readalong – SFFaudio

The SFFaudio Podcast #900 – READALONG: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

Jesse and Alex (Pulpcovers) talk about Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

Talked about on today’s show:
read all the Crichtons, middle school, volunteered at a library, everything else available, the John Langes, paperbacks, the 10th Michael Crichtons, theoretically a John Lange novel, a Murder In Hollywood, the pirate sites, don’t trust the estates, a better writer, Timeline is mid-1990s, several revelations, hey mom, how you doin?, science, biology, animals, a bad choice, doctors don’t actually have good jobs, mechanics (essentially), a human being, you can’t just buy a new car, how doctors are, horrible people if they think their magic powers are useful, patients vs. objects to be experimented on, genetics, amphibians, snakes, turtles, parrots, he wrote a screenplay, Westworld, they’re all the same subject: theme parks, the evil master plan, the whole purpose of it was for a theme park, the company is gonna make a theme park, exploit this stuff, telling some investors, a little vague, not as good a book, this new technology is going to change the world, genetics, make nuclear look like nothing, the quantum realm, a good movie, not to fanboy over the most popular thing, The Andromeda Strain, mainstream books, Michael Crichton doesn’t come out of the science fiction ghetto, technothriller, weird science fiction guys, don’t worry, Margaret Atwood, marketing purposes, fight against that, he didn’t read Astounding, Larry Niven, the classics, a parallel evolution, born in the 1940s, 50s and 60s wise, he tells us, he loved Conan Doyle, The Lost World, kinda pulpy, Ian Malcolm as his Sherlock Holmes, he comes back, they thought I was dead for a while, his only sequel, The Terminal Man is his Frankenstein, the story of the guy who had a tin-foil, literally gave him foil, insane asylum, turned it into a thriller, The Andromeda Strain is The War Of The Worlds, in an interview somewhere, a neat twist, an inversion, a baby and a sterno drinker, Congo we could argue that it’s King Solomon’s Mines, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, getting all the classics, an Ian Fleming one, a James Bond one, doing his best to tip his hand, a lost nuke story, Thunderball, Grave Descend, really good, get crackin on these things, pirate books, parallel evolution, axes to grind, the theme parking of reality, what tattoo it was, Robert Picardo, emergency medical hologram on some lady’s arm, liked Star Trek Voyager, the worst of the best ones, pathetic and sad, Disney adults, bought out, Larry Ellison’s son, the phrase is the important part, they have rides and stuff, maybe Universal Studios, aging out of it, a whole Stars Wars theme park, a class of Star Wars adults, a new Punisher special, Marvel adults, some patheticness in our society now, a lot more in Westworld, Westworld is a great novel, the mystery box problem, such a thing, horrible writing, one of the things that killed the new Lord Of The Rings show, J.J. Abrams, just tell the story, a weird artificial mystery, writing the novel chapter by chapter, no idea where the story is going, cohesive idea, a lot of speeches in this book, the Jeff Goldblum performance, Michael Crichton’s voice, he’s smart, had to compare the movie to the book, what the book was doing, might as well do it now, almost a perfect movie, in relief to the book, the ideas in the book, the differences between them, Hammond is the bad guy in the book, the same kind of bad guy as we see in Timeline, obsessed assholish ceo, an explicit liar, the flea circus, dream of entertaining children, he brought the kids for a specific purpose, approval more likely, “spared no expense”, sitting at the end with the ice cream, his death in the book is transfered to the death to the bad guy from Seinfeld, Nedry, who the traitor is, intro scene on the beach, all the terrible personality traits, the villain of the movie vs. the villain of the book, motivation, Drug Of Choice, a book, a phrase, during covid, injections, not ivermectin, not hydroxychloroquine, buy my own island, the trigger for everything goes wrong, eaten, in the sequel movie, nibbled to death, Peter Stormier, stuck in a bunch of other movies, the family on the beach, Jurassic World, parents getting divorced, the aviary dorm, the movie follows closely, Eric S. Rabkin, had a hand in the script, a Hollywood movie director, enough juice, a Spielberg movie, how to make money, to be filmed, wanted to make a movie with Sean Connery, the opening of Timeline and the opening of this are quite similar, a road trip, Mexico and Costa Rica, a huge glaring flaw, Costa Rica doesn’t have an army, a civilian military, Hammond and Muldoon, heavy armament, rocket launchers, SPAS-12, tase the dinosaurs or rocket launcher, a solid 50 caliber, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, this is a trope in science fiction magazines, James Patrick Kelly, people go back in time and hunt dinosaurs, recreating that, definitely cool, some little slippage, dispense with it, how many raptors are left, after the kids are switched, why is the movie so good?, the best scene in the movie, the t-rex, the banner falls down, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, something to put in your trailer, when Steven Spielberg dies, so visuals, pure Spielberg, they’re in the helicopter, the stand-in for Crichton, love interests in the movie, the kids are in there too, heading back to the mainland, are those supposed to be dinosaurs, the idea of the book and of the movie, colourful birds, a symbolic hint as to what’s going on, if there is a message of the book, what dinosaurs are like, probably wrong, popularized The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, such good speeches, we’re destroying the planet, the earth’s going to be fine, we’ll be dead, don’t overstate it, weird mental trap, be precise, it hurts for a while, moving the needle, referencing earlier work, I was not a paleontologist in the early 90s and the 80s, middle school, a position being argued for, doing research, a lot like Carl Sagan, a science popularize, the book holds up, the CD-Roms, the kray supercomputers, super-secret navy lab, it has 300kb of memory!, nobody has 3 krays, $80 on ebay now, Malcolm in the book, complex systems are subject to chaos theory, he’s a Cassandra, we do build zoos, see I was right, as a narrative thing, to be charitable, able to interview Ian Malcolm, the first zoos were not very good, video reconstruction based on photographs, a scale flying machine before the Wright Brothers, flying machines, figuring out control surfaces, excited about airplanes, go to the airshow, Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Dulles, a space shuttle, an SR-71, downtown D.C., why aircraft are so important, a peak of technologies in a physical space, see and understand and climb into, smaller and smaller, difficult to appreciate, bi plane vs. monoplane and tri-plane, let’s do 4, tri-plane was peak for a while, the shape was more important than the number, by the middle of the 30s nobody’s doing biplanes anymore, this seems to work, the end of the book, cleaning up the details, only eating the things that are high in, catchphrase, ‘they’re turning the frogs gay’, read a lot of stuff, Alex Jones, very defensible, Plato, really wide, crazy voice, he’s a doctor, they read the same stuff, used the word gay?, the tweak on the quote, a really good book, based on science, high concept, describe what the book is about, characters being characters, Snakes On A Plane, Sharknado, best elevator pitch: Jurrasic Shark, The Meg (2018), the action of this book is a lot like Aliens (1986), Alien Earth, monsters get out, all deadly, feed you to their babies, Hobo With A Shotgun, Grindhouse, the Fu-Manchu one, sign me up, covers of books are like that, boob armour, the Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan’s Island, the premise of the show, a sea-shanty, he’s excellent at this, the book is really good, he’s less good at people than he is a really good stories, Eaters Of The Dead, accessible content, explicitly Beowulf, the other is crazy, sort of a character, an arrogant asshole, the kids are the kids, the scientists are interchangeable, Sam Neil, by picking actors who look like something, what he’s seeing, Ian Malcolm is in the book as a real character, the kid actors, concertizing, relationships and interests, hacker girls 11 years old, very draggy section of the book, chock full for charts and illustrations, the menus of the computer, menu screen after menu screen, how to reboot, skim over it, as a blueprint, the film succeeds in the way that the book can’t, the demon of success, the audience demands other stuff, read The White Company, we must have more Jurassic Park, the curse of success, I just can’t finish the last book, sequelitis, marketing, ranking it in the Crichton books, better than Timeline, the drop in the quality of the writing, he’s getting fettered, a paperback market, he’s not doing the Michael Crichton thing, Disclosure, a legal thriller, the technothriller, Prey, taller and narrower, a babboon or a monkey running a barcode, patentable, life finds a way, the distillation, right to repair, in normyville, aircraft parts, legally impossible to fix their aircraft, extraction stuff, go back to physical media, massive files, 10tb movies, you can do it, going back to physical media, back to horse and buggy, especially on twitter, owning their own copy of a thing, you want your own copy, a big paperback guy, digital, search it, takes up no space, another copy at home, a book server, audiobooks and ebooks in one app, update the language to be more inclusive, like they’re behind, excited about amphibians, a business that’s self-sustaining, follow your interest, getting into rye, fertilized the pig pen, not really into grain myself, that lack of interest by most people means they’re behind the times, find a way to get a computer in the house, I want my own modem, mom, the 14.4 for my 286sx, I’ve heard good things about the internet, cultural lag, subject to forces of control, it’s a prison break, life is a prison break, it’s always been a prison break, ceolcanth is really important, what’s going on in evolution, what normies are doing, playing phone games, tic tock, scrolling vertical video, “brain rot”, Moonraker by Ian Fleming, watchable, Tex Avery, Bugs Bunny style scene, he’s on the last leg, Roger Moore touching a lady’s leg, they fight, Jaws appears out of nowhere, never see the stewardess again, the implication is…, he and another Bond girl, giving the captor the eyes, a wink, which sexy person tied up on the table, funny thing underneath, Hugo Drax is named after Lord Dunsany’s younger brother, Hugo Boss, funny uniforms, Lord Plunkett, big long names, Ian Fleming knew the younger brother who was in the navy, a weird connection, a small world in that class of people, lords and second sons in the UK, they all know each other, why Roger Moore movies are fun and funny, the laser fights, every scene is payoff after payoff, as close to Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd as you can get, delightful, they’re just horrible, he’s cool lookin, the cars are cool lookin, there’s no humour, there’s no fun, darker as they go, good action movies, good Bond movies, fairly dark, Casino Royale, so bleak, mommy issues with M, he’s a servant, darker earlier James Bond movies, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Diana Rigg at her Riggiest, good to go to the source, almost all of them are Canadian public domain, did somebody fake-up a new James Bond thing?, anti-MSM, that’s a sentence, an anti-trans diatribe, Bond was struck by something, not even a pretense of diversity here, Athelstain, women or non-white or disabled, he was king, so fuckin unbelievable, a human, artificial intelligence is mostly bio, people operating on automatic, some human signed off on it, some estate said this is James Bond suitable material, people want to adapt these things for a different audience, expand the audience, Hunger Games books, teenage girls and people who used to be teenage girls, a boy fashion show, a frequent complaint about many things, they don’t care, PBS guy Charlie Rose, the sequel, he knew he had a big audience of children, he had an agenda, compatible, inevitable interest, a challenge, not mentioned is the big piles of cash, rationalizing it, a sequel is very hard to do, more of the same, too different, the problem, the goodreads ratings are all 3.6 except when it is a series, 6 books into the series, the hardcore fans, the declining number of readers, do not finish, do not rate, a crazy feedback loop, more of the same, The Lord Of The Rings, way off topic, gave up, the story had ended, much more like Sherlock Holmes, this high concept, Snakes On A Plane 2?, Samuel Jackson, one of the coders, Arnold, nameless secondary characters, evacuate the island, random nameless staff, storm coming, core group, random security guards, the chef, killed in the lodge, a security guards desk, is there a body there?, dead people, killed, splatted, eaten, death count goes way down in the movie, a little ride at the beginning, the hero characters, Sattler and Grant, an item, a very good movie move, subverted in the book, he doesn’t like kids, spends a bunch of times with the kids, she’s my grad student, he’s a widower, obsessed with one thing, live out in the badlands of Utah, if he had grown up and joined the military, work for great ideas, a lot of fun stuff, Binary, about psychology, parallel characters, the baddie the goodie, mirror images, a binary gas, mix two liquids on the plane, late 60s novel, early 70s movie, the book cooks, a naked lady on the cover, not a lady in the book, raw psychological paperback mindset, 400 pages exactly, all of yesterday, all week, Robert E. Howard and Hugh B. Cave, The Cult Of The White Ape, see you on the internet.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #898 – READALONG: All Flesh is Grass by Clifford D. Simak

