The SFFaudio Podcast #872 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Hour Of The Dragon by Robert E. Howard

The SFFaudio Podcast #872 – The Hour Of The Dragon by Robert E. Howard (8 hours 56 minutes) read by Mike Vendetti, followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Alex (Pulpcovers), Cora Buhlert, and Mike Vendetti

Talked about on today’s show:
Weird Tales, December 1935 – April 1936, the chronologies, which order to read them in, the writing order, a summary, the first chapter, I was a mercenary, a pirate, a thief, one of the last ones written, Conan’s greatest hits, with an overarching plot, the Del Rey versions, an offer from a British publisher, in comics, the way it is serialized by Marvel the first time, very serial, the text itself, the individual sections, King Conan (the comic), Savage Sword, Red Sonja comics, Robert E. Howard’s horror fiction (with Cthulhu on the cover), Lovecraftian homages, Cora’s first Robert E. Howard, Conan The Conqueror, original Lancer in good condition, very very evil American trash, this is educational, terrible trash, pretty good, pastiches by Robert Jordan, committed suicide, every paperback, every introduction, 19898/9, there are risks, writers die of suicides, the guy who wrote Conan the Barbarian, the FBI didn’t kill Howard but…, Ernest Hemingway, two things, Lord Of The Rings, the phrase: The Return Of The King, an object that needs to be gotten rid of, thrown into the sea, hold up fantasy writers, polar opposites, low fantasy/high fantasy, the structure of this, the morality is completely different, contempt for kings, a king who doesn’t want to be a king, bother with all the Aquilonia stuff, reading enough of the Savage Sword, heads to North America and has adventures with the Aztecs, a novel there, Galactic Journey, Aztec dragon boats, Juhn Buscema, Ernie Chan, Roy Thomas, Alfred Alcala, amazing, Ben-Hur and this book, the movie, a downfall and a quest for vengeance, crawling back up, how Robert E. Howard wrote this, a map of Hyboria, thee same old map, Sygia is Egypt, Shem is Palestine or Israel, Shemites with blue beards, probably read Lew Wallace, he did, correspondence, did Tolkien steal it from Howard, not liking it, Cimmeria is Ireland, an Irishman, Asgard and Vanheim, the scando countries, fake europe, Aquilonia, Charlemagne style France, Nemedia, Zingara is Spain, Argos, placenames, there’s no Mediterranean, Kush is on the map, a tour thorough the Hyborian lands, a galley slave for all of 5 minutes, you’re my slave now, slave revolt, nice try, history as Amra, sailed with Belit, saves the black slaves, Conan is a good king, he’s been poor a lot, treats people well, let them worship their stupid gods, they’re transporting arms and armour, associated lands, Kull was a galley slave, a grist mill, wheel pain, to make Conans, a Conan factory, no other purpose, water or wind, an awesome scene in the movie, one guy on twitter shits on it, it’s not true to the stories, let’s talk about the Kevin Sorbo in the room, look at it without listening to it, it is put together like a film, the tone is wrong, Kevin Sorbo as Hercules, goofy, problems taking Conan seriously, Clonan series, Thongor the Barbarian, the He-Men, masculine muscular, the butt of the joke, a condescending article, slush for Strange Horizons, a rebuttal, academic scholarship, academic work on Robert E. Howard, too much, a pulp fiction “journal”, don’t feed the trolls, lay it out a little more, a huge chonky book, a great book, in comparison to Lovecraft, a sense of identity that comes from his family, a country gentleman out of time, much more unstable, aggressive with his arguments, a piece of propaganda that’s excellently done, Jews are just like us, a story of the Christ, Christianity is awesome, well done, how do I incorporate the ideas of Christianity into my life, surrounded by Christian people, in order to not be overwhelmed by it, a statement about the world, just reject it, ignore it, rebut it, his greatest hits, sell a book, religion, Conan’s religion has no substance to