H.P. Lovecraft – SFFaudio

The SFFaudio Podcast #877 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: John Jones’s Dollar by Harry Stephen Keeler and When The World Screamed by Arthur Conan Doyle

The SFFaudio Podcast #877 – John Jones’s Dollar by Harry Stephen Keeler (29 minutes) read by Brian Dirkx for LibriVox and When The World Screamed by Arthur Conan Doyle (1 hour 2 minutes) read by Ben Tucker for Librivox, followed by a discussion. Participants in the discussion include Jesse and Scott Danielson.

Talked about on today’s show:
The Black Cat, Amazing Stories, with Amazing art, serialized in Liberty Feb 23 and March 3, in The Strand, Professor Challenger stories, The Lost World, rotundness and anger, Malone, stands tall, The Disintegration Machine, The Land Of The Mists, contact the dead?, spiritualism, finding dinosaurs, Alien Voices, Leonard Nimoy and John De Lancie, The Invisible Man, Wells and Verne, everybody knows Conan Doyle for Sherlock Holmes, a 1000 steps down, serial characters, not as popular as Sherlock Holmes, the shadow, full colour illustrated, the worst Challenger story, the premise, the story was filled with details about digging, from a weird perspective, a 10 page story, hears about someone else’s invention, he makes a bet that dinosaurs still exist, Around The World In 80 Days, he is the central character of this story, the idea is much stronger than the story, the fun part about it, The Poison Belt, a gas that’s gonna kill the planet, doomsday, delay the inevitable, oxygen cylinders delivered, his wife, an asshole to everybody except for her, she’s really nice, we have a mat and a something else, clean your boots very thoroughly, respecting his wife’s domain, survive it, they go outside and everything is dead but they’ve survived, dead people everywhere, they all were just in a coma, they’re just tall tales, the way Superman stories work, the problem with X-Files is the continuity, that should really change the world, he drills into the brain of the earth, it spouts up a geyser of stink, shakes the whole planet, these are science fiction tall tales, Conan Doyle’s odd beliefs, the fairies and the spiritualism, you hear things about people, the accepted narrative, the article about fairies, doing that for a lark, you can say things facetiously, take it out of context you can be misquoted, how Sherlock Holmes works, The Sussex Vampire, its a more mundane gothic reveal, there’s no supernatural in Sherlock Holmes, after WWI, we might have been misled on that, his biographers, people had a hate on for Orson Scott Card, never noticed him being a raging asshole, a slight difference of opinion, we’re allowed to have slightly different opinions about things, I really like roses, zinnias are much better, in the context of Houdini, Houdini vs. Conan Doyle, they were friends, debate over dinner, celebrities of the period, Lovecraft and Houdini, ghost wrote for Houdini, The Cancer Of Superstition, purchased by some collector, if it ever comes out, a big round fun character, they’re told from different perspectives, prescient, people in little squares, every zoom call, one of the students was tardy, really cool, we invest $1, destroy capitalism, the Fabian socialists win, could have been 10 minutes, a very small idea, March 21, 1988, you left 17 pounds fifty pence, hoarded it for 3 millions, you and Norweb, 180 billion pounds, April fools, Red Dwarf, a joke inspired by this story, the compound interest story, own everybody’s wealth, doubling your money, 3%, far enough into the future, what we’re told about bank, is that how your bank account works?, you go into cold sleep for 40 generations, do you expcet the money will be there just as promised, the institution, they’re managing your wealth, this fee and that fee, for the privileged, 2 stories, the first sentence or so, they’re both tall tales, told stories, how to get a job, economy and education, wait a second, the people saying it were completely wrong, something about banking, obvious, they always leave out, what is money?, working on the money theory?, is money food?, money is just what humanity has agreed is the common tender, growing the carrots, six rabbits for 1 carrot, a car, direct trade, this abstract thing, not a pound of silver in the bank of england, silver has inherent value, you think it is valuable, just like my beanie babies, a jackson pollock to play the game properly, still unbelievable, who mints the money?, we’re told, almost zero, what kind of money are we talking about, zeroes and ones, the bank, i wanna live in a home, I would like a home, you need a mortgage, they lend you some money, you have created money for them, they leave that out of the story, the reason the money supply is growing, a billion dollars, $100,000 a month for the next billion years, It’s A Wonderful Life it’s in Bill’s house and John’s house, Pottersville is the world we live in, they want to lend to Blackrock and Vanguard, you are person who rents, Blackstone, the fantasy that’s told in this story, a Fabian socialist wants to improve the world, the last sentence, had been born, a person who owns everything, we’re designed to answer the question, The Lady Or The Tiger, reading the story subversively, told the story about compound interest, a lime crush and Battlestar Galactica comics, that’s way in the future, testing children with marshmallows, that’s MK Ultra, susceptibility to being controlled, try that with a cat, with dog, the more cookies pile up, dogs are like MK Ultra humans, we tell them what’s going on, try it with a wolf, which is smarter the wolf or the dog, the border collies are the smartest dogs, we programmed them to do that, might be readable as do you actually believe this, the boy doesn’t show up for his class on time, I don’t beleive you, Siri is it true there was a power outage?, they all look the same, they all wear horn rimmed glasses, they’re all babies with glasses, worst zoom call ever, this history, the University of Terra, naive Jesse wouldn’t notice it is told the same way in Red Dwarf, the chessboard and the grain of rice, a grain of wheat, you don’t understand the power of doubling, not enough rice on the planet, this is a math fiction story, the crazy part about it, we get sold by ideas like this, this is how we get tricked, I should invest some money in my bank account, if this goes on the curve becomes vertical, the singularity, vertical is impossible, a physical impossibility, infinity, why Math is not as important as they make out, Math is not our world, we use it to describe, a whole philosophical box, self-consistent, All You Zombies, a completely self-consistent story, the unmarried mother, the bartender is the main character, telling it to make the story, how ever other person has a slice, eventually there’s no molecules of pizza left, cutting carbon atoms from the fluorine in your pizza, but you can do it with a circle, a huge impact on people, flipping through Instagram, isn’t this odd, where a hurricane is going to go, much simpler, the eclipse through math, the hurricane is complicated, how many bodies involved are involved in the hurricane, social phenomena as mathematical, handwavium that away, 1776, a line in that play, the promise of America, boomers, you could be a fairly decent fuck up as a boomer, not true for most people after, Gen Alpha, just save $100,000 by living with your parents and working at McDonald’s, those stories lead us in the wrong direction, lied to about geology, no dinosaurs in the oil, saying that for real, there are fossil plants in some coal for sure, made out of the same stuff, we are told this is a fossil fuel, an alternative theory of geology, a giant living organism, Stromboli exploding, volcanoes, out of them come a lot of carbon, carbon dioxide, the non-biological creation of rocks, the Greeks, thought or said, amber was the tears of Apollo, probably tree sap, giant tree sap out there, a biological rock, at least some coal is biologically created, diamonds are pure carbon, not made in the bellies of worms, it seems to be coming from the earth itself, life happening, life getting into every nook and cranny, where does a tree get its mass from, the mass of the tree comes from the air, when that tree falls those compounds are in the ground, deposits, natural places, plant life has gathered, now we have coal, animal life for billions of years, the decay of these animals in the earth, the wikipedia entry for petroleum, what we’re told, abiogenic petroleum, an alternative mechanism, mid-1850s, abiogenic sources have been found, the controversy is over how much exists, abiogenic petroleum exist, that’s why it is called fossil fuel, different kinds of coal and different kinds of petroleum, cars converted into woodburning, add an oven to the back of your car, designed for gasoline, we can make trees into plastic, ultimately the earth has carbon in it, magma and lava, mostly carbon, this carbon cycle we all know about, getting the earth’s pimples, the world is some kind of being, a flesh and blood being, a shelled creature, all self contained and curled up on itself, its not like it’s a guy’s brain, shaved skin, a living thing, skinned animal, an echinus, a sea urchin, how do they exist, what does it feed on?, the ether, we dismiss the ether as something fun, doesn’t exist, where we sweep all the problems, ethereal, the reason we want it, light as a particle and a wave, a rock in a lake, through the medium of the water, water has substance whereas ether doesn’t, if that were the case, how can we detect ether, that sounds fun, I’ll read that story, it solves a problem it doesn’t explain things any better, maybe we just don’t understand what we’re talking about, that’s fine, then that means all the planets also have that possibility, we’re the fleas discovering we’re on a giant dog, there’s no godliness to it, not a thing of worship, not like Mother Earth, seems like we got blood here, Big Trouble In Little China (1986), special elevator, wizard: the black blood of the earth, you mean oil?, skeptical, a really good science fiction writer, monsters in the upper air, The Horror Of The Heights, airplanes are still new, people crash, Amelia Earhart sort of thing, giant jellyfish, the upper atmosphere, a place we can’t reach, previously deepest drilling, Professor Challenger, challenging the theory, plate tectonics, magma and hotspots, good story badly told, enjoyable, zipping, how to drill, a good science fiction story, the big idea in it, off on a tangent, that’s what you do for the story, what if?, his harshest critic, the earth was hollow, the moon is hollow or not real, the Moon was a hazard to navigation, reading it subversively, Eric, Just Imagine (1930), 50 years in the future, unfrozen, wakes up in the far future of 1980, a number for a name, eugenics has made everybody better, no teeth, big heads, tiny bodies, a great improvement, how did our math equation go off, the economics of Star Trek, there’s no money in the future, what do you gamble with if you don’t have money, not even holosuite hours, Engineering Economics, how things are funded, try to learn it, how things could be different, imagine a Star Trek world, what the economics of such a world could be, the ideal thing is everybody gets what they need, access to crayons and desks, enjoy their art, a lot of hate for China, official hate, jealousy driven, they didn’t fuck it up, in the late 80s?, China went to Japan, what that doing was was opening up lots of banks and having them lend people money, their lending officers are not there to help you, to make their economy incredible, more lending officers, make every possible business happen, his own factor, let’s give him some money, really good at horsewhips, the relevant experience, you mean like old fashioned, rather than to extract value, whatever we’re doing we’re doing it wrong, disinvestments and extractions and scams, crypto tanked, I’m trying to take it okay, the way out, just another scam, bitcoin is not like that, bitcoin is math, the other ones are mathplus, the whole thing is just imaginary, enough people want it, based on nothing at all, let’s pretend there’s an earth, the easiest amount of gold, the deeper you drill, true for gold, true for bitcoin, prime numbers are a real thing and kind of unpredictable, less and less frequent but more findable, a finite amount of it, theoretically infinite, more and more scarce as you approach infinity, South African rand, British dollars, you shouldn’t buy bitcoin, you should mine gold, exactly the same as numbers are imaginary, universally checked by all the miners, a replacement for the gold standard that went away, the money doesn’t inflate, inflation is impossible, there is no extra money, in our world, banks make money out of nothing by lending money they don’t have, only theoretical when they lend it out, a real problem in our world, money in their vaults equal to their lending, theoretically why paper currency came into existence, most banks issued their own currency, you trust the bank has that in the vault, a silver dime, they took the penny out of circulation, the copper is worth more than the penny, debasement, start adding lead to the gold, where this inflation comes from, what makes a lot of people mad, told to be mad about bitcoin, the only real crypto currency, shitcoins, all pyramid schemes, backed by the math, if your trust the math as you would gold, not as something to invest in, real dollars and buy bitcoin is a way of keeping the value, a condemnation of the currency that it is fleeing, 2014 or 2011, the guy who fixed Jesse’s windshield, a bitcoin wallet, your computer is on and running cycles in the background, milibitcoin, little grain of gold, an alternative to currency, there’s no lender, banks are subsequent development to trade, pay your taxes with my face, they mint that up, the goal of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamura might be an ai from the future, a science fiction idea, come into existence, not in any other story, the creation of a digital currency, the particular bank owns it, letters and numbers, what a happy couple, wild stuff, educated a little bit, a little more cynical, it was fun, what did you think about the tech?, the viziphone, prescient, describing zoom, a literal piece of chalk, educators, teach trades, automation in specific, practical, how do you do the things, what’s a motor, what is electricity, expertise, have done these jobs, expertise at the college, spread out further, what we do, teaching in the zero hour, before school starts, a high school teacher at every highschool, manage the classroom, we’re present while they’re doing these labs, it’s definitely working, we’ve got a formula that’s working really well, train them every summer, help people on site, experts there while the highschool students are doing the actual things, if they have a question, engineering vs. science class, something went wrong, we have to move on, the light should light up, competency based education, moving at an asynchronous pace, the person struggling gets more attention, people who breeze through stuff, a lot of 1 on 1 attention, the problem we’re trying to solve, effect more people, a lot of openings and good careers, work that creates satisfaction, your work is satisfactory to you because people are benefiting, professors doing science, a history professor, all theoretical, damn you and your stupid ideas I’m drilling!, two different approaches, Professor Challenger is a better teacher than the Professor bobblehead, checking on the one student’s story, 3214 vs. 3221, 7 years in the future, the Philip K. Dick estate, for copyright reasons, their logical, we haven’t colonized mars by 1990, they think the novelty of the story is tied up in the dates, different ideas, Godzilla Minus One (2023), representing destruction, almost a metaphor for the war itself, what happened to our country, Godzilla Vs. King Kong (2021), the shooting, the action, Kirk holding his chin while he considered whether he raped that woman as a clone or not, transference, focused on the short hair, not noticing her personality, better than a plain old saucer, the stories are the thing, Galaxy Quest (1999) had that, love it at that level, the captain’s quarters, a thread about the coffee cups, she’s a yeoman, sprayed silver to look spacey, Kirk looks at her ass, he’s holding it up to his lips, no garbage cans on the bridge, they yeoman never comes back to take the cups away, they eat them like an ice cream cone, focused on the wrong thing, get the story in there, make sure it is a good one, a lot of bathroom time, Strange New Worlds first episode, in old Star Trek they’re on the planet after the opening credits, lying in bed with his lover, Captain Kirk had sex, why is he so space horny, the point of the story, gold after gold after gold, pretty debased bro, some fun episodes, do you want fun though?, Peacemaker is fun, The Suicide Squad, fun and enjoyable, Tramp Abroad soon, 4 hours vs. 16 hours, easy going fun, take her easy.