The SFFaudio Podcast #898 – Jesse and Scott talk about All Flesh is Grass by Clifford D. Simak

Talked about on today’s show:
1965, the point in his career, without serial in magazines, what’s happening after 1958, distribution is just awful, Galaxy, Astounding/Analog, F&SF, magazine sales, hardcover 1st, Doubleday, purple covers, it’s ok, mid 60, psychedelic covers, horrible, Foss cover?, spaceship with blowout, a science fiction book, flowers and faces, rocketship = science fiction, dragon = fantasy, good cover or not, where we start, what’s the cover look like, favourite, love this book, a fan, one of his best ones, the suspicion of the main character, suspicion of the flowers, he/it/they be, is it justified?, Simak’s behind it all, trust Simak, aggressively hostile at times, talking to the politicians, personal suspicion, harsh circumstances, losing his business, can’t pay his phone bill, unsettling, am I losing my mind or not?, very Philip K. Dicky, guy standing in his garden talking to his tree, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, a delusional homeless man, careful framing, trying to go for an effect, clunky careful framing, this is just a crazy man, all he has to do to be a secret hero of earth, a solipsistic power fantasy of a child, reinforce that, drinking himself to death, Tupper, autistic?, something wrong with him, the primary source of contact until the phones get going, until the barrier shows up, backstory, setting up the scenario, particular distress, it’s cool, so many Simaks, Dick is similar or vice versa, he really cooks with short stories, that old Del Rey paperback, to read Simak is to read science fiction, kinda true, you think of space, other alien planets, are they really other planets?, what recurrs in his books, humanity is screwing up badly, there’s a way out, a friend named Gavin, the solutions he always gives are fantastical, to the point of destruction, a science fiction trope, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the one with Gort [The Day The Earth Stood Still], we will destroy you, Simak was already on it in 1965, gotten into scraps, town asshole, a pretty brutal fight, blood, the girl runs off, periods of things like that, lash out, a surprise, dogs fight, turning on each other, snarling down on the ground, a real town, Millville, population 127, the town is disappearing, instead of Ray Bradbury nostalgia, I’m still here, world wars, humanity as a species, we are bad because we did nukes, those rockets have yet to go off, putting this collective guilt on us as individuals not to do war, follow orders, like we’re the bad ones as a collection, Bradford or Brad, humanity itself is worth saving, not a Malthusian you fuckers have to stop breeding, Ring Around The Sun, empty and beautiful, mobs, a newspaperman, hip deep in that, he’s seeing everything, the plant is closing, this is key to understanding, look at the news and process it everyday, local news, see the trends happening, the tv says there’s going to be good weather next week, the current state of humanity, WWII, throes of Vietnam, greed, corporations, extremely pessimistic about humanity, an optimism about what humanity can be, on the whole humans good, extreme ideas, the knowledge of the universe, this incredible knowledge, tap that, solve these problems in ourselves, recurring stuff, that optimism, laying down some goodness, the interaction with the flowers, he does talk to an elm tree, through the telephone, in his best novel, Galactic Pot-Healer, talk to Mr. Job, an ai that put you out of work, go to Cleveland, radio broadcasts, look in your toilet tank, doesn’t like being mentally ill, you are needed for a great project, a return to a belief into something bigger than yourself, raising the sunken cathedral, find a purpose, a novel of a romantic poem, the romantic poets, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, continuous as the stars that shine, along the margin of a bay, they outdid the sparkly waves, a jocund company, the blissful solitude, no alien intelligence inside these daffodils, how’s he gonna resolve this book?, what if we’re cut off from this possibility, the other species can cure humanity of its ills, they aren’t just healing us, they’re replacing the broken things in us, witch-doctor, penicillin, an alien economy, the way the romantics work, you go for a walk, the birds of the air, the grass, the trees, then you go home and you write it down, an experience of nature, a nature walk transformed into a piece of art, aliens who want to contact humanity, a solution, they need our love, they need us to appreciate them, an olive branch, the flowers say, we need living space, we have no hands, for the benefit of each of us, many earths, a common aim and purpose, that’s heavy, that’s the threat, suspicious of corporations, Monsanto says, they’re resistant to this, the terminator gene, making ip laws on nature, when Simak posits some aliens, can’t we just trust them, he is the god of the book, this god is good, malevolent aliens, if Lovecraft wrote this book, Mars is a dead world, never been any evil acts done on Mars, a kindly touch, some encouraging words, that’s a sterileness, uplifted, in a quest to enjoy symbiosis with other minds, first contact, we meet aliens and we become friends, a flower garden, cherry blossoms, blackberry blossoms, we need a closer relationship based on me eating part of you, what those bones were, they wiped themselves out, never developed properly, delivered to his plate, the money being grown by the flowers, not real money, what makes it not real?, it hasn’t been officially blessed, cynical and looking for trouble, a communist!, even they’ve got a program in Mississippi, how important money is to us, if each of those bills had a new serial number, it’s above our pay grade, be able to spend it, break the system, some flaws with the book, the dome, Under The Dome, definitely came from this, aliens again, playing a game, adolescent, he fails on his endings a lot, what it did to that small town, The Tommyknockers, The Mist, the scene in the grocery store, we gotta sacrifice one of us, I should sacrifice myself, the homeless guy rushes in, back to his father, looms over the book, the original sin, cultivated and cared about them, a repayment, an investment, a very weird book, it takes the sentiment and thought behind romantic poetry and turns it into a science fiction novel, the barrier proves this guy’s not crazy, to prove existence, pass in between, permission somehow, there’s something there, create the crisis and the proof, if this were a Philip K. Dick novel, calm down bro, running around town, an invasion like Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, the horror of mental illness, thinking people are demons, a man in crisis, good hints, what’s she gonna do, all the great people who came out of this town, self-insert, a business guy, not super-imaginative, straight laced mind, a means to fund other projects, set aside some of this money selling gadgets, write cheques, really cool, a collection The Gentle Invaders, The Midwich Cuckoos, the barrier, a whole town in put to sleep, 9 months later all the women are pregnant, still rape, a new hybrid human alien species, too gentle to make the aliens malevolent, Leigh Brackett, Fritz Leiber, Mack Reynolds, 1969, Hans Stefan Santesson, editor of Fantastic Universe, Edward D. Hoch, 60 cents, Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1966, Judith Merrill’s review, long winded, right after Earth Abides, John Christopher, personal nomination, conformity vs. individualism, some zombies too, no hasty conclusions, solid speculative content, oxymorons, meaningful and eminently readable, our protagonist is an individuals, mobs, rumor vs. fact, there will be peace, we will be nuked, panic, she’s bringing her own stuff to it, him vs. the government, some bigshot through the dome, NPCs, quite well realized, the father of the girlfriend, knows himself, this is your money, here have a drink, self-concious of his own limitations, a history of all the people in this town who are making a big impact in the world, they’re all inspired by the flowers, no?, a walk in the woods, lovely daffodils, a spring in your step, the beauty of the nature, a Doc Labyrinth story, shoes that come to life, a living thing, zany guy’s house, latest invention, The Preserving Machine, allow beauty to survive nuclear war, transformed into a living creature, lay eggs or gestate, life persists even in the face of disaster, these plants preserve knowledge and truth in themselves and want to share it, the animals that come out are reflections of what Philip K. Dick thinks of the chamber musicians, deadly serious, plant life is the thing I’m talking about, jokes about my favourite musicians, this field of flowers is beautiful, cultivate your own garden, write a poem, maybe someone will like, a rifle and a tower, kill all the politicians who want to make war, get better soil, love it, very biblical too, these are not even a monocrop, they can be sticks or vegetables, fruit, how amazing fruit is, eat me, take me, get my seeds elsewhere, this deliciousness serves us both, our relationship to animals, chickens, beef, get upset, how can you eat that thing, a creature, ready to be harvested, what they’re there for, this planet must be sterile, only because it can feel pain, our relationship and its relationship with us, the whole animal business, a lot more nightmarish, the John Wyndham line, the humanity, cause war, I’m cool the way I am, a good book, a line in here, they need us, use their knowledge, make it meaningful, take on meaningful, a computer database that’s no one using, the big PDF page, to read an appreciate, to turn into audiobooks, the cost is your time and clicking on it, self-aggrandize, treasure must be appreciated, not forcing your hand, crappy stories too, not trying to curate, this is exciting, make it more available, it would be bad if nobody ever appreciate it, building a library and nobody comes, adds meaning when people use it, a beautiful sunrise, a beautiful starry night, it needs to be percieved to have its full flower, never been an evil act on mars, nobody tortured on Venus, no genocide on the Moon, a really satisfying chocolate bar or what have you, thumbs up!, really happy with him, more than half-way through, the repeated theme, industry is disrupted or be disrupted by new technology that makes everything free, The Visitors, free car, free house, forever car, forever house, all super-cheap, gadgets, little things that can be made in that small town factory, outside factory in the next dot over in the endless, The Fisherman aka Time Is The Simplest Thing, the impact of technology on people, how can I make my life more like that, mow more lawns, get more cash, give money to this hospital, some scam, when a corporation is trying to get me to give money to a charity that’s some scam, we have to do something, go for a walk, be kind to your neighbors, don’t give into the idea that you are guilty of what your government does, Heinlein being in favour of the Vietnam War, I’m in favour of good things and not bad things, thinking about the people around me, think locally, notice the effect of the global effect, you have to be nice to Tupper, he lies to the mom, the bum who’s always scrounging for money, intimately invovled, a very subversive sort of take, eccentrics in a small community are worthy of attention and not being dismissive, where the bum lives, drinks himself to death, a fellow human, he’s asking, something there, gotta do some more Simak methinks, on the other hand, a PDF that eventuially got turned into an audiobook, Hellflower by George O. Smith, a short novel, the cover has a lady, a space surfer on the skids, an alien chemistry of unstoppable evil, the flowers are bad, a star master, soul shattering ruin, the one unparonable error, he didn’t die, bog on Venus, the cool gleaming sea of deep space, the vilest parasite in the universe, peddler of a poison, plants bad book, plants good book, fun, before we do another palate cleanser, a good narrator, 160 pages, nice and short, Saturday May 30, nice short book, Hellflower!, some Virgil Finlay, quite pretty, considering reading, not public domain, 3 pages, pretty cute, from the same magazine, Startling Stories, Take A Seat by Eric Frank Russell, I am got through, much luck, psycheport machine, tremendous, something knows, must slither like mad, might never find again, I am excitement, his thing, it call strong, get self sender activated, deep and dark, never done before, foice-sensor, counterswing circuit work, is mighty brilliance, streakiness, of what I do not know, not like mine, nothing but dark, am slow and careful, hearers on top, only two hearers, true mind cry behind noises, much poor, one this side one that, feets, what fore these bits, no fouice sensor, many hard bits in body, other think, it want to keep it maybe, Jelap, everlasting in dark, it know smell, other thing, as for reptiles, smell only olfactory spray, if eater is much small, have thing in it, flat soft, not dexterous extensibles, come cold and round, try to move feets, suddenly I find eyes, seek sensors, much poor only two, maybe eyes discarded, am fool, eyes have soft covers, blingbirds, much laughing for relief, there is four things, have wearings over bodies, shiny bag, two stiff tentacles, white and soft like bark bugs, mind call, much gentle, none receive, no controls, I am seated, sound noise, controls might injure, they make noise with eater, force wind, sloppy gargle, odd one with bag, very white, make think they see me inside, hold himself much white, he help it up when other arrive, enormous strain to reach me, is foolish not to tell, involuntary, shift feets a bit, show psycheport, shift feets, they much stupid, with eaters, one odd comes close, looks inside, middle cold thing I felt before, how can I make noise deep inside, do not like me, put wet on it, touch this, that, they is finish, much white, clamour in distance, stiff tentacle, light go much low, elctron fluid through me, they deading me, an alien sense its way through something, the alien has transferred consciousness to a human, the alien is in the human’s body, the wife or the husband, I am Jelap, I am the guy who’s not here, an electric chair, wanted to not be there, reached out into the universe, experiments on an alien planet, the dying or just shocked body, wild, the key for me, this is horrible, odd one comes close, is he alive?, middle cold thing, stethoscope, cannot hear me inside, trapped in this body, a couple of Lovecraft stories, Beyond The Wall Of Sleep by H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Out Of Time, travels the world, steward and caretaker, 30 years older, finishing the lecture, they regress him, vegetable people, they’re explorers from Earth’s early history, transferring their consciousness, plant monsters, cute, a good one for Reading, Short And Deep, a great story, class in five minutes, date not set yet, bringing Rose with her?, so little of her husband, a little bit of email, a computer thing, a major computer guy, switching jobs, take care.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #897 – READALONG: The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim

The SFFaudio Podcast #897 –Jesse and Alex (Pulpcovers) talk about The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Talked about on today’s show:
family names, English people are weird, disappointing, what year this book came out, a prolific writer, the reader’s digest version, it’s really cool, no one else has read it, post WWI, it has to be 1920, there’s a movie in 1921, a weird and good book, the ending obviously, four different things going on, the 39 steps meets The Prisoner Of Zenda, a lot more swordfighting, talk about previous swordfights, he fell on my sword, came away with a broken arm, it skips all the fun in a certain sense, subdues Robert Urthank, smokin, alcohol, a lot of guns on birds, like it a lot, the only way it could be constructed, a new student, choose your own adventure book, if you do this turn to page 18, death, premature imprisonment in a skull mountain, the best ending, rewrite this as a Choose Your Own Adventure, do you drink the whiskey?, at some point in the narrative, the author tricks us, a possibility, really suspicious, my fake wristwatch that I don’t have, that’s a slip-up if…, the main character is called by his proper name by the narrator of the book, the twist is he’s not lying, it comes out of nowhere, a clever book, oooh!, The Sixth Sense, sitting around in rooms with a little kid, a good twist, missed the twist, the revelation which was kinda cool, massively improved, do you go on another hunt?, do you go in the black wood?, is this a little Hound Of The Baskervilles thing too, her brother who’s mentally deficient, we don’t have the butler, we’re supposed to be in on it, very cool, how can you do this to me?, I was not your buddy Leopold, does the book play fair?, misses something he should have known, I’ve been gone for so long, he also was gone for a long time, a teenager, a trick for us, in on the secret, the German guy, we will expand!, we need breathing room, use this for inspiration!, take my papers, hold them for me, two documents that are opposite, Germans are nice fellows, evil conquerors, in combination with the black wood, haunted place from the past, a body buried there, Baron Ragstein, his own demon in his backstory, his real demon?, fought a man and was exiled, mirroring, at Oxford, both at the same school, one is charged with the other’s bills at school, a nice little touch, a very good condensation of scenes in the book, other Universal Horror movies, a werewolf story, the calling in the night, a fakeout, clearing the black wood, the resolution of the valance, which is he?, the spy or the counter spy, he’s the hero, we never see him meeting with the British, the white linen, what happened in Africa, Africa changes a man, the cousin, Africa, India, all the same, the women are black and there’s lots of beasts, he took the Baron’s money, and followed the Baron’s plan, quite striking, guys gone to seed, the first of his name not to waste all his money, degenerate, regenerate, the family line always degenerates, a Lovecraftian family, in the basement eating your friend, I’m paying off the family debts, his skin looks better, standing a little straighter, like you’ve been a military uniform, a great surprise as a possibility, the author knew what he was doing the whole time, turning old novels into Choose Your Own Adventures, poor student, every poor kid, The Great Gatsby, a rich guy observed by an acquaintance/friend, the very first Hard Case Crime book, Grifter’s Game, conmen, a supersolid horrible noir awesome ending, the lobby was air conditioned, his tone apologetic, every stinking dive, palm up, he liked to receive it, a great opening, the girl is tied to the chair, making her a heroin addict, the great dissipation, you don’t want to have him for a boyfriend, great writing carries you from page to page, overly long, the lack of action, The Thirty Nine Steps is a bad book in a certain sense, written during the war, a spy book, a chase sequence, Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, at the Eagle’s Nest, some SS guards discover him, he goes to ground on the run the whole book, it never says Adolph Hitler, a WWI book with the knowledge of WWII, awesome pace, what’s going to happen next, Hitchcock movies, this is a spy book, is it though?, you’ve got a secret mission, what’s the special mission?, elected maybe?, an English nobleman that’s secretly a German spy, spend all this money, we will back you to the hilt, the meeting with the Kaiser, a cameo, Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Kaiser Wilhelm, over muscled Kaiser, we’re going to win World War One, a fluff piece of fun, a really good twist, not as tight or compelling as Lawrence Block, pre-war English dialogue, not well remembered, The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson, his poetry for children, Treasure Island, how often have you thought about Kidnapped, Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, it has been spoiled, it is very possible…, the way the book was written, bad writing?, the Englishman was seen in Africa and was not dead, he’s in the room with us right now!, the rumor is true?, the way the book handles this is to never give a definitive reaction from our viewpoint character, too long for what the idea does, Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde, a cool idea, Two-Face, a man who is both men, it works better as a film, never being inside somebody’s head, the camera goes to their pov, or over narration, doing the original star wars with old Luke, narrating the events of the original star wars, I didn’t know at the time, now I’m a blue milk addict, you can do things with viewpoint, on a desert island, Chagos, Prisoner Of Zenda everytime, on every page level, piled up coincidence, sparky and fluffy, almost a play, drinking and meetings, a little romance, the romance storylines, falling in love with Lady Domini, she’ll find you out, she’s a very nice kid, Hungarian princess, unrolls the scroll, their both in exile in Africa, killed a guy, disgraced and can’t come home, a collision in Africa, the way I’m going to kill him, very very salty, passive aggressive way of killing somebody, fighting to the death off-screen, the flashback to that fight at the end, make the whole movie filled with lots of flashbacks, Memento (2000), tell the story backwards, nice awesome noir reveal, have meaning in his life, the only thing that matters is me, companion books, now let’s see it from the other guy’s point of view, which universe you’re in, a burning desire to live, that setup at the beginning, that contrast at the beginning, beaten down and thin, the shakes from the alcoholism, erect Prussian, definitely the German guy, turned his entire life around, that’s the mental work we have to do, if you’re not second guessing the book review already, a goodreads review, 1 star, is that guy lying to me, you used to have curly hair?, can you grow out of curly hair?, a very girl book, lack of outdoor action, The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, a swordfighty action movie, no a brooding plotter, clockwork vengeance machine, swordfights with people, work em in there, it would make sense for either persona, on the riverbank, the most interesting character, madman, the schoolteacher, a nice period piece, rowing, the fencing team, a big smite on his face, a secret scar, why he can’t get undressed with his wife, new scars, a birthmark, arm break, not a short book for what it is doing, that big a disparity, Timeline by Michael Crichton, condensation, the movie just zips along, a few too many filler scenes, repetition, adapt this well into a film, fun movie stuff, the definite film version of this is yet to be made, Trading Places (1983), The Prince And The Pauper by Mark Twain, Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein, inherit the kingdom, they’re both barons or a baronet, a woman back home who’s mad/in love with him, injuries and deaths on both sides, the balancing act for the mirror, William Wilson by Edgar Allan Poe, for the present, a call me Ishmael situation, making a joke about the publication, this other kid, degenerate gambler, reflected badly on the narrator, a long short story, stabbed in a swordfight, split personality, a split self, which one am I, The Prestige, a very good book, an estate in it, a weird dark land, a confection, a bon bon, very delicious, greatly declined, the Star that was E. Phillips Oppenheim, lost authors, no champion, Mr. Grex Of Monte Carlo, 2 books a year for years and years, the concept binds him in certain ways, the secret he wants to reveal, knife’s edge, a certain