it, wants to be left alone, Robert E. Howard’s perfect god, somebody to swear by, Mike is waiting, link above, will leave a mark on you, engaging, look I can be in the world to, is this the only Howard story, we’re the good cult, dark gods, witchcraft with old ladies, she’s great, evil cults, Mitra, ineffective, share?, cults!, the Ashurrities, Roman era Christians, we got Mike, the movie with Charlton Heston, his response to Ben Hur, the chariot races, the galley slave incident, he’s in opposition to Ben Hur, all kinds of opposition, learning to let go of vengeance, suspicion, suspicious, played by Harvey Fierstein, Jubba, gender swapped Xaltotun, fine with the gender swap, The Spy Who Loved Me by Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love, loved him from afar, respected him as king, king by his own hand, By This Axe I Rule, smashes the tablets, no more law, one of the best scenes, the best Kull scene, a response, helps explain why it is a bit weird along the edges, so many characters who are part of the bureaucracy and power structure, a lot of guys who keep track of, The Phoenix On The Sword and The Scarlet Citadel, a woman’s waist, an early trans-person, not as manly as Conan, this is what he looks like, in what way is this story working, C.L.A.I.M., descriptions of colour, arms being lopped off, the colour of black lotus, amazing lotus, when reading Isaac Asimov, everything was in my mind, no actual description of them, robot stories, a black man, the two novels, The Naked Sun, American robotics investigators, narrating up a Robert E. Howard Conan, how long is that, 26 hours and 18 minutes, 21 stories, The Black Stranger and some later stuff, The Tower Of The Elephant, his best little story, magazine compilation copyright, Wikisource will have it, everything that was there, Robert E. Howard doing Conan, just so imagely rich, every sentence is almost a poem in terms of description, approaching a city, so much text, so flowery, this gets you an incredibly detailed image in one or two lines, very very right on, a blonde female, son’s fiancé doesn’t like blondes, Margaret Brundage, her Conan is the scrawniest, he’s not a skeleton, Robert Valentino Conan, he looks powerful, masculine, completely limp, need some Yul Brenner energy, laying down, we get a legit monkey fight in this book!, the movie adaptation, he’s sort of a half-simian something, remakes of Planet Of The Apes, you could give him a really good Thak, give him a cape, a gorilla face, Mighty Joe Young but a little small, the monkey’s stronger than Conan, he doesn’t say my guy is the chosen one, the son of god, or a devout believer, a canny survivor that comes from good morality (by not being a civilized fuck), being a barbarian, all the people who were sold into slavery, in the comic book adaptation, almost a wedding party, the Marvel one, Dark Horse, too asiany and too dark, the Cimmerian one, Aquilonina girl tied to an altar, the book is not about Zenobia, make the comparison, brass bra, in the sky is all the other Conan loves, Belit, Red Sonja, Valeria, queen of them all, Groucho Marx, in the internal chronology, the Aquilonias think he’s dead, no son and no descendant, sexual interest vs. moral interest, that witch with the dog, kingdoms, lineage, he has no heir, the whole plot is essentially about a lack of authority because of a lack of attention to that future, a rightful heir, conspires with the Germans, the Prussian invasion of France, you need to have succession, he rejects empire, it has to be the end, king stories don’t really work, usurping some guy, just playing RISK, someone is trying to usurp him, our period now, The Goblin Emperor, half-goblin, weird half-breed, who murdered, finding himself in a position, a good person in a difficult situation, the bad side of the family, William the Conqueror (aka William the Bastard), as you do, he has legitimacy because he has royal blood, he’s super-anti-royal blood, King Kull is also a barbarian, effete, the slight against one of the Aquilonian court, a description, they inherited their