The SFFaudio Podcast #779 – READALONG: The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

Jesse, Evan Lampe, Cora Buhlert, and Terence Blake talk about The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

Talked about on today’s show:
Terence without a story, no story here, short novel from Hard Case Crime, pretty slight, the narrator, this fake Maine accent, a little hard to understand things here and there, you get used to it, the name of the owner of the restaurant, some of the beginning, Jack Ruby vs. Jack Moody, JFK is in here, a theme, a throughline between the stealing of the money and the keeping of the article, it’s our story, it’s not for the people from away, including the US government, everybody does it, not nationalistic, localistic, a political point, what these islanders are like, such places, lonely and weird, late 1990s, drive up from Boston to the Canadian border, Acadia national park, a rental car, an ice cream parlour, a cinema, and a gas station, we don’t like strangers here, local teenagers were hanging out, staring at us, talking German, the two strange women, priceless looks, an old A-Team episode, when you read Stephen King, exaggerates this aspect of it, condensed, a love letter to Maine, Pet Semetary, Derry, know the town’s secrets, talking to each other and playing cards, in the Lovecraftian sense, you gotta remember it, the illustrated version came out in 2019, the disc break, when it first came out, a really big deal, used to sell Hard Case Crime, no. 13, the biggest living author up to that point, when Stephen King hit, drew attention, Cora retweeted an article, a paid advertisement, affiliate links, Holly, whatever that means, in terms of sales, Charles Ardai, Joyland, Crichton ones, crossover appeal, Later, a thematic sequel to The Body, on a publicity tour, host of a TV show, NPR, hardboiled, noir, crime encrusted filthy books, Ardai bent the rules, an introduction to the 2019 publication, The Birth And Rebirth Of The Colorado Kid by Charles Ardai, revive pulp fiction, gorgeous dames in torn negligee, grab you by the throat, someone lay bleeding in the gutter, about the same as a movie ticket, bookstore, drugstore, a quixotic plan, half a century earlier, there was drinking involved, David Dodge, Day Keene, Wade Miller, maybe there’s a well known writer out there, write us a blurb, gone on record, John D. MacDonald, Lawrence Block, Richard Stark, the great Donald E. Westlake, I understand completely, I tried to sound cool, it would contain a mystery, a boxing story, a western, it presents a hard case, the mystery of the unanswerable, the classical mystery tradition, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Flitcraft, vanished like a fist when you open your hand, if that’s not a noir story…, a pretty weirdest book, an experiment, a thought experiment, a philosophical parable, metafiction, trynna make some points, teased, this is a fantasy book, continue their legacy, if she doesn’t go on to the New York Times, I’d like this to be true, small towns have newspapers, county paper, the Tri-Cities, the last issue of the last newspaper went online, its owned by a corporation, required by law ads, not doing news anymore, before the internet killed off these smaller newspapers, The Province (newspaper), The Vancouver Sun, a corporation asking for donations, this is a fantasy world, he has a fantasy setup about how things will work, there’s no Walmart here, wherever Mooselick is now, King Soopers, things have changed, corporate control, corporate extraction, the earlier setting in the 80s, he’s almost a regional writer, he’s been to California, what percentage are outside of Maine?, he’s not a city guy either, Deer Isle, Maine, other island stories, Dolores Claibourne, a zombie apocalypse, strangers experience, the island on the show called Wings [Nantucket], you’re gonna make it Stephie, passing the torch, making a story out of nothing, the story is there’s no story here, to make it a story, story construction, a central mystery, one of the two interchangeable, more than a single gunner, that’s Stephen King for you, can’t even separate them from each other or King, the girl is pretty well done, a fantasy, she’s from Away, write about hayrides, we’re gonna last years, a little fastforward, the really old one, skip to 2023, she sold the paper to a corporation has kids and lives in Ohio, is Jesse being too cynical here?, school is in, not supposed to be solvable by the reader, Jean Paul Sartre’s Nausea, waves don’t form a story, a thing without a story, an event without a story, a philosophical education, resistant to paradigms you bring to bear, even if you fail all the time, all the stories published in the newspaper are lies, a beginning a middle and an end, the meta-level, an inversion of values, the insular mentality, closed minds, they don’t like strangers, big city people, Heidegger used to say, even if he was a Nazi, in closer contact with Being, the real people in touch with what life is, inculcating existential philosophy, independently constructed a theory of story, the school of problems, is this deliberate?, what Evan said, what makes a book memorable, this story about story, mysterious lights, a story about how stories are told, real life events are turned into a story (or not), the other cases, weird lights, UFOs, church picnic poisoning, dead boat, a likely story, some kind of weird crime that was never solved, an unsolved murder, 22 years, Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975), the art in the book, the last image of the story, Stephie looking out of the view, there needs to be a sexy lady, a newspaper folded over the rail, Vinceteague, Chincoteague, wild horses, the story goes, a Spanish shipwreck, annual capture of the herd, sold to rich people, Cora’s experience, intruding on their local haunts, a defensive look, you’re a tourist, curiosity, you’ve just walked into their living room, boxes full of board games, a community center, we can’t blame them for the weird feelings, take your money and monetize, a generous tip, need two old guys who know the score, like they see it go round like it’s in a dryer, he’s gonna give em a book, bringing a book to our lowly new publication, Lawrence Block is a really great writer, nobody cares, everybody knows the name, everybody can act like him, that’s the fantasy, supporting local causes all over Maine, patriotism on a local level, Walter Gibson, he didn’t move away, he’s made it a virtue too, this is how one ought to be, 31,000 people, a Lovecraft idea, you can write from anywhere, I don’t fit in New York, August Derleth, those regional things your writing about Wisconsin, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Cross Plains, [City Of The Singing Flame], set on a hike, it’s for you, you’re local now, that’s the story, why didn’t they give him a story, they just take his money, right Evan?, I guess, it’s a response to the idea that stories must progress to a point, to critics, why is that there?, why is IT 1,000 pages long, meditating on that, letting the story breathe and be what it is, that’s the change, bring everyone to the parlour, why they kept it secret, Nero Wolfe isn’t going to show up, Jesse’s week theory: it was suicide, why would he do it in Maine?, the geographical solution, people running away, the physical limit of the border of the country, maybe his wallet was stolen, just like the food out of his hand, insure you choke to death and have a brain hemorrhage, old guy detectives, the money gets to the right hands, Stephen King likes moms, trying to help moms out, a less important gender for child raising, like an old gay couple, help out as best they can, published in all the papers in Colorado, desperate old men all over the United States, Hancock Lumber, a pay paper?, free weekly, no longer, two on Sunday, newspapers called out, New York Times, Boston Globe, Bangor Daily News, if done in realtime, restaurant to the seaside newspaper department, giant printing machine, go get a muffin, a pee, some coke, pee break, retro flashback to the future, he died six months later, obituary for the really old guy, 1915-2005?, she’s still there, smelling the seaweed and the fish, front page obituary, small town newspapers, editorial content, usually on the front page, local journalists running around, small arts events, festivals, local sport, shooting competition, report about Hugo winners, desperate for content, dine out on your story, a young woman, a man in his forties, the Russian coin, the red herring, a Russian sleeper agent, The Americans, told to come to Maine, a commercial flight, a very good theory, why do you carry evidence you’re a Russian around?, 10 ruble coins, a plot point or not, a sleeper agent from an alternate earth, he’s from another dimension, supernatural elements, he can’t help it, why not?, the lights, the author said it was extraterrestrials, Rendezvous With Rama sequels, Mary Celeste, the Doctor Who version: The Horror At Fang Rock, aliens landed in the ocean, Telefon (1977), the Soviet Union objected to the movie, the premise is that there’s been a purge going on in Soviet Russia, hardliners, trying to start WWIII, a detente, a Robert Frost poem, fugue state, suicide mission, Charles Bronson is a KGB agent with a perfect memory, when they die, this guy died in 1922, these are fake people, the birth certificate of a dead kid, the suicide theory, how to fit all the pieces together, the gun in the hand pointing at the head, assassinated, a calling card, maybe he found it on the beach, perfectly constructed, because it’s a fiction story, some newspaper stories are completely fiction anyway, without having the tweet thread, a bad idea of what actually happened, Sherlock Holmes, getting the quotes wrong, a well constructed meta-story, characterization is immaculate, backstories of various people, the widow eating her meal and looking great, this island and its people, a mystery that can’t be solved, no obvious solution, the church picnic, The Shining, Stephen King’s explanation, telepathic powers, ghosts come to life, the story is terrific, his way of solving, psychic powers, so good at telling the story, a problem of madness, a psychic command to go to Maine, much more elaborate, a central character who ends up dead, goes to quite a length to justify a death to alleviate a problem, drinking himself, fucking around with his boss, hurting his kid, trying to do right, go live with the magical blackman in Florida, Murder She Wrote, Jessica Fletcher, Cabot Cove at Universal Studios, giving school, the coziness of the town, the judge, another graduate student, a CSI guy, local time colour, CSI being a good show, grounding it in the period of time, peak of its popularity, so many spinoffs, it’s realistic, super unrealistic, weird tiny clue, the reality is Mark Furman plants the glove at OJ’s house, the theory of the case, fuck it he’s guilty, told not to look in the bag, the underlying theme: it’s okay to cheat, that’s just a Stephen King move, desperately wants to be Stephen King, a descent attempt, one aspect, kids, boyscouts, body horror, The Troop, Dreamcatcher, a central ideology, lensing all his writing through, this is what I believe, the NPR series: This I Believe, Heinlein’s, we all cheat a little bit, it’s good to like our locals, the definitive Terence thing, when you’re an old many running a newspaper in Nice, fuck off and sell your paper, a smaller town, an island off the coast of Spain, Glory Road, nude island off the coast of France, nude island, the whole island is news, Île du Levant, naturist resort, gonna have to get into nudism, inside on an offset typewriter, wear big hats, prove that you’re not wearing a wire, East German nudism, lingering nudism, Wreck Beach, sunbathing garden, close to exhausting this very slim book, 3.5 hours, padded out reprint, 2005 afterword not in the audiobook, a real case of a woman in Maine who died and was never identified, unsolved and unsolvable, the phenomenon, people hate mysteries, the reason the police are there to solve crime, a collective will, find somebody to blame, who the victim is, teenage drug dealers, not a story, cold cases, years after, calls after all these years, crimes no one really cares about, some kind of theory, one of the big fictions, it’s the drug cartel, they’re so horrible, court cases, drug dealers are so bloody stupid, they’re amateurs, that’s not their business, unsolved without a story, two boys [Sebastian Burns and Atif Rafay], murder, awaiting extradition, France off the coast, upper peninsula of Michigan, the Point Roberts anomaly, [turns out Jesse is conflating two cases from the same period, the Sebastian Burns Atif Rafay case and Frederick Gilliland (who was tricked into Point Roberts), Jack The Ripper, still trying to solve, supernatural solutions, time travel, space alien from Star Trek, 150 year old, the Zodiac Killer, annoying people, the police were not fully corrupted, lazy bastards, pressuring people into confessing, Homicide: Life On The Streets, a bunch of people to kidnap the governor of Michigan, money, retarded, lonely, not reporting on stuff, unsolved cases in Germany, equivalent of a state governor, Switzerland, a famous hotel where other people have died, a famous press photograph, late 1980s, dressed in the bathtub, someone important, Mossad, the Iranians, a shitty terrible person, the official verdict was suicide, Seth Rich murder, no story here, perpetrator unknown, no one would do that, Salvador Dali would have killed himself like that, constantly screaming, this is of course locked, July 10, 2016, 4:20 am, a victim of attempted robbery, with lots of citations, leaked DNC emails in 2016, hacking the email accounts, quotation marks around that, Hillary Clinton had broken the rules, Donna Brazile, thumb drive, how fast can u download?, no good evidence, it’s always Russia, Mossad is pretty fucking active, if you talk about Seth Rich on youtube, we’re nit going to have this be a story, shot in the back, some political reason, die on a beach, the thing that’s being addressed here, making a connection between or fear of random seeming deaths and how being unsettled by death is, The Body, the point of that story, hit by a train, dead crow on the sidewalk, who did this?!, it only matters when it’s people, maybe it died of old age, I don’t need a story to make me feel better about it, hit by a car, our response to the fear of death, what he’s going for, the the dead kid on the beach is Stephen King, he’s 42, hit by a van, 1999, mentioned at the end of the audiobook, a little biography, making a story out of the story, now I feel satisfied, satisfied there was no explanation, not knowing the others, always broken up, bathroom or muffin, we can’t experience it as a framed story, jump back in time, circle back to the table, a TV show, Haven, an FBI agent, relationships, she has a relationship in this book, somewhere in Ohio, leaning up against a garbage can, a little essay by Brian Aldiss, what sticks in your memory from science fiction stories, inspire you later, the example of a mad robot on the Moon firing into the void, not a powerful enough image, he’s a blank slate, emotion, empathy, whatever, before they knew the story from the widow, in 20 years, a vague impression, sounds familiar, short, bought the book at an airport, these old guys, a young woman, sitting on the beach looking out at sea, the new cover has that, looking at the corpse, a girl with the tape recorder, Glen Orbik, nothing to do with the book, really, Holly, simply written, for the Hollywood Reporter, a familiar King protagonist, September 9, 2023, Stephen Colbert, latest book, quickly shot to number one, 2014’s Mr. Mercedes, If It Bleeds, Finders Keepers, $30, just $19 right now, on audiobook, narrated by King, The Gunslinger, online for free!, lit window, silhouetted windows, by today’s standards, an improvement over that, in the 1990s, 80s are great, Scribener’s reissuing, The Institute, Rolling Stone, I like her so much, go on with, what she was up to, supposed to be a walk on character, stole my heart, the supernatural realm, dealing with covid, covid-denier mom, eventually succumbing to the disease, wear a mask, get your vaccination that doesn’t work, mom, a time capsule, devour, emdash, all the familiar trappings, covid books, I’m not going to read that, unimaginably deprived, the book’s description, summon all her formidable, professors, the shopping section, to bookmark it, crime fiction roundup, I’m reading a Stephen King now, of course he’s up to this, very well written, King likes Gibney, 15 hours, Evan is looking forward to it, Fairy Tale was illustrated throughout, Gabriel Ba, yeah, yelling at Evan, how can you stand this shitlib?!, build up a whole narrative, fully embrace how awesome, as a thinker, his essays, his fiction writing, not extraordinary, Lester Del Rey hits the buttons, build a robot lady in their basement, what happens if humans uplift dogs and monkeys, character constructor, limited ideas, stepping on his dick, the lone gunman theory, he’s a good boy, he has to, the sex scenes for Cora, Vaush is gonna misinterpret, free publicity by denouncing it, why does Cora read The Guardian so much?, triggered, the news is so fuckin shitty, translate them, nothing Jesse needs to know about, a few episodes, didn’t need to think about it at all, license Stephen King something, like Foundation, getting sued by King, how many ongoing TV series, Castle Rock, the good one, not the quality, the sheer number, Netflix tv shows and Netflix movies never have sex scenes, foreign language, an American company, Jessica Jones had sex scenes, boobs?, Oppenheimer, HBO, Cinemax, in the 1990s, slightly less than pornography, sex in them just to have sex in it, titillation while watching a murder mystery, random sex scenes rammed in, Outlander, Foundation sex scene, dirty limericks, well shot, unAsimovian, how would Asimov take it?, Janet Asimov, Terminus is destroyed, ruined it for her, a symbol of the whole series, we’re destroying Asimov, taking Asimov back from Asimov, the format, interesting idea, you don’t have to watch it, Cora has made herself into a fan writer of this sort of shit, Terence is a glutton, Terence hates himself, Wheel Of Time is better, lowest common denominator, bad crime dramas, some SFF stuff, Star Trek, The X-Files, 30th anniversary, nothing to watch, interestingly quaint, corrupt but not in the way it really is, aliens, skeptical of the government, the official policy is aliens exist now, when are you gonna release the videos, space force, Time For My Stories (Chapo Trap House), peak of the American Empire, anxiety of decline, The Sopranos, plagued, watch old movies, watch Mission: Impossible original TV series, CIA competence niceness, overthrow their elections, not actual agents, very good competent, actor, strongman, electronics experts, model, patriotism, out to help people, works, well made, the music, the editing, cliffhanger stuff, they don’t get what Mission Impossible is, Miracle Mile (1988), Trombone nerd, WWIII, Los Angeles, Tangerine Dream cinematic universe, westerns, Jesse gives Terence too much homework, The Last Run (1971), car chase, working class detective, weird today, still really good, dutch without subtitles, Tangerine Dream, striking, online somewhere, William Friedkin died, in with the news, The Exorcist (1973), Sorcerer (1977), The Wages Of Fear (1953), bluesky invite, Sopranos memes, no use for it yet, good meme, 1977, releasing his movie against Star Wars, we’re gonna wipe the floor with that shit, I was still right, The Mandalorian, trapped in South America, stuck in the jungle with no money, the dynamite has gone by, very very slowly, fuckin Amazing, almost wordless, the name of the truck, don’t the French love Friedkin?, a French film star, a huge hit in Cannes?, be your boyfriend from highschool, jungle vs. desert, very international, Steve McQueen, Roy Scheider Ally McGraw, Dominican Republic, popular holiday destination, not very American at all, Austrian actor, really really good, science fiction, fantasy, not a wink of fantasy, we’re done, put the book in the mail, Ill Met In Lankhmar, Evan is going to send the audio, in the original French, Arabic through Greek, own private language, what we all do, whatever language we are tweeting about, good discussion.