distancing effect upon the reader, imagine this as a Hard Case Crime book, the first 16 cover proofs, what Charles Ardai was doing, he took a Sherlock Holmes story and published it as by A.C. Doyle, a screaming lady in a nightgown, contractually obligated, I wanna tell stories about the KKK, the mormons, playfulness of an author in his element, a good place to be for a reader, in contrast, some people on the internet are either biobots or dumb, a photograph of some books at the drugstore, food deserts, book deserts, you have to walk into a driver, the newsstand, the spinner rack, the gas station, stumble across things, more and more unusual, the oasis of the library, free books on the internet, you have to go find them, confronted by things that attract your eye, a bbq place with great smells, thousands of views, silly comments, too many James Patterson and Bill Clinton, who wrote this book?, a Stephen King, new paperbacks out now, a wasteland, the same thing is happening with movies, kids these days are not watching movies, never watches movies, old movies, so many rereleases of classic movies, not the reboot, make another couple million bucks, once the culture of film becomes so backward looking, breaks that cultural transmission, theatre, the stuff they put out is limited, an apartment near Broadway, some variety, elitist, ballet, new operas, performing the Nutcracker a dozen times a year, a high culture low culture, horse racing and dog racing, just degenerate gamblers, just dog food, if you thought that it had value, subsidization is another scam, lots of scams going on, the point of the movie The Producers was, something special about the book one, the codex as we don’t often call it, the paperback, the publicity materials, they did the thing, “pulp revival”, Pulpcovers.com, noir and hardboiled, fantasy, high fantasy, low fantasy, dragon on a big pile of gold, little invisible guy, The Black Arrow, N.C. Wyeth, anything N.C. Wyeth draws you in, Men Of Iron by Howard Pyle, a movie, 1891, a student of Howard Pyle, impulsive rash, hard knocks, carefully watched and guided, a key player, too many possibles, early boy’s adventure, middle school, a big tournament, barely stand, lifted by a crane, that’s not how armour worked, maybe Crichton read that, responding to it, no one could possibly move in this armour, much tougher guys, speaking with authority, using other sources to make this claim, ignore the weird Victorian ideas about how armour worked, betrayal the Prince of Wales, who’s responsible, Sir Walter Scott is responsible for all of this stuff?, Ivanhoe, 1819, the other Waverly books, more influenced by Waverly and Ivanhoe than any other cultural phenomenon, plays and books, other than music, less about story, patriotism, Charles Dickens, an industry unto himself, now we’re James Patterson, a crest to this wave, John Buchan is not the beginning of the wave, books start coming into their height?, as soon as you get paperbacks, cheap entertainment, mass market, that attraction of the cover, grab the workman on his way to the cover, a scantily clad screaming lady on the cover, with a brass bra and a leg cling, beware of the 3 volume novel, Oscar Wilde’s, if not him, the cheapest thing is ticktock, reconstruct his life, wait until sleep comes, they’re watching youtube shorts and tiktok shorts, it’s right there in your hand, riding a bike while looking at his phone, everybody is looking at his phone, listening to my phone, consuming video, playing a video, this is the new phenomenon, a very heavy hardcover from school, the death of…, did the book industry do it to themselves, Hollywood definitely did it to themselves, easier lower common denominator, cheap and easy, trying to relax, mass market entertainment, Doritos taste better than celery sticks, project right into my eyeballs, old tv, a lot of writers from books, a lot of plays, adaptations of stuff, regular broadcast tv, unbelievable, 9-1-1, everybody on the show is retarded, a fire in space episode, I can’t believe this got produced, the thing that used to produce Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, even easier, free, the most addictive possible content, plugged directly into your brain, the Larry Niven, a tasp, just pure pleasure, the way you get interested in the theatre, essentially dead as the major media, a skinsuit of was the most popular medium at one time, Lincoln was shot in a theatre, shot by an actor too, the music hall, if you want to see this play played out, the best actors, the perfect version of it, why would you go to the theatre, further down that path, it was always low-brow, the friction was the point, as things get easier they become worse, computer games, super compelling, home computer, school computer, that’s where the money is, a little more interesting, guys in their 50s, I wish my kid would just play a game, watching livestreams of other people playing games, games teach stuff, stuff about geography, almost every time it’s some singer or a video game, the literary people can’t get work in literary places, independent, a guy in Finland making Lovecraft games, popular culture, this legacy of older stuff, not born into the pulp or paperback industry, are we the weird outliers?, it’s awesome, we can find an old book and appreciate it, lost treasure, enjoy it, appreciate it for what it was doing at the time, a level of appreciation, whoe’ver’s listening to this, 80s and 90s kids watching movies from the 50s and 60s, Lawrence Of Arabia, I heard it is really good, short attention span, the Jake Paul of authors, a modern sequel of The Cannonball Run, Camille Paglia and Slavoj Zizek, slop videos, I’ll do anything for attention, the personalities have changed, the rat pack guys, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, pretending to be priests, a couple of hot girls in a Lamborghini, guy who thinks he’s a superhero, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), already old, middle aged people in the audience, Buster Keaton, Spencer Tracey, Don Notts shows up, that pool of people who fit that mold, Jack Chan was introduced to the world, Jamie Farr, Roger Moore’s biggest fan, facial surgery to look like Roger Moore, that meta-stuff, weird reality, what’s the mcguffin?, just the pleasure of having done the race, bragging rights, trace it all down, the blame on lack of land reform, 1958?, the newsstand corporation, the kid who inherited or whatever, distributing books and magazines, in 1953, in 1958, down to 10?, back to 4, no distribution means no eyes on magazines, tv from the 1950s, shifting tastes, a lot of it went to paperbacks, a whole different channels, comic book stores, even that’s not doing well, vhs was a new distribution system, laserdisc and all that stuff, early access, you don’t understand it, it may have gone terribly, Gilbert and Sullivan, expensive, don’t live in England in the 19th century, some new medium before the tasp, vr stuff happen, the theory there, get all that exercise, watch someone else streaming, the rise of livestreaming videogames, so passive, mostly scams, massive amounts of scams, corporate subsidies to political ones, look at the chat, almost not even words, strings of emojis, people alone looking at a guy playing a game, not particularly interesting or smart, a lot of euphemism, bizarre and pathetic, complaining about pulp magazines being badly written, are they James Patterson bad, incompetent filler, the editors did a pretty decent job of rejecting stuff, professional editors, next month’s issue, this was a lot of fun, good stuff now?, hype for things of the present vs. hype for things of the past, it is happening, a new John Lange novel, the drawer book, A Murder In Hollywood by Michael Crichton, not co-authored, a Tom Clancy in that picture too, an Agatha Christie, you can’t trust it, there’s an estate there, fucked with her whole career, And Then There Was One, out of copyright, less likely to have bad books out there, rewrote The Cats Of Ulthar as a cute story for children, baby’s first Cthuhlu, Dr. Seuss versions of Lovecraft, pre-ai, The Tomb, print editions probably still being made, cheap public domain classics, in one volume, faux leather, slap the gutenberg text in there, new introduction if you’re lucky, all about the money, not about the ideology, an honest mercenary, Ian Fleming, the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Guy, all Canadian public domain, through and past, Jurassic Park, a month out, “so so”, that’s fair, so okay it’s average, the book has merit, hauled into its saddle and can’t fight on its own, see you on twitter.