stuff, Xaltotun is in his tent and smoking hash, he’s a wizard, undead vampire, she’s great, more of her, cultists, Conan crashes the resurrection, the high priest of Set, he walks back into the pyramid, Aquivasha, also undead, hookin up and rulin the pyramid, pyramid and mummy interlude, Xuthal Of The Dust, The Slithering Shadow, they never go outside into their garden, instead of watching tv, high on lotus juice, slug monster from Cthulhuville, his commentary on non-outdoor work, being cozy, my uber eats delivered to the door, all live indoors, Red Nails, the one with the laser beam, stegosaurus, top 2 Conan stories, problems as a narrator, do you remember the weather you forecast, it just goes away, in six months, a reexperience of the book, a sequence of things, fathers and upwards respect, towards the emperor, surrogate fathers, towards a legit Jesus, generous with water and food, wants to heal the sick, wants people to be honest and nice, do the people of Aquilonia deserve Conan?, the hero they need right now, get some drinks, the gold isn’t power, surrenders, to the Nemedians, the knights, Provenance, protect the city, they came too late to the battle, they roll over, reading this again as an adult, 1933/34, Conan riding across the devastated Aquilonia, destroyed plantations, the utter fury he feels, the rise of fascism in Europe, hated Mussolini, hated Hitler, Europe in flames, the Prussian invasion of France in 1870, WWI, scorched earth, a conquering, they took the city, but they left again, Alsace/Lorraine, the Border Kingdoms, a German speaking minority, ballistas not canons, war devastation, the responses of the people to power, getting things back together, feels quite complex but the messaging is fairly simple, the driving thrust of the book is a series of interesting tours, the Heart of Ahirman, the most McGuffin McGuffin that’s ever McGuffined, The Fire of Asshurbanipal, a terrific one, a lost city, they find a magical jewel, a different jewel, more dangerous somehow, a little bit like The Ring, Xaltotun doesn’t want it, his phylactery, he’s a lich, a soul box/jar, hide it, keep it safe, hot potato, silly, a review on YouTube, it shouldnt be named The Hour Of The Dragon, a flag of Nemedia, Conan the Reconquer, invisible friend on the internet, a pivotal time of crisis and opportunity, destruction power and rebirth, the mix of the european and asian dragons, monsters, water creatures, they’re lucky, dragonboat festival, rebirth/rains, the guardsman of the king are the Red Slayers (in Kull), the Black Dragons, there isn’t a central female character in it, he sleeps with one of them?, doesn’t have sex, the original Conan movie, about to be executed, set pieces, puts on his outfit, kills the guards, rescues the woman, on the cover of Conan The Conqueror (Ace double), in any other story she’d be the love interest, Count Trocero of Poitain, he does sleep with her, he stables with her, in a cave, like in a manger, another scene out of Ben-Hur, I am Zalata, child of the night guiding armed men, the raven, not at this point, the answer fantastic, mounted the rocks, circuitous path, an eagle, an uncanny thing, she’s like Circe, she commands multiple wild animals, she lead the way, the great wolf trotting at her side, a narrow precipice of stone, half-hut/half-cavern, dethroned, now’s our chance to fuck this witch up, settling scores, the children of the wild are kinder than the children of men, brooding in the silence of glens, vs. city streets, my children, your sword, those Nemedian dogs, the foolish villagers in the valley, my answers angered them, you’ll be king one day, she tries to eat him or suck his blood, throws her into the fire, wow, scary, old women in Robert E. Howard stories, young maidens or ancient goddesses, she’s millennial old from Ancient Acheron, she told me she was 19, played for comedy, a very Kevin Sorbo line, her minion, damage from his face, you promised me blah blah blah, the line from The Empire Strikes Back, I’ve altered the pact, he’s kind of alien, when Orestes comes back, so much worse