John Jones' Dollar by Harry Stephen Keeler - The Black Cat

John Jones' Dollar by Harry Stephen Keeler - Amazing

When The World Screamed by Arthur Conan Doyle - Liberty 1928

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #876 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Tower Of The Elephant by Robert E. Howard and The Tale Of Satampra Zeiros by Clark Ashton Smith

The SFFaudio Podcast #876 – The Tower Of The Elephant by Robert E. Howard (1 hour 23 minutes) read by Mike Vendetti and The Tale Of Satampra Zeiros by Clark Ashton Smith (31 minutes) read by Tommy Patrick Ryan, followed by a discussion. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Scott Danielson, and Cora Buhlert.

talked about on today’s show:
Smith’s 1931, 1933, paired, Weird Tales authors, big 3, big 4, thieves stealing things from places, things not going according to plan, a tweet, art from both, who thiefed it better, Howard, had read the Smith before, 25 years now, maybe more, a few other things too, badgering about Conan, really good, over the last 4 years, sword and sorcery, really liked it, good introduction to Conan, a good story, with one caveat, no girls in it at all, more interesting character, Red Nails, People Of the Black Circle, Queen Of The Black Coast, old fashioned language, perfectly harmless Conan stories, stray racism, stray anti-shemitism, pro-cimmerianism, trying to cancel Astrid Lindgren, Pipi Longstocking, great children’s book, the audience for that Star Trek babies show, isn’t quite what you were expecting, of these two stories, which one is the science fiction story, literally an alien, stapled to a couch for 300 years, other planets, not surprised, if he was less Cimmerian he would question his sanity, the tones are very different, a pair of thieves into a forbidden building, one of them dies, with no great jewel, a horror story, a cosmic horror story, Tsathoggua, an inklings situation, an Inkling situation, Seabury Quinn is the big fourth, correspondence, Robert Barlow, Frank Belknap Long, H.G. Wells was in Weird Tales, Tennessee Williams, the people on the cover, Clarke would be one of the big 4 of something else, takes the cover, doesn’t have scantily clad women, Galactic Journey, Margaret Brundage covers, got quite grumpy, naked woman on the cover, strategically placed, less than 5%, scantily clad ladies, all academics, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Texas, California, Rhode Island and New York, except to go to Mexico, and New Orleans, re-qualification, San Fransisco, using the mail, reading each other’s stories, corresponding, not exactly an inklings situation, C.S. Lewis, writing for money, elderly and sick parents, stuff in the 1950s, a pulp story, chapters, the whole last chapter of the book is a nice delicious infodump, the fight in the bar, what kind of men are men, Gundermen, a city of thieves, Yara is a thief as well, a pot bellied Nemedian, Taurus, Poland maybe?, Zamora, Turkey?, Hyrkania, Russia, Ukraine, an analogous, the tower, our guy who’s bragging, to teach women stealing, a Kothian, hooked nosed shemite forger, he wants to sell a particular woman to a shemite, a slave of another race, he stalked her and got her, a big story about bragging and what being a man is, why has no one broken into the tower, the conflict, Howard doesn’t do this, semi-unconsciously, getting into a fight with Lovecraft about what’s going on, civilization vs. barbarism, Howard is massively affected by this, a completely corrupt city, carry swords openly, a beef, the only killing Conan does of a human, a Nemedian who’s already on the job, inaccessible towers, with winged people, pre-cataclysmic land, lions, tries to betray Conan, Conan figures it out using Sherlock Holmes style techniques, what eventually is not a pay-off, escape the city with a bag of gold, what do we come away with?, he doesn’t walk out with a gem, some insight into Conan, a mercy-killing, compassionate, Yag-Kosha, torturing him, blind, drugged stupor, he helps Yag-Kosha, a man of a certain thing, The Ten Commandments, very biblical, Solomon Kane, old testament characters, physically gets the Staff of Solomon, this proof of God’s power, A Song Out Of Midian, Mt. Sanai, Christianity, civilized long settled people, intricate and complex, formulas and rituals, simple and understanable, Crom was their chief, gloomy savage god, gave man courage at birth, kill his enemies, literally engaging, the perfect god for atheists, The Vale Of Lost Women, lovecraftian monsters, from the outer dark, essentially miracles, fights the god, that is victory, man can fight a god, he isn’t writing this because he’s trying to make a philosophical point, he can’t help but put his stuff in there, a minor debate in Conan The Barbarian (1982), a haze of bewilderment, all touched in the head, low tolerance, ideas about life, I live, I love, I slay, I am content, sits around and listens to philosophers a lot, how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, shaking your head, up their own navel, religion students, teachers of religious education, translated 500 different times, what’s going on, which is the better story and why, the Conan story, very enjoyable, a mythic depth to it, it’s cosmic, a Lovecraft feeling, came to earth in China, Ganesha, this is what I need you to do, take my heart out, squeeze the blood on this gem, ancient ancient stuff, in The Odyssey, Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides, instructions, strums the guitar strings, biblical and beyond biblical, from the depth of the human consciousness, differing philosophies, read both before, deeper, more mythical, a great story, funny, what happened was, got on the internet, excited to meet other people, an early forum, Scott Lynch, The Lies Of Locke Lamora, KGB Bar, Asimov stories, rude, that’s true, way to stupid, a collection, appreciate it more, the executioner, dark but hilarious, some guy who was a jerk, ultimately you are on team Conan, an incredibly important story, rogue thieves story, definitely important, Boston Blackie, Dunsany, the first one in fantasy, the template for Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser, we like the Conan more, the different philosophies, engagement with the world as it is, having that idea, rug pulled, The Mirrors Of Tuzun Thune, a much gander aspect, race and borders and stuff, how to be in the world, except for the story and the experience, we come out of the story with a greater awe, comes out with a missing hand, meets a monster, a genuine monster, into a circle, the same temple, things in particular, 3rd person, the author giving his opinions, that’s a mistake, all sorts of clever, early in Conan’s career, The Frost Giant’s Daughter, the names of the characters, he treats his characters very disposably, usually keep the main character, background characters always change, Turuz Oomphalious, Tommy [Patrick Ryan], what kinda accident, sounds like a real name, both of these are jokes, less than zero, omphalos, navel, also a circle, they’re thieves, thieving to be luxurious, fur bikini, enjoying the thievery, that drunkenness, decadence, a repeated motif, loves describing the colours of the materials, the materials themselves, the sensual experience, literally lost his hand, writing with his sinister hand, the story as it is, the tale of everything, the shrine of the god, the jungle taken suburbs, hyperborean rulers, one giant sentence, what kind of guy, violet juice, rubric, on strong vellum, made of the skin of the mastodon, some lying legend, a warning letter, the colour of the ink, he is an aesthete, pleasure seeking, touched in the head, a response, a little more like Taurus, he enjoys the spoils of his takings, the king of thieves, too much rich food, drunken burglary, own everything nice, The Hound, they steal art, they make art, their art is horrible, hounded to death, go in to steal something, round and round, lives to tell the story, his lesson was not learned at all, why we love reading Clark Ashton Smith, Conan’s motive, a very good question, the whole point of Conan, the viewpoint character, we want to be him and we want to have this experience, they’re doomed, the characters don’t survive, the luxuriant growth, as you approach it, snakes, other animals, and bats, a doom, walking towards their doom, they’re fools, Conan is Robert E. Howard wrestling with the world, people would come at Jesse with religious stuff, figure out what’s going on, how do you defend against their arguments, comes in cynical but open, asks his questions, a famous line in this story, that’ Heinlein line, armed society is a polite society, from outside the city, the Karen mentality, grateful and thankful, the thing we hate in ourselves, we need to be a certain way, in the end he comes away with a broader experience of the world, that is the payment, a young Conan, newish to civilization, very curious, an atheist, he’s anti-religion, a religious region, books about theology, he’s doing his own research, he’s arguing with them, A Witch Shall Be Born, crucified and survives, a betrayal story, every movie, even the Solomon Kane movie, he’s a philosopher, he’s wrestling with something, it’s not always Conan but it is always Robert E. Howard, women shouldn’t trick you into wanting them and then take your money, his takeaway, what if everything’s fake?, literally wrestling with things, Xuthal Of The Dusk, The Slithering Shadow, responding to gothic fiction, rejecting it, how to avoid becoming weak, he came to earth, a rebellion on their planet, jungles of China, the names are not great, his apprentice, oversteps, builds the tower, a story of betrayal, I have to stand on my own two feet, own bootstraps, ultimately we know what happened to Howard, don’t do that, pay his bills, caregiver for his mother, a double funeral, his father, slow to pay, trapped in this house, his girlfriend had gone off to college, is she really dying this time, he wanted to kill himself, the excuse, untenable, let’s be careful, a long life, he drank a lot, got married late in life, stepchildren, he did his art, he cultivated his garden, this amazing vocabulary, very strange for thieves, the stand-in for these characters, trying to make art, the putative author of the story, it’s navel gazing, he knows what he’s doing here, sensual pleasure, the problem of existence, existential philosophers in the form of sword and sorcery stories, steals to survive, jewels he kept, find yourself a husband, crazy socialists, civilized lands, next to warehouses full of grain, cuthroat capitalism, super loyal to his friends, young thief, mercenary, pirate, he’s everything, the man in full, 16-mid40s, a mistake to think about how Conan is, what is this character come away with, a sense of awe, wow, how are we supposed to feel about this mercy killing, honourable and terrible, Robert E. Howard’s position, frontier guy, dogs and horse being shot, too injured to continue living, a hypocrisy there, one of the pacific island wars, head blown open, what do we do?, the cameras are here, of course you’re going to shoot him, everything that happens is horrible, you sorta need to have a reason external to you, what it has to be is anti-dogma, thou shalt not kill (thy self), he’s trying to do good in the world, harms all of us, his friends are all sad, not gonna make you happy, a choice between these two stories, we are told to reject the story by Satampa Zieros, that’s why it can’t be compared, much tighter and more complete story in terms of unity of effect, what Poe would be talking about, it nullifies itself, it tells us to reject it, there are immense possibilities, first fighting dinosaurs, a nested dug in on itself society, the sun’s