The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #895 – READALONG: Timeline by Michael Crichton

Jesse and Alex (Pulpcovers) talk about Timeline by Michael Crichton

Talked about on today’s show:
1999 novel, a very chonky book, 464 pages, Congo?, this genre of Crichton, John Lange, a lot of success, Stephen King syndrome, a writing machine, weird psychological stuff, powerful books, drinking, cocaine, a stern talking to, a post-Jurassic Park book, went forward, The Andromeda Strain, a great novel and a very good movie, Eaters Of The Dead, A Knight’s Tale, electric guitar jousting, they look pretty similar, pale versions of Neo from The Matrix, remember it fondly, rock music, condensed it in many ways, 36 hours, cut out a lot, weird changes, trivia wise, the movie that broke Michael Crichton, rolling over for every Jurassic World movie, Jesse doesn’t believe in spoilers, making the French the good guys, Lady Claire, less of a complete shitbag, you’re the special one that I love, she sleeps with the abbot, apparently that works out, a woman worth abandoning your timeline for, projecting, a very Michael Crichton, the protagonist of the fictional text woven into the Lucasarts Tie Fighter game, X-Wing, collector’s manual, in my bedroom, study up, Star Wars novel, secret conspiracy with the emperor, Crichton’s brain, the Elephant, Joseph Merrick, the most cool things, too many characters, some other handsome guys, villainous guys, a Scottish guy, a good cast, the girl, looks sweaty, rock climbing, caving, a big unweildly book, really cool stuff in it, Cricthon’s outsider science fiction status, Asimov of H.G. Wells, King Solomon’s Mines, War Of The Worlds, The Terminal ~~Experiment~~ Man, Frankenstein, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, literally starts the same, suddenly a knight charged at me with a lance, that’s not a science fiction novel, getting the facts right, mythological space, tons of fuckin research, the 100 years war, necessary for Crichton, just French and English, a few subtitles, wave away the language problem, really good excuse, suddenly communicate, Occitan, prot-southern French, standardized post-Napoleon, regional thing, more confederated, the official French dictionary, Quebec, lots and lots of castles, a lot of renactors, French speakers, woodsy Canadian, Eaters Of The Dead, armour looked pretty good, all fine, Castlegar, two houses somewhere, a real budget, the script, why movies work (popular or not), viking barbarian land, a smaller scale setting, dozens, one magnetic character, Paul Walker, fun to watch, part 10 or whatever, so American it’s shocking, Billy Connolly, the most California guy to ever live, so blank, not designed to be a movie, a treatment for a film, a bastard sword, so many things going on in it, 7 characters?, trying to do a lot, the whole universe explanation for it, this mystery, the guy in the desert, never explain, yes they don’t, the flaw that they missed, what’s wrong with the book, it’s a criticism of the new tech bros that are comin, the Elon Musks, as opposed to governments, zany experimenters, all corporate now, corporate criticism, he’s like the facebook guy, he’s like a Zuckerberg, they want to kill him, the book feels colder, the evil megacorporation, definitely a jerk, master race, not yet, in that direction, hints at some of that, we’re gonna have to kill you now, why does he do that, prevent a pr disaster, we need him to die, it gives us catharsis, the catharsis for the film, like Gomez, immediately beheaded, bubonic plague, loves history, science, medicine, combines all of these things together, Travels, astral projection, he’s not a druggie, breathing exercises, accessing inaccessible parts of experience, weird tricks, weird weird guy that’s supersmart and now dead, Arizona, France, Eruption, Vulcan, marketing at train stations and airports, all Dean Koontz titles are like this, all the same, you have to make it dumber, a Star Trek book, we have to fix it, this concept, instead of doing as a playful satire, quantum shit, it’s not novel, he’s doing that sort of work, not basing it on the golden age 50s stuff, he seems to have no interest in it, not everything that Wells wrote was science fiction, creating it independently, hit the same checkpoints, checkboxes, this mode of science fiction, infodumping, Jesse loves Ringworld, flicked into existence, the same idea, talking to an alien, big dumb object, all about sex, a sex companion, Teela Brown, Nessus gay sex?, Speaker, females are non-sentient, weird drives, very silly, the human characters, Merrick, the only intriguing character in the book, screen time, that’s what’s wrong with the book, cool ideas, well developed, stuff happening, when you go back in time, a first person one guy story, here’s my story, sidetracks himself, a double text, interspersed, thins was bullshit, we can become annoyed and like that annoyance, the found document with a frame narrative, you gotta get them out of your system, everything worked that day, not every souffle, different ingredients every time, don’t change a thing, keep experimenting, more of that, what most readers want, give it to me again just like you gave it to me before, BBC piece from the 70s or 60s, 38 women live in this council house and all begin their day by shaving, down to a formula, that little doc, how poor these authors are, ladies go to the library and borrow the books, the dustman, the library’s fault, disposable books, more different, stretch you legs, good ideas and a noble failure, all the action, none of them are essential, not core, better Crichton books out there, way better, lost city in the jungle adventure, dropping people in the middle ages, too much flashing back to the company in the desert, no fucking idea how their technology works, how any of this works, shooting in the dark, you don’t know how any of this works, that’s all cool, drop it for the movie, one place and time, too much time back in the office, stuff’s happening, escaping across the rafters, each of the modern characters, important later, she was brought in to clamber over the ruins, practice our longbow skills, a good setup, it doesn’t gel, fine but forgetable, a fun character, a terrible person, the scene with the abbott, a surprise, she’s the one that comes out, not a faker, the opposite of Crichton is L. Ron Hubbard, a writing machine, gimme a picture I’ll write to that, John W. Campbell, things that he’s gonna be writing about, the sci-fi magic wand, completely accurate, Harry Stubbs, Hal Clement, Jerry Pournelle, what if there was a world that had this gravity, Mission Of Gravity, heavy gravity planet, shaped like centipedes, how would your existence be shaped, Flatland, essay?, text, going with an idea, competent characterization, infodump is important, a 15 hour book, about to do the time travel now, quantum foamy book for the first five hours, understanding what the concepts are, the transcription errors, why the badguy can’t get home, bones are misaligned, his arteries don’t line up, go to see the cat, body horror, nose tissue, a third eye, much better handled, the reveal, touched on twice, mishandled, maybe there’s a third guy from the past, no hint, hey pal, a real plot point, the facial scar, a transcription error, a very cool idea, you could do the story without it, makes the book bigger, more interesting, we’re destroying these people, very calm about everything, the tech guy, he’s Crichton, helping us along, how and why things are happening, will the glue hold, what about these water cracks, a pistol?, so the equipment can be destroyed, feels like a puzzle, mashing pieces together to make it fit, it has transcription errors, the book is flawed, it has a schism, the bad guy, Dekker made French, their version of the story, a year earlier, repair the damage, a lot of speeches given, trying hard to do a good book, it just didn’t really land, cool ideas in it, Sphere as an abridged audiobook, reset the timeline so none of the book happens, when did it start going wrong?, intermixed, they’re Epstein people, asshole fuckheads full of arrogance, the experience is bad, raw and talented, super into literature, all classical, ancient scientists, enlightenment era scientists, the list, Jurassic Park, is it good? a great movie, a very good book, the sequel, as a book is really good, 1990, a big gap, 1966, how early he started, late 80s early 90s kind of guy, 1976, The Great Train Robbery, his 1970 novel Drug Of Choice aka Overkill, fake vacations, real vacations, scuba diving, but why?, he likes scuba diving, almost died scuba diving one time, an incredible urge to have sex, he would write it, your sister might read the book, an interesting phenomenon, it’s about interesting phenomenon, flaky new age guy, best explain them, salacious details, living with a girl on the beach, fourth breakup, reset, really strange experience where the cactus was talking to me, evil corporation, giving them diets, fat reduction, Ozempic, helps you stop smoking too, the addiction of eating, the pleasure response of food, the circumstances you’re in are wonderful, everything is wonderful, under a hypnotic state under the drug, really bad food, you fall down, you got that in a tennis match, anything you’re suggested becomes your experience, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, the vacation is in realtime, that would be a way better movie than this, double framing, why is there pain involved?, because film, grimacing into a windmachine, you’re being destroyed, they don’t destroy them in the movie, it’s not even a science fiction movie because they just don’t care, why he didn’t like it, Coma by Robin Cook, organ harvesting, a conspiracy thriller from the 70s, Robert Wise did The Andromeda Strain, John McTiernan, a lot shorter, what went wrong?, a book that works, Rising Sun, weird relationship in the 80s with Japan, their population, all of that came to nothing, a love and fascination and a hate and a fear, not that important, Canada, not super important, they’re treating it like England, except culturally, samurai movies, cars, an economic fear, trends continuing on, Japan will own everything, a samurai comes in to fight RoboCop, that fits the trend, a lot sexier, a high school kid, nostalgic for things that happened before I’m born, adventure stories, an evil corporation, murder prostitutes, weird Japanese sex fetishes, sexual harassment in the workplace, we talked about Airframe, only the Crichtony bits, corporate espionage, expecting it, I know how this is going to go, he’s losing it there, Pirate Latitudes, why wasn’t it published?, whatever happened to him went wrong, State Of Fear, people around the world, still afraid of climate change the way they were programmed to be, the biggest climate change disaster in human history, they don’t actually care, why are we pretending to care, people hate that book, go to Bluesky, a hate for Michael Crichton, what that argument might be, worked in a library, service hours for something, the item list, somebody has to go find that book on the shelf, once a week, 90 books that have been requested, the Dewey decimal system, so many interesting books, a half dozen books, read a lot, in that period, not Prey, 2002, he got mad about climate change, allow him to rant about it, him wanting a forum, if he had a blog, contracted to write a novel, Next, genetic engineering book, horrible oversized paperback, narrower and taller, Dragon Teeth, Micro, Richard Preston, A Murder In Hollywood, an excerpt from Scratch One, Stag Annual, spy book, Grand Prix, Monaco, James Bondy, except for that one, Easy Go, the Egyptian one, Binary, Man’s World, December 1970, the death divers, Pollen or somebody, Norem, somethin to see, how to decide, dinosaur fossil hunting in the old west, other people’s hands on it, it should be good, even him touching stuff, a few left to read, a really good movie, that happens a lot, 3.5 quarters, it didn’t improve the experience of either, very-mid, definitely a movie, technically a film, it’s not awful, they tried, perfectly fine, it doesn’t hold together, he didn’t get to use Sean Connery again, experienced Sean Connery, he directed a movie, it could have been a novel, Looker (1981), Runaway with Tom Selleck, Physical Evidence (1989) starring Burt Reynolds, Theresa Russel, Ned Beatty, well executed, extremely a heist movie, the sexual jokes, very 70s, Donald Sutherland is great in that movie, nobody talks about Looker, Albert Finney, James Coburn, Susan Dey, a scanning machine, 3d models, 3d actors, tastefully #StrategicPlacement, the transcription error, a portable version of this, a hand scanner, 3d printing now, very awesome cool technology, without their consent, a hypnotic effect, plastic surgeon, reusing that idea, that’d be a fuckin awesome book, a book about a theme park, deep dark May, some kind of a trip, in-laws in Arkansas, Virginia, that’s what I got a wife for, absolutely true, they know when anniversaries are, birthdays, caring about that stuff, important for social relations, I need to send the book out on time, The Great Impersonation, how awesome it is to have so many good Simak novels still to read, a writer passed his prime, a Wizard of Oz setup, the past, another dimension, The Visitors, giant big black slabs show up in the sky, 2001: Monoliths, small town Minnesota, they start eating the trees, the cellulose like poor, food for their babies, eating cars, then found in fields, new cars that never break down, ingest a person, some houses, free houses, all built in somehow, magic, not supposed to be magic, high tech, aliens, the final scene, newspaper editor hero, what should be published about what’s going on with these alien visitors, a house out in the woods, shadows inside, people inside, part of the aliens, super suggestive, early 80s, Ring Around The Sun, free homes, super-cheap, the forever car, economic disruption in the United States, a threat in the 50s, by the 80s, Japanese cars, the 70s in fact, super-sensitive, rural America, an experience about human relations, so valuable, oh boy I get another Simak, disturbed, food for thought, Hard Case Crime, they definitely exist, Blackstone just republished them with terrible covers, one of them’s a recycled, next week.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #892 – READALONG: Ring Around The Sun by Clifford D. Simak