than we knew, normal good human ancestors, the absolute, he’s from Python, where they squeeze you death, resurrect a dead empire, necromancy on a national scale, drag the world into the past, the actual present world, really nasty strain of conservatism, make Archeron Great Again, Make Acheron Again, people rise to power for different reasons, it’s kind of an accident, it happens offscreen, super-competent, merit matters, you should be able rise, your skills should enable you to rise, king by his own hand, The Hyborian Age, the Probable Outline Of Conan’s Career, son of the blacksmith, in America you can become president, 10,000 years ago, Greek democracy and Kings or Emperors, the other direction, that tour of Stygia, the big evil snake is on the street, a theocracy, the Egyptian system, King Kull story, Exile Of Atlantis, fell in love with a Lemurian pirate, burned at the stake, he throws his dagger at her, Atlantis: I hate it, forbidden love, laws are against it, wondering about existence, really existentialist, no progeny, an analogue for Robert E. Howard, racially mixed marriages, Lemurian pirates and Atlantean maidens, The Curse Of The Golden Skull, Bran Mak Morn stories, a Weird Tales filler story, better than Tolkien, the Battle Of The Five Armies, Bard shooting the arrow, great incidence in The Return OF The King, I am no man, it’s a girl!, a thief sneaking into a temple, million year old vampire lady, a scroll, Jewels of Gwahlur, that suspicion usually pays off, she gets a reward (him), the opening, plot’s not super awesome, little short stories, details, the weird goblin people, that’s so cool, the powerplays, becoming a pirate again, bite sized bits of story, loosely strung, From What Hell Have You Crawled, bring back chapter titles, The Haunter Of The Pits, all comes together, there I won, it’s just over suddenly, him wanting to get paid, more words, Almuric, never completed, more Otis Adelbert Kline, Dennis Archer, went to Weird Tales in 1935-1936, summer of 1936, the anniversary of his death, the grave, leave little gifts, alcohol, he drank beer, leaving spirits, a Robert E. Howard bar guide, off twitter now, switched over to Bluesky, post everything four times, look into Solomon Kane, Conan as a character, Solomon Kane stories, more our world, 1600s/1700s, maybe this guy is just insane, purposely religious, African witch doctor, not Christian but good, the staff of the biblical Solomon, immortal vampire woman, zombies, vampires, flying monsters, innkeeper, the shortest one, Rattle Of Bones, Red Shadows, Men shall die for this, he’s like The Punisher, found her on the side of the road, swore vengeance, Wings In The Night, will they sell, a little cachet, second tier, still before Kull, El Borak, and the boxing stories, books about war, Ambrose Bierce, An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge, What I Saw Of Shiloh, All Quiet On The Western Front, Cora got PTSD from the movie, Through The Wheat by Thomas Boyd, 1st infantry division, the disillusionment of young men going to war, Jack London, the Japanese invasion of Korea, he liked being first hand, War by Jack London, pre-WWI war, that really amazing Jack London hit, Tales Of Soldiers And Civilians, too many people watching, dying but not dead yet, remember forever, vividly to this day, Belgium, much better balm, too young to appreciate it, WWI letters, WWII all the time, Dolce Et Decorum Est, WWI poetry, Soldier’s Home by Ernest Hemingway, everywhere he walks in the town, as if there is purpose here, a tiny little branch of hope, a younger sister, his only connection to not killing himself, the dedication, so powerful, captured the experience of so many soldiers all over the world, Erich Maria Remarque museum, cottage industry, Die Brücke (1959), The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham, he doesn’t fit in with everybody anymore, goes off to Asia, told from the POV of his friends, George Time, stealing food from a dead German’s pack, a ring off a corpse, so many stories we just let go, the right questions to ask, Cora’s