

…where I realized that there was a new classic Dan Carlin out.

Carlin’s connective thread in this episode – that the insane choices of 20th century history are in fact a kind of horrific logic – delivered with fascinating historical evidence and illustrated with his incredible storytelling skill, shows the inevitable, frightening, awful logic of bombing cities full of people – even with nuclear weapons.

Carlin poses questions like. ‘In war, how many enemy civilians are you willing to kill in order to save one of your own people’s lives?’

And of course if that number is not equal to zero you’re down the path towards logical insanity.

Here’s the episode |MP3|

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

Posted by Jesse Willis

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

SFFaudio Online Audio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Jesse Willis

SFSignal Podcast (Episode 070): Panel Discussion of Favorite Podcasts

SFFaudio Online Audio

SFSignal PodcastSFSignal Podcast #70 features me and six other folks very quickly discussing Science Fiction (and other) podcasts. Unfortunately I think a lot of the best stuff came after the actual podcast ended. At least that’s the part of the discussion I enjoyed most. As a part of that I also invited Matthew Sanborn Smith to participate in an upcoming new releases and recent arrivals podcast.

In episode 70 of the SF Signal Podcast, Patrick Hester asks our irregulars: Do you listen to podcasts? Which ones, and do you listen to fiction podcasts?

Have a listen |MP3| or subscribe: http://www.sfsignal.com/podcast.xml

I took notes and think I got most of the podcasts that were mentioned:

Me:
The Cthulhu podcast
Lightspeed magazine podcast
Forgotten Classics
The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast
Gweek
HuffDuffer.com

Fred Kiesche (of the Lensmen’s Children blog):
Escape Pod
Beware Of The Hairy Mango
The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast
The History Of Rome
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History
The Incomparable! podcast
Geek Life
Writing Excuses
Adventures In SciFi Publishing
The Tolkien Professor
The D6 Generation
The Nerdist
The Command Line
Living Proof Brewcast
365 Days Of Astronomy
Spark
Quirks And quarks
The Naked Scientist

Jeff Patterson (of the Gravity Lens blog):
The Nerdist
-The Doctor Who Cast
RiffTracks
Changesurfer Radio

John DeNardo (of SFSignal.com):
Functional Nerds
Beware Of The Hairy Mango
Notes From Coode Street
StarShip Sofa
The Skiffy And Fanty Show

Paul Weimer (of Blog, Jvstin Style):
Russian Rulers Podcast
Ancient Rome Refocused
Heatflash
the Speculate! Podcast
Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me
Three Moves Ahead

Matthew Sanborn Smith (of Beware Of The Hairy Mango podcast):
StarShip Sofa
The Tobolowsky Files
Tank Riot
Around Comics
RadioLab
Lightspeed
The New Yorker Fiction Podcast
Luke’s Creative Podcast
Dunesteef
Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas
I Should Be Writing

Patrick Hester (of SFSignal.com):
Seattle Geekly
Dragon Page
Adam Carolla
Slice Of SciFi
The Babylon Podcast
The Geekdad
Mac Tech Break
Podiobooks.com

Posted by Jesse Willis