Jesse and Scott talk about Ring Around The Sun by Clifford D. Simak

Talked about on today’s show:
Galaxy 1952, 1953, one of his earliest novels, Cosmic Engineers, Empire, not really Simakian, very Campbelly, Campbell rejected it, City, guess the right answer, what does the D standfor, the D stands for Philip K. Dick, this book is superDick, kinda wild, a kitchen sink, so much happening, under the discipline of a competent writer, a great writer but competence is not the word for him, not natural, tons of wild ideas, under control, why does the little girl show up in the first scene?, cookin breakfast, infodump, why are you not married, this book is largely about childhood, child-like, we’ve been following an android the whole goddamn book, growin a beard, getting hungry, the big conflict is he’s fighting with himself, split into three, given his essence, what kinda book is this?, fairyland, as one might, familiar with fairyland, the topped stripes, a very strange book, David Pringle, a critic, The 100 Best Novels 1949-1984, an English Language Selection, 2 simaks, Way Station and City, 1949-1984, this is a good book, a Tall Tale, too complicated for its own good, prose style, a new plot twist in almost every chapter, a very ornate book, the McCarthyite era, economic speculation, technological panaceas, telepathic androids, robots who are also hungry, a very good Simak novel, after reading Shakespeare’s Planet, Way station, good book, sparkier, All Flesh Is Grass, Stephen King, parallel structure, not just because it has androids, a forever car, at the end of his career, a ton of Simak, keep going, recurring things, revist these things, houses, something was in the house, a bit of mental separation to avoid conflation, coming from everything you witnesses prior, every person has in common, they had some sort of childhood, even if you’re six and im sixty, graduation, your first job, your first love, start with the basics, always a possibility, Simak is not a boy, gotta get that top, almost Bradburyesque, the system that we live in, the economy, Star Trek economics, the forces, people protecting what they have, extraction, it doesn’t seem possible, not as good as The Visitors, almost all the parts, false notes, so many sparks, as maturity sets upon you, that theme I touched on earlier, very mysterious, setup pretty early, rumours of a forever car, it’s cheap, when things are happening in the economy, participate or not participate, cultural discipline like the Amish, they have to review it, they have to make the case, a benefit vs. a disruption, assailed by iphones and androids and robots and waymos, you can’t control what your government decides to subsidize or ban, all you can do is see what’s happening, the solution, the pretentionists, super-interesting, grilling him, what his particular cosplay is about, a sign of what’s going on, the conflict, there is technicality conflict, partly fighting with himself, why is this disruption happening, Simak would like some alternatives, razor, lightbulb, everything is free, how close they are, comin out of WWII, this cold war thing, spread outside of the cities, a big country, no target, constant extreme disappointment and hopeful, the mob is in the background, he doesn’t let that get him down, not a black pill book, locking us into ways of behavior, he’s searching for it, can’t we just all agree, a nice walk, changing of the seasons, an agrarian populist, doesn’t want cities making all the rules, we need farmers, making sure that way of life is protected, rustic rather than agrarian, people who love the countryside, people’s views on policies, one colour another colour, different motivations, the people have needs, one needs a truck and the other needs a subway pass, the uniparty (whatever flavour) doesn’t give you the cheap reliable bus or truck, supersmart, what if we take the idea of automation and use it as an application of disruption for the benefit of people, teetering on the edge of being evil, Crawford is a representative, a think tank, a billionaire class or higher, deep down they’re all the same guy, essentially just Simak, we’ve got to do something, the doing something is writing this book, for serialization in Galaxy, Simak was a newspaperguy, the Minneapolis Star, keeps you in a world, an academic, who the president is, tax policy, you have to understand it and get it out there everyday, being a political advisor, the politicans don’t do any research, so many things going on in this book, what’s the motivation behind this, even the Cold War might be wrapping up, set in the 80s (or 77), worries about the economy going bad, the word carbohydrates, we don’t just need foodbanks, soylent green, a FOOD episode, Gravy Planet aka The Space Merchants, on a parallel earth, manufacturing carbohydrates, wood goes in cellulose comes out, the scene on one of the covers, exploring the factory, bringing in raw materials, who is paying for all those robots, selling at a subsidy, inputs are free, drill down, what his economic solution, nobody gets paid anything, all profits, everybody gets everything, communism, altruism, Crawford is a sympathetic evil guy, I wanna let you live, make me understand it, you can’t threaten the way things are, the alternate people who seem leaderless, Robert A. Heinlein, By His Bootstraps, time doesn’t exist, this book has a lot going on, a coup happening, a breakoff civilization, agrarian populist, there’s no voting, there’s only opting in or dropping out, this is not an evil book, Beggars In Spain, Slan, mutants, quasi science fiction, his first sale is published in 1952, 1953, Clifford Dick Simak, Dick’s not influenced by this, this is a parallel extraction, Dick cites Null-A and Van Vogt, Realms Of Fantasy, renfaire shit, Society For Creative Anachronism, the 70s, mutant = X-men, rebellion, The Golden Man, the danger room, his subversion of mutants, what if they’re superattractive to women but don’t know how to read, women with three breasts, so mutated they look like slugs, so mutated we don’t recognize them as mutants, what John W. Campbell was asking for: more mutants, mutant stories, in essence, you’re supposed to think I’m a SLAN, we the people who can see the future, man walking on the Moon, telepathy, an autist when it comes to tops, he can think about childhood real good, I can read a different science fiction next week, the podcast mutant, observation/joke/question, people on twitter, how much to spend on editorial revisions/covers, they’re in the bubble, you’re the weirdo, as a percentage of the population, people who read 10 books a year, they absolutely exist, 1 guy Tony C. Smith, discovered science fiction as an adult, got excited about reading like a kid, knew how to read, just didn’t do it, book addicts, get books cheaper, give books cheaper, can’t afford them, and thus SFFaudio was born, a family of readers, both sets of grandparents, reading something non-fiction, an immediate upbringing, ancestrally, school teacher, shop teacher, great uncle, voracious reader, great grandparents, their book collection if they had one, you inherit things you don’t even realize, they have different things, are you ashamed of your books, gi joes, transformers, music, a personal culture for each family, used to be anyway, figuring out what this book dealing with, it’s so big, society and the personal, the weirdest aspect, that’d be loving himself?, the most broken part of the book, too spinning in on itself, wow, an interesting thoughtful guy, recurring, hopefulness, knowledge in the stars, Time Is The Simplest Thing, disrupting the economy, read this week, chapter 33, so he was an android, an artificial man, the cunning of man’s mind, the mutants did!, even he himself would never know, artificial women too, and a host of other gadgets, wreck the race from which they sprang, China is disrupting our economy!, good jobs, the mystery of the story, how he composed the book, it mostly fits together, the mystery is less important than rumniating on the topics themselves, sparky full of ideas, flying witches on broomsticks, steal ideas, bring them home through Mexico, Walmart style disruption stores, wow, rejected by the girl’s family, fairyland of youth, memory, super-hilarious, the past is the most interesting place, a hilarious and interesting genre, the Merryland books, 1672ish, Erotupoia, Bettyland, a genre of fiction, a visitor reports back on a place he went to, a geographical version of a woman’s body, hills over there, rivers down here, having fun, making fun of the genre, with childhood, that Bradburyesque sense, certain scenes, endless summer, how come we can’t live in a good world, feel that, meanwhile, boardroom tables, privacy policy, extract more from you, televisions are so cheap, they’re using the tv to influence, Netflix button, put ads in your operating system, Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, the whole point is to extract from you, a car you can hand down to your grandkids, forever clothes, forever razor, Stressed Out by 21 pilots, momma sang us to sleep, build a rocketship, you need to make money, getting out from under, whoever’s doing this, Vickers says, and his parents need to be thawed out, so it turns out…, horrible capitalist system, all my contents are correlated, he was the guy behind all of this, go talk to the robot, the plan is to make things better for people, doing these things to the economy, the importance of knowing what your doing, mindfulness sounds really bad, pitchfork and torch, we’re gonna do this to accelerate the badness that’s happening, the evil people in our world, saying to themselves, if they think of you at all, we have a mandate to make profits for our shareholders, Cora’s tweet: every time I see this guy I want to punch him in the face, Albania’s ai minister, power good government with good solid nuclear power, the disruption happening seems familiar to us, the forever car, how people think about Teslas, tended to be publicly enthusiastic, the promise of them, the batteries won’t, in the frame, bends the frame, throwing the