great uncle, born in 1897, WWI German sailor mutiny, locked up, home in Bremen, the Bremen Soviet Republic, run of to the US, died in the early 1980s, surname, want to ask but don’t, family secrets that no one talks about, Nazis, these people were bad, we don’t talk about them, German POWs, Fort Riley, a powerful statement, least of all an adventure, a generation of men, escaped the shells, destroyed by the war, the modern movie, completely ruins the story, a grunt’s eye view of the war, ruin the end, Paul gets killed on November 11, a quiet day, Wonder Woman (2007), Twelve O’Clock High (1949), written for Jimmy Stewart, had PTSD in spades, I can not go back there, Flight Of The Phoenix (1965) with Hardy Kruger, the bombing raid, I was on the other side, almost killed, it was a long time ago, Hal Clement, Gene Roddenberry, last time I was here I was bombing the place, terrible stories of the bombing nights, graphic descriptions of hiding in bunkers, an American airbase, practicing on the moors, low flying noisy miliary airplanes, born in 1938, taking potshots at him, these people, Stephen Crane, his graphic description, The Red Badge Of Courage, The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky, The Open Boat, Manacled, it’s vivid, an epic poem, Storm Of Steel by Ernst Jünger, chiming in, the most powerful war book, weird answer: For The Temple, the Roman sack of Jerusalem, the first Horatio Hornblower book, the entire collection, not public domain, short stories, C.S. Forester, E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, it does everything, everything was provided for people, the plot is almost non-existence, guy calls up his mom on Microsoft Teams, the machine stops, the plot is not the story, utopian literature, English 12, reading science fiction in school, Germans don’t use the word dystopia, Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, won’t survive reentry, the machine stopped, lost without the internet, our phone, my navigator, literally lost, try to by a map now, the B.C. Ferries are trying to make people reserve your ticket and space online, not the winged creatures, if it has to be online, no ebay store, amazon store, government services, reserve bus tickets on your phone, scan a qr code, clipboard, to use the bank machine, it is the machine stops, old/poor/homeless, really hard to get stuff, government service, access to the road, the Amish will win, we’re competing here, the Leigh Brackett book, really interesting, a better short story guy than a novelist, for a guy who only wrote one novel, some of the best short stories, also wrote a lot of poems, he’s so good at it, they just didn’t sell, here Merry sing a song at a pub, Gandalf talking about Mordor, he wrote a suicide note 3 days before he killed himself, more than once, a year after his suicide, so amazingly powerful and rich, that rich language he’s so good at, a Robert E. Howard movie that was funny, Dennis Dorgan, Sailor Steve, a Breckinridge Elkins is a cartoon, a dumb smart guy, Popeye style villains, A Gent From Bear Creek, they don’t advertize it, MFA creative writing woman, his suicide note as a poem, June 18th 1937, The Cross Plains Review, The Tempter by Robert E. Howard, dream away the ages, who are you, I am Rest, Alpha and Omega, lusted for the resting, set me free, this world of human cattle, long I sat, never free, huger grew the phantom’s figure, through the fogs of old Time came striding, gliding gliding, from the shadows into day, he put the trigger in the poem, why would you write your suicide note in rhyme?, because he’s a poet, a trigger warning, cause people to commit suicide, never talk about war, just let everybody learn it on their own, “died of suicide”, you have to coddle everybody, you don’t go outside, comfortably nesting, she’s a podcaster, she’s a streamer, Australian music in the 20th century, 3 viewers, that’s us now, a yard party, on this note, we all should, see you all next time, Mike is 84 years old and looking at the world a lot differently, a good morning/afternoon, lunch/dinner.