bright, how different they are when they’re really quite similar, why do Sherlock Holmes stories work for us so well, crusaders stories?, why do we like his writing so much, of they’re not stupid ideas, so distinctive and iconic, even though he’s great, he’s always going to be third tier of these guys, his ambition, tend my garden, make things beautiful, the colour of the wine, all surface, all pleasure, older than Robert E. Howard’s, at least one word he made up, abroad already in the half light, the poisonous looking fruits, malign attention, he is a thesaurus, adamantine, pecuniary depletion, it means purple, his vocab is better than everybody’s, he literally didn’t forget his words, come away with vocab words, Hyperborea, a place of his, greek for far north, Averoine, Poseidonis, Zothique, Ziccarth, he get’s a second story, absolutely isn’t, a pretty weird one, The Sword Of Welleran, The Theft Of The Thirty-Nine Girldes, chastity belts, elephant revenge, 1,001 Nights, The Black Diamonds, two kids grow up in Baghdad, always meals, has them have lunch, he’s playing with himself, his own version to 1,001 Nights, his imagination is running wild, Spider-Man or RoboCop or Peacemaker, Abdul Al Hazred, towel on his head, cosplaying, pretending to be a pirate, spears, he had a lot to live for, he would have been wealthy, H. Beam Piper, lived into the 1980s, he’s funny too, the humour is in the boxing stories, Breckenridge Elkins, the only book is on LibriVox, a mountain man, he’s so strong, exaggerated fun stories, Sailor Steve Costigan, not a bright guy at all, an amateur boxer, there was a demand for boxing, railroad stories, Action Stories, Fight Stories, a better market, more Howard, space em out, $0.99, they’re all the same, they’re all good, when Lovecraft reviewed the Clark Ashton Smith story, very Dunsany-like, The House Of The Sphinx, we come into a middle of a scene, there’s something out in the woods, a 1 page story, the house is falling apart, what is he doing in this story, a bookstore, in the lobby was a sphinx, Egyptian sphinx, designed to prompt you to figure it out, being very playful, to be playful, the connection, comes away different, enjoys the names and enjoys the joke, the luxuriance, it’s soapstone, wealthy aristocrat, no electricity, not selling to the same magazines, the author and their art, Michael Crichton, a literary connection, Travels, The Andromeda Strain, dedicated to Arthur Conan Doyle, engagement with literature from before you, Atlantis, Lemuria, trying to engage with the ancient, out of the bible, out of other stuff, mediocre writing that comes and goes, engaging with tropes, the save the cat formula, enemies to lovers, really popular, modern writers, they’re not engaging, they liked Firefly, you don’t have to read this old stuff, they draw on everything they’ve read, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Greek classics, took Latin, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, religious education classes, same five parts of the bible, quite annoyed, don’t ask questions, it should be, pulp authors, literature, mythology, religion, made teenage Cora go to religious education, Jezebel, transliteration issue, stole a bible, they’re designed to be stolen, here’s a question, walking around to hotels, leave a copy of the Robert E. Howard’s stories, an amenity, if you look at his manuscripts, backs of hotel paper, paper is expensive, designed to be stolen, hotel shampoo, the sheets on the bed, towels, pocketed stuff, everybody is a Clark Ashton Smith character, not going to happen, whoever the Gideons are, public book shelves, compare the translation, crime novels, little free libraries, in demand, other books were still there, crime novels, two crime stories, Midsommer Murders, NCIS, speaking of crime, reading Howard as a teen, how dare he kill that Brythunian, read a western, everybody is out to kill everybody, some piece of media, horribly immoral, they’re stealing as they go through the countryside, everybody in the city is a thief, when Conan steals, people who can afford it, poor farmer, from wealthy people, terrible people who have deserved it, human trafficker, deserves is not the way of Jesus, violent American trash, complete nonsense, a transgressive thing to do, Conan, Rambo, and Rocky, fifty years old at the time, sympathy, Nancy Kress’ Beggars In Space, reject it, what is being promulgated is evil, doesn’t happen very often, not connecting, a visceral this is evil, Slan is kinda evil for the same reasons, put sympathy in the wrong place, I am better than you, evil stories, on a podcast about it, refuse to watch shows, the death penalty, never watching this show again, 24, torture, a terrorist somewhere, children committing murder, Adolescents, radicalized, ahistorical, age control of the internet, see weird things online, atheist can’t have evil, how are you defining evil, god as the source of morality, dragging this out, important, as written in the move, not really a commandment, you have to, pre-the Israelites, virtuous pagans, a graven image, the KJV, some are uncontroversial, describes the Ark of the Covenant, of heavenly things, strange gods before me, take the name of the lord god in vain, remember the sabbath day, the same one, days of the week, the next one, honour they father and mother, respectful unless disrespectful, thou shalt not kill, armies kill, just war theory, you shalt not murder, when he gets married, thou shalt not steal, rob from the rich and give to yourself, Robin Hood, apparently not, the way they get out from under Pharaoh, fine get out of here, curse on the first born, lambs’ blood, we all know what steal is, when Blackrock does it, the number one, don’t lie about what people did, thy neighbour’s house, thy neighbour’s wife, set up these stones, the turn the other cheek stuff, old testament times, Jesus himself was asked, he didn’t say all of them, love god and love each other, a condensation, ordering your life where god is first, from that ordering of your life, this turmoil, this chaos, this idiocy, evil, makes the rest of it less important, in the proper ordering of things, willing the good of another person, jealousy fades away, good for you but also good, that’s a bad idea, causes strife, people living together well, in-groups, monotheistic and abrahamic religions, Hindu or Buddhist, pretty universal rules for living together well, Edward Page Mitchell, the best early science fiction writer, a fantasy, a Bangsian fantasy?, the rapture, a scene in it, pile up all the gold that they have, the heavens shakes, the roof comes off of the world, lit on fire, Moses is up on Mt. Sinai, down in the valley beneath, a golden calf to worship, revelry, Moses comes down and he’s really mad, throws the tablets at the golden calf, it zaps, elide it, got the tablets back, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, is that the same gold?, if it is, it is more interesting that way, a whole lot of different stuff to explain the story, 30 years of Moses’ life is absent, putting it all together we have to do a lot of inference, it’s immutable but very mutable, Edward G. Robinson, that’d be good right?, the Judas of the group, motivated by gold, we fell enriched, but we literally get nothing, we should raise money, nothing on tv, they pull open the drawer, a faith in the book, a faith in the word, the word remains, something fun about that, a notch deeper than that, Jesus is the word, bored in hotel rooms, single rooms, parents’ magazines, parents’ books, micromanaging commandments, when and how to have sex with what, giggle giggle, indulge Jesse, semi-interesting story, this one church has the Ark of the Covenant in there, exposed, maybe it is radioactive, we did our own raiders of the lost ark, [iodine] fight the radiation, how much does that effect us, translate it, we decode it, thous shalt not own a Tesla, surprising!, draw human blood, older fragments being found, the Gospels, the older fragments match, controversial content, what books included, what books aren’t, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, the Christians have got something cool over there, an argument or a possibility that is always out there, the oldest existing, when a new translation comes out, Hebrew or Greek, as accurate as possible, interpretation, different readings of passage, better not to have the tablets, imagine we have no doubt that it’s the actual tablets, that’s impossible, what’s really true is the story, as a film, Moses is put in the river by his mom, the prophecy for Oedipus, very similar, the ending is the Israelites leave Egypt, not a destiny doom thing, by the power of God, why is that so central to the idea, the parting of the red sea, a series of coincidence, read this as mythological, the Greek response to reality, the innovation that makes it powerful, Lewis’ conversion to Christianity, Tolkien had a part of that, these stories are mythological, this is the myth that’s true, the more interesting reading of it, these are not supposed to be read as actual events, scrutinizing the videotape, scripture only, the genesis story as literal, these stories were orally told through time, the details are not long there, the important points are hit, wowed the audience, Bros. Grimm stories, relating actual events?, yes, anything older than Abraham, the story of Noah, a cool movie to see, this is what it says, Noah (2014), a spiritual aspect to them, god helping you through tribulation, the historical aspect, the story they told themselves, Egyptian records, historical characters are in there, black Americans in slavery, the story of the Israelites being freed is a big deal, a deep thrumming, a Jenny (Colvin) word, either or both, Augustine goes through Genesis, meanings, in the year 300, these days aren’t literal, the number 40, a poetic word, a lot, many, not the conventional way, to sophisticated for how stupid we are today, important to understand what was being written and to whom, lamb of god, meant something specifically to the people of the time, we don’t have the symbolism, if we understood the symbolism, the story would make more sense, a cat on a rooftop in the Hansel and Gretel, very specifically a bird, broken by modern interpretation, Cinderella, a corruption to turn it into princesses, the original Grimms, the original grizzly versions, obsession with stone babies, cautionary tales for young women, why doesn’t the wolf eat the girl in the forest, and her lunch, he get’s into the grandma’s bed, what was the woodman doing there?, retold for a modern audience, very artificial sounding, Bros. Grimm: Demon Hunters, young women, nurses and nannies, aimed at girls and young women, The Iliad, Yul Brenner, Moses, his accent, The Magnificent Seven, Westworld, while he’s sitting on the throne, Priam from ancient Greece comes in, the King of Troy, we can get a timeline, Hollywood edition, smart and educated, a strange film, Cecil B. DeMille, a narrator throughout, and then this happened, Charlton Heston’s hair, an easter egg for us, Trojan War, the Jews are doing this over there, Midian, how would he know about that, very cool, much more interesting and public domain version of the MCU, terrible language, The Fantastic Four movie, Mythopoeia by J.R.R. Tolkien, fun as heck, when next are we three meeting again?, the links are there, science fiction and science fiction, hiking, full on the weekends, if not then, then, spread em out, did we ever do anything by C.L. Moore, we did a big show on it, Stefan Rudnicki, Skyboat let us use one, bye.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #875 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Undying Monster by Jessie Douglas Kerruish