car away, the cars have televisions in them, all the smart cars, Windows 10 isn’t supported anymore, your Ford Focus isn’t supported anymore, Ford Mustang from 1964, a throwback pickup truck, can fix it yourself, anyone can fix it themselves, emissions are why, you can’t achieve good emissions without electronics, waiting at the light the engine is turned off, save theoretical emissions, the biggest expulsion, it’s all gamed, theater, try not to play any games you can’t win, the casino, not gonna win, not gonna go, Bryan Alexander travels a lot for work, an endless nightmare of airport problems, sleeping in the airport, much rather not, it’s incredible that we’re here, what air travel is going to look like in the future, bar lounge area, seats too small, crammed in, extracting you, the Chinese with their flying cars, not allowed to disrupt our world, the pretentionists, Samuel Peyp diarists, pretending to be cats and dogs and birds, my area of study is Aztecs, online video games, Balder’s Gate III, escapism, building games, Minecraft, the biggest genre, survival, farming, sandbox games, everything’s easy, 2 seconds to mine, crafting, rock and stick and 2 seconds later you got a handaxe, 10 minutes later log cabin, building your own log cabin, pretty satisfactory, digital log cabin, didn’t have to get sweaty, I live in my game, the people at the renfair, jousting, friendly and together, conventions, leavin the world, a bubble for 4 days, similar interests, I was somewhere else, Robert Silverberg is still alive, every science fiction convention, during COVID, theoretically left science fiction for a while, he feeds on the same interests, people that read a bunch of books, grinding horror, driving across the United States, the next 2 Dortmunder books, if you’re painting a warehouse, a lot of ceilings, intense labour, a kind of pretention, you’re out of your head, drudge work, great experience of another world, arms and eyes, appreciating some thoughts goin on, a really amazing thing, a kind of dissociation, something going on in this book, MK Ultra, The Manchurian Candidate sort of stuff, CIA, human robotoids, wipe people’s memories, implanted memories, very Philip K. Dick, for political control, assassinations, interrogations, send messages, the Jason Bourne series, MK Ultra fiction, extensive in the United States and farmed out to Canada, we have to invest, at least 20 years, the Chinese are doing it, maybe the Russians are doing it, POWd by the North Koreans or the Chinese, act strangely, obviously brainwashed them, we need to be able to brainwash, how can he be an android, fully functional, a scene where Data has a beard, can he control the growth, you can imagine a model of Data that has that ability, everything about him is a man except we’re told he is not a man, people are programmable, you learn these languages, something that humans have that dogs don’t have, responding to their environment, programmed to learn human things, Simak is reading the paper and reading between the line, Philip K. Dick was not a connected guy, he worked at a music shop, this is not public at the time, from the Nazis originally, news stories, the Korean War, they must be brainwashed because they’re rejecting the United States in favour of North Korea and China, on the wrong team, other possibilities than mind control, the most powerful street is Madison Avenue, both are scary, K Street, think tanks, the justifications, the oligarchs to do what they want, Crawford is not as bad a guy as we thought, come on friend, he said softly, Simak doesn’t want war, a lot of horror, he doesn’t know the way, hopin to make the place better, less of a Catholic book than his other ones, not a Catholic guy, some of the thoughts, more of a spirtual level to it, how Arthur C. Clarke’s The Star, a jesuit, a relationship to the stars, pathos and suffering and understanding, more scattered, touch on it a few times, page 178, end of chapter 39, how he came to be, his purpose and his end, a tool of immortality, the orderly progression, the next step, law unto the entire universe, the strength of human face, divinity, terrible need of faith, question and doubt, no need of faith, faith replaced with knowing, questing, a lot of great stuff in this book, so sparky, continually impressed by him, so philosophical, idea books, not stuff happening books, thoughtful and exploratory, an OCR, the fire wheel dog formula, the formula of the mutants, an earlier forward step, fire, cook things, pull things, dogs?, bows, plumb line, technologies, ssomethin super interesting, an extinct [breed] of dog, canis vertigus, the turning dog, manor house, run on the wheel to turn the spit, a small dog with curled legs, literally three technologies all together, replaced by motors, technology leads to technologies, a border collie, different labs, different from goldens, programmed differently, retrieve birds from swamps, love your children, take you on walks and be happy to see you, herding, keeping their sheep in their proper place, moving them from place to place, talking about technology in that way it is science fiction, you can’t have science fiction without connection to technology, it isn’t engineering fiction, mine the asteroids, that isn’t about how to make the rocket go, atomic pile!, what will it do to the people?, if there is a main thrust in this book, products that will no longer have to be manufactured or repaired, intentionally destroying society, a tv with spyware built into it, well you’ve got food that free, who is being evil?, the oligarchs, want progress to stop to maintain the status quo, conserve their profits, pretend I was somewhere else, more interesting or better or not like this, zombie apocalypse games, Project Zomboid, ambulance driver or cop or teacher or athlete, survive for as long as you want, an endless game, no victory conditions, Sid Meier’s Civilization, if they’re trying to hurt you, doing it and don’t care, changing it to help me win this game, taking stuff from you and putting it in my pocket, Crawford is from the old guard, America 1950, the other world mutants, help the population, he makes a film, talk to the pretentionists, evacuate the earth to these other worlds, on to the stars if necessary, a temporary solution to this particular crisis, we in our present, people out of work, carbohydrates are the solution, going off to be pioneers, let’s do enclosures, fill it full of sheep, goodbye people, crimes that can get you exported as your punishment, free land in an empty continent, more profits for Hudson’s Bay Company shareholders, love or indifference or hate, probably not going to be neutral, “mutants”, not telling what’s going on, we spread this out, $500 per room, trade that in, they’re not trynna make a profit, the help is accelerationist, for a not religious guy, lying is evil, deception is not necessarily evil, you shouldn’t lie to people, the oligarchs are hurting society somehow, the mob, trynna hunt people down and kill them, offscreen in the book, “populist”, kind of a slur in the United States, people getting what they want, close to fascism, we bind you up together, a whole bunch of farmers, get our voices heard together, the popular voice vs. the bound stick for violence, on team Simak, a bit of violence, story is about conflict, Hamlet the play, the first detective story, when does the ghost appear, the soldiers see Hamlet go talk to the ghost, the ghost of his father, the rest of the play is him trying to testing his hypothesis, does my mom know?, to know or not to know, should I just go along?, a philosophical investigation, everybody dies, Ophelia dies, he kills Polonius, the ultimate answer is maybe you, do I want to turn over this rock of knowledge, feel something, catharsis, detective fiction comes out of Poe, when it hits with Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, a little bit of science fiction and a lot of mystery, this essential question in us, not being satisfied, a conspiracy book vs. a mystery book, turns out it is a third of me, what a book!, so good, glad to have read it, YouTube video, different things there, what Simak next?, May 2nd, The Handle by Richard Stark, gonna love it, Way Station, All Flesh Is Grass, 1965, how many did he write in the 70s?, lots in the 70s, A Choice Of Gods, Enchanted Pilgrimage, The Fellowship Of The Talisman, The Werewolf Principle, The Fisherman, a rusty rocket, a scene in the book, so rich, he’s the man, overcountry travel, he’s the flyover country science fictionist, New York guys, Bradbury in Los Angles, Missouri, Colorado, California, Orson Scott Card in Utah, when you get to the west, Wyoming, east of, Ohio, Kansas, is Kansas the west, right in the middle, Shaun D. Standfast, passed away, notebook lm, 9 interviews, living in Minnesota, geographic and philosophic backwater, east coast, New York, distinct effects, professional isolation, the science fiction swim, tied closely to his desk, a lot of publication with John W. Campbell, rely on letters, a Clifford Simak letters set, Isaac Asimov and Jack Williamson, Minneapolis, Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson, tell me more, the distilled info, people that like audio, an audiobook, make it feel like a real conversation, shaving and smoking, pops out an mp3, my android ran out of cigarettes and is grateful to have some more, how much Dick have you read, not as coherent at novel length, some of the images, his best novel, very disputed, Galactic Pot-Healer, very funny, it ends like a flat tire, great scenes, not exactly a Simak novel, what makes it so great, if he’s Tolkien it is his Lord Of The Rings, rougher and sillier, the basis as a place to escape, wasting time on the internet, gets a call from god, raise a sunken cathedral, other pilgrims, yarrow stalks, The Man In The High Castle, how great Dick can be, what did we settle on, All Flesh Is Grass.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #891 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Lost Continent by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne

The SFFaudio Podcast #891 – The Lost Continent by C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne (9 hours 11 minutes) read by Alan Winterrowd and Mark Nelson for LibriVox, followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion are Jesse, Alex (Pulpcovers), and David J. West

Talked about on today’s show:
1900, the book public domain, one of the narrators abandoned it, it’s up on LibriVox, the last 5 chapters are by a different guy, Mark Nelson is a good narrator, an off day, suddenly became a different guy, the first narrator, in Virgin Planet, quay, not kway, it’s key, grandma was an english teacher, a big Q up there, interesting, people love this book, a great D&D campaign book, an amazing campaign setting, it wasn’t awful, describe this book to someone, not nearly as fun as it sounds, Goddess Of Atvatabar, way more fun, invade the inner earth, do colonialism, listings, here’s the art, more priests, castles in the air, imagination, you can just conjure, vr world, look there’s some cookies on a plate, fades away, all sorts of interesting stuff, the magic is more science, The Hunt For Red October catterpillar drive, atlantean technology, the victorian sensibilites, how many things he brought into it, it was serialized over six months, some revisions for the book publication, you can’t really smooth it out, another meeting with that priest, walking around the hallways, Lin Carter’s forward, something with a little more punch, the dinosaurs and the tech, the pulpy aspect, about that introduction, the Ballantine cover, the checkerboard at the base, a masonic book?, a really short foreward, other atlantean books, de Camp would have really enjoyed it, Clark Ashton Smith, not allowed to be, not involved, an excommunicable offense, recruited, not a joiner, part of a structure, in their recruitment, you have to believe in god, in the normal way, other gods as well, trying to expand?, aprons and such, is there any evidence in the book, at the base, if you go to London, the City Of London, checkerboard things, a youtuber who walks around London, hiding in plain sight, on the Metropolitan police, the tartan of the guy who brought it in, based on his career, that important in the UK, amazing skill, a long boat trip, a lot of power, buddy buddy, a conspiracy hidden in plain sight, the construction of atlanis, a giant pyramid, apparently not, Dean Ellis, got his remit by reading the book or being told what to paint, would have noticed, some amount of ancient lost knowledge, a Masonically influenced story, he destroys the evil at the end of the book, what’s in the ark, the secrets, the evil empress, immortality?, etc., this knowledge is lost, all the other cults, Rosicrucian, thoughts have wings, do you ever think you were an ancient god, maybe I was, Atlantis, cool man, the framing device, the occasional cave tiger fight, the very long and drawn out, some swineherd’s daughter raised above her station, sword and sandal lady, more like Zenobia in Hour Of The Dragon, pure of heart, the girls in this book, mess up the pronunciation, the twin sister, she feels like a chekov’s gun that never goes up, the chessboard pattern, the characters are very maneuvered, lots of pawns, an image from When Worlds Collide, the space ark, an ark in this book, the cover of one of the sons of Krypton, the story of Superman is basically that of Moses, put in the basket and sent down the river and becomes good, helps people, he’s a superguy, a big honking novel from the 1930s, Balmer and Wylie, as you would expect, coming from the bible, the earth is gonna get hit by a rogue planet, to save the people, a machine gun setup, trying to get on the ark, 2012 (2009), really good, great disaster movie bandwagon, the destruction of the world, earthquakes and lava, just barely manages to get through, this is a comedy, supposed to be laughing, took the remit, Star Trek, like every other show, Paradise, high ratings, the president’s been assassinated, underground bunker in Colorado, regular drama, Fallout, Silo, a spaceship, a generation ship, they’re in a bunker, an old Doctor Who episode, colonizing old Earth, a repeated theme and idea, a mechanistic book, priests being moved around, is this supposed to be that, we are above the fray, in a brotherhood, C.J. Cutliffe Hyne was aware of Masons, the first episode on Battlestar Galactica, is he a mason? 33, could be, numerology, the meanings of numbers, 42, 69, six seven, 69 Barrow Street by Lawrence Block, good for jokes, our hero, kinda stiff, sometimes he has a beard, they wrote him as this great hero uninterested in women, what is the point of writing this character, have you not learned to woo yet, if Conan was suddenly thrust into this book, you need to fulfill this role, Black Colossus, much more concise too, not the worst, Ben-Hur, a slow pace, 5 hour book maximum, to warrant all of the text, forbidden magic, the island sinks, the priests sink it, the negative culmination, she’s the key to unlocking why Atlantis sinks, what went wrong exactly?, upset with the priests, he’s a priest guy, they worship the sun?, Zeus?, not a random name, that stuff is not worked out, the high gods, references to a pantheon, 9 years in the jungle, stuff happens, why does the girl have a twin sister?, torn between the two, 2 identical women, a box to check, did nothing with it, more degeneracy, not a lot of showing it, the queen is psychotic and evil, the whole country became this degenerate, struck down for their arrogance, pushing in this degenerate direction, very casual slavery, enslaving all these Europeans, some kind of hubris, the sailors, an entourage, parading on her elephant, kill em all or whatever, out to see, such a hardscrabble life, take all his stuff, stab anybody, a viewpoint, these people are contemptible, way before the ark stuff, justifying the drastic action that happens, it didn’t feel new, our hero is very formal, when Hamlet comes back from school, investigate this and figure it out, I’m not gonna marry you just yet, mechanically placed, the game being played drags it out, and yet … cave tiger!, brontosauruses were recently discovered, a mixed audience, Pearson’s, interested in science, wireless telegraphy, astrophotography, ballooning, hero indian guys in Indian, a mixed general magazine, serialized novels in the 1890s, Sherlock Holmes novels, that thing holds up, tighter, basically forgotten, John Buchaneque thrillers, lots of interesting setups and no amazing gelling, a traditional gothic, kicks Sherlock Holmes out of the story, it can hold together, Agatha Christie was popular for a reason, Deucalion, son of Prometheus, he calls it out in the prologue, the introduction, the same trick used in William Hope Hodgson’s The House On The Borderlands, awesome setup, our two guys, lifting rocks to get his workout, Canary Islands, not a normal place to be, Canary Islands is connected with the Atlantis myth, boom we’re in the Yucatan, pyramids out there, colonies of Atlantis, weird hairy neanderthals, can I get some of that, every continent on the planet has pyramids, the one pyramid in Antarctica is probably just a mountain, Peru, St. Louis, a very stable structure, a very recognizable structure, really old, a tower is gonna disappear, many such great wonders, wandering around the pyramid, stabbing behind the curtain, a monkey in a cape, you never know, oh yeah it is a victorian novel, he’s not one of the famous names, cold sleep with our girl, her hair gets long, is she gonna come out of this okay?, a sleeping beauty, awesomely connected to anything, if it had been a surprise, 9 years go by, complaints, having read too many novels, enthusiastic, a good introduction, his own fiction writing, weird thread, some teacher of creative writing, I want to be a novelist, they can’t anybody, I don’t read novels, that never happened kind of events, that’s being ableist, I’m a novelist because I want to run a television show, comics being made to be Netflixes, not a good comics, a visual connection, a Robert E. Howard or a Westlake, Cowboys And Aliens, Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig, a storyboard, the audience is for the execs, Men In Black, more like the comics, how many sequels?, soft reboot, the images that stick, old Galaxy covers, a robot body, a showcase of tropes, fun things to see, playoff against the comedy, there’s something wrong with books today, a New York Times utube short, the edits, mass market paperbacks have died, very sad news, the substance of the piece, here’s Stephen King, sold the paperback for Carrie, $400k, that changed her mood, it was largely novels, the cheap paperback, that media, that medium, the physical size of that format, Tolkien wrote a book, 6 books, 3 volumes, 1 novel, James M. Cain paperback, the Ballantine ones, thinner than the thick of your thumb, that format is connected to the thickness of the paper, portability, games is the premiere medium, tiktok, mindless short form brain rot, movies position of primacy, short stories, little tiny markets for it, Clark Ashton Smith, A Vintage From Atlantis, maybe the book would be better if it had a map, random encounters, might be pterodactyls, rocs, corrupt empire, before the continent sinks, overthrow the empress, fail and try to escape, he didn’t set anything interesting there, this early in the game, bringing in the dinosaurs, the megafauna, touching on the witchqueen, older movies, not unvaluable, a good book not a great book, The Seed Bearers by Steve Valentine Timlett, murdering people left and right, occult matters, not that occult, how it touched on how the society as a whole, the ark is loaded with stuff, fan fiction, he’s British, very likely, more extreme on the violence and the sex, the cover descriptor, Atlantis, leg clinging a lady, exploded and split in half, new books in, grabbing this, tells you what’s going on, trilogy, the other two, take place much later, with Picts, Bran Mak Morn, the Taliesin series, weird elvish wizards, Stephen R. Lawhead, Minoan bull dancing, the pictish beast, the tin islands, water horse, hippopotamus, the unknown animal in all the carvings, pictish beast and regular horse together, very boneless, fossils, game name, PictishBeastTheories, the Loch Ness monster, longer neck, Kentucky cryptid, crypto-zoology, no online much, every animal, the mammoths, aggressive hunters, big herbivores, just put cave in front of it, do you find them in caves, a standin for dire, this island is kind of a death world, huge knowledge base, giant pyramids, superrich, rich farmland?, stable civilization, constantly being eaten by fish and flying birds, Deathworld by Harry Harrison, Jason dinAlt, erratic psionic abilities, everything is deadly, neurotoxic venom, planetary romance, drop the hero on the planet, cross the landscape and survive, not get eaten by the empress and what have you, Soylent Green (1973), Make Room, Make Room, a funny writer, find you something good, People Of The Black Coast, better to pair it with something, fun, light, thin, giant crabs, aviatrix, her personal aircraft, Miracle Science And Fantasy Stories, the brothers Dold, illustrations, the blind one, the author and editor of it died, Douglas, in Russia during the revolution, 1917 revolution, scroll threw the illustrations, very Dungeons & Dragons, anubis sort of god, in the temple, crocodile faced worshipers, page 59, the dead-alive face of Orne, they were turning him into a mummy, a guy with an ax choppin, holding a gun looking in, giant crocodile god, very much out a module, hidden group, the scans in the scans group, the PDFs are up, overhead map, page 29, The Valley Of Sin, grand canyon, mummy chamber, sealed door, sluice gates, this is the adventure you were waiting for, make you a mummy against your will, more weird menace, more shudder pulp, they’re all fun, but they’re pretty uneven, amazingly good, pretty good, the cat girl, the sins of the cat girl, not even a cat girl, the other animal she’s pretending to be, the concepts drag you in, an evil cult under the basement of this house, a followup tweet, novelists whop don’t read novels, write the screenplay you want to write, they only ever talk about novels, his short stories are much more coherent, they’re not meditative on a particular idea, more fun, the length is the reason stories suck, going to long, too many pieces to keep track up, make a girl go to sleep for nine years, suddenly we’re really rockin, Howard has an agenda, he has opinions about things, I’m angry about that subject, hated everything else done in that same vein, David and Edgar Rice Burroughs, the Gor book, the concept of Gor, bring samurais, bring mongols, make them all fight, I submit I’m just a woman, by book 3, liked the cover, suckers for covers, a sucker for interiors, the part they always show in the auction, beautiful Dold art, reading Weird Tales without having the art hurts your interest, The Uncharted Isle, a monkey man story, if only for the art, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, they’re not famous if they’re new, Fantastic Novels, great interior art, makes you want to read it, it has this, giant snake throne?, warrior with a spear and a shield, volcanoes, got the drama built right into it, if only it were that good, needed a Kull, are the gods real?, what is the purpose of a city, Kull introspecting a lot, it needed more, a placeholder for other things, the Malazan books, H. Rider Haggard and She, weird superqueen, degeneracy and evil, sort of abstract, she had the whole society backing that up, baboon buddy, even the servants, personalities, I am destined to be your lover, the Victorian aesthetic, feast your eyes, Brides For The Beast by Wayne Rogers, a mystery terror novel (28 pages) and it has a monkey, “A lust-mad scientist whispered secrets concerning her lover’s birth—to Minna Talbot while a mad thing, whose origin was unknown, brought terror to that mountain wilderness…”, a grisly experiment with a great ape, each chapter has a name, foul clutches, hate feeds, it’s gonna be rough, a guaranteed good story, an unguaranteed and probably not so good, see if it is worthy, the promise of the editorial introduction, he’s your brother, experiments with a great ape, maybe they mind swapped, we don’t have, historically they didn’t sell super well, more commonly known, how many Railroad Fiction magazine, G-8 and his squadron, all the love magazines, a Ranch Romance, we are narrowed by the Munsey Magazines, how a big a shadow, The Shadow and The Spider, a lot of fun, series, one and dones, maybe your a monkeyman and have to burn yourself, how much you love Brides For The Beast, eat breakfast, Wayne Rogers, author of Substitute Corpses.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Leave a comment

Posts navigation

Older posts