Posted by Jesse Willis

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

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

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

Posted by Jesse Willis

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

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

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

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

The Thing On The Roof by Robert E. Howard

The Nameless City by H.P. Lovecraft

The Nameless City by H.P. Lovecraft

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #864 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: In The Abyss by H.G. Wells and Black Hound Of Death by Robert E. Howard

The SFFaudio Podcast #864 – In The Abyss by H.G. Wells (33 minutes) read by James Dixon for LibriVox AND Black Hound Of Death by Robert E. Howard (56 minutes) read by Ben Tucker, both for LibriVox, followed by a discussion of both. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Will Emmons, Cora Buhlert, and Alex (pulpcovers)

Talked about on today’s show:
1897?, 1936, posthumusly, 1896, proto-Lovecraft, both of these stories are science fiction, would you object?, the point of either of them?, half-gadget story, chanting, science fiction elements, not the thing that’s going on, functionally horror stories, what happens at the end, our boy is killed, deep sea monsters, he’s down there living with them now, white surface god of the merpeople, an angel, brough evidence the source for all the goodies that fall, you can’t weld underwater very easily, fire, bring the equipment from above, when Lovecraft has his deep ones, crowns and stuff, treasure from the same source, the village of Innsmouth, immortality, a horror, I’m one of them, impure bloodline, the people I passed over on the Mayflower, so excited to go down again, we have to wonder, The Time Traveler at the end of The Time Machine, explorers, still things to discover, vanish again to explore some more, stick to their room, yithians exploring, The First Men In The Moon by H.G. Wells, a bathysphere spaceship that goes up instead of down, plant the flag and punch natives, he can’t get out, not even a hint, drink the potion, if this window opens, unscrewed, Silurians or Sea-Devils from Doctor Who, deep sea, not blob-fish people, people shaped, houses with no ceilings, the tone is different, a comedy piece, anti-comedy, put up a cheer, doesn’t really go anywhere, the repeated line anywhere, like butter spread on bread, supopsed to object more, tonally not, make the argument, the explanation for what happens in Black Hound Of Death, Mongolia, the Erlik worshipping sect, great at plastic surgery, they gave us all their science, secretly dribbled out, wrapped in a revenge story, other shudder pulp stories, Cat-Woman, set in Quebec, that one’s even science, mailed away for some gladular, the importance of hormones, maybe we can make a werewolf, not contagious right, Garfield, set in modern days, what makes it so shudder pulpy, or weird menacey, prototypical weird menace stories, weird tales pioneered that, trying to get the cover, naked girl tied to a table, Margaret Brundage, a parallel universe Margaret Brundage cover that would have been amazing, Seabury Quinn, a naked lady standing over a grave and a kitten, Sin House, good cover, elements that are super-interesting, is this an actual state, Louisiana, or Arkansas?, there’s a river, the negros call it Egypt, New York city, definitely not in New York City, Texas, pine forests, weird relationship to forests, so freaked out they have to write horror stories, pine trees, the soils become acidic, woodcutting, big plantations, hiking with 1000 year old oak trees, the image of the old growth forest, the first line of the story, Egyptian darkness., unseen things lurking in the blackness, slinking figures, prowl beyond the edge of normal life, not here for no reason, some such thoughts flitted vaguely, deep pineland, dares invade in the night, densely timbered river country, obscurely racial reason, main bad guy is Adam Grimm, Bros. Grim, the bible too, in Exodus, the Jews wanna flee the pharaoh, mark their doors with lambs’ blood, the mezuza, 3 nights there’s darkness, occupied by ex-slaves, one white man living in this forest, honorable white man, save his fellow white man, a little like a Solomon Kane story, treats all races equally, an escaped prisoner, killed a sherriff’s deputy?, forget to mention, a black man killed by this black man, a trustee, a killer of all men, a particular mission of revenge, you can’t write a Robert E. Howard story without a collection of grindstones you need to grind, barbarism vs. civilization, hiding in the forest, betrayed a white man, got a letter with a photo of his face, the girl is only there because we need a girl, look good while naked on the cover, a threat in the forest, more obviously manly, another strong image, a black man with his ear ripped off, same thing happens to our guy in another fight, my superior boxing science, beat each other to a pulp, a thing that happens for real, Evander Holyfield, Tyson did the biting, one ear had been torn from his head, gigantic beast had ripped it out with his fangs, mangled ears of boxers, that’s from being punched a lot, traditionally you don’t bite, a meal, a shotgun, the second ear, a wild beast, Tope Braxton, as bull apes fight, knee driven to groin, gouging, the pistols on the ground, aware of only one desire, to kill with naked hands, a motionless mass of bloody flesh and splintered bone, iron talons, bruised