The SFFaudio Podcast #875 – The Undying Monster by Jessie Douglas Kerruish (7 hours 56 minutes) read by Ben Tucker, for LibriVox, followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Alex (Pulpcovers), and Tommy Patrick Ryan

Talked about on today’s show:
Monster?, before 2014, her publication in famous fantastic mysteries, pretty good, not super well known, did you write it, different spelling, different lady, here’s a big novel by me, 8 hours long, a full novel, 3 and half hours is novel, people disagree, unplug and plug back in, decent, you liked it, good points, inventive, where to get there, that one’s not great, the recording, he’s got a British accent, most of the voices, competent, Ben Tucker is good, an interesting choice, a lot more acting, did you manage to see the movie?, this last week, last night, driving to and from some stuff, spoiler alert, a good werewolf story, Luna, more obvious, the werewolf is attracted to the moon, for whatever reason, fasinated by shapechangers, werewolves in particular, the druid class, into wolves and bears, Diablo, a werewolf or werebear, Brandytook?, lifted from Tolkien, our favourite hobbits, awith a swing of his stick, inventing the game of golf, the shapechanger, turn into dragons, D&S or Pathfinder, forgotten everything about this book, all the pictures, a hand of glory on the cover, scenes from all sorts of different stuff, the drivers died, irritating, big loss there bud, missed out on the etymology, fascinated by skinchangers, skinwalker, a [novel] approach, 4th and 5th dimension, a very strong personality behind it, the Saga of the Volsungs, oh yeah, skipped throughable, the video on YouTube, on archive.org, sort of worth watching, the book is quite different, 8 hrs vs. an hour, the last line of the movie, wait a minute, a weird joke to put in a murder movie, this book is all sorts of things, Oliver and Swanhild, she straps on her brother’s service revolver, WWI, driving almost everybody to kill themselves, the shaw, either Doyle, Professor somebody, or that lady, Doyle is Conan Doyle, with so much baggage, the subtitle of the book, Hound Of The Baskervilles, a reverse gothic novel, early Scooby Doo, old man withers!, the supernatural thing is always fake, inheritance scheme, condos, what shaw is, old english, a thicket or copse, what it is, context it makes sense, this weird dark cave, forested, a coppicing, a copse of trees, a forest cultivated for making charcoal and home heating, sticks of the right size, for making faggots, walking sticks, wand, a little tree branch, you can just substitute the moors, with the Doyle reference, a mystery, supernatural stuff, documents, the legend, a doctor showing up at Sherlock Holmes’ residence, the legend of the Baskervilles, extraordinary evidence, a response to that, a story by Barry Pain, The Undying Thing, contemporaneously, turns out it was first published in 1893, a chain, a feudal house in some part of England, the old English manor house, a family in decline, the setting is great, cool old things, secret rooms, mounds, guys who live in cottages, Holmes, Dracula, vampires, a series of RPGs, larping, Vampire The Masquerade, weirder, give me all the rules, five phases of werewolves, krynos form, the wolfman, almost pass for a really hairy dude, a dire wolf, loup garou, Norse mythology, unexpected but welcome, the twist, the dog is dead, maybe he’s not a werewolf, the first ancestor, still hiding, the Magnus guy, all turn into wolves because of crazy, if you have the knowledge when you are in the womb, before he had sex to make you, encoded in your genes, racial memory, scanned through it, as soon as she’s out in the wood, how come I know that, forgotten the movie, noted on a tweet, really funny audio drama called THE MONSTER HUNTERS, retell old movies as their own, 1970s groovy monster, Heir Of The Dog, a game on Steam, gold car, ache in my back, she’s playing with the record player, they are attacked by a werewolf, this is what inspired that, the tropes are there, scared to death, when John Baskerville comes, connecting these altogether, incest, old English families, keep it in the family, Swanhild is also in Eric Brighteyes by H. Rider Haggard, 1883, maybe it starts with a g and ends with an l, ghoul?, such a werewolf nerd, a rundown of the Saga of the Volsungs, the race of the Volsungs, an edda, the translation by William Morris, 3000 years later, reading Edgar Allan Poe, you fool, this bird is not a Raven, yeah, we don’t care, where Gandalf came from the dwarves of the hobbit, Smaug is not in there, Fafnir is a talking dragon, talking dragons are also shapeshifters, there’s just talking dragons, talking fish, dragons are men, they shapeshift because of their behavior, sit on piles of gold, kidnap maidens and keep them for themselves, a good king doesn’t sit on his horde, he has 1, if you are a bad king you become a dragon who should be slain, werewolves are something you do, you put on the mantle of a wolf, the skin of a wolf, something you put over yourself, you become a wolf’s head, becoming crazed, about to be eaten by her brother, the way the family will prosper is by eating somebody, conk on the head, The Fall Of The House Of Usher, brother sister creepin, Roderick young comes to visit, falls into a black lake, the background for what could have happened, heroine, really good at hypnosis, the gal Kate, still alive at the time, wasn’t dead yet, I’m a normal man now, did kill that lady, alone with only one other person, a thin explanation, believing in the rules of the thing, a GenCon viking guy, vikings and dwarves, beards and culture, the land of the ice and snow, Immigrant Song, really fun, links, the setting that it’s pulling from, a neat exploration, is it well written, cheesy stuff, the movie ends abruptly, the natural ending is about an hour before the ending, the lady detective wrap-up, some more hypnosis, better in its parts than it is in its whole, the giant man overlooking the estate, the first image in the PDF, made of the shaw, sort of symbolic, the giant man of Dannaou, ancient chalk carving out, horses or men, the horses are well regarded, genitals exposed, looms over the whole story, you’re Danish, I knew it, sloppy, convention stuff, a terrific Lovecraft connection, The Alchemist, an early one by him, little boy raised in a castle, near Spain?, no mirrors in the castle, part of the castle has been condemned, some kids point over at him, maybe he has a dragon head, this ancestral curse upon the family, the men in the family will die before the age of 30, they die from accidents, earning immortality, he has cursed the family, by literally staying alive to kill them, in the background of this, Paulo Coelho, The Lurking Fear, respect Lovecraft as a humorist, a journalist who goes to investigate Thunder Mountain, a family up there, under the right conditions, one of these cannibal people living under the old house, a big burly friend with lots of meat on him, CHUDS, Lovecraft is hilarious, Re-Animator, same joke five times in a row, so many cool touches, our lady detective, she’s there but she bakes some taffy and they make fun of her, not really the same character, she’s the star of the show, a Madame Blavatsky, her aunt, her lesbian lover, not a lot of homosexuality in here, this threat of incest, vibe based, you don’t remember incest in there, Stapledon, the guy who made the hound luminous, he’s married to the love interest, he wants to be the heir, he gets really mad, that’s find, simulated incest jealous, a kind of a clue, the Baskerville race, the Usher race, a brother and a sister, alone together, she has a boyfriend fiancee, we’re out of duty to not being incestuous, a childhood friend of the family’s, we were in the war together, another male character, to do some lifting, made the change, hears the howl, going through the moat, the secret room, he was much more dedicated to his fiancee, the fake arm thing, artifical arm, Thorin Oakenshield, Bifur and Bofur, Zipper and Zoffer, son of, Swanhildsdotter, fake arm saved his life, the movie doesn’t represent the book very well, too much to adapt, she’s such a great investigator character, Murder She Wrote but paranormal, he’s got a crush on her, such a Mary Sue for this book, she is having so much fun being the smartest one in the room and the love interest, her hero character, she brought in herself, kind of a witch, weight as much as a duck, extracted from the PDF, wit, knit, Hammond’s race shall live and thrive, espieth, dieth, worse than death shall be his lot, you should kill yourself, why did the grandfather kill himself?, he saw the monster, The White Ape, Facts Concerning Arthur Jermyn And His Family, when we do a show on Congo, Michael Crichton, King Solomon’s Children, an Amazon delivery from Africa, kerosene, as you are a Lovecraftian investigator, the box was his grandma, sorta looks simian, he couldn’t live with the knowledge, racial horror, my grandpa used to work in the circus, restart the call, super bad joke, packed delivered, which is worse, in this book it tells you, a break, why that racial memory stuff needs to come in, under control when they had the knowledge, they had to kill, we just gotta eat somebody, attacked before the book started, the poacher, the butler’s worried, she grabs his pistol, reading it into it, laying it down, weird, fun, you shouldn’t marry your sister, on board the not marrying your sister train, a lot of characters, the least interesting character is our werewolf, our dude’s name being Oliver, Oliver Reed played a werewolf, 1942 movie, 22, 24, the reprint, 1948, Ben-Hur, a 23 hour show and a couple hours of talk about it, back to the werewolf book, a twist on the genre, the racial memories were weird, Danish Norse mythology, lycans is Greek, in Roman times, man in saxon or something, werebear, werecat, manbearpig, Saxon is German, Eaters Of The Dead, Beowulf, Grendel!, a good twist, hate parties, flapper dancers, false trails, a viking longship in a mound, the sword hilt, the background, the evidence that this is all true, complete bullshit, she does a lot of things very well, a preconception, word association, revealed, this is actually, false memory shit, demons, recovered memory, almost all of this is fake, hypnosis ads, quitting smoking, any phenomena that exist in society is either a threat or a tool, it’s not what we think it is, it’s not Mesmerism, the phrase hypnotic ability, a hypnotic disability, the performer up on stage, dancing like a chicken, those are plants, one way of understanding, cold reading, guy pretends he has psychic powers, begins with a G, he loved you very much, a scam, assistants, who travel around, fill in, become actors, a little bit like dinner theater, if you can’t juggle, often involves dominance of personality, the most interesting person in the room, the non-Vichy France, De Gaull was the tallest, if tall promoted more, you need to be seen, hire a dwarf, a commanding presence, submit your personality to that person, to regress him back through his ancestry, you want this to be true, confabulating, I didn’t want him to make stuff up, familiar with hypnosis, through hypnosis, the book is really good, an interesting departure, refind it again, cool, but incongruent, a little hard to follow, impressed, 40 minutes of the last hour, viking hypnosis, taking away his trauma, we’re all gonna watch Ragnarok together, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, all this viking stuff, the rainbow bridge, the Norse myths, just watching the Thor movies, God Of War videogames, out of Greece and into Norse myth stuff, Neil Gaiman, Beowulf script, stuff going on with him, not sure we like him, he’s a good narrator, super-impressed, a good writer, Lemony Snicket, instead of Tim Curry, a retelling, having that knowledge, the reference to Wagner, Ride Of The Valkyries, tapping into the same stuff, the Ring Cycle, retelling, nothing new under the sun, all variations, quite similar to it, she has done a little thing, what I imagine Seabury Quinn is like, remixes popular things, Murder On The Links, Poirot on a golf course, nobody reads him anymore, not true of Holmes, The White Company, Professor Challenger, 4 or 5 of them, When The World Screamed, drill to the center of the earth, the earth doesn’t like it, a really good Doctor Who serial Inferno, turning people into werewolves, green werewolf, a mirror universe, under a fascist regime, eyepatch, just like the Star Trek Mirror Universe, they destroy the world, Stan Lee, they’re different, much more like a werewolf, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bruce Banner, cosmic, get a werewolf costume cheap, acts like a werewolf, transformed by contact, scary and fun, how it ties into this book, in the tradition of this Hammond family, the possibility, the accept it, they don’t cut down the trees because they’re not cowards, it’s a trait, they’re leaning into it, Teen Wolf (1985), Teen Wolf Too, dad’s a werewolf, terrific, he has it under control, keep that anger under control, Nazi Germany, werewolf units, fight to the bitter end, hide out in the mountains, run NATO for us, Operation Gladio, unwilling to submit to others, dangerous between the cities, like Robin Hood but in a bad way, turn werewolf, the North American wendigo, the same idea, you do this by having eaten human flesh, killing a person in the way you kill an animal, acted wildly, play on the basketball team, otherwise you might become a wolf, metaphorically, vampires work that way, a Star Wars reference, Wendigo in Marvel Comics, Alpha Flight, werewolfesque, Beast, female werewolves, types of mutants, Shaman, Puck, Sasquatch, a man of the woods, bigfoot, werewolf adjacent, an uncontrollable thing, starlight and pine trees, a lack of control, they don’t even realize, I didn’t realize I was a rapist, Seth Green plays a werewolf, interesting to think of how people handle werewolves, the player was in complete control, a special attack, he’s hairy, he heals, outdoorsy, he’s short like a Wolverine, 5 foot 2, the inbetween a man and a werewolf, the claws come out, Hulk 181, Ginger Snaps (2000), Brotherhood Of The Wolf (2001), a frogdog, ERB enterprise, a six-legged frogdog from Mars, Odin’s horse has eight legs, a regular horse, in about 10 years, rural wild dog attacks, suburban?, clawed by one of these dogs, transformed, on her next flow day, the period cycle, not an expert on women’s periods, on the moon’s cycle, doesn’t track the calendar exactly, in men’s bodies, most animals have a season, she’s just a girl trying to go to high school, 2 sequels filmed back to back, solid action werewolf movie, you can do a cool variation, Wolfen (1981), a review of how good it is, the audio drama of A Princess Of Mars, $90,000, Bruce Boxlightner, Tom Baker, Sean Patrick Flannery, Tim Russ, nice and short, all 18 books, start another Burroughs series, submarine, lost world, The Land That time Forgot, Beyond Thirty, airship/submarine, savage ladies that need to be saved, The Monster Men, artificial men, he’s really good, Tarzan Of The Apes, The Return Of Tarzan, first went full Burroughs, his origin story, in America, follows Jane back to America, Clayton, still engaged, gets on a steamship and runs into communist spies, gets to Paris, a Rue Morgue thing, maybe it is you King Of The Jungle, an Arab princes, a stolen stallion, lion hunt, pirates, a lost colony of Atlantis, women are super-duper-hot, a lot of treasure, super-hot sacrificing priestesses, the craziest novel, heavily serialized, The Cave Girl, a nebbish guy, just read books, from Boston, she’s adopted, washed up, French baroness, under her tutelage, they’re all good, back a little bit, wrapped up with a bow, he torches her career, she hid evidence right from the beginning, the most cringey scene, that makes you better, that meme going around, that meme going around, the male fantasy, the female fantasy, the midwit, the idiot and the supersmart guy, Strange Tales magazine, two ladies asking for Robert E. Howard, what’s supposed to be male fantasy, you just have a good enough lens on this, this book is so girl, too long, there’s a lot going on, the archaeological dig, let’s look for papers around the house, stuffing out of the couches, funny stuff, you can’t put it in a movie, described in some detail, offstage, some couches, got his dictionaries out, swam in the moat, they’re treating it like its a serious mystery, a very self-aware book, a little bit like they’re in an RPG, literally how Dungeons & Dragons came to be, I want to have my own character, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are D&D characters, big into D&D, walking home from school, storytelling and coming up with interesting scenarios, the diceless part of it, some of the funnest fun books, Choose Your Own Adventure, theater of the mind D&D, this level of detail in the narrative, remember the time we tore these couches apart, as a pure narrative, she needed an editor, novel length, one aspect of the book, the scurrilous journalism in the background, and tourism, they sorta solve it, the sister gets a telegram, a substantial sum, laughin, I hate being a celebrity, the paparazzi I hate you guys, the girl psychology is hilarious, a popular author for a period, in her time, she was not a Doyle, female fantasy, an interesting perspective, there’s a woman in danger, man, don’t run into the woods, dummy, the good reporter, recording seance, it was him along, the seance people, from Chapter 5, golden calf in Sussex, over the breakfast table, inflexible monosyllable, Providence, unless those poachers get involved, the Daily Speculum, funny newspaper name, afflicted family, taken in dense fog, larger than sacred edifice, mainly boots and blurs, portraits of the Monster, heavy type, bandied about, argued about in coffee houses and bars, their exact meaning, spicy murder or divorce, the Sussex Horror, Stop Press, snub them all, the drawing room, playing up the book as being exciting, everybody’s talking about you, influencers, fairly high tech, threw it back, horses, more Victorian, you don’t need that for the story, only if it helps the story, if it is a red herring, female service, being famous, they’re vampires, a really good find, the hand, missing his hand, the hand of fate, the hand of glory, learning about energy exchange, an energy vampire, sending out vibrations, a drug, fame and fortune, reporters all over the grounds, a much more literal thing in today’s society, any level of famous, people who work for youtubers, carry the camera, show off the new makeup, how is thing a thing?, that’s the world we live in now, a pretty fun book, two thumbs up, a solid B, book club, more critical, what’s wrong with this one, some Arthur C. Clarke, put yourself in the shoes of highschool you, The City And The Stars, where it went, the worldbuilding is incredible, a sad ending, ate Luna, we can never be together, maybe contraception didn’t exist, the Anglican church’s the Lambeth conference, gonna do two Robert E. Howards, pair them with other things, 2 desserts of the same ingredients, spirituality and emotional healing, move out of summer, other events, The Tower Of The Elephant and The Tale Of Satampra Zeiros, out all of October, Too Much by Donald E. Westlake, John Jones’ Dollar by Harry Steven Keeler, the first episode of Red Dwarf, White Dwarf, a Jupiter mining ship, 2 lower deck guys, eating from the vending machines, put into suspended animation, three million years later…, everybody’s dead, everybody died from a radiation leak, the last human alive in the universe, piles of dust, back from hypersleep, lonely and going senile, like Douglas Adams, a comedy, full of science fiction, the story should be over, back as a hologram, his own roommate back, every kind of science fiction there is, the shipboard computer, 2 pounds six pence, because of compound interest, Futurama does that, drilling to Hell, so lucky, you can watch Red Dwarf for the first time, some capacity in October, is this great literature, a good read, concerns, tropes that happen, inventive, the 4th and 5th dimension, human consciousness, she’s crazy, I’m a sensitive, I’m a supersensitive, Call Of Cthulhu style investigator, on the level, laughing along with what she thinks is very formal, playful, the most important person in my life, progress.