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED by Glen Orbik

The Colorado Kid by Stephen King

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED edition

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED

The Colorado Kid - ILLUSTRATED

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The SFFaudio Podcast #777 – READALONG: Zero Cool by Michael Crichton

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #777 – Jesse, Terence Blake, and Cora Buhlert talk about Zero Cool by Michael Crichton

Talked about on today’s show:
1969, very impressed until the end, there’s a DVD, he re-wrote the book slightly, opening and closing chapter, the etext, old man Grandpa Ross, nephew, grandson, Todd, a very non-60s name, was it true you once visited Spain?, Grandpa nobody will believe this story, DVD?, it was a true story!, of course it was, you could get videotape in the 60s, these two sections are not in the original book, historical document, became famous, Janet Evanovich, a SpongeBob t-shirt, considered dated, it doesn’t work, complained Stephen King under the Bachman name, if I fix it up, replaces contemporary references, puts the Smurfs, flashbacks to the 50s, all the tech is of the period 1970 or earlier, Stephen King’s shitlib politics of today, 10 references to the Republicans are bad, in the middle of this book, words left out to make it shorter, some words were put in to make it explanatory, no other pattern, stylistic, the additions at the beginning and the end damage the center, he’ll soon know about my falcon, it’s not first person, you can’t have that frame make a lot of sense, kind of a James Bond story, two James Bond villains, Herve Villichez to playh the count, henchpeople, character actor, no voicebox, machine gun when he answers the door, a strange omission, changes hair colour, editing mistake, Karin is blonde, Angela has dark haired, blonde on the original cover, Eric John Stark, on the Hard Case Crime cover Angela’s the beach lady, raven haired, the nurse, Karin, European Karen, what was Angela’s actual profession, henchwoman, she’s not working for the count anymore, a few moments where the rug is pulled out, a radiologist standing on a rug, rugs all the way down, she pulls out a gun, where’s the jewel, if I give it to you what would we do, we’d go to Capri, I don’t trust her, pretty good, not great, on the latest cover (from Blackstone), didn’t notice his girlfriend had been replaced, stubble, she’s a transwoman, she hasn’t shaved for a while, very progressive, movie logic, not that different today, in colour, people have cellphones on the beach, Costa Brava, young attractive women, families, he didn’t have eyes for them, show off their bodies and get seen, another holiday he went on, he sexed it up, what percentage of the book do we not know why anything is happening?, 60%?, our Hari Seldon figure, Sherlock Holmes’ smarter brother, Mycroft Holmes, some of that was fake, round numbers, you’re both watching the show, the count, James Bond villains interests, perfumes, falconry?, and you’re a dwarf, cognitive estrangement, he’s not as smart as you thought he was, very pastiche, the whole doctor thing, radiologist, gynecologist would have been funnier, an autopsy, like a Hitchcock plot, more Donald Westlake, disappointed, not the right relationships to his experiences, facts he likes to throw down, shortest lifetimes of all doctors, exposure to radiation, that changes it, back at the hospital, extext?, republished with a new intro and new extro, breaking it down, really missing some core goodness, The Last Run (1971), a big jewel that Montezuma had, lost and found, in the Bermuda Triangle, that’s what you say grandpa, that’s another story, solve it, what does the grandpa story do?, successful radiologist, daughter or son had a son, didn’t marry Angela, what did this adventure prove?, nothing, the center story is an anecdote, makes the book less, looking for an idea, radiologists see things in black and white, the conversation wit the blonde, accepts him as a lover, the game has no rules, how detective stories or thrillers or whatever ultimately we mean have no foundation, it doesn’t work on the back end, a kid’s eye version of reality, thinking grandpa is cool, don’t tell any of my friends, grandpa tells sex stories, contradictory personality, pick up hot girls, he’s 11?, he might say that ironically, he aged backwards, a screwup, fine with it, doesn’t react in the right way, he had children, an interesting video, Caleb Maupin, American communist christian, why the liberals turned against Michael Crichton, State Of Fear, a rich kid, he went to Harvard, we knew these things, high graded kids, really smart, not that great academically, clever, interested, not the ultra rich, traveling to Europe, not glamorous, becoming democratized, part of the jet-set, travel to Egypt and Spain, Amsterdam, Nice, Cannes, he’s not there on a Eurail pass, life experience, reading paperbacks and being a doctor, rich assholes, those are his people, drinking beer on the beach, not doing his medical stuff, good at doing the cramming, Hunter Biden is a lawyer, you don’t have to be a good lawyer, pass the bar, test intensive, ways of cheating, medical school, wanting the title, not how he defines himself, a lot of people will do that, I’m a filmmaker, I’m a writer, a confection, supposed to be sweet, made up of a bunch of things, no major nutritional substance, a Philip K. Dick book written by Michael Crichton, a massive list of these?, set in the Spanish hotel, pretty good, a computer path analysis, not very big, Odds On, an island hotel, Scratch One, Easy God, Egypt, Grave Descend, Drug Of Choice, Binary, set a very high bar, ranking these, the most substantial, the best fun book, well written too, somewhere in the middle, too long, Harold Robbins, doctor stuff, doesn’t stay and dwell, drug aspect, perfume acting, hawks use their sniffers?, maybe Jesse is wrong, he personally has discovered, what does it add to the book, murderhawks, having a gun, the count, traveling is Spain, Grenada, that’s going in the book, ok, that’s cool, one or two European locations, it’s all fake, a commentary on vacations, really well structured, no major commentary on reality, there’s something to it, Grave Descend, ranking, the order in which we read, on a high high, three good ones in a row, starts off really well, stuck with the smuggling and the snakes, Jesse why don’t you write a novel, inauthentic hurts, Jesse can you write this for me, originally it wasn’t his name on the book, just money, that guy is a different guy than the John Lange that wrote it in the 60s, embarrassing, the central plot of this book, not something you’re supposed to think about, a beach reader, an airport novel, a little deeper, wanting to do something and not having anything to do, something to do, tomb raid, the puzzle of that, if it were told from another POV, from the femme fatale’s POV, why is this stupid radiologist in this book at all, erectile dysfunction, a republican presidential candidate, mirrors of each other, two forces coming together, a science fiction novel painted as something else, a show like Magnum, P.I., anything cool, it’s mentioned in there, he has zero cool, cool title, surprised you’re taller, not the exact age, I’m a doctor, I’m a writer, but you’re six foot four, basketball players are tall, prestigious college, librarians have classes, football players are big, in reality it’s a bell curve or something like that, North Americans are smaller than north Europeans, Dutch, notable, clothes, made for completely different, 6 foot 9, join my football team, that’s a basketball player, goal keepers, guards, take up more space, something that probably happened, dropped his sunglasses, because he’s rich, he’s a doctor, he’s tall, above the norm, what women want, 7 foot 9 is preferred, we’ve got a dwarf, uncomfortable, he’s not a count, a descendant of Montezuma, a similar story, Sharpe series, Bernard Cornwell, your peninsular war porn, Sharpe’s Gold, treasure in Spain, the TV adaptation was written by Nigel Kneale, surprised, the cross cultural exchange, the conquest of Mexico, writing it for a film parody or satire, finding this corpse, why is he being obtuse about it?, Washington Irving wrote about the Alhambra, what was he doing in pain?, Edgar Allan Poe went to Scotland, trips to Europe, far fetched and weird, worshipping in the right way, the moors, going underground, witchcraft in England, the protestant reformation, semi-plausible, a lot of implausible stuff, the professor could have had his own book, Hari Seldon, a proto-Hari Elsdon, his book is The Dynamics Of An Asteroid, a supergenius and a dwarf perfume collection, what happens to Tex?, the humour aspect, wacky development, I will put you in my dungeon, am I supposed to buy this as defiance, a parody of those things, Peter Ross, he’s nobody, we’re supposed to be him, he’s chasing the girl, keeps getting pulled off track, German, Sindey Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, two other Peter Lorre roles, being the bad guy, the sympathetic villain, at least 25 characters, random henchpeople, the guy with the voicebox, one and dones, some random guy with women’s clothes on, why is this a good idea, wacky, the pulling the rug out at every opportunity, Karin with a wig, when we get the first time someone gets sprayed with cologne, overhearing his captors, very interesting about the splatter on the ceiling, the height of the ceiling, another character, the cop has him in jail for murder, his girlfriend, boy is he mad at her for five minutes, the author is telling us we know that the character is not privy to, trying to work with Michael Crichton, a mystery to be solved or something else, the prison scene, the embassy walk on character, this may have happened to him, still garroting people, a joke about Franco, an East German guy, a false passport, until 1975, during the Franco era, the last Spain book, The Clash, during the Spanish Civil War, police on the streets, go on holiday in a pretty nasty dictatorship, the background, Portugal was also a dictatorship, a revolution, members of the E.U., school atlas, a developing country, it’s not in the first world, just slurs, the Third World doesn’t mean developing country, at one point he starts describing an assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle, The Day Of The Jackal, unknown motivation, a hardboiled noir story about a deeply philosophical idea, he gets sex, non-Spanish people for holiday and sex, eat some food, drinking the beer, going to the pool in the hotel, socialized, reading books, the bastardization, updating and framing, some of them are really good, we did the best ones first, had we started with The Venom Business, in print with Blackstone, saying it’s like a Philip K. Dick novel is a high compliment, more boobs, fairly rapidly forget Zero Cool, retain an impression, we had a good talk out of it, those three are a lot more memorable, reminded of a lot of scenes, rich guys obsessed with something, easy girls, sand, which one was Zero Cool, easy come easy go, the original covers, the top row vs. the bottom row, by the 1970s, is this the order of publication, the target audience, why anybody would read those, people are hard to understand, James Michener, if you try to talk to people about them, The Mists Of Avalon, the reason Terence read this book, Hard Case Crime cool covers, reading