the bone beneath, a solid ache, three thews, sluiced from an ear that was ripped loose from my head, the choking until his hands meet, bloody scenes, the goriest, a Frank Frazetta illustration, Shadows Of Zamboula, the strangler, violent and detailed, they’re comedies, Steve Costigan ones, primal, the racial dynamic, a throwback for black people, this other dynamic, physically changed by semimagical methods that are all scientific, Erlik is their god, Himalayas, a Turkic god, People Of The Black Circle, two white explorers, chivalric hero, a dutch door, beneath the bottom of the door, the holes of the two barrels, because of the framing, this is a story set in a forest at night, unending, two kinds of darkness, the darkness of the barrels of the gun leveled at him, white characters and black characters, peeping, a lady on the table naked, twelve times, there’s no blessing, god please, the blood of the lamb on the door, how did he construct this story?, revenge, weird menace story, what things you need to include, plausibly, can’t be magical, a girl take her shirt off, that was implied, Dime Mystery, Spicy Mystery, posthumously, never intended for Weird Tales, 1932/3/4, crime magazines, Dime Mystery, Weird Terror Tales, Horror Stories, straight mystery was older, when did Horror Tales start?, that Ray Cummings story, werewoman, 1935, when Weird Tales starts they don’t even know what they’re doing, Terror Tales started in 1934, when Lovecraft writes in, almost gets the job of editor, he knows what we’re writing, Edmond Hamilton, spooky horror, gothic, weird fiction, some science fiction, sword and sorcery boom, supernatural investigators, traditional ghost stories, supernatural detective stories, William Hope Hodgson was doing it too, John Constatine, the Dresden Files, female versions, erotic urban fantasy thing, less focus on the mystery, not weird Sherlock Holmes stories, an action movie, crime mystery, hardboiled fiction, Hammett or Chandler, where we’re going, back to the bathysphere, spread like butter on bread, talking about your food?, everybody agrees that it is a ball, two windows, the second hand description, has to go down again, I have to go down again, choose when he’s gonna come up, a padded room, padded in a sphere shape, the friction, moving so fast through the water, suspend your knowledge, barely had submarines, they knew back then, brace yourself when it is moving, seatbelts, for racing, just brace yourself, post WWII, he could had a chair in there, a window to the outside world, James Cameron, the bottom of the deepest ocean, a cool undersea civilization, Titanic, separate incidents, they want to go to space, to be the guy that went there, his explanation is not super evident in the story, it was there, Everest hadn’t been climbed, up by themselves?, there’s no food up there?, before mountain climbing started as a sport, climb across the alps, why are these people, this important, for the narrative of this story, it is crazy to want to do this stuff, he saw things he says, he never wrote it down, what he said that he saw, he’s crazy, hallucinating, pendants to other stories, The Crystal Egg, a precursor to The War Of The Worlds, a palantir from The Lord Of The Rings, the people of mars, designed to be in the same book as, kinda like Dracula’s Guest, experimenting with the idea, Elmore Leonard, Karen Makes Out, the nested narrative, a graveyard stone, having sex with dead bodies, super-normal, afraid of living out his life in a padded room, he’s insane, real boring, there are people down there, whenever a ship of our’s sinks, the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society: let’s combine War Of The Worlds and Innsmouth, sinking our ships, the mer-people, mermen, aquaticans, [tritons by H.P. Lovecraft too] undersea people, the idea lives on, the earliest version, The Abyss (1989) weird things on the ocean floor, not evening getting it in a letter, H.G. Wells interviewed the guys on the boat, here it all is, The Temple by H.P. Lovecraft, as one does, creatures floating around down there, dolphins that are escorting them, Atlantis, Atlantis as aliens on earth, Disney World, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, dragged like a train on a track, giant squid attacks you, a vivid memory, sole visit, at 5, time machine, steampunk Nautilus, windows where you could look out, 1 or 2 meters deep, the instinct in picking these two stories, how stories are constructed, weird fiction vs. science fiction, they are, it’s pulp, literally is, constructed to fit in a pulp magazine, straight up science fiction done in a sophisticated pioneering way, radically different, something like science fiction, his math was really bad, a werewolf dude, weird mongolian priests did it, he just wants a monster, maybe it is about the effect, we know he wants the cover, for the formula to get certain things in there, manly brawn and manly code of behavior, I’m an honorable white man, all I ask is a pallate on the floor, a cool little touch, why The Odyssey is so important, guest host relationship, someone else’s home, white men have to be like this, also blacks here too, turn to the Wells, sailors trynna be interested in this thing, he seems crazy, who would you hire?, you need sailors, better trained, research vessels, those kinds of things are called Davits, poop is called the poop, a sling?, a boom, rowboats, lifeboats, modern research vessels, run some experiments, go back to the universities, what the sailors talking about on the ship, turns into a first person story, waited for three weeks, Wells