The Undying Monster

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #870 – READALONG: Lord Of Light by Roger Zelazny

The SFFaudio Podcast #870 – Jesse and Scott Danielson discuss Lord Of Light by Roger Zelazny

Talked about on today’s show:
1967, a bunch of awards?, a Hugo, nominated for a Nebula, novelettes in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jesse’s gonna have trouble with this one?, lotsa things, may have modeled Jesse’s mind properly, “like”, Nine Princes In Amber, pile of audio, digital pile, read by Zelazny, an author narrated book, Harlan Ellison, Lawrence Block, the Amber series, A Night In Lonesome October, good reason?, the new copyright when they reprint it, a performance copyright, he’s an excellent narrator of his own stuff at least, the guy for this was fine, one mispronunciation, Shiva, Mitra, Robert E. Howard lore, the politics, the suppression, the whole conceit of the novel, a colonization of a planet, pretend to be the Hindu gods, the whole caste system, the demons in the book, suppressing the people and running the show, accelerationism, do we tell all the people about this technology so their lives improve, if everyone is gods nobody will be, everybody on an equal footing, this way to be better than everyone else, getting reincarnated, moving their soul around to different bodies, flippin their genders, making up Nirvana, slowly working through Clark Ashton Smith and Lord Dunsany, Gene Wolfe’s The Book Of The New Sun, hard to read, looking at a super complex object, appreciate it on that level, that’s an interesting object, complex and cool to look at, obscured things, purposely not telling you things, revealing things, little infodump, really interesting, pretty well written, a style a lot of people aren’t gonna get along with, hard to model the people of the period, the least there: when he goes to a town and sees a bunch of people lined up to use a vending machine outside of a temple, a dig at religion?, is the book about religion?, in the Catholic Church, in the Church now, not with this Pope!, people in the past who have used the church for political power, what the church is, the Hindu deities, Hindu pantheon, sorta retelling things, fantasy or science fiction retelling, is the planet that these guys are playing Hindu pantheon Earth?, the answer is supposed to be no, our hero goes to a new town, how to do your prayers properly, played for humour, something smells like shit, that’d be all the shit I’m keeping in jars, new device called a toilet, backstory improving myself, playing a game with the reader, being a bit provocative, that attack Jesse is about to make, it isn’t just the Hindus, the Buddha, what analogy can I do, pick a religion that nobody cares about: the ancient Egyptian pantheon, worshiping Thoth, when did that end?, well documented, super-super-horrible, approx 1500 gods, very inconvenient, the Romans had about 700 gods, a god for every river, every day of the week, Janus, tons and tons of gods, used to control people vs. make your life better, valuable about it, it is helpful, true because helpful, the words of Jesus in this book, a Christian in the last story, a populist religion, topdownism, it wasn’t the king, eventually that does happen, stop viking, not how it started, a secret religion, contrary and opposite to the Roman empire and the Greek religion, they are controlled by their priests and scribes, you need to learn all of this magic, The Book Of The Dead, magic spells, the ancient Egyptian deep state, theocratic agencies, controlling the person at the top and everybody else, how lawyers run things, if you can’t navigate the laws, Augustus is chief pontiff, the head of the religion and the head of the state, the priests are running things, keeping the pharaohs in a dizzying state, subservient to this massive set of gods, we never get to see it from the little people’s point of view, the deep state fighting with itself, John Brennan, the guy with the mustache who wants to nuke everybody, John Bolton, thousands dying with their decisions, the worst example, I am science, Fauci, when they’re attacking science they’re attacking me, that is not how science is, that’s spellcraft, I am in touch with the gods and you have to go through to me, all mistakes, slight improvements and slight tweaks, peer review, Benjamin Franklin, jockeying between transhumanist elites, a topic of regular conversation, change your gender, become immortal, download yourself into an ai, handwavium, Fury by Henry Kuttner, elites controlling little people, interesting what he did here, looking at it the same way, an interesting object, same territory, admire a lot of the writing, mythic event stuff, Michael Moorcock with Elric, a zoomed out quality, Sam woke up at the beginning of the book, a moment remembered by history, paintings, this was momentous, we need to document this, The Sword Of Welleran, The King Of Elfland’s Daughter, a kid takes up the sword of Welleran, other statues, half an hour long, 8 hours, 350 pages, an interesting question to think about, should stories reveal character or show character growth?, the focus has swung, modern novel of science fiction, science fiction has become a setting, no character development at all, an H.G. Wells story, The Star by Arthur C. Clarke, describing the place that he’s in, not the stuff being produced today, the older stuff, you can’t be nostalgic for things 300 years before you were born, Yama, the Death God, multiple names, fighting the assassin, that entire fight was amazing, the aftermath of the fight was amazing, become Buddhist, against my new mindset or worldview, he knew he couldn’t win, profound, beautiful, good stuff, why people like this a lot, star quotes around you like, things to like a lot, oh yes, he’s doing the thing, page 239, borrow unavailable, the fresh bitten thigh of a maiden, one ought to read this subversively, if you don’t you’re a monster, I’m a Slan, no you’re not, Beggars In Spain, I’m one of the sleepless!, the enlightened one, the goddess of night, Tak the Ape, the coexistence of the animal and the divine, like Lovecraft, not the Sam part, snarkiness, smoking, in that direction, subversive, do they smoke Marlboroughs or Lucky Strikes?, treating it kinda lightly, Dick did the same, Dick is a lot like Zelazny, co-wrote a book together, a sequel to The Man In The High Castle, Dick doesn’t do series, not able to do it, super-interested in religions, writing to the Rosicrucians, instinct, too much garbage there, busy work, when you read the words of Jesus, not legends of angels, not genealogies, he never said he was a deity, perhaps some will not agree, monotheistic religions, more conducive to human value, you know who Odin is, and Thor and his brother Loki, the Marvel superheroes, the adventures they have together, they’re a lot like superheroes, The Avengers, tied up in this book in a footnote, the movie Argo, Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four, John Buscema, other artist, The New Gods, superheroes that are actually gods, instead of Vishnu and the elephant god, or the monkey god, they’re NEW gods, like aliens, when he switches to Marvel, The Eternals, too painful, why people love Roger Zelazny, the best things, massively, 24 Views Of Mt. Fuji, By Hokusai, the new five, much less complex, family oriented, very different, the prose, archaic, old fashioned, just talking to you, very familiar, the 70s, fairly direct, The Turning Wheel, eastern mysticism, eastern religion, traveling for religious purposes, controlling people, nothing good, sympathy for Jesus, he isn’t trying to sell you much, it isn’t about enriching the pockets, or putting you under thumb of someone else, harder to do today, the ability to read and read the words, the encyclical, local language, Vatican II, a good move, pro-Vatican II vs. anti-Vatican II, overall a reverence has been lost by moving it to vernacular, the posture of the priest, facing away, worshiping with us, an impersona Christi situation, South American country, the mass, people who can’t read, the magic has gone from it, a reverence for the language, Harry Potter, Our Father Who Art In Heaven, memorizing the latin, the pater noster, just sounds, a series of sounds, what the point of this is, thy will be done, they may be pretty, no intent, alluded to it, hatin on Poe, American literary critic talking to Lesley Stahl, shittin on Harry Potter, maybe it will lead to better books, go on to Hunger Games, literally better books, capable of enjoying them, take some students to go see Harry Potter movies, the spell scenes, just Latin, it sounds interesting and magical, we only partially understand, the priests in Rome doing their holy stuff, chant, music, sounds beautiful, a lot of randos, music knowledgeable, ska has no words, musical lyrics can be incredibly powerful, incredibly inane, Abba lyrics, why am I having this runaround in my head, makes you stupid, something intitally outside of you, advertizement jingles, brain colonized by Madison Avenue, The Space Merchants is a central work, Taylor Swift, numerous commentators, writes about breakups, she writes a song about it, men are horrible, Halfway to Texas, a crazy little girl, someplace new, trying to be strong, whole thing is wrong, you held me back home, this is inane, useless, if you get some benefit out it, that would be punishment, deeply grok them, too simple, lyrics do matter, Sting lyrics, stories that he tells, exceptions to be found, not everything is equal to everything else, monotheist as an improvement over polytheistic, less subject to loopholes, the definite word on this, chemistry, valances, the periodic table, its based on a reality, how they teach it in school, the supposed to be result was, you didn’t clean your test tube enough, the flame close enough, make you conform and get your marks, confidence in chemistry, metallurgy, charcoal nearby, based in a reality, actual science, macroeconomics, no progress in macroeconomics in the last 100 years, truths we won’t factor in, access to make the purse strings open or close, super-evil shit, what is my purpose here on earth, Jesus has an improvement over anybody in this book, sum up the plot of this book: this old system of the elites controlling things and pleasuring themselves – they’re evil fucks, exploiting and denying, a fantasy, an evil fantasy, it’s false, Robert J. Sawyer books, downloading yourself into a robot, make an ai sound a lot like you, chemical treatments, biofeedback, adrenochrome, it’s evil because its lies, religious trappings, people pretending, actual Hinduism, using this framework, the answer is no, the book would have hit a lot harder, a savage attack, science fantasy thing, Urth, not on Earth, uses a name for Earth, we came from this other place, what his purpose was, religions are this, nothing more than this, a really interesting take, Lord Neriti, an extremely violent dude, it’s not that Christian history doesn’t have armies in it, Sam is trying to subvert things, that Jesus speech at the end, taken into account, the words resonate, they’re powerful, back to the stupid Eternals movie, close to 3 hours or 2.5 hours, at least 10 actors, the guy with the gold arms, the guy from India, the guy from China, came to earth to stop some demons, a more positive version of this, a superhero has to fight a supervillian, fighting a bankrobber and you’re Superman, Batman has to fight an ever expanding assortment of insane people, all the horrible Marvel movies, human beings watching superheroes fighting in the sky, we become observers of these lords of immortality and bulletproofness, alien invaders, all silly and stupid, Daredevil is a little more sympathetic, maybe it’s Catholicism or lawyerness, Batman’s fairly broken, he doesn’t have, progressed to The X-Men, from an alien immortal who is invulnerable, to a guy who has no super-weapons, super-interesting, little little kid, never read comics, Green Arrow, never went to a comic shop, at the corner store spinner rack, buying paperbacks, 8 years old, when science fiction became a real thing, original Mr. Spock, Star Trek, tv guide, wake up to see that every single week, minor Star Trek novels, before that, Dolphin Island, a library in the school, an occlusion, at 8 years old, second grade, The Three Investigators, no comics, missed Robert A. Heinlein as a young person, isolated in love for science fiction, conversations in