books for weird reasons, The Name Of The Rose, this book is full of references, so big, conspiracy in the Vatican books, The Da Vinci Code, unstoppable steamroller, run for high ground with your old Heinlein paperbacks, a pretty good fantasy book, why would anyone read Fifty Shades Of Grey, taps into class?, some era of people, even if you aren’t reading it, that chatter, a Scandinavia book, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Swedish politics, Men Who Hate Women, an airport paperback for very short flights, thin paperbacks, five-six hours, people read old books in old books, television at home, I Love Lucy or Star Trek, go out to a movie or read a book, as a form of casual entertainment, audiobooks are replacing that, the paperback genre, a drugstore spinner rack, the new format size, mass market size, fit in a jacket pocket, back pocket of your jeans, super-portable, reading can become a fashion accessory, on a bus holding a paperbook today, justify the price, is larger better for the printer?, more glue, more ink, a bigger format so it feels more substantial, cellphones started getting bigger, folding phones, if you’re going to pay $2000 for a phone, people are kinda simple that way, controlled by the price, it can radically effect the book, perhaps the reason to add those opening and closing chapters, older books, bigger fonts, small and physically thin, break your wrists trying to read a book, too many characters, too much running around, a lot of scenes in Scratch One like the scenes in Zero Cool, early on in the book, the French feeling of deja vu, a sample on Audible, the girl on the beach, the restaurant, the relationship with the girl, I love you, that femme fatale role, never bought into it at all, half a villain, happened at the end, epiphany at the end, can’t we punch this up a bit, I don’t really buy me, sarcastic, more along for the ride for a lot of it, not contributing much, not the long arm that got him out of prison, she was in the same room, did you kill that guy?, she did get him out, they’re the same guy, switching sides, not his best book, watch The Last Run (1971), read Binary, Drug Of Choice, Easy Go, maybe Grave Descend, whip up something for dinner, Cora’s dad, really annoying, needs to go to the gas station, you tell him how things are, move on to other Crichtons if necessary, The Andromeda Strain is a solid book, Eaters Of The Dead, Antonio Banderas as an Arab, The Thirteenth Warrior, AD 922, 1976, Norsemen, Rus, a retelling of Beowulf, a real guy, the Marco Polo of the Arabs, lies on the copyright page, fake notes about references to actual incidences, a meta-text, The Great Train Robbery, Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland, super-funny, he put all his good stuff in one book, cold and clinical, as a piece of writing, really cool science fiction, coming out of a different writing system, make sure it’s a good one sometime, The Terminal Man, 2nd novel under his own name, serialized in Playboy, epilepsy, a brain pacemaker, let’s do it, a plutonium power pack, takes place over four days, pre-cyberpunk, Elon Musk’s computer brain interface, read by Luke Daniels, right after Lowdown Road, November 12, gluttons for Crichton punishment, series about a girl, goes into adulthood, early 20th century, in the middle of WWII, why is she flirting with young men?, childrens books in the 1930s, heart racing trip across 70s America, CB radios are hot, 70s truckers movies, learning all the lingo, phrases that get turned into normal English, fender bender, CB radio jive, sex stuff, information, list of CB slang, Smokey And The Bandit, bear in the air, full grown bear, local yokel, a subculture of people who don’t have a fixed community that they live in, truckers live all over Canada and the United States, their community is their people they communicate, like BBS, Convoy (1978), a ballad, civil disobedience, authoritarian war measure act, you live in the capital, trying to get a meeting with the prime minister, protests are supposed to be inconvenient, gluing themselves to the road, idiots, a good cause, the method isn’t so great, the names of cities, Beantown, The Big Apple, why is it called that?, Cowtown (is Calgary), Disneytown, Hotlanta, California is Idiot Island, not all cited, Motorcity, Emerald City, Dallas, Texas, Rhymes With Fun, (Vagina) Regina Saskatchewan, super-ephemeral, preserved in film, a way of being connected, there’s an app for that, a way of being in touch with that community, same money different stamps, too slow, convinced, culture, a fun book, nobody knows really, Hayy Ibn Yadhan by Ibn Tufail, a book from 1185-ish, most translated text from Arabic, boy raised by a deer, the gazelle boy, supposedly a true story, the wolfchildren, has to keep up with his mom, a permanent baby, animal-raised children, wolf-children, never snake children, they don’t have the milk, dodo-child, extincted family, the self-taught philosopher, going after Avicenna, in the bosom of an antelope, Frankenstein, 2023 politics, Genghis Khan was really cool, it’s been a while, a conversation with Deleuze, nomads, Genghis Khan, trying to cancel Nietzsche, Jordan Peterson, so many people are triggered by him, read a Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, semi-ignorant, he’s not a politician, gives speeches, clean up your room, get married, you have to clean up your room if you want to get married, a simple idea, a lot of people need, good advice, very good on the Bible, Maps of Meaning, a rationalist, good analysis, thinking mythical, symbolically, more coherent than Slavoj Žižek, systematic ones, Sex And The Failed Absolute, that new movement of leftists, for Freud and Lacan, Less Than Nothing, more conceptual meat, youtube is not great for good feedback, participating in their engagement systems, corrupted by spam and failed updates, emails, moderation, because blogging was destroyed, rss is defeated, we defeated them, now were stuck, the other things, we’ll see, you should write a novel, 13 year old blog, why would I write a novel?, a terrible idea, buying a printing press, what if I typset it wrong, that’d be a lot better, Cirsova guy, magazines and books published, no feedback, lying, Jesse doesn’t want headaches, 200 people listen in the first week and a1000 over the next ten years, evolving all the time, people can’t believe their own thoughts, they want an official stamp of approval, the phyiscial copy of the book, Appendix N by Jeffro Johnson, Jesse loves blogposts, a real shame they’ve been de-platformed, what is Cory Doctorow doing, BoingBoing.net was a thing, probably still going, on Twitter, pluralist something, too much, his interests are not the same as mine, a really good science fiction idea guy, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, Robert J. Sawyer, interactions, his ethics are spot on, made a wrong turn, where’s my RSS, there’s no way to get them, there’s no ecosystem, let’s get that blogger who we really like reading, finding people who blog and bring them on, deplatform non-twitter blogging, and why did they do that, all consuming, this is where all those blogs went, jokes all day, threads, dream at the beginning of blogging, guest posting, dialoguing, narrow and eat everything, resilient against what google, trying to kill the internet, we can talk about our blogposts on our podcasts or youtubes, you in the past, no longer me now, vivid dreams, physical things, listening to a Doctor Who episode, politics, writing that down immediately, really interesting this guy is brilliant, different medium, short stories are also weird and hard, putting on a play, people want dialogue, arbitrary rules, Terence reads Jesse’s dreams, a cliche from the past, plans for the future, tell me when you want to be a doctor in the future and ride a horse, “last night I dreamt”, boring people have boring dreams, stress dreams, obscure kinds of dreams, a warehouse full of product, I need this capital, assorted chocolates, Sigourney Weaver, dark alien chocolate, mam, something about xenomorphing, esprit d’escalier moment, Bob Hope had come to visit and someone had ordered 36 cases of red wine, the sociology of dreams, social class, different jobs, not the last word on dreams, last night I dreamed, just a fantasy, just a joke not a dream, Baldur’s Gate, people are doing it for themselves, she had a white dove in her hand, a long black sedan, the inventor of non-philosophy, François Laruelle, this is close to a non-philosophy dream, a door to the beach, translucent toaster, little feet and hands, it’s organelles glowing yellowy, Mr. Punch, a living alarm clock, back to back, a supplement to this analysis of The Road Warrior, pithy, concise, observing everyday life, cash reserves, a reverse Edith Keeler style, vintage 1960s money, the purpose for my time-travelling, it was garbage day, broken bicycle pumps, dozens of photo albums, shiny new dimes, I audibly swore, a man stepped out of an alcove nearby, bud, the artifacts, we are collecting across the whole stratum, there was a lot more work ahead, that guy stepping out is me, these are like experiences you become amnesiac to, they can’t leave physical scars, you’re ignorant of them, phases, seven years of writing dreams down all the time, 2000 dreams, the old reflexes, read it again and put a title on it, it’s good, it gains in meaning, not wanting to write it down, this is really good, I need to remember this, the only way to preserve, loses the detail, the extemporaneous immediacy, it didn’t come in text, not copying and pasting, the sleepy voice is not present in the experience, the transposition is good for the dream, writing it down the first time is the definitive form, typos, get it all down, always start with the same word, dreamt, he’s talented, an art contest in Israel, takes job, 120 characters, transport all this stuff to another blue sky, it won’t be public if it’s not there, deleting tweets, major typo, spelling rules in French, straight away, part of the archive, reconstruct your life in 212 years from now, let’s bring Terence back online, somebody like Bobby Derie, sure he was racist about spaghetti, but he also says good things about ravioli, full of soybean oil, spaghetti’s feminine, you choose the stars, macaroni, they all taste the same, with our brains, which one should I choose, the cheapest one, call up Mr. Job, a good show and good talk, curse Jesse a little, see if you like it, mutilated versions, ThePirateBay, the 1971 film with 4 seeders, qbittorent, reddit is a really horrible place, so censored, super-censored, people talking about the letter mu, qbittorents the new mutorrent, what a great website, more bitcoin to give them, mined bitcoin, windshield repair, heat the apartment from mining, it might be a classic, as philosophically deep, philosophically famous, she’s got a Hugo as well, a lot of location based, southern France’s roads, a boy movie, there’s a girl in it, a pretty substantial role, plays some games.

John Lange books

SIGNET - Zero Cool by Michael Crichton

Hard Case Crime - Zero Cool by Michael Crichton

Hard Case Crime - Zero Cool FEAT. Grave Descend

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The SFFaudio Podcast #772 – READALONG: A Meeting With Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke

The SFFaudio PodcastJesse, Scott Danielson, and Terence Blake talk about A Meeting With Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke

Talked about on today’s show:
under heavy pressure, Playboy, December 1971, the audiobook, superfamous, The Star and Nine Billion Names Of God, A Fall Of Moondust, Dolphin Island, a middle school library, an introduction to hard science fiction, all about characters in relationships, a mystery involved, a disaster movie, what he’s really good at, the twist at the end, sprinkled the hints, the paintings in Playboy, a hot air balloon, multiple gases, a giant medusa, aka a jellyfish, Jupiter, on Earth, the story this is most similar to by Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes Professor Challenger guy, The Horror Of The Heights, pilots go up and disappear, crushed, giant jellyfish in the upper atmosphere story, Queen Elizabeth IV, an abrupt end, the sequel inside of it, awesome opening scene, imagery and everything, the shocking end of that section, really good, among the best Scott has ever read of Clarke’s, the structure hurts it, the beautiful writing, a bit of symbolism, an idea punch that hits you out of science fiction and into philosophy, he’s doing propaganda, he don’t cheat at all, is there an Arthur C. Clarke story where the knowledge of the solar system at the time of writing is ignored to tell an idea, he won’t write a story unless it’s plausible, petty concerns of being a human, deep time and cosmic depths, what does that make you, the Olaf Stapledon thing, characters, the guy in here, important to tell the story, solid, now he’s very solid, concentric circles of sense of wonder, a little bit in the future, almost cinematic action, some of the phrases are ambiguous, going on another mission, lightning reflexes, reconstructed him, after they reconstructed me, we’re just not fast enough, tai chi teacher, not explicit, his pilot’s reflexes, he doesn’t say this is the murderer, when they put me together again, the surgeons made some improvements, this is one of them, set more than 100 years in the future, treaty on first contact, the line that blew me away, the Mao Tse Tung in the American museum, what?, Americans got over their hatred of red China and think Mao is a hero as the rightly should?, the San Diego naval museum, war trophy, do you want to make friends with the Russians?, name an aircraft carrier after Stalin, or Ho Chi Mihn, named after people now, destroyers are named after cities, how do you embrace other countries?, incorporate their heroes, adopting Greek stuff, they’re ours now, we’re the inheritors of the Romans and the Greeks, it shook me to my core, what a good writer he is, it’s a good one, another ship that he named the Kon-Tiki, one man across the biggest sea, the prime directive in this, amongst six or more other phrases, Asimov, encounters with the American Indians and Africa, three laws, how to be in the world, don’t lie, what’s going to make you happy, start with that, it causes problems, fuck you is not a lie, be polite?, what would the basis of the prime directive, the categorical imperative, don’t use others as a means to an end, a negative, let them get used to you, not the Star Trek one, they break it all the time for purposes of plot, there’s something behind it, those are how you should act as a person, just replace the word robot with human, a human must consider other except where injure, my feelings are hurt, fuck your feelings, a person must protect his or her own existence, interesting application, we’re not robots, methods and plans of dealing with other people, taking stuff coming out of philosophy, parallel evolution, Asimov’s fourth law, the zeroth law, technically fourth, The Evitable Conflict, 1950, Chairman Mao, Nixon goes to China, detente, because Sri Lanka (or India) had to play a role, a tornado touched down, doesn’t cheat at all, an airship book, more of a hot air balloon than anything else, hot hydrogen of course, thinking through the scenario, the twist at the end that brings it up, this guy’s immortal?, a ship of Theseus scenario, rolls away at a calm 30 km per hour, 7 feet tall, to give him self-confidence, feeling separate from humanity, the ambassador between the ones made of carbon and the ones made of silicon, the aliens, radio dish heads, are they intelligent, I’m convinced that Medusa knew your blindspot, hunting, the intelligent species must be the predator species, a feint, a lightning bolt, why not, up for grabs, the aimed at manta fell like stone, Jupiter is a lightning bolt god, when we see him at the end, he’s turned to silicon, identified with his metallic aspect, Medusified, plummeting manta, I’ve studied a lot of jellyfish, Juliana and Luke on the Science Fiction Book Review Podcast, octopus books, a Ray Nayler book, spiders, eight-legged non-human creatures, the length of the story that’s required to do the job, an hour and half, somewhere in between, two parts, a view of humanity, superchimps/simps, clothes, slaves, brought out of mothballs, a POV of Earth from someone not interested in it, be a pioneer, no one could go, a super-pioneer, why this book exists, the opposite of the moonbus book, trying to conform, people want shitty romance cheating on your wife disaster relatable, I’m more like this guy, Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, almost none of it is that interesting, his brain level, he’s just not interested in the normal things people are interested in, exploring the ocean, so interesting down there, Jacques Cousteau, collecting notes on hailing frogs, not the normal science fiction writer, maybe Olaf Stapledon, his personal life, not interested in slow pitch, Arthur C. Clarke goes to hell, develop a deep philosophy to deal with it, Howard Falcon, like HAL, Jesse I’m afraid that’s not possible, HAL has conflicting orders, The Sentinel, wow!, full of philosophical things, sense of wonder things, it’s all earned, if this then that, Criminolly, garbaugust, worldbuilding, there’s no distinction between science fiction and fantasy right now, cool ideas about how the world works, tried a few more, testing the theory, wanting to be engaged, turning into Jesse, why we have to be so enjoying about terms, The Kaiju Preservation Society, infodumps about made up facts, could you explore it?, honest, solid, he doesn’t cheat, he’s standing on what he knows, realities that might be interesting explored, he’s not a cheater, when Larry Niven cheats it’s so he can get to another thing, twists something, a third of the episodes, are there any Star Trek episodes that are hard SF, the closest they come is The Galileo Seven, a rip off of The Cold Equations, Spock gambles, there’s a percentage chance there’s a passing alien spaceship, why did I read this story, have their cake and eat it too, angry fights, be hard about these things, you inhuman monster, Spock’s being very logical, fan service episodes, not memorable episodes, social soft science, what should our relationships be, the good stuff, people watched a lot of television and movies with spaceships in it, wouldn’t it be cool if, aliens, almost none, Childhood’s End, even The Star, doing soft science fiction, why I don’t like science fiction and fantasy books, fantasy is a whole other thing, show me where Ted Chiang cheats, an interesting thought, The Merchant And The Alchemist’s Gate, Howard Falcon was unloveable, a novel called The Medusa Chronicles by Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter, a sequel to The Time Machine, Terry Pratchett, the childhood of Howard Falcon, when Star Trek goes back and explains the early life of Kirk and Spock, a fallacy involved, for what purpose, what does it matter?, unless there’s an idea there, why it’s shit, this episode we find out Kirk has a brother, why?, a massacre on some planet, just to raise the stakes, to make the Holocaust personal, to do a technical job, a Chekov’s gun on the wall, Spock having eyelids, to press the reset button, a technical requirement of a show where it’s not serialized, Vulcan nerve pinch, the ears are not what make Mr. Spock Mr. Spock, an emotional being controlling his emotions, him being a spawning salmon Theodore Sturgeon episode (Amok Time), every time they bring up a Vulcan, there’s exceptions, response video, Michael K. Vaughn, he has good taste, a good youtuber, people say why don’t you, here’s a recommendation, seem to be following Luke Burrage’s podcast, a big thing in France, amongst the aficionados, how intelligent it is, boring, The Mountain And The Sea, quite into philosophy, coming at it from a philosophical side, setting the scene before anything noticeably strange happened, how long it is, judging books by their cover and how long they are, bad cover, does it need to be this long, poingant and mind expanding, the UK does better covers than the USA, the UK edition, RayNaler.net, translated into French, thought it was brilliant, June 2023, Cthulhu, Japanese style, maybe this book is necessary, another cover with more tentacles, almost doesn’t ever talk about tentacles, cosmic horror = tentacles, Antarctica, the melting and stuff, a giant frozen 17 tall penguin, Tekeli-li!, philosophies of writing, Robert E. Howard is writing for money, very successful as a pulp writers, 4 times as big, Lovecraft doesn’t write stories that don’t need to be written, this is what is selling right now, even when he’s doing very pulpy stuff, things that are not needed for the story (to make the cover), a born storyteller, writing story, they like stories too, they don’t have the chops, people who won’t write for the commercial market, antagonistic to commercialism, Clarke is a bit of both, very elderly collaborations, sullying his legacy, The Light Of Other Days, very disenchanted with Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov, Silverberg, cash-ins, a reader need not be subject to the whims of the author, because your friend wrote the book, fuck you, go back to basic principles, Clarke has a purity in him at times, Bob Shaw, an expansion, Light of Other Days, the New York Times lie list, Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King, Black House, shouldn’t be trying or able, necessary compared to Asimov/Silverberg, Clarke/Baxter, Olaf Stapledon wrote this, he didn’t write for cash, the unique fluke, King’s psychology, King has a limiter or a governor, he doesn’t use it for evil (or for good), hurts his own work, a fantasist of childhood and American life, a fantasy writer, we just don’t think of him that way, “fantasy realm”, The Goblin Emperor book, secondary world fiction, worldbuilding is mostly bad, silly worldbuilding, 2001: A Space Odyssey, psychedelic experience, intelligent worldbuilding, to fill pages, fall apart in a mush, a speculative component, the sensory impact of the trip, highly informed, standing on what is know and speculating, if there was life it would be in this zone, that kaiju book of Scalzi’s, wonder about your purpose, none of this is helping me in my life, what happens during the game, processing a magazine, sitting too long, certain number of hours, that’s fun, but it ain’t a novel, it ain’t good science fiction, what would our guy from youtube think about Philip K. Dick, make a magic system work, things are happening because they have to, if time started going backwards, still in the Roman Empire, spins up a world in order to explore it (not to fill pages), his novels are all worse than his short stories, just better, his short stories are better than that book (The Man In The High Castle), a children’s book, Galactic Pot-Healer, work and being out of work, a frontier where people are challenged to find meaningful work, that gunfight was really cool, some people act like robots, unemotional or mean, is sex with co-workers cool?, very fun and very rich, he didn’t need a setting for some characters, if your story doesn’t have idea at its core it’s not science fiction, imagine with ideas, live with ideas, a Philip K. Dick essay, Olaf Stapledon writes big long thick books that are science fiction but not novels, that’s interesting, how do you do that, a history of the last and first men, like reading a whole bunch of Clarke stories, unique in fiction, poor guy, there’s a lot not to enjoy, How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, until you toss it across the room, a good theory of fantasy, fantasy is pretty big, the hardest of the hard, uploading and downloading your brain, it’s not, Ringworld, a whole bunch of gimmes, smart aliens, an aggressive species, they generate a D&D party, the Larry Niven character, just an excuse, a gravitational feeling thing, complete bullshit book, everything is fiction, it would just fall apart, 100% cheater and it works because he has an idea at the core and everything else is to get to that idea, he cheats in every possible way, Clarke has a very different philosophy, even in A Fall Of Moondust, not his best book, a bunch of boring characters, people get lead astray, super-good, a lot of Silverberg lately, Tor Doubles, read about a third of half of each of those books, a Silverberg novella, especially with his novels, he’s a contemplative dude, he’s sorta artsy and literary, he likes old books, Heart Of Darkness on another planet, elephants for the economy, sex on the brain, human relationships, the worldbuilding is to get to the transcendent point, The Book Of Skulls, being a good writer helps, Passengers, what is he famous for?, made Majipoor maybe?, Lord Valentine’s Castle, Nightwings, doesn’t have a killer book, big stature for a guy who doesn’t have a killer book, Neuromancer by William Gibson, rather than the fixup, his standalone short stories are really good, Phases Of The Moon by Isaac Asimov, a writing machine, wrote for money, still alive and not licensing his name out, 2010, now that he’s not poor, not getting his pension padded, good story, good writer, Arthur C. Clarke, he knows what to do, Farnham’s Freehold, he’s gonna rant about it, it’s not as bad as you think, Paul, oh my god, at the time, Westlake, revving back up, The Colorado Kid illustrated edition, Justified: City Primeval, there are character in it, Elmore Leonard short story, Tommy Patrick Ryan, some random guy on the internet, through Eric, 11th ever published story, readability through the fucking roof, so much characterization, got worse at the end, No Man’s Land by John Buchan, early evening, a reasonable hour of the evening, save the hunger to be angrier, approaching it satisfied, Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, Ace Double, a subpodcast of only Tor Doubles, we started with the first one, The Screwfly Solution, The Girl Who Was Plugged In, Run For The Stars by Harlan Ellison, savage, a juvenile delinquent in space, clairvoyant ability, very Harlan Ellison, A Boy And His Dog, Eye For Eye by Orson Scott Card, The Last Castle by Jack Vance, The Dragon Masters, I love the lengthy, Ill Met In Lankhmar, Vintage Season, The Sword Of Rhiannon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm, Kim Stanley Robinson short stuff, they don’t list the table of contents, The Ugly Little Boy, Edmond Hamilton, Screwtop, Enemy Mine, Hardfought by Greg Bear, an idea man, he shoulve had a badge that said “idea man”, The Blind Geometer, Fritz Leiber, Universe by Robert A. Heinlein, fantasy, Damon Knight, Icehenge, Press Enter by John Varley, Death Of Doctor Island also The Island Of Doctor Death, Karen Haber, Home Is The Hangman by Roger Zelazny, Wheels Of If, Gene Wolfe, The Book Of The Short Sun, Conjure Wife is on LibriVox, Ben Tucker is good, a five hour book, unleash hell, we got this in our back podcast, shownoting, back in the day, Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle, Naxos, the torch of science, a metabook, 1831 novels, so many good ones, Scottish essayist, Fraser’s Magazine, purports to be a commentary, Godborn Devilsdung, a book review of that book, transcendentalist, German idealism, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, there are things in themselves, things as we perceive them, the laws of our mind, ways round, suppressing different premises, this book sounds really good, in a funny way, Johnathan Swift, Tristam Shandy, Laurence Sterne, founding text and serious organizing study of clothing, fashion theory, sartorial ambitions, clearly a book we both need to read, my all time favourite book, this is one of the books that makes life worth living, only seeing through clothes can we understand life, not composted, a half-mad saint, 320 pages, in the PDF, the torch of science, not the smallest cranny or doghole can remain unilluminated, what is he famous for?, some sort of hero worship, a precursor to the superman, the great providential men who make history, Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan by Ibn Tufail, like Tarzan, most translated, 1,000 Nights, the dream one, very solid, very Borgesian, Borges never wrote a collab book to make money, Frank Herbert son, Tom Clancy ghost author to write Borges books, a funny tweet thread, Hobbits and wizards, good morning as in fuck off, Justin fucked every Canadian for 20 more fucking years, he’s bought and paid for and corrupt as fuck, persist, not a big damn hero, very bad man, make some coffee.

Playboy, December 1971 - A Meeting With Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke

Playboy, December 1971 - A Meeting With Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke

Playboy, December 1971 - A Meeting With Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke

Posted by Jesse WillisBecome a Patron!