is not an upper class guy, didn’t know any better, it’s pretty good, what do we make about what’s going on amongst the sea-people, making noises, a community, a city, they live on our trash, it’s tantalizing, is there something else going on there?, they have no idea they’re at the bottom of the sea, a gift from the gods, this is normal, comets are symbols from god, fall from the heavens, we also can see the heavens, they can’t, natural phenomena, Philip K. Dick, little people in a cage, plan c, we are plan a, Project: Earth, these are the replacements for us, escape into the world, just like we did, who are you writing this report for?, a CIA world fact book, he has to report to people, a Mormon god, he’s got his own god above him, they live in rooms with no ceilings, not gonna get rained on, its for privacy, swim over you and see what you’re doing, analogies to other sea creatures, polyps that make up barnacles, imagine these are barnacle people, they’re filter feeders, sunken ships, whenever we cross the ocean, the technology that they’re getting is getting newer, the Titanic fall on top of them, a lot of weapons, WWI, WWII, hasn’t worked their entire society, aliens on another planet but right here, the real effect of its being science fiction, the sense of wonder, an infodump that tells it, what if this go on?, is this contagious?, what if this secret order of monks is releasing our technology, push it to make it be that, this is Egypt, the black people living in Egypt, bad white people and bad black people, this torturous thing to other people, escape from Egypt, the secret cult of priests of Erlik, super-science, how we maintain our secret, clearly modified by Mongolian super-science, on him as a hound, the better explanation, I want the cover, everybody loves a good thew, thews attract girls, that’s just science, not even fiction!, the title, Wayne June who didn’t die from suicide, comes to visit, Mr Jim Moon, a black hound of death, the thing that chases you down, chased him down, probably just the one bullet, who is the ladies’ man, H.G. Wells or Robert E. Howard, there’s no girls in this H.G. Wells story, hits the gym, lives at the gym, gym bro, men or women, which one do you find more attractive, a bit of fat on his body, super-defined muscles, women don’t are as much, those are for the guys, Robert E. Howard isn’t writing for women, let me see his bank account, how he treats my children, Hugh Jackman was first being Wolverine, Muscle And Fitness and Good Housekeeping, flexing and super ripped and oiled, a v neck sweater, pastels, smiling, the oiled muscles all the time, cool muscles underneath, a good provider, H.G. Wells is the ladies man, its not cheating if…, I don’t want to keep this bod to myself, famously a playboy, not an Andrew Tate style playboy, he’s for men not for women, all the baggage he brings, Lovecraft (not a ladies’ man), characters are almost always men, and flat, Arthur C. Clarke style characters, Weena, The Sea-Lady, the whole serialization, a retelling of the Hans Chrstian Anderson story about The Little Mermaid, well she has flippers, pushed around in a wheelchair, she’s a fish lady, lives kinda like a disabled person visiting British society, the guest to have at your party, novels by H.G. Wells that nobody reads, The Sleeper Awakes, Amazing, green aquarium, all about propaganda and speakers that are telling you the news, The Sea Lady, Pearson’s magazine, slick mags before they were slick, middle class readership, 1901, Amazing Stories, 1928, 70 pages, a victorian bathing suit, you can see her tail, fins all over the place, he has women in stories, a couple running away for a sex adventure in Paris, each other’s spouses, one of them has a turban, I guess we should dine together, what if sexual relations are different, Robert Silverberg and other people, what if we live differently than we do, a comedy of manners, a giant chicken The Food Of The Gods, chemical fertilizers, The Colour Out Of Space, giant food and what it does to us, Buck Rogers, contaminated food, werewolves are a metaphor, they’re like dragons, european dragons are evil kings, they steal maidens and don’t share them, men who go crazy, not protected by law, scientific explanation story is about manners, amazing fights, the blackness of the forest, a hodgepodge of stuff, moderating behavior, he did bad, Kirby Garfield, savage and a barbarian, he’s from the city, doesn’t follow the rules of hospitality, werewolf making priests, to be courteous, skulls split open, bash their head in, the philosophy of Texas, cops show up on the trail, we assumed that, the assumed, makes you more polite, not saying that to be funny, the discourse in the United States, makes you more polite, Heinlein has that same take at points, make the case for this, honour cultures, insults are met with violence, daughters get murdered, in between that, fairly strict ritualized interactions between people, never insult your guest, in a safer environment, call the cops on him, that formal structure is gone, formal handshake is going extinct, to show strength, old men would shake my hand and it would come away broken, know who you’re making friends with here bub, hands hidden, its about showing grip strength/murder strength, something wrong with their mentality, a hug between hands, quiet backwoods, laws of Germany, new years day, squeezed your hand, when he finally died, not very sad, his handshake was too manly, rude sexual jokes, pre-teen or early teen, cooling rooms, quite backwards, the Devil’s Moor, boys and horses (pretty stupid), horse trainer