high school, a funny book, into fantasy, when Shannara started, that list of Ballantine Adult Fantasy books, craft, quality, Audio Realms, that audio version, it had music, a book on Genesis by St. Augustine, symbolism and things we lost as humanity, the Bible was our common story, a lot of them are Christians too, Marvel or Star Wars, Star Trek, see what tattoos put on themselves, money is the driving factor, should have stopped, Thunderbolts* (2025) is good, the story had an end, the end happened, Asmongold, who is that?, what is that?, skibidi toilet, these are not corporate, they might be corpratized at some point, Colbert is cancelled, The View is cancelled, on hiatus, not an audience enough for it, the advertizing revenue is drugs and health insurance?, the medium, listen to the radio, sport radio, country radio, a huge sports fans, all the stick games, all the ball games, the Cubs won, did the guy hit the ball?, The Last Inning by Nelson S. Bond, old baseball player, cut from the last team where he gets paid $5 bucks a game, wakes up in Baseball Valhalla, the games are always good, in full swing, Twilight Zone in 15 minute installments, it’s not a sport it’s a pastime, the best episode of Deep Space 9, football now has taken that over, a football game on Sunday nights, MMA, boxing, conversation at work, football is definitely king, dangerous and painful, fantasy football is huge, pickem games, bigger than any other sport, the up down thing, soccer is a bottom up thing, you can play soccer in your backyard, you don’t even need a ball, not as dangerous, basketball you need a basket, you need a rock, rocks are cheap, part of that is participatory, they played it, in the United States there’s a lot of people who really dislike it, comparative, fits American psyche, impatience, clocks, things like that, 45 minute halves, 1 to 0, why basketball is an American sport, Real Salt Lake, she is done, why do I ever want to watch this again, 3 hours of football in which no one scored, anathema, hockey with regards to soccer, a lot more dangerous than soccer, there’s fighting, NHL, a very Canadian thing, Canadian Football League, frozen lakes, see themselves represented in it, go out on the frozen lake, need a pair of skates a stick and rock, top down vs. bottom up, dressage, horse dancing, a horse, a stable, money, stableboy, saddles, riding lessons, you can’t just teach it yourself, polo, like soccer for knights, the stick is easier than the horse, a space bigger than an apartment building, common experience, could have been better had it been a short story, unless it is radically changed for this, Zelazny is a series guy, what like what we see in Amber, not 9 serfs in Amber, sword and sorcery, Brian Murphy’s favourite sword and sorcery stories, Flame And Crimson is the book, The Tale Of Satampra Zeiros, there’s a pudding, a bowl full of pudding that eats one of the guys, Robert E. Howard, Black God’s Kiss, Dragon Moon by Henry Kutter is public domain, The Tritonian Ring by L. Sprague de Camp, Fafhrd and The Grey Mouser, Ill Met In Lankhmar, David Drake, Charles Saunders, Conan in Africa basically, The Shadow Kingdom, Beyond The Black River, Red Nails, Karl Edward Wagner, at this stage of life, The Tower Of The Elephant, everything comes up except for LibriVox, so fucking broken, enshittification, well done Cory Doctorow, Mike Vendetti, just recorded The Hour Of The Dragon, 3 where he’s a king, I’m a do em all, Jesse, didn’t understand copyright, he can do it and he will do it, gets enthusiastic, Sinclair Lewis, The Broken Sword, that first novel in the Elric series, the Fritz Leiber ones are not mythic, way after, the development, Fritz Leiber reads Conan in Weird Tales, him and his friend as the main characters, taking that dungeon crawl you see in some Conan storties, a team, a team-up, D&D-splaining, the party is Tolkien, they get the fellowship, warrior, another warrior, elf, dwarf, thieves, tpk’d, total party killed, only one of them is killed, Lord Dunsany stories, really cool overlay, a sphinx, that’s awesome, he doesn’t say what he’s doing, who killed chronos, The Nightmare Tarn, The Tempter by Robert E. Howard, Howard at his most philosophical, at his most attack on the deep state, the progenitor of things like They Live (1988), really solid, weird that he’s doing kings, corruption from above, his letters with Lovecraft, civilizations become corrupt and evil, leans in and says yes, they’re evil and old and we gotta suppress this knowledge, a one way influence, his Solomon Kane stories, he’s a puritan, largely adventuring in Africa, voodoo men, this is pure evil, we must go fight it, occupy sounds somebody else’s body, here take the staff of Solomon, sort of part of my religion, a mode of that, a suspicion of magic, just fakery, People Of The Black Circle, a retelling of the Marco Polo story of the Hashashim,, reading things from 1000s of years ago, 1254-1324, a certain valley to be enclosed, every variety of fruit, most elegant, all covered with gilding, he kept at his court, 12-20 years of age, tales about paradise, just as Mohammed was wont to do, some four or six, the deep sleep, the state of stupor, delightful objects, lovely damsels, in Paradise, unwilling to relinquish, commands of their master, put death by these disciplined assassins, been exposed to the emnity of the old man of the mountain, fairly familiar, still in use today, it’s the guy who tried to assassinate Trump, evil company, super-evil, people still do this, government related, lonely needs a girlfriend, an operative paid by the government, let’s go blow up a bridge, 7 people in the van, the governor of Michigan, how do we end up doing this?, ply em with money and wine, this is how we’re told suicide bombings work, arrested, Robert E. Howard did a story on this, set in Vendhya (not India), sorcery circle, his magic is largely fake, all you have to do to survive the sorcery is not believe it is legit, a different way of doing it, fireball damage, Harry Potter wand, sumin exportorum, not getting wet, you have to play along, I’m damned, if you are not a believer, it’s an alien, kind of the same story as the book we read today, stapled to a couch for 1000 years, Howard’s a lot more grounded, The Vale Of Lost Women, a god from the outer dark, an alien, it can fly, it’s not human, not a Christian, what do these stories mean, what does it mean to wrestle with gods?, nice language he’s so good at in his poetry, less toleratnt for the stuff happens fantasy novels, a long way of getting to him being interested in this subject, playing a game with himself, readable as either science fiction or fantasy, his playing the game, starships and cigarettes, him breaking that, it depends, science fiction has rivets and fantasy has trees, science fiction that is not the same, hard Science Fiction, The Cold Equations, that’s not fantasy, a philosophical piece of fiction, we have to think about technology, most of them are completely fake, a vaccine for a disease that doesn’t exist, a spaceship that needs fuel, bootstrapped to get to John W. Campbell’s, power like it does, you can’t just magic everything away, the reason we love Star Trek II, the reason we love Star Trek III is Katras, planning, remember, double eyelids, all well and good, that’s series shit, that’s not the part we love, we set up a mechanical style problem and think about , a really awesome thread, the problem with screen addiction is we’ve always had this problem, a dialogue by Plato, The Symposium, people have always been addicted to screens, cave walls, shadow puppets, magic lanterns, illuminated manuscripts, movie screens, talkie movie screens, just like radio now with added screen, home video game screen, cellphones with screens, picture of the guy in the cave, always has been, your body comes with built in screens, when we look at a screen, early science fiction, visiscreens, they’re looking at a television, you can see the world, submarines do not have any windows, how can you navigate without windows, actually going to build the Starship Enterprise, there’s nothing in space to look at, when a romulan ship encounters a federation ship they’re both right side up, listing, it’s all metaphor, we’re told there’s tech, Day Million by Frederik Pohl, without all the religious baggage, deaging cream, get the botox, deluding themselves, technology is the reason it’s not magic, another axis to put this on, Star Trek: New Worlds, set in space, phasers, not magical phasers, dilithium crystal, the axis of bad science fiction, each individual episode needs to be judged on its own, the giant with the giant cigar, The Doomsday Machine, Kirk can do these infodumps, the writer knows, they built a weapon so terrible, they’re gone now, how do you know that bro?, in 45 minutes, an awesome idea, it works as a metaphor, nuclear weapons, it works in every direction, it is important that Decker try to blow it up, the shuttlecraft is not the important thing?, Star Trek is coming The Tempest, from Forbidden Planet, added a secondary hull and some tubes, things that look like a transporter, operates the same way visually, imagine The Tempest is a science fiction, the no Kill I episode, The Devil In The Dark, don’t kill all the Indians, very good, Spock has another girlfriend this season, some other girl, the cartoon, is it science fiction, some of it is definitely, pick an episode, everybody’s favourite, The City On The Edge Of Forever, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, what time travel can do, the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, let that lady die, hugs Bones, it’s philosophical, how time machines work, he gives an analogy, how do warp drives, bend the paper, snake oil to get to the story, if evolution is real and things go on as they are, the workers and the effete elites, that’s him making an argument, farther into the future, nothing really matters, a crab on the beach, back to earth, love is real, our time on earth together, two different things that are going on in there, three places in time, he leaves again, is he going to go see Weena again?, she ain’t that smart, not about time travel to the past, god show out of this, Lord Of Light, The Einstein Intersection, Aye, and Gomorrah…, heard about Thorns from Jonathan Weichsel, Chester Anderson, The Butterfly Kid, exists on Amazon, hippies had a new kick from outerspace, Reality Pills, pot smoking poets and musicians, lobster shaped giants from outer space, Peter S. Beagle wrote the foreword, poet, author, and musician, underground journals, new wave movement, Ray Bradbury, his good stories are good, the pirate site, Ten Years To Doomsday, reprint in 1977, an alien invasion novel, republishment, co-authored, misclassified him, probably not a book we need, a ton of fun, standing out as not having read, A Night In The Lonesome October, super-interesting, a request, he is pretty consistent, it’s pretty short, going to wikipedia or whatever, websites memorized, 31 minutes, something to pair it with, comparing the style as well as the subject, the Brian Murphy list, Eric Brighteyes, the main character, novella length, similar length to the Howard, The Barrow Troll, a comic, The City Of The Singing Flame, capital AND, Linortis Reprise, The Ship Of Ishtar, a show from 2010, podcast 091 – Oath Of Fealty, not a good book, the number one problem, 40 or 50 people, hear the idea, at least it wasn’t a huge book, Lucifer’s Hammer, Footfall, The Great Brain, ya, middle grade books, he was really smart, your Encyclopedia Brown, exist outside of Utah?, the first house to get a toilet, charge tickets, he’s gonna invite everybody over to take a shit, making fun of his own book, Salt Lake City, a Mormon thing?, how widespread is The Great Brain, famous illustrator, The Return Of The Great Brain, real books for real children, not Edgar Allan Poe, probably worth finding a copy and looking at it, at the time it was pretty exciting, who stole my wagon?, this person has motive, the two first episodes of Bookish, the setup is pretty good, asks for backstory, we don’t know each other well enough yet, viewpoint character, spinup theories, don’t trick me bro, tried to solve the mystery, setting it up, Nero Wolfe and Sherlock Holmes, who did the murder, a little to character heavy, the UK is going strange, a rebranded itv?, bathroom, save it in a jar, getting better, how am I supposed to take this book seriously?

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #867 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Thing On The Roof by Robert E. Howard and The Nameless City by H.P. Lovecraft

The SFFaudio Podcast #867 – The Thing On The Roof by Robert E. Howard (26 minutes) read by Connor Kaye (for Eldritch Archives) AND The Nameless City by H.P. Lovecraft (28 minutes) read by Scott Carpenter for LibriVox, followed by a discussion of both (beginning at 54 minutes). Participants in the discussion include Jesse and Alex (Pulpcovers)

Talked about on today’s show:
2 stories, both about 28 minutes to read aloud, something related to the meta-text, Unspeakable Cults, The Noseless Horror, set in England, why is it set in England, big old creepy houses, British guys, one of the stories today, set in England for no apparent reason, something about this plot, the only time H.P. Lovecraft tried to do Howard: The Quest Of Iranon, Lovecraft heavily influenced by Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft wasn’t interested, he wasn’t commercial, Howard wanted to be a full time writer, have that as your job, died at 30, Cowboy Stories, Action Stories, it’d be good to have some beans, that successful commercial voice, Lovecraft wouldn’t have accepted the editorship of Weird Tales, this is the same plot essentially, a different storytelling technique, The Hound, two lovecraftian characters, an evil art dungeon, Manly Wade Wellman?, [Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long], black curtains, very exaggeratory, similar in tone to The Mask Of The Red Death, the plot, an amulet in a graveyard in the Netherlands, the monster in the grave comes and kills him, published twice in Weird Tales, The Fire Of Ashurbanipal, how Howard does buddy buddy, he’s Afghan in Arabia, Howard doing Howard, him doing Lovecraft, point to, teaching students how to write, Character Language Allusion Imagery and Message, nameless like the city, almost no backstory, with the Howard, British jerk, rude to his frenemies, rude to his servants, booklover archaeologist, more academic, a Fall Of The House Of Usher situation, we understand them both, the Lovecraftian scholar, he insulted me years ago, offering an apology, I’ve cleared my name on my own, runs off to South America, three month quest, the Doctor Strange movie, the warnings come after the spell, one is more homebodyish, I want treasure, Belloq and Indiana Jones, rivals, H.G. Wells and Jack London, muscular and fast, the Golden Goblin edition, riddled with typos and odd woodcuts, a parody of Lovecraft at that point, very different from other eldritch tomes, grimoires, less than 100 years old, some dude just wrote this, I studied all the weird forgotten cults then I was brutally murdered, found murdered, assembled, slit his own throat with a razor, The Black Stone is a real story, good painted cover, a purple velvet background, Robert E. Howard’s stories inspired by Lovecraft, these are really fun and interesting, basically the same length, the Lovecraft is much slower, a lot more dreamlike, artificial distinction, his dreamland stories and his cthulhu mythos stories, a guy who goes into the desert, crawls into a cave, horrible spelunking videos, head down in a spot, really horrible, in the darkness and suddenly there’s light, how detailed those murals are, conveyed all that information, he’s got timestamps, how does he convey that?, this incredible detail, a little credulous, depictions of funeral rights, a terrible accident or a war, these guys are immortal, That which is not dead, a lot of poetry in both of these, the text for The Nameless City, loose cable, the poet Justin Geoffrey, smashing babies against the Black Stone, Iram, the city of the Pillars, Sheba by Jack Higgins, a sucker for lost desert cities, lost cities are real, one in Turkey, ones in South America, ones in North America, the deep time of the Earth, an aryan mummy, of a higher race than the native indians, racial stuff, Atlanteans, they’re crocodile/alligator people, a previous species on the Earth, something very important, talking about Atlantis a lot, everything is old, no matter when you pick, all you have to do to push that number back is go out and look, not Mormons in space, the deep history of humans on the earth, there wasn’t always just stone age people, men think about the Roman Empire everyday, some of them are thinking about deep history, some scholar writing a book somewhere, Egypt is very obviously an older civilization, Honduras, Guatemala, got the wrong book, Heinrich Schliemann, cable broken again, not quite as good, finding these things, finding some ancient city in Honduras, didn’t find the inner chamber, how The Hound works, a batwinged creature, maybe that has happened many times, the hoofed thing comes and retrieves it many times, keep closing the door, the comic book adaptation, reading it this time, did you hear something?, a hoof on the roof, it’s Santa Claus!, an ox or a horse in the bushes, the final line of the story, an enormous, hoof, slimy, high pitched, a tentacle, jelly like bulk, Robert E. Howard didn’t quite make it clear, the Marvel comic book adaptation, a little frog hopping ahead of him, a separate from from the one he’s using as the key, crystal frog, a toad which hopped ahead of him, they show it, big splash page, jumping out the window to return to Honduras, interpret, a bad translation, they weren’t worshiping a frog, some god that lives forever, the mummy was its priest, the key was carved to look like a toad, a crystal toad, locked in the inner chamber is this other thing, call it toadish, an alien up there, a moon calf, carving it up like veal, try translating kimchi into english, sauerkraut, you’re gonna get something, getting it second hand, hears some horrible stuff, sees the wreckage, foul unspeakable slime, crushed and flattened, they lumber in the night, colossal wings, the meter and the rhyme, very sing-songy, alluding to something, written for this story, Justin Geoffrey is Robert E. Howard, layers and layers of literary stuff, the distancing technique, there is no medium between us and the narrator, we start right there, I’m right there, protruding uncannily, an ill made grave, as I cower in my bed, hiding under the sheets, elbows and noses, a shallow grave, this Howard thing, different segments of his poetry, The Children Of The Night, tread not where stony deserts hold, very Nameless City, why was he doing that?, is he like Tussman searching for this place?, it feels very dreamlike, there’s no evidence for it being a dream, in a style that’s dreamy, The Doom That Came To Sarnath, the city of Ib, the Nile, a confluence there, the striking change, in the darkness, suddenly he thinks he sees a light, the worlds that he sees described, they are always in light to, always light underground, promised this underground place, The Mound by Zealia Bishop (and H.P. Lovecraft), a collaboration, a mesa in Oklahoma, a headless ghost, dystopian nightmare of centaurs, a Spanish explorer, a nested scroll of what his experience was, slavery biotech, under the earth civilization, bio-tech, attached to opium drips, Xthula Of The Dusk aka The Slithering Shadow, something Howard is all about, even crocodile civilizations, down with these reptile people, some societal and environmental problems, why it is hidden from us, poetry injections, amazingly steep, Thomas More, a reservoir of darkness, moon drugs, the jetty sides as smooth as glass, the seas of death, how’s that supposed to comfort you?, what the mad poet said, couplet, comedic attraction, let’s do this, everyone warned me it was a terrible idea, my skin is coming off, sucked down into, the last 3 paragraphs, the grim brooding desert gods, what abaddon guided me back to life, monstrous colossal, when one cannot sleep, cacodaemoniacal, articulate form, the grave, strangely tongued fiends, the luminous aether of the abyss, a nightmare horde, the crawling reptiles of the Nameless City, the ghoul peopled blackness, great brazen door, how are we getting this story, hinting that he got out?, Lord Dunsany, a club story, pioneered that with a character named Jorkens, Fletcher Pratt, Gavagan’s Bar, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, invited Jorkens over for lunch, chased by a lion, went into a cave, how did you escape?, freak out and wreck the place, a silly joke story, the end of The Outsider, the tomb, the castle, over the landscape, the moat now a garden, why is everybody freaking out, the doorway is a mirror, I’m the monster!, now I ride the nightwinds with the ghouls, huh?, where’s the end of the story, the great brazen door, brass that’s been heated and colour distorted, Ex Oblivione, hates his life and wants to live in his dreams, in his dreams he finds a gate in a wall, how to find the key, taking more opium, get the door open, all of light, he finds himself dissolved, going to the realm of the Forms, until the time I’m placed in another vessel, the pre-heaven, reincarnation involves pain and annoyance, a low door, became dead, are we there with him?, a first person recounting of an event, he wrote it on a roll of toilet paper, Ms. Found In A Copper Cylinder, a ghoul peopled blackness, hail the rising sun, satisfied buy why?, balancing these two stories, love vs. like, prefer Thing, Howard more than Lovecraft, a sucker for the Nameless Cults, better with language, evokes so much, workaday, rushed through it, trying to sell it, the guy telling the story is fairly sane, the guy is gone, crazier more elevated language, it’s almost like The Nameless City isn’t a story, an episode of The Twilight Zone, The Fall Of The House Of Usher, a narrative from a perspective, this is all an analogy for our world, more of a Howard thing than a Lovecraft thing, The Slithering Shadow, the lady plugged into the opium, she’s watching youtube, she’s watching twitch, checked out, stagnating and dead, present asleep, it’s not like The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, almost more of a straight horror story, one of the endings of Re-Animator, they don’t like it, a dream fully detailed out, and then I was trapped there forever, we wake up out of the story, Robert E. Howard is way more explicable and copyable, much more like a spell we go under, very dream like, what can we learn from them, learn about these places, always underground, the conquistadors missed this, natives to torture to death, the more Heinrich Schliemann approach, the Temple of Doom, keep reading the book, bro, he wants treasure, he’s genuinely interested, our guy in The Nameless City, a compulsion, he has a camel, he has some tools, he came here, lived only in myth, the explanation is zero, a potion to save his life as a disease, a character with a personality, the swooning in Robert E. Howard stories, forget about character completely, C.L.A.I.M., real poets and fake poets, the language is just amazing, like a magic spell, each sentence builds the spell, visualize what’s going on, what is the message, read the whole book, don’t go messing in old tombs, a good thing has all of this, just dealing in tropes, the pictures, when you read a poem by Howard, sense data, just look at the titles, stories full of imagery, the colour of Belit’s skin, what the dragon looks like in Red Nails, he’s largely imagery, apparently it’s great, Jabberwocky, about nothing, means nothing, vorpal sword, the sound is really important, sentence patterns, the sounds of things, names, Tussmann, a funny name for an Englishman, Herr Tussmann, makes sense, he’s bad because he’s a German, evil because he’s French, the plot, that was fun, how he cast this magic spell, mesmerized by whatever it is, almost more like poetry itself, a Clark Ashton Smithy spell, story count, bang out stories in a week or two, each of these guys, all really into poetry, they don’t get money for that, got no money, just good will, why you doin it?, they loved poetry, people talking about writing on twitter, using ai to crank out, not for the love of the game, build my brand, that fundamental love of poetry, they don’t read enough, not absorbing this text for the love of the text, I played World Of Warcraft, muscle mommy, Orc City thing, that’s something, doing this wrong, his stories to his poetry, Clark Ashton Smith second tier down, better at poetry maybe, both of these are very good, they work together really well, reading them back to back, done differently, you can see Robert E. Howard put in some work, probably took a week, a lifetime of dream-journaling, one is a story and the other is something else, Howard trying to do something a little Lovecrafty, written a decade, Lovecraft doing Lovecraft, something off about this, this is him making fun of Gothics, the pirate one, The Black Stranger, Black Vulmea’s Vengeance, the people copying Howard, I got an axe to grind, Howard doing an Agatha Christie, Howard is a great writer, so commercial, front of the mind, what are they buying, do we want adventure stories?, boxing stories, whatevers selling this month, I’ll tell you whatever story you want vs. I can’t be any other way than I am, Strange Tales, Argosy, Farnsworth Wright, The Sowers Of The Thunder, get paid $40 for it, one of his best?, is that true, top half?, not top 10, he wrote a lot, and he’s really good at it, Tevis Clyde Smith, a shorter and better story, stocked up, real literature, that sounds like a guy who’s proud of himself, July August 1931, 5 years of writing, he got better as he went along, Tamarlane as a fit subject for Oriental Stories, the best story by far that I ever wrote, judge by any standard, seemed to erudite for the general reader, correctly estimating his audience, the Seabury Quinn lovers, my audience won’t like it, too thin, also etc., no attempt at plot, usual stereotype, he could have had the story for nothing, just to see it in print, mid to late August, to Lovecraft, a berth there, yarns, thin plot and light action, formerly rejected it, in the final letter, March 1932, the roof business and the sowers stuff, quite a few praises, get it into The Souk, The Eyrie, better than everything previous?, late Robert E. Howard, Solomon Kane is before this, Kull precedes Conan, the last recurring character, El Borak, James Allison, Kull is 29, Steve Costigan, 29 and 30, everything is 29 and 30 for him, ludicrous how much he wrote, he wrote so much good stuff, The Statement Of Randolph Carter, The Tomb, when you see Tussmann do you say that’s me!, as a character, so obsessed with this, two lines and then runs off, who does that?, an insane life, skull caved in by a hoof, decaying estate, there’s no explanation, he wants the treasure, doesn’t care about his own reputation or name, the backstory is really interesting, having to had to defend himself, so random attack, the Nameless Cults thing, the fake book as a concept, the weird pirate editions of the books, making fun of Lovecraft, buy the Del Rey not the Lancers, so expurgated, allusion is a major factor, an Aesop’s Fable, no reference to Dambusters, no reference to Akira Kurosawa, the couplet that explains what the moral of it is, one and done and we’re done, the more layer of enfolding, a reminder about a story by Poe, The Oval Portrait, almost is all frame, a guy in Italy, just wounded, breaks them into a castle, food on the table still steaming, the wick is still smoking, they find the castle abandoned, turret bedroom, bandits in the original, surrounded in this round room with paintings, armorial trophies, beside him on the pillow is a book that tells you all about the paintings, a build up for the internal story, a painter who painted a woman to death, drawing the spirit out of her body and putting it in her into the canvas, sets up and ends, why lately abandoned, a rich deep interesting story about art, he talks about being wounded, Tussmann’s eyes blazed, shot in the foot, how did that happen?, sealed up chamber, the opposite of our unnamed narrator, purely by chance, a similar sort of setup, it just so happen, it’s a meta-story, the framing making the layering more interesting, no framing at all, comes to us somehow, storytelling, start as far as possible into the story, cut out all the build up, start with action, Basil Exposition come out to explain some plot point, Constantine (2005) with Keanu Reeves, you have to roll with it, not like Blade III, a tv show out of it, at no point does it slow down for the audience, buckle in, why it doesn’t resonate with a lot of people, Robert E. Howard is very good at knowing what the audience wants, force of nature vs. innate skill and temperament for it, doing it for money, Re-Animator and Lurking Fear, let’s get Hour Of The Dragon scheduled, going to the beach again, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, not on for Hombre by Elmore Leonard, The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. by Jack London, Lord Of Light by Roger Zelazny, nominated for a Nebula, really short stories, The Horses Of Lir, a little later, a movie.

The Thing On The Roof by Robert E. Howard - art by M.S. Corley

The Thing On The Roof by Robert E. Howard

The Nameless City by H.P. Lovecraft

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #866 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Detour by Martin M. Goldsmith

The SFFaudio Podcast #866 – Detour by Martin M. Goldsmith, (4 hours 8 minutes) read by Ben Tucker for LibriVox, followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse and Alex (Pulpcovers)

Talked about on today’s show:
1939, only four novels, the movie, the movies, the 1945 one, an incredibly close recreation, everything with sue, identical lines, cut out, just over an hour, the car is a different car, set after the war, a prewar car, a 1941 car, war production cars, a whole history of wartime industrial policy, all civilian production, consumer goods, more volume, keep the people at home happy, not as many cars, models from 1943, the car is described, a gray buick with a rumble seat, ’36, set a year before it came out, “the rumble”, really good read, had to stop listening, so good, bang this out, at a swim meet, 7:30, done by 9, there’s no drag, no ending, the first two thirds of a really good book, the tweet, holding something, suddenly stopped, something happens in the book, save the rest, think about this for a book, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, 99 pages, judging for hugos or edgars, novella, the kind of book, addicted to paperbacks, I’m off the bus, what a great book, how come all books aren’t like this, noir gut punch, it’s dark, there was a point in the book, Vera gets the car, where’d you put the body, what do you say to that, in their conversation, is this a surreal novel, is she gonna kill him and continue down the road, endless highway to Los Angeles, a Twilight Zone episode, wrote 2 episodes, 1964 season, this thing is never gonna end, caught me out, suddenly have chapter 2, Alex Roth, his girl’s pov, Sue, totally jumped, that was his girlfriend, she’s gotta whole life going, a parallel story, what’s cut out of the movie, the two stories don’t really touch, flashback stuff, she reads the article about him, the only interaction, thematically it fits, wasn’t extraneous, just in memory, more surreal, waiting faithfully, we don’t know what she’s like, she is not a nice person, the Vera in the movie, also not a nice person, Sue is pretty horrible, incredibly selfish, somehow even worse, justify everything to herself, putting these two together, catching up to her, parallel stories, one’s an aspiring actress, professional violin player, seeing Sue from Alex’s pov, she seems like a nice kid, seeing what she does to Raoul, Alex and her roommate, you’re just not that good of a lover, he kinda deserved that, she just does this to everyone, she is a monster, what won’t I do to be a movie start, degrade myself in every possible way, a little bit like Sunset Boulevard, how terrible Hollywood is, it’s very good, film noir from that period, the book is just crackerkjack, in a police cell telling this story, bummin around, can’t go to New York, Los Angeles or Phoenix, regretful, all a confession, arrested for his own murder, no I’m the musician, your dead dad, the only one who knew about the scar, nope, I’m with Raoul now, already had a wife, screw his almost ex-wife, the point, we like our Alex Roth, too deep in with him, tired, sunstroke, can’t believe his luck, a hamburger, a sign, delay you, they do go off the road, changing the top on the car, the guy he’s replacing, this guy’s a monster, stole his mom’s wedding ring, took his brother’s eye out, any human that isn’t a total monster, brother in New York, roommate girl, side character, sleeping in the same bed, they’re poorer, literally in the same room, not a king sized bed, girls are a little smaller than people, the reveal, reveal, reveal, Hendrix, I strangled her, what!, wow!, where am I, this is about half-an hour before she died, in the movie he does strangle her it is kind of an accident, the marks on her neck, so squishy, so bendy, when she pivoted at the waist, her head being floppy on the top of her neck, strong images, Vera takes the phone and runs into the bedroom of the hotel, tangled up in the phone line, a little bit less deliberate, the movie is more censored in terms of sexuality, what’s the worst you can do rape me?, douche, books are completely uncensored, tended to be across borders, you can’t get Lady Chatterly’s Love imported, straigh up porn literature, it’s just hard and noir, striking, comparisons, magazines had more censorship, sent through the mail, delivered by trucks, how they got comics too, we might have to look at regulating, EC comics goes out of business, stop for the border checks, the fruit of livestock, provincial stuff too, whatever animals infesting the fruit, seemed weird until asking about the fruit, going back to the character, Haskell, he’s got something wrong with him, he was dead before he hit his head on the stone, these are all excuses, utterly fails, impulsive, he can explain, look it wasn’t me, the worry about him rolling the guy, the Fredric Brown, The Screaming Mimi, it didn’t record, just go read [it], a real ending, funnier, entertaining and interesting, nervous laughter, what to think about some of the things going on, intial impression, maybe the car was stolen, his angle, the scars on his wrist, the scar on his arm, he raped a girl, sometimes girls get passionate, she nails you, makes light of it, if you see a pharmacy wake me up, smoking marijuana cigarettes, why is he doing that, pain?, mental pain?, somethin’s wrong with her, it was Vera, she was the one he was having sex with, the woman on the page, fuckin dangerous and evil, sympathy for her, she is definitely dying, she wanted to have a real life, she wanted to be a star, cynical and pouting, he picks her up, why?, she’s a girl, this kinda book is about this idea, hitchhiking, a dead thing, pretty much dead, no one’s going to stop and pick you up, probably a serial killer, serial killer picks up another serial killer, first experience of this book and this novel, The Hitcher (1986), roadside diners, driving through the desert, Rutger Hauer, C. Thomas Howell, somebody to talk to, lonely, people need people, keep awake, talking keeps me awake, he buys our hero dinner, and breakfast, a steak, driving across country by yourself, a huge long drive, so helpful to the hitchhiker and it costs you so little, normal people, we’re all in this together, being a little more kind to our fellow man, Christmas and it is snowing, poor stranded motorist, what a scenario, rewatching it, what the hell is his motivation, repressed homosexuality, he wants to be killed, a very iconic and strange movie, Eric Red, the same scenario, the story changes you, taking on the persona, his billfold in your pocket, his name, he’s wearing the man’s clothes, driving the man’s car, this road is an endless highway, she got out of that car, she met someone who was her but a man, reading the letter he didn’t send to his dad, I’m selling bibles to churches, a good business investment, a number on the horse, the fix was in somehow, the roommate, sympathy for Raoul, seducing waitresses where his wife works, a weaker less aggressive version of Alex and of Sue and Vera too, binder full of narcissism, commercial for toast, actors care about their image, make emotional connections to other humans, because it is about the road, New York and Los Angeles, poles of Americanness, he can go anywhere, a piano, where is his fiddle, he sold it, he can get any old fiddle anywhere, his music teacher, everybody has to make a connection, she’s an interesting strong character, motivations: spite, companionship, some company in her last days, terrible to everybody, kidnapped him, takes all the money and everything, this scam, get 7 million dollars, take the $700, a bird in the hand vs. $7 million in the bush, playing cards, gettin ripped, smokin, not a kind word, these are broken horrible people, she’s quiet and she’s sleeping, pretty hard, the wonderful line, ancient primal, she was Adam’s wife, Noah’s wife, archive.org, read it in the browser, on your phone it scrolls, mostly the phone, a really nice clear scan, it is public domain, filthy like that, without a mask of cosmetics, primitive geezer would have gone for, she’s getable, as a passenger, he’s feeling great, drivin the car, being generous, give em big tips, only a few hours to live, final supper, ultimate supper, makes a joke, come back soon, a cute little joke, a grim joke, cynical, come out to Los Angeles, you don’t need to be faithful to me, she understands men, I ain’t going to be faithful to you, very naive, so James M. Cain, so hardboiled, at the end our hero doesn’t die, the free gas the goverment gives you, that Arizona perfume, ISFDB, set in realtime, the bombing of New York by the Nazis, an America bomber, multi-stage rocket, NASA guys with German accents, Doctor Strangelove, everything goes back to somewhere, are they prescient or is everything cyclical, bigger than the War Debt, WWI, the War in Europe, income tax, inflate everything up, people on the road trynna make a life, controlled by their human instincts, nice to spend time with people, change your location, our description of Alex from Sue’s perspective, beating people up all the time, the outside POV of him, he’s pretty nasty, until strangles Vera, a screenshot, 80% through the book, he’s doin his best, a good point, the cops aren’t just gonna believe him, this setup, who’s gonna believe he didn’t do it, our narrative of hitchhikers are dangerous, understanding what happened there, a first person perspective, I strangled her, from whatever Vera did to him, he was pretty sluggish, doctors on the side of the road in the rain, the cop comes by, what are you doing down there, oh I see, button that up, peeing, a very fate book, on a highway headed in a direction, be generous, saying to yourself, just kept driving, it’s the same car, a million Teslas half of them are white, sitting in the same car, the ashtray’s in the same position, that instinct to make human contact fucked up his whole life, it wasn’t going well for him, 4 people, each of those people is completely fucked up, and Raoul, dumped at the end, when Sue is reading about Alex, jumping off the Hollywood sign, fits with the media, he is a weak man, this girl hurting him by calling him a name, all about herself, I love him, I hate Alex, he’s dead anyway, I’m still married to your co-worker, send this letter of to her boss, I’ll never marry him, so petty, mid-early 20s, she’s about 24, comparing the movie to the book, identical, the used car dealer, the number is much inflated, ten years of inflation, WWII, that was nasty, used car dealer, haggling over a price, a world you do not want to operate in, I like fishing vs. the fish packing industry, beef, steak, sausage, the killing floor, the cynicism, I’m better than that, I have people for that, scrub my toilets, almost like an existential book, the hardboiled and noir books, femme fatales, murdered, destroyed, more mayhem, seeing Vera on screen, Sue in flashback, nice singer, powerful on the screen, the TCM intro piece, good little essays, going over to the actress’ house, in her 60s at least by then, come into my bedroom, get down on your knees, look under the bed, neatly laid out, I’ll participate but you need to know about all that, Hollywood is a hard place, high and low Hollywood, Boogie Nights, The Player, Robert Altman style, small piece of real estate, he’s got a big dick, [The Nice Guys] with Ryan Gosling, 2002 was 23 years ago, best movies of the 21st century, the list, best comic book movie, nothing you hadn’t heard of, Everything Everywhere All At Once, as long as your arm, there are still good movies, the writing is very strong, as much, a cheap movie to make, hard to find a book that’s a really solid short read, long long books with a small idea, swap identities with a corpse, consequences to it, the writing process, for writing appreciation, why is It’s A Wonderful Life Not A Christmas movie, Die Hard style, set at Christmas, kind of a Detour, see his wife, New York detective, the Christmas party, then Alan Rickman happens, the family is reunited and together, essential the same plot as A Christmas Carol, 3 ghosts, 4 ghosts?, Marley’s ghost, three visions of reality, the transformation we see with Scrooge, go get a Christmas goose, parallel structure, he doesn’t like Christmas, the Christmas spirit, he’s a waste, this angel comes down, not so he has a great Christmas, Thanksgiving, pretty subtle argument, those are the best arguments, something to the writing in here, the coincidence, a tweet Alex was participating in, one big coincidence, Edgar Rice Burroughs, that’s where he lives, never important, they’re the same size, this fun idea, all Chinese look the same, weird ties, you can kinda see it, same hump on the nose, fine with it, that’s a big coincidence, that he picks up a hitchhiker, allow that, that’s fine, takes it in to that almost Twilight Zone level of awesomeness, what do I know about reality, the Alex that we remember, him taking swings at people, he’s so polite to Haskell, a class thing, digging through the bags and finding more reefer, nice luggage, if he was a bum, they’d pin the murder on him, more like this please, more books like this book, solid twisty almost surreal, a different end, faking out the dying father, if he’d run into Sue, something, a turning back, the way they had come, you never get there, the highway is endless, rest stops and dusty highway gas stations, Sisyphean hell, Desert Saints, a mechanistic society, H.P. Lovecraft, railroads, automobile engines, anything that replaces human or animal labour, distanced from each other, physically distanced, Oregon Trail, cars are a thing now, drive across the country, a pre-war book, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, painting pictures of early 20th century American capitalism, the dirty 30s, go build a dam somewhere, FDR’s NRA, a later organization, hugely popular, fascism!, pushing back against oligarchs doing other things, struck down by the corpse, what a rumble seat is, my brother back in New York, cousin in New York, something’s wrong, when he lies to Haskell, I’m from Detroit, he aint a good soul, a rotten bugger, keep lying, Greek gods for the modern era, this kind of fiction is like a Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex, fun and good, upcoming, Hombre by Elmore Leonard, The Thing On The Roof and The Nameless City, The Assassination Bureau, Ltd., Jack London, Goliah, The Red One, ancient astronauts, room soon, a short story, guy says I’m gonna fix capitalism, send letters to the oligarchs, come to this meeting, go to this ship in the harbour of San Fransisco, zapped out of existence, the next round of guys, they get zapped, a giant computer ai in the South Pacific somewhere, just a guy, remote zapper, really good thinking stuff, technology to change society, weird communist socialist guy, Jack Johnson, Korea, sleepin with the bums in London, a hobo march to Washington, not all equally good, The Unparalleled Invasion, 2000 years in the future, a period of time in our future, germ warfare, everybody in China, colonizing the remains of China, doing that all before WWII, what this month is doing, things are progressing, those will be easy, the one with the toad temples, hoofy noises on the roof.

Detour by Martin M. Goldsmith

Posted by Jesse Willis