The SFFaudio Podcast #770 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Progeny by Philip K. Dick

The SFFaudio Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #770 – Progeny by Philip K. Dick, read by Mike Vendetti. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the book (45 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Paul Weimer, Evan Lampe, Mike Vendetti, Terence Blake, and Jonathan Weichsel

Talked about on today’s show:
IF Worlds Of Science Fiction, November 1954, we’re bringing it back, Worlds Of Science Fiction, IF, it’s IFfy, the tagline, a tier below, a tier above, James L. Quinn, early in IF’s run, 3rd year, Evan Lampe’s podcast, the Philip K. Dick review website, John Taylor Gatto State Controlled Consciousness, schools created to create utopian visions, close to Philip K. Dick’s perspective, the story about the autistic kid, not really autistic, a nurture story, the thesis of the story, raised by robots, kids in it is very unusual in actual science fiction, 9 at the end, Theodore Sturgeon, a good handful, Tony And The Beetles, The Father Thing, comes up every time, something that happened to Philip K. Dick, the hospital, the mental institution, typing on his keyboard, you know what we need is more science fiction stories about kids adopted by robots, Nanny, menacing, how menacing this story is, body horror, sweat and smells of the body, the aftermath of the meeting with the father, The Last Of The Masters, hairy sweaty man, girls boobs, almost connect that to AI, newspaper article through AI, a Promethean moment, Ed is left out of it, he doesn’t participate, channeling Eric Rabkin, the robot doctor, a sandwich, in fairy tales, a science fictional fairy tale, sharing food means you love that person, the squirrel accepts his food, Pete’s doctor/boss/trainer, I’ll eat at the cafeteria, pop the question: will you come and be my son, I don’t like to buy in the diner they skin you, six hundred employees, this is menacing, sentences that go unfinished, training to become a bio-chemist, a messiah for the robots, a go-between, what does the smell of his father remind him of, laboratory animals, a contemptible smell, I can’t place it, just like when he was a baby, Dr. Bish, the automatic heating system clicked on for the night, the smell as the experimental animals, the promising young boy, the boy smiled, awkward and humane, a secret private smile of complete understanding, evil emotions, you’re son’s deformed!, my god, what does it mean?, what about that first wife, a secret that he’s telling us over and over again, a secret Philip K. Dick child?, a waveshot of his head, talking about himself?, sociologically going on, there’s no manual telling you what to do, Dr. Spock, let the kid cry themself to sleep, the worst thing anybody’s ever done to Americans, ADD, needs a lobotomy, icepick lobotomy, one of the Kennedy children became a vegetable, you have to trust the doctor, towards that, that exchange, did he try and pick up the child, a circumcision or something, feel the weight of the child in his arms, sanitary, antiseptic, oedipal complex, and today, sex studies from the 50s, Kinsey studies, living back there, oh my god I’m a homosexual, I had no idea, lies and wishfulfilment, sweeps the nation as a fad, weird instiutional problems, you’ll be happier when you join the institution and follow the rules, Dick likes twists and layering of twists, a systematic distortion, growing up with the robots and imbibing their ideology, all the paperwork, the consent forms, what does see mean exactly?, the laws, math, age, why I was 19, sneaking into the rocket facilities, I was twice your age when this happens, more tired and sweating and balding than he was before, didn’t have a kid at this point, Beyond The Door, a wife cheating on her husband with a cuckoo clock and a boyfriend, whose Pete?, Mrs. Peters, this name, Ed Loyce, Ed Doyle, figures in his life, Pete might be him, the father became extremely busy, coming back, here I am I’m your dad, his dad lived in DC, a serious character flaw, when he’s 18, comes back on the delivery day, expects to have a say, he doesn’t get that, writing to his mom, boarding school, mom, send my pills, non-nervous pills, full of anxieties, nervous breakdown in high school, he takes their answers seriously, is that really true?, he writes about it, the robot is an institution, institutions replace parents, the doctor is not a human, fleshy cover over its arms, two robot taxi drivers, a strapping late model robot, they’re replacing Ed, the doctor adopts the child, talking about himself, these amazing psychological conditions, this unfeeling monster, the child didn’t need to be touched, these things are in the air, 1928, the abortion truck story, children hiding in thornbushes, The Crawlers, The Pre-Persons, the father agrees to go into the abortion truck with him, maths, 1974, the ability to master algebra was the test for having a soul, animal soul, authority says this, what happens if that’s true?, the neuroses that I have, served by robots in a cafeteria, being raised in a boarding school, mandated to join this army, a really bad consequence, keeping the baby with you at all times, Jesse is very talky, primarily about institutions, how institutions sell themselves, what was best for the kid, she trusted the institutions, being inhuman by not wanting to bring the baby to her breast and smell it, she’s not sad about it, I was chatting with the doctor, she’s smoking, people aren’t sad sending their kid off to public school, the entire ideology of the system, a sexual thing, smoking with the doctor, fantasy sex with the doctor, the post coital cigarette, a cuckolding going on, push psychoanalysis a tiny little bit, the biological becomes an institutional complex, 1986, your kid has ADD, your kid needs amphetamines, there’s a biological thing, the calf comes out of the cow, literally happening, how much culture and institutions erode, she is a monster because of it, we’re all monsters, a more primitive part, Dr. Bish what is this weird white liquid running out of my breasts?, he’s an idiot, what a moron, the internet is full of misinformation, an institute, Los Angeles Central Hospital, late for the birth, infodump, we don’t touch our son, when do we get him?, the waveform says he’s going there, another institution, once he’s fully grown up, his brain is no longer plastic, when he’s an adult, molded into what the institute wants, the mom is out of the picture, they’re divorced, Ed Doyle’s alternative, the frontier theme that Evan so rightly picked up on, no squirrels, Pete’s dad’s job is the plumbing, his only job is to supply the sperm, Star Trek, high end jobs, build and maintain those ships and those systems, in the end you still need infantry, pushed away his wife, away all the time on the frontier, a traveling salesman, as a result Janet leaves him, something really important, the gendered nature of labour saving technology, Philip Dick doesn’t get this, Evan’s Philip K. Dick readthrough, hostile to washing machines, microwave, refrigerator, who raises kids?, mostly womens work, the bullshit of raising kids, making the lunch everyday, stroll in from alpha centauri, the wife is making the rational choice, shitwork, Dick really has this problem, after a certain point in the story, son come with me, this is going to be our business, there’s a lot of things that need doing out there, out beyond Prox, nature, self-fulfillment, won’t even accept his sandwich, extrovert with the nerdy kid son, eat hamburgers, sitting at home, making plans to destroy humanity, make them less smelly and more docile, Sales Pitch, commuting through space, replacing body parts, have your colon replaced with a plastic tube, no more sweatglands, make everything antiseptic, just make sure that children are clean at all times, the runny nose, he needs to go on a boat and learn the ropes, the mom’s instinct and the dad’s instinct, when the answer is the institution they’re both wrong, giving up a lot of power to the institutions, Mildred Clingerman story, an automated kitchen, about 7 Ray Bradbury stories, Catharine Beecher, bastion of their power, use science and knowledge and education to rationalize the domestic sphere, a viewpoint, a little glowing breast, spray on glowing, she’s glowing because she just gave birth, baby needs milk, not enough baby formula, baby formula is bad for kids, you could use a breast pump, giant reliance on artificial milk, convenient, maybe its because you’re at work, factory or office or school raising other people’s children, bad marriage, the menace is unstated, maybe the Oedipus complex is worth it, not just corporations, government regulated facility at the very least, public private partnership, a legal person, not a caring person, not capable of caring, that’s what his waveform says, he’s going to be a rocket jockey, the son doesn’t even understand the question, he smiles, you think desire has anything to do with it, the robots and the man all have emotions, maybe he’s not the best boss, as close to lying he gets, designed to be sympathetic towards Ed, propaganday, why do we trust this institution, a photo of his plastic brain, bio-chemistry, they’re going to fuck around with humans, the alternative is the queen living West Texas planet, emphasizing the cleanness, unpolluted, smoking, drinks a brandy-frappe, what’s best of the child, she’s been reading all the books, Gayelord Hauser for nutrition, parenting books, how they sell of these things to parents, no shopping, no clubs, no social life, the optimistic part of the story, Earth is going to Hell, Dick was an optimist, Hello, Doc!, the event has happened, a top-level robot, it had fooled him, Dr. Bish appeared plump and well-fed, is the robot married, diamond-tie clasp, simulated manicured nails, a pinstriped shirt, white collar vs. blue collar, just the baby daddy, rushed in from the airport, have you seen a squirrel before?, leaned on one way, we can’t trust this, trusting it is the bad thing, we agreed to this, they were intimate at some point, to determine the gender of the child, he’s only gone six months, natural sex, a lady with boobs so he fell in love with her, she’s a monster because she trusts the institutions, yes I am, H.P. Lovecraft, that amazing transformation thing, regular successful businessman, not hairy, the robots becoming too human, Isaac Asimov’s Let’s Get Together, a critical mass of robots, Herbert Goldstone’s Virtuoso, learns to play the piano, music is supposed to be hard, somethings shouldn’t be automated, AI art, two robot taxi drivers are acting like robots, literally human beings who are obeying instructions, turning them into robotic people, ROTC, failed the first day, twirl your rifles, get a haircut, his robot stories are so different, fixed it, could have easily been a chapter in The Humanoids by Jack Williamson, serialized vs. novel, earth vs. an alien planet, expanded novel version is really good, an answer to any objection, a really important concept, any word you don’t know the meaning of your are subject, bleeding under your dura, doctor I know exactly how we fix this, subjecting ourselves to their ideologies, sometimes that’s a good thing, look both ways before you cross the street, a hard concept to get across, when we read these stories, wow that’s really powerful, but why?, escape valve, the place we can run off to, frontiers exist, a perceived option, go west young man, where do Americans run off to?, Taiwan, to Vietnam, not an option, Miss Columbia, propaganda, plant a flag, government giving you an outlet, free real estate, shaped politics for most of American history, pick up your stakes and go, everyone moved to Saskatchewan for free land, then everyone moved to Vancouver for jobs, the dust-bowl, the dirty 30s, 3 million people were displaced, we don’t have the language to describe it, people moving out of California to Texas or Florida, internal movement, region in this, State Controlled Consciousness, every utopian movement, Sunday school, propitiate your ideology, Dr. 2G-Y Bish, bishop, kids put into religious orders, designed to break up the family, outsourced to religion, keeping doctrine, interesting idea, not very many characters, Janet, Ed, a big jump, takes him out into the country, Los Angeles, go back to the city, a general experience, Evan’s generation, the first generation to go to college, those Thanksgivings, those times back are a little weird, at least four or five years to orient back to the working class culture, academic sorts, we gotta get this fence fixed, inspiring and interesting stuff, intellectual stimulation, trying to communicate that, it doesn’t translate very well, rebalance how you talk to people, most people don’t read books, unless youre constantly building up, Jack Williamson, Gilles Deleuze, cows, chickens, horse, chicken business, cow business, the second dimension, initiated into a more bourgeois culture, the double gap, so rich, fairly obscure Philip K. Dick story, following the 9 years, Paul sings the classics, Cat’s in the cradle and the cradle’s on fire?, kill his father and marry his mother, it doesn’t come from the Greeks, Sigmund Freud, is it true?, not exactly, recapitulate the relationships you are trained in, animals training other animals, interacting with other humans, any of the seven times I’ve tried, maybe that’s not true, a structure, he likes older women, where is the libido?, the attitude of Doctor Bish, looking at Peter the baby with a look that was greedy, in Anti-Oedipus, the bureaucrat caresses the forms, Anti-Oedipus by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, bottom of page 71, creasing the edges with his nail, plugged his desire into rules and regulations and forms, go to the police, see if there’s a detective on duty, it gives them something to do, he’s not like Mr. Spock, sinister and evil and aloof, like Data, Data had curiosity, satire, embodiment of authority, an evil twin (Lore), psychoanalyze Star Trek, the Lore Data stuff, gave him a twitch, Lore made Data have a twitch, there’s a twitch here, a libidinal twitch, different educational institutions, Hampshire College, Fordham University, unstructured to structured Jesuit university, post-modern to classicist language, a whole different language, small economically depressed town where half the stores are closed, an aversion, they were hit with books at school, lame TV too, a reality TV show was cool, marriage counselor reality TV show, what is it on cable?, therapy, if that was L.A., a level beneath, an aversion to reading books, the struggle, Peter Camenzind by Herman Hesse, goes back home, his rural town was better, a spiritual transformation, stained with sweat, page 74, he brought out his pipe and tobacco, a big sulfur match, murmured, this is a good pipe, 25 years ago, do the math, only about twice as old as you, a WWI veteran, WWII guy, at a certain point in life every man starts smoking a pipe, filling and lighting a pipe, old fashioned stuff, that ritual, sucking on a pipe, casting smoke out of their nose, a little bit interested, lost in his reverie, if he was a little more skillful they could’ve connected, he had the right instinct, what makes it a tragedy, when dads fuck off, there’s a problem, wife, institution, capitalism, we could work together, how long it is, almost nothing happens, a walk, a hospital scene, episodes over 9 years, backfill, infodumping, 3 scenes, permission, fill out these forms, the ride in the car and the walk, the last scene, off with Doctor Bish and Peter, the key to Peter’s reactions, emotional, that’s interesting that you think we can connect, oof, anthropological look at the father from the son’s POV, distancing, broken sentence, when you will…, quite right, the backstory talking, bumming around town, outside school rightly, sneaking into the rocket launching yards, hopped over to Mars, a hasher, Ganymede was all sewed up tight, space freighter, worked his way out to Proxima, workaway, I found what I wanted, swelling with pride, little retail and service place, everybody needs a plumber, a good job, the best blue collar job, the pay is very good, when the water starts flooding you need a plumber, building communities, he sounds very free, like a rolling stone, not an appealing life to someone who’s a part of the institution, she doesn’t leave the earth, she likes being under the system, you could go off, there’s fear involved, there’s the comfort of the institution, institutions can’t love you, fill out your forms, ivy coloured walls, drifters, cafeterias, you have money, an efficiency you don’t get at home, living in China, didn’t eat dinner, new job, cafeteria lunch, where do you wanna eat?, doesn’t the food just kind of appear?, where to eat and what to make, drops from your mind really quick, elementary schools in France?, fancy lunches?, 20 years in a highshcool, 2 hours or longer to come back home, sandwich, all sorts of good things in it, presence of the outside inside the institution, “I’m not reduced to the institution, I have my sandwich”, taco Tuesday, people get excited about the rotation, a crazy thing, homemade food, ketchup classified as a vegetable, school lunches program, the healthy food pyramid we just made up, at the top is a greedy corporation, like am institutionalized restaurant, weird hot things, hot lunch and cold lunch, 2 cafeterias in the same school, Cold Lunch Paul, bologna sandwiches, hot lunch for free, against the rules, a person who hasn’t been completely institutionalized, get you hooked on the hot lunch, back to bologna sandwiches, like the place, baloney, 70 liters of chili, more efficiency, the prices start creeping up, adulterating the materials that go into the pot, corruption, let’s have a daycare, a hired person, paying money vs. taking turns, we can lower the quality of the care here, just not loved, all in this little 46 minute story, chat GPT, it can do my homework, I can fire everybody, charge subscriptions, hire somebody to do this, you still hire dishwashers for restaurants, an open version of chat GPT, answer emails from other robots, an efficiency there, students are into chat GPT, grunt garbage work, pedagogical value of repetition, they’d much rather cheat, painting class, if they’re into it they’ll do it, most students don’t want to be essayists, kids doing their homework, punishment, if you get low grades you need more attention from the government forms, chat GPT can be really educational, dialogue with it a lot, The Three-Body Problem, Chinese TV series of 30 episodes, suggestions and prompts, analysis, no that’s not what I want, good ideas, some creativity sparks, Rossignol, better and better, The Ash Grove, makes you cry if you let it, makes children emotional, as a corrective, analyze Philip K. Dick’s story, Progeny, a search engine that’s weak, that’s not enough, you have to work for 20-30 minutes, write some John Adams Thomas Jefferson boy love romance, oh yes you’re right, you overestimate, most teachers can’t even get the assignment clear, make sure you have a period at the end of all your sentences, formatting problems, what this is perfect for, autobiography or memoir, just answer the question, a sophisticated text prediction, good grammar, less important for students, the facts don’t matter that much, formatting is really important, this is a lie, how they get good grades, cheating the system, a good solution to a bad problem, easier for the prisoners, abolish the prisons, new ways to punish students, make other kids do their homework, what chat GPT’s revolution, read this paragraph and reorder them, take out things you don’t like, living in an affluent area, I’m a governess, there’s a scary man, young Tommy is very bright, essay about thermodynamics, describing some of Jesse’s job, same advantage that rich people’s job, it doesn’t help them, how to understand great poetry, a bunch of assignments that are due, parents hire a ghostwriter to right a novel, ivy league school, Rebecca Black’s song Friday, I like sitting in the front seat sometime, super-well produced, something to make their kid feel like a superstar, chat GPT same advantage as the rich kids, we’re pretty conclusive, Pirates Of Venus, north shore of Minnesota, overseas, NSA work, top secret, Evan Lampe is gonna step up, Farnham’s Freehold, 12th – 23rd, Sailing To Byzantium by Robert Silverberg, solved, feeds and resources, podcast schedule, the music under it, crazy, a youtube thing, people don’t know, people discover that audiobooks because of youtube, excited for them, any sign of a ghost is excitement, it’s youtube vs. books, Arthur C. Clarke, past The Colorado Kid, Alex from Pulpcovers was censored, an appeal, after careful review…, sooo careful, a lady might not have any pants on, jealous losers on twitter, White Trash, HOE REPAIR, just exposure, what Jesse likes about Jonathan (he’s read a whole bunch of books Jesse hasn’t read), the guy from Switzerland who had nice handwriting, an autobiography of a character’s soul, a German genre, fake autobiography, Bohemian Europe in the 1890s, talking to farmers, dude, common for some people, fake and phony and putting on airs about intelligent they are, literary circles, don’t read anything past 10 years ago, Scalzi has replaced Heinlein, they say they believe that, keep current, you don’t have time to read both, most of everything was crap, harder to determine today, hasn’t withstood the test of time yet, debating how to pronounce Weichsel in 100 years, first hit rap group, recorded their songs here, hit song, fun catchy song, walking around the town, they saw the sign, that’s it, 50 years from now, this town has not accomplished achievement, absolutely amazing, on the ferry, CTV News, CNN for Canada, tell Americans, the shitty Justin Trudeau government, an extra bunch of money to poors, they want to get reelected, full blown Social Credit, a tax rebate, 19.8% commercial space empty, 50% is much more common in a small town, all for the sake of posterity, chat GPT teachers marking chat GPT homework, dead town, it’s just awful, hang out at the bus stop, hang out at the convenience story, kipple from Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, all the non-losers have left for the off-world, the world of the book, same world as Progeny, everybody is replaced by robots, squirrels are dying, institutional pollution, fill the ocean, thesis proven, same setting, same ideas, not literally true, working the same mine, working the same ideas, Nick And The Glimmung, Galactic Pot-Healer, a stepping stone to get to that other idea, androids, robots, three weeks from now, a really good one, Sheba by Jack Higgins, in response to people not liking Dial Of Destiny, the legendary temple of Sheba, put me down, Indiana Jones tanking is kinda bullshit, poor box office, in what period of time, one of the most expensive movies ever made, we didn’t need the first one either, we wanted it, now we don’t want them so much, two versions of The Warriors (1979), available as an audiobook, an excuse to watch it, comic book inserts, less real and gritty, Ship Of Ishtar by A. Merritt, work to do, editing this anthology, for secret operations, bunch of authors, substack, cool public domain stuff, Moon Tomb, the moon and death, Misha Burnett needs to promote better, some salty interesting points on twitter, great cover art, he’s problematic, jealous?, when you get famous enough people become jealous, Poe was a third rate writer, why did they say that?, because its true?, shit all over Lovecraft, lob a grenade and leave and close the door behind them, Edgar Allan Poe, who’s a better poet from the United States?, start making your list now, Annabelle Lee is popular and it’s good, The Song Of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain’s parody of The Raven, Bugs Bunny, controversial, that’s Heinlein in extremis, alcoholic mother and the lawyer father, bridge party, people are not asking for an adaption, see everybody explode, skinny dipping, the young black kid, see you on twitter.

Progeny by Philip K. Dick

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The SFFaudio Podcast #762 – READALONG: Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #762 – Jesse, Paul Weimer, Evan Lampe, Terence Blake, and Jonathan Manfred Weichsel talk about Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Talked about on today’s show:
get people to believe he’s Terence, J stands for Jonathan, Manfred sounded cooler, just change your last name to Scalzi and all the blessing will come, you can replace Heinlein, this John Scalzi book called Sixth Column, serialized in Astounding, not based on a Heinlein idea at all, the original idea was Campbell’s, all the problems it has are Heinlein’s fixings, Jack Vance shitting on Campbell, psychics and telepathy, well done for a bad idea, not one of his best, major works, thought experiment, opposite thought experiment, Revolt In 2100 in reverse, theocracy, make people believe, If This Goes On is Revolt In 2100, revolts against people in power, revolution, fighting against the forces of prophet, pan-Asian tyranny, motives of the character, technomage weapon, falls for a girl, the movement culture makes the ideology, the change in him, less emotional growth, learns to become a rebel, how people get radicalized: through women, against god, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, the conspiracy element, the secret society within and a false leader, Adam Selene, Mike, the disciple is coming, enjoyed the book, one of the strongest competency fantasies, this Ledbetter effect, what a Campbell move, they’re genetically different from us, isn’t the US filled with other than white people too?, race is a thing, in the original texts, the whites vs. the pan-Asians, setting from Asian to not Asian, tone down some of the binary, unfixable, Anson MacDonald was racist, tiny brain – galaxy brain, old Heinlein, troll way you want to do it, changes, some city has been atom-bombed, considering the year, it starts when the war was over, we’re the werewolves of this Nazi empire, individual stories were fighting, you can make the argument they’re still there, on the Moon?, still guys in the mountains, people being killed into the late-1940s, ideological true believers, a hand that touched them to make them military, an uprising, a prison revolt, start a religion to solve a problem, a very American move, the turbans and the staffs, the beards, he stacked the deck, pan-Asianism, this less is less bullshit, the pan-Asian movement, Noble Drew Ali, Moorish Science, fezzes, little Hitler mustache, if this was happening in your community, government did stuff, the Black Muslim movement, Nat Turner, a movement out of Japan, the Black Dragon Society, take over Asia, Pan-Asian Orientalism, they’re trying to create a force against European colonization of Asia, unequal treaties, China, an attempt to unify counties under threat, nationalism, a congruency there, civic nationalist ideas, anschluss, an Ottoman identity, Pan-Africanists, Sun Yat-sen, the Asia for the Asians idea, largely a creation of the Japanese, the Japanese Empire, we have to fight the imperial power, they’re bad like us, as a way to avoid war and fight the west, Manchurians, national ambitions, disconnect between political realities and what unites us in people’s minds, post-colonial African, a pan-Germanist, a pan-Europeanist, subject to the master race, propaganda to that extent, not serious about pan-Asianism, Savage Headhunters, Shinto, edge out the other religions, atrocities, the Rape of Nanking, they weren’t being altruistic, the psychology of creating this book, it’s the Japanese, a god emperor somewhere in Asia, they conquered India, this pan-Asian government, the Soviets, Korea, set in the future, flying vehicles, The Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard, 1940, the end of the world, Europe is off the map, Beyond Thirty by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the South Pole, a similar setup, blackout and curtain, blackout curtains, they’re out of the game, a country knocked out of the Risk game, right before the novel begins, the United States is washed up, a plothole in the book, buildings, people walking around, it wasn’t bombs, a electromagnetic weapon, Washington is gone, the last flight out, Cheyenne Mountain, where NORAD is, Colorado Springs, tentacles, a fun book, the swami hats, the halos, he can sell it to Campbell, Heinlein operating at the Anson MacDonald level, early Heinlein comedy, the great God Motar, it got the cover, the conversation with the prince, the Divine Hand, silly and racist, funny dialogue, if Japan wins, states make nations, a national identity, folklore, flags, constitutions, anthems, winning in Asia, controlling this vast empire, give it enough time, a white republic became multi-ethnic, the original illustrations, the troops look Japanese, the Hand looks Manchu, scholar hat, more Chinese than Japanese, Mongolian, mongoloid, the five races theory, they’ve got a religion too, a divinity aspect, they don’t understand American religion, just use Christianity, Japanese spies, Francis Xavier, Commodore Perry, the Non-Intercourse Act, Trinity RPG, why can’t you close yourself off, capitalism won’t let you, the Khmer Rouge, the 1st world, the 2nd world, and the 3rd world, unequal treaties, you’re trading with us now, we set the terms of the trade, gunships, they are really good at this colonialism, free trade, snuggle up, after a war, more unequal than others, Cuba is not allowed to trade with the United States, open up countries to trade, many port cities, everybody get their own port, a lot of dissatisfaction, you are the slave class now, protectorate, brutal, this isn’t as racist as it could be, these two groups think race is a thing, you have to buy in, a biological fact, what the theme is, defeated by your prejudices, binary racist skeleton plot, what leads to decline and downfall is a set of prejudices, a native American born Asia, subject to the ray, Heinlein doing his Heinlein thing, I’m different from him, so about racist, police are the same everywhere, will they stay bribed?, pedagogical motifs, people are prejudiced, the summary of the first 2 parts, the Blitzkrieg of the United States Empire, the Citadel, military research, Ardmore works hard, Colonel Calhoon, believes himself to be Mota, or Motak?, he’s John W. Campbell, complete atomic power, selective death ray, a general solution of unified field, well behaved slaves require religion, encouragement and disencouragement, render under Caesar, African American religion, religion is a delusion, Stranger In A Strange Land, so much time focusing on religion, it’s a fake from the beginning, he’s Jesus, the disciple depicted, black and a thousand feet tall, Joseph Smith (not Jesus), doing more than one thing, Valentine Michael Smith, the disciple of Jesus, vanishing people, he dies like Jesus, stoned to death, but didn’t come back, the Mormons get a very favourable mention, a good version of religion, practical, the business aspect, they’ve got good business sense, an infinite money generator, Robert Heinlein being a gold bug, a DC superhero character from the 40s, Doctor Fate, The Flash with a WWI helmet, Babylon 5, not for religious purposes, a Mormon-like branch of Christianity, mumbo jumbo, invent and remember, a short novel, people offended by this, an evangelical branch of Christianity, ripped from daily headlines, slot-machines in their megachurches, come die with us anyway, people die for Christianity all the time, there is a third rail in the United States, American friends, there are Canadian religious people, tied to the land in the U.K., writing for a very secular Science Fiction magazine, make up a Christian religion and say it’s all fake, people would be very offended, when the Beatles compared themselves to Jesus, Dungeons & Dragons, third hand worried, when the panic came out, an American media thing, spill-over, the one with Harry Potter, if it gets to be a big enough interest, having fun, all the names, the other aspects of Mota, reading this in the 1940s, smile slyly inside, he’s being sneaky but I get it, it works as an anti-religious polemic, what makes this a lesser book, if Evan got his away, people would think about it in a different way, tying Americanism to Christianity, John W. Campbell’s All, racialism, using the dopey religion, so religious they’d be wrong about using Christianity, the conversations with the Christian believers, wrestling with using this fake religion, so contrived, For Us, The Living, just ignore Europe, the religions of Iran or Turkey, Chinese didn’t know that Americans were Christian, an Iron Curtain around the United States, closed off from the rest of the world, Donald Trump, build a wall around America, consume itself in war, Heinlein has no interest in Europe, Hitler, Medieval European, a feudal Catholicism, like monks living in cells, armour, nuns, charismatic Christianity, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, literalist, the Republican party, living in Job’s universe, atomic power, the serial we are about to read, fair probability, the effectiveness of invention, plausible, the whole setup is wholly implausible, invasion literature, if we had this setup, so many coincidences, they just happen to…, so constructed so as to be not one of his best book, whoever that is, definitely Heinlein, biggest problems, general acceptance of drugs, magic, the drugs only have the effect they say on the label, you have to take sleeping pills, also I don’t you getting up, konking you out, a naivete about drugs, good healthy skepticism, what happens right after these pre-WWII books, a think tank to help win the war, L. Sprague DeCamp, commissioned as an officer, pressure suits, Astounding [by Alec Nevalla-Lee], is the tech ripe, tech-bro, is there government funding for this thing, Larry Niven and Benford, rods from god, beat the Soviets, same thing, let’s think up scenarios, now everybody has to take their shoes off forever, you could combine liquids and make a bomb, endemic and super dangerous, the Slan effect, reading a Philip K. Dick novel, now I can run the world, that guy is weird, what maleness means, maybe children are smarter than adults, principles, all you have to do is take your hypnodrugs and you can learn languages, he can’t see it about himself, spin-up, he’s wonderful, it’s hokum, man can he write, criticism of Heinlein, sexual politics, the collapse of America, not for the betterment, to undermine things, the society of Friday, Balkanized, royals have moved to Canada, California, Ottawa, never a threat to world peice, a planetary society, the beanstalk in Kenya, she’s the James Bond working for a secret organization, tied to Gulf, in the future of Gulf, a take that at his own work, takes his own piss, time travel pussy one: The Door Into Summer, why Evan needed to do Heinlein for his podcast, he’ll mention other countries, he’s trying to bomb America, bombing the Taj Mahal, mostly he just cares about the United States, practically the United States, he’s so smart and good at spinning up, no impact with working at the navy yard, the Edison trust goes on, like G.E. or Bell, Bell Labs, their existence is there because they’re a trust, wild speculation, you’re given the monopoly so you have to give back, he’s got transmutation, lead into gold, poison gas into oxygen, there’s a change in energy, win WWII with alchemy, a broad comedy, very comedic, forgettable Heinlein, religion as a mask for science, power-play, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, Dune, is the religion fake in Dune?, planted, a psychology of the masses, staff officers, soft sciences, planted the seeds for that chapters, precedents, Orphans Of The Sky, Universe, the science became a religion, gravity as a metaphor, a secret society, long and too big, the concept is really cool, he takes the long view, six months?, how many years are they at this?, couple years at most, he has only three issues to write it, where did this idea start in American literature, Mark Twain’s criticism of the Christian scientists, diet books, Extract From Captain Stormfield’s Visit To Heaven biblical justification, post-apocalyptic, what’s the name of that story?, many different satires of religion, hardly anybody there speaks English, they jailed his corpse, are they believing their own shit, Theosophy, L. Frank Baum, you can’t say I’m an atheist, having an argument ready, what’s a Christian, take you to their temple, what’s that?, judo flipped them, join someone else’s services, soul-searching, doing good, whatever names doesn’t matter, unity of all faiths, a scientific based version of the theosophical ideology, Muslim cleric in a Jewish temple, the audiences take it, the scientiologiston the street corner, we welcome Christian, play to whatever, they don’t start with you’re wrong, I worship Mithra, The Altar by Robert Sheckley, Two Dooms by C.M. Kornbluth, half-colonized America, a very C.M. Kornbluth story, if Weinbaum had lived, could have been bigger than Heinlein, nobody’s trying to say Scalzi’s the new Weinbaum, Zelazny death anniversary thread, google nGram, his works aren’t in print, locked away under copyright, H. Beam Piper is bigger than it ever was, the evidence is huge but Paul is not convinced, Scalzi wrote a reboot of the public domain book, after 1963, sinecure, go to youtube and look at all the views and compare to sales on audible, it’s huge, I only read free, free as I can do anything I want with it, a certain racial slur against African Americans, the good stuff rises, peter want the better stuff, the bad covers on Amazon are commercial, excised, taking offense by being babied, flatfaces, yellow monkeys, aliens, slanty-eyes, slanties, made that up for this book?, made up slurs are less problematic, thought experiment, Farnham’s Freehold next, pan-Africans invading the United States, The New Sun, we’ve got some white guys we need to hate, the token guy, Heinlien is anti-racist, the character is in the serial, who would die from their beam, the antidote to the racism in this book, lifeboat rules, a prejudice you have to overcome, just take this pill, go in with a ray and kill cleanly, soul-searching, get over your prejudices, promoted instead of fired, took the black pill, have you ever butchered a hog, Heinlein wrote these lines, pages and pages of dialogue Heinlein talking to himself, walking down the street of Des Moines, roll tanks, you’re a slave now, handing out gold, one foot in the Great Depression, soup kitchens, poor relief, Beyond The Horizon, in this era of his career, the changing nature of the stake, ambivalent, biases, dismissing female priests, can’t wear the beard, the oppressor, comfort women, mobilizing the women, traditional, burning the past, no research in it, hara-kiri everything’s to do with face, white women turned into comfort women, we need to liberate women, all hands on deck, salable chattel, 1911, anarchist feminist Chinese radical, comfort stations, a discussion in Japan about the new woman, changing the roles of women, the audience for this, written real fast, writing so much, chronological read through of Heinlein, the development of ideas, not an issue in 1941, the future history stories are under Heinlein, a rule throughout magazines, whole issues written by Robert Silverberg, we need more L. Sprague DeCamps, guess Caleb Saunders is getting a cheque today, recruiting guys, almost every issue, one year of Astounding, off magazines, a quarter of the way through, a future history laid out, And He Built A Crooked House, competence fantasy, Elsewhen, if I was running the war, Civilization with infinite gold or tanks, fun but weak, a pressor beam a sucker beam, the stacks were stacked against, the chess move, god damn them, enjoyable but a weak book, Paul didn’t enjoy reading this book?, the gun one, compare, by Paul, going at it on Twitter, it’s about guns, head and shoulders above this one, silly, a paycheck, I have this story here, unsalable, doesn’t stop him, Campbell’s writing was never amazing, maybe you could do something with this, more ambitious, social credit, post-scarcity, honor culture, a gun controlled society, cultural regulation, also not one of his best, one of the best of his early works, The Green Hills Of Earth, the novels that go down hill, crackin little ideas, he excels at novels, Friday is a really good book, bulky, falling in love with your rapist, a relationship with the guy, some mitigating fiction, your puritan locked down guy, a bit strange, a minor bug, Heinlein is at his best when he’s challenging you, shallow appreciation of Starship Troopers, the classroom stuff, arguing against, engage, come to an agreement, some candidate for the evil party, raise the age to 25, as a platform, get more people not to vote, does the Army vote for Biden?, the cultural perception, officers vs. non-officers, pro-war vs. anti-war, what’s the purpose, explicitly telling you this is for engagement, that speaks very well to the society, indoctrinate, in comparison, to write about his present, a veteran teaching the class, teacher pay, anything that will disrupt, learning things, conformity, marks are a way of controlling, we gotta do way more of that, a weird book, a classroom setting, a very complex book, a poll before the election, the 2020 election, the Army voted for Biden, go talk to the people, 2016, a choice between warhawks, Paul needs to flee, Clark Ashton Smith, a google ngram, you see the spikes, Edgar Allan Poe compared to H.P. Lovecraft, work it to make it work, Silverberg’s Downward To The Earth, 1981, Majipoor, throw in a contemporary of both of them, his presence doesn’t drop like Zelazny’s, H.G. Wells, pushing people’s buttons, not as controversial, challenging, Harlan Ellison, mostly a TV guy, mostly essays, Edgeworks, really bad press, full of typos, shoulda been smarter, reprint rights, number one is Ray Bradbury, he’s part of the curriculum, book guy, if you wanna be big you have to be mandated, Bradbury is safe and tame, he’s not great, he’s good, he’s got real good stuff, The Martian Chronicles, The Veldt, A Sound Of Thunder, he’s all about the feeling, he’s nostalgic, his ideas always have to do with feelings, what makes Fahrenheit 451, books are good, he’s in the slicks, his novels come later, his first movie is so flat, Rocket Ship Galileo, the worst Heinlein movie is the one he was involved with, was he smoking, Waldo, Magic Inc., a messy publication history, a lot of fixups, The Penultimate Truth, the Virginia Collection, full of typos, archive.org, The Unpleasant Profession Of Jonathan Hoag, at a certain point, I love Heinlein, I hate him, I love him so much, wow!, the market is drying up a little bit, that furious pace, that was his job, he was a fiction writer, Hal Clement was a teacher, Searchlight, All You Zombies, he loves the drugs, By His Bootstraps, how can he be so trusting of drugs?, he’s a tech bro, isn’t it the same worldview?, they’re the problem solvers, COVID on the brain, ivermectin, Jesse gets credit for something?, not that long ago in the 1970s and the 1980s, Alzheimer’s vs. dementia, cancer’s an old one, cancer is fundamental, the chances get greater and greater, a Whiggish view of science, revised or updated, why be so arrogant about our own views, historian, Heinlein: Tech-Bro by Evan Lampe, disrupting systems, taking government funding, the French Revolution, Enlightenment tech-bros, how about a 10 day week, the Temple of Reason, we got some good stuff out of that, Silicon Valley, they’re lighting, disruption is good, computer miniaturization, making things small and faster, multi-threads, a legit improvement, it doesn’t scale to non-hardware very well, running cooler, can do more at a faster pace, the software is magic on top of it, your monthly subscription, a Philip K. Dick story, Cory Doctorow, Australia has month, you will own nothing and you will eat bugs, funny on slack, mass resistance to the policy, why do students have phones with them, the Cory Doctorow explanation, the Evan Lampe explanation, Douglas Adams, cell phones looks like crumpets, a mainstream guy, the zoomers have revisited the Karl Marx line, my cell phone is trying to kill me, William Gibson, hacking the gibson through my cortex, Transmetropolitain by Warren Ellis, Neal Stephenson, because they’re geniuses, after whuffie, how good my camera is, how fast the wifi is, how come i don’t have a clip tray in my Windows, better and better then real bad, Mark Twain, the Civil War, avoiding poetry, 100 page poems, take a break from Mark Twain, both very Americans, traveled a lot, wrote for a living, Innocents Abroad, Life On The Mississippi, A Tramp Abroad, a short story that’s an anecdote, A Literary Nightmare, Anthony DeSimone, the story of a meme, feels relief, an early example of a meme, a little rhyme to remember ticket prices, so fuckin good, so clear but also has stuff to say, started out very optimistic ended cynical, gilded ages, everything travel, The Number Of The Beast, sick in bed, bedridden, trails off into nonsense, veers into the wrong direction, To Sail Beyond The Sunset, episode 103, Time Enough For Love, gonna explain something in Methuselah’s Children, he’s his own grandpa, very Heinlein, maybe that’s a different book, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, upcoming slots, Paul’s not available, the first Carson of Venus novel in on LibriVox, it’s different, builds a rocketship, crashes on Venus, a parody of the competency narrative, wrong way Carson, read it as a self-parody, Bison Frontiers of Imagination, Pirates Of Venus, unusual for Burroughs, Lost Of Venus, do the Heinlein, Black House, Logan’s Run, Clifford D. Simak, a VR novel, Lord Dunsany, Michael Crichton, Progeny by Philip K. Dick, (Alex) Pulp Covers, bother Paul, totally racist, still really good, the mom’s an alcoholic and the dad’s a lawyer, the drama of it, the family relationships, mixed African race, enslaved all the white people, all good, he’s experimenting, The Puppet Masters, people in a certain class, different shades of skin, being extra-specially sensitive to this stuff, they’re just people, people are people, they’re all Americans, he thinks men and women are very similar, Heinlein’s sexual politics, screenshotting, raping his own daughters, sexy Heinlein books, they go to the future, skinny dipping, he likes lookin at ladies, missing in Sixth Column, a similar scene, the rebels are all nudists, Heinlein got over it, being comfortable with his body, marriages, he’s right about that shit, people bang more, abolish gender?, nudism in Nazi Germany, body culture, ready for the military, read the back of the comics, if this goes on, many different body types, the cat one, Nudist Camp, gold wire, David Ashton Walsh, just a fascist who wanted to fuck his mom, Mike B. Young, his twin daughters as well, who is going to stop you, Lazarus Long, these are his fantasies, The Roads Must Roll is anti-union, the Canadian truckers protest, as a guy, a guild, not what unions are after, they’re not for solidarity, eugenicists want to take over, create a master race, what the engineers are after, Starman Jones, without joining a guild, stowaways on the ship pick it up by doing it, Lester Del Rey, Badge Of Infamy, be a guild member to use Chat GPT, a class of people, they’re tv writers, movie writers, Professor Coolbreeze, a rich tapestry, who still fucked babes, they’re puritans, strawman the guy who’s a writer of books from a long time ago, do some raping, why does he have rape in his stories, all the libertarian sci-fi, libertarian tendencies, he’s thinking things true, people can’t win an argument with a dead guy without strawmanning him, a skill that people lack, what people read, formulaic stories, maybe challenging, Jonathan is a writer who breaks a lot of rules, accidentally vs. intentionally, intent, appreciation of popular fiction and literature, people say they read Heinlein then can’t believe how racist he was, the party discipline requires denouncing, you gotta say this now, a very twitter phenomenon, party conformist, people who still watch actual broadcast television, two different worlds, far right far left, a maga hat on, keep a sun out of his eyes, BCIT hat, visible maga people, hand painted signs, Trump flags, being visibly breaking decorum, rainbow pin on their lapel, Ukraine flag on the lawn, a laptop class, political people on twitter, very political most days, how is this processing, something Paul tweeted to Evan, there’s something wrong with me, how come I don’t get this, Elon Musk was defending him limiting some traffic in Turkey about the election, especially in right wing countries, hearing Erdogan is pro-Putin, not conforming with NATO, ethno-nationalist, continuing policy, he caved on that one, did you lose your brain, Evan is against ethno-states, always thinking about the people of the United States being white, projecting 100s of years in the future, doesn’t fit into his future history, should have worked harder on the re-write, the Americans fighting against eh pan pan-Asian, fundamentally flawed, you can’t really fix this, a thoughtwave pattern, those kind of experiments, a magic wand that kills all the women and Dylan Mulvaney is still alive, servicing John Campbell’s position and needs, I’m selling books here, kills only Asians, why not just disperse the death ray in a wide beam, the recruitment, what stupidness that it is, a very minor work, more silly than anything else, goofy, enjoyable, character heavy and painful and a transformed world, very engaging, the character of the alcoholic mother, he recycles them a lot, the mother-son relationship, allows him to be castrated, never before explored before, doctor my balls don’t work, insert some glands in yeah, some pain down there, okay doctor, drugs work perfectly, did he tech bro himself out of babies?, if he had had babies, he would have petered out, they’re all about children, childbirth is the goal, Lazarus Long has hundreds of children, what’s the point of life, I may be awesome, life is kind of absurd, reading writers who have these problems, Edgar Allan Poe, going to the ladies, Zora Neale Hurston, girls, yes, invented everything, for an American audience at least, much more than that, literary criticism of his, this is shit, here’s why it’s shit, a lot of context, his novel is rich, interesting nested, figure out what mode he’s in, he has to fill pages, writes a story to a piece of art, William Wilson, for the present volume, written for a book called The Gift, doppelganger and debauchery, Evan’s plan, Gertrude Stein, ambitious, 2 a week, 895 episodes, Lovecraft and Dick readthrough, Civil War, the American character, the American spirit, it came from those authors, Twain is much more of a common man, the great American author, America made its historical context, feed into later works, American culture made something distinctive before it went into massive decline, the anarchist socialist communes, counted out America, right after the Civil War, an alternative that doesn’t suck in the world, Jesse’s pitch, being America’s bitch sucks, do it in Canada, oppression but not much, basic government service, Colossus will get things done, getting the temple built, Mary McCarthy, Willa Cather, Margaret Atwood, the Canadian education system, Canadian literature is not the best, 10 times the population, extremes that Canadians don’t suffer, have your literature imported, the CBC’s job, other countries’ literature, Poe and Dick and Lovecraft, Stephen King, great literature exporters, chains, people claim there is, Mark Fisher, good history being written, new history vs. new fiction, Neil Gaiman, wonderful scholarship, self-aggrandizing, Jesse’s argument, a smart way to do it, nice microphone, quiet time, Jesse’s a terrible narrator, come to some arrangement, focused on audio, evangelical for it, audible [the website] didn’t exist, a growth industry, good product and great covers, listening while walking, from a commercial standpoint, only still on the rise, Jonathan has been converted, somebody is listening to this five hour show, gab in the background, nope, Tommy Patrick Ryan audiobooks, he wants to help out, not a money relationship, a wheelbarrow with a big hole in it, wheelbarrows are expensive, cover that hole, Jesse was right the whole time, publishing tasks, corporeal, orgy, divan, figures out the voice of the narrator, the Bronson Pinchot vs. Tom Weiner, straight reader vs. performer, a female accent, speech impediment or style of speaking, nobody has any inflections, there is a spectrum, transparent narrators, the elephants are very calm, he’s from Brooklyn, you’re never going to hear the end of it, people think they can reinvent the wheel, profits in new markets, used bookstore project, who doesn’t want to own a used bookstores, when 9/11 happened, homeland security, the US Postal Service, you’re fucking with me, street traffic vs. online only, a good location without a bookstore, buy a bookstore, you get the market, an inventory, people bring in free stock, pandemic rules, the pandemic was a very good thing, jubilee, she gets a prize you get nothing, wait until Kamala is your queen, reelected for the 2nd time, carrying his corpse around from press conference to press conference, Canadian foreign and domestic policy is largely dictated by US foreign policy, a demented guy in charge, the institutions, Bryan Alexander, speech impediment, its not on the news, shaking hand with butlers, juice him up, the clips are out there, that’s the scenario, brings nothing to the table, rumblings, Megan Markle, Oprah, renounce her royal title, a bad book, pan Atlantic country, H2O (2004 CBC miniseries), plausible scenario, a reverse coup, as sequel too, David Cronenberg, James Cameron, Marilyn Chambers, early controversy, a movie industry, set in Toronto, The Fly (1986), A History Of Violence (2005), Scanners (1981), filming there, architecture is Canadian, brutalist, a fetish for him, Canadian actors who never leave Canada, any kind of traction, just move to the states, William Shatner, where the work is, pass yourself off, Deadpool guy, aggressively Canadian, Ryan Reynolds, big weird country, kinda fake, founding myth, the North-West Passage, this big thing that was in the way, French Canadians, teach the controversy, two big companies, 54:40 or fight, break the line at 49, take up to Alaska, war with Britain, Vancouver, Washington, Hudson’s Bay, two business men go into a meeting, fuck the people who live on either side of this line, the black exclusion laws, Oregon has a racist foundation, escaped slaves, the problems that that entailed, no black people allowed, weird behavior, weird politics, every year Jesse goes with boats with clubs, Jesse puts his skins in a warehouse, all Americans live in California, a very arctic thing, more into salmon and cedar, three day festival and everybody goes clubbing, almost like a J. Manfred Weichsel story, satire, Heinlein and all of them went to the government, Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee, there’s an audiobook of it, using science fiction ideas, Giants Of Eternity by Manly Wade Wellman, like in The War Of The Worlds, dig up all the super-scientists, Marie Curie, this is amazing, Charles Darwin, Thomas Alva Edison, Louis Pasteur, Isaac Newton, make fun of their personalities, got a big beard, the jokes write themselves, a cult of Edison, Edison skepticism, very important and also an asshole, a patent troll, a copyright troll, self-promotion, a machine that talks to the dead, break that out of the old dusty lab, Alfred Bester, telescopist, a baby seahorse nebula made out of anti-matter, wax cylinder, Ray Cummings, The Girl In The Golden Atom, super-science, a huge effect on science fiction, for a pulp author, still writing in the same mode, second pass at Edison, 1887-1957, the opposite of The Girl In The Golden Atom, our galaxy is an atom, just needs to fill pages, he had an idea about science, old fashioned for his time, Fitz James O’Brien, he’s sparky, What Was It?, dope smokin fiends, an invisible creature, while they’re smoking their hash, super racist, The Diamond Lens, a little lady, The Lost Room, Edgar Allan Poe, hoping to be sent to the front, lingered until April, died of tetanus, the biggest insurrection in U.S. history, 1/6, hundreds of people died in New York, The Wondersmith, nice big mustache, Guy De Maupassant, he’s in Weird Tales, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Vanity Fair, Atlantic Monthly, died at 35, he really did cosmicism before Lovecraft, a cosmic point of view, some tech, 100% down with science fiction, Mary Shelley, Margaret Cavendish, travel to other planets, it has to be Wells, Edward Page Mitchell, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, Jack London, 1899, The Clock That Went Backwards, The Chronic Argonauts, ancestors in Amsterdam, their aunt is immortal, one of them stays and makes her, Back To The Future, that’s like Heinlein, Travel By Wire by Arthur C. Clarke, The Man Without A Body, this new fangled technology called telephone, a teleporter or a transporter like in Star Trek, didn’t charge the battery, Victorian era science fiction, Sam Moskowitz renewed all his copyrights, Science Fiction By Gaslight, Under The Moons Of Mars, scientific language, carbon emissions are going to kill everybody, coal heaters, the air becomes solid, heavy stuff, an idea that is science fiction vs. feels like science fiction, this is science fiction, looking back from our perspective, writes it off, A Corner In Lightning by George Griffith, electricity is a finite resource, a battery in the Arctic, her non-fiction, the Royal Society, arguing against the scientific method, giant like a lobster, tools to examine the world, distorting the view of the world, her major argument, being facetious, people took it like I was serious, hyperbole, aka he’s evil, an over-reading, trying to enact political change, excluded, utopian fiction, women in power, all we need is Hillary and everything will be all right, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, he makes fun of himself, liberal positions, made Britain a very powerful science, the science, peer reviewed then it’s science, a 30 page essay, coherence problems, doing science, replicate it, that’s science, holy shit I did this thing with electricity, this Ben knows what he’s talking about, spoilers, trained not to care, peer reviewed scientific study on whether spoilers spoil, subsequent studies, they don’t want to hear it, they believe that spoilers spoils, hearing about a good science fiction novel makes me want to read it, who dunnit?, Twin Peaks, Glass Onion (2022), getting triggered, incorrect view of books, shipping, relationshipping, root for the two character get together, have they not seen Moonlighting?, lotta dumb people appreciate things because they’re dumb, people wanted to watch adult things, Are You Being Served, Yes, Minister, I like Scooby Doo, still stuck in the Scooby Doo phase, unable to put their pants on, they’re not thinkers, Dune, just gave a Hugo award to, they didn’t do the banquet scene because they’re making it dumber, Lady Jessica is crying every three seconds, no voice over narration, no whisper talking, the miniseries, Dune is a smart book, they’re reading it wrong, they’re reading it shallowly, jumpin on Heinlein, it’s literature, think critically about it, some guy wrote a fiction book, Kittycat Massacre, Cat Killer by Donald E. Westlake, the death of a fake cat, basically The Cats Of Ulthar with a juvenile delinquent in New York, Donald E. Westlake, The Balloon Tree, Nolan and Simak, slow/fast, new to audiobook, first audiobook last week, coming into something new in this format, Motar/Mota/Motak, page breaks, chapter titles, you gain your eyes back, ebook bumps (braille), feeling a book, so hardcore, half-assed job, oeuvre, exercise, Jonathan is not ready for this, never go back, Aftershocks to Shokz, they screw on your bone?, sits near your ear canal, transmits through the skin into the bone into your ear, vibraty, implants?, Open Run, Open Comm, one ear free is the rule, this tech is ripe, proprietary but magsafe style, big long charge, soon…, bluetooth doesn’t work underwater, swim while listening.

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein

Paul Rivoche art for Sixth Column

Posted by Jesse WillisBecome a Patron!

Reading, Short And Deep #404 – Virtuoso by Herbert Goldstone

Reading, Short And Deep

Reading, Short And Deep #404

Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss Virtuoso by Herbert Goldstone

Here’s a link to a PDF of the story.

Virtuoso was first published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1953

Posted by Scott D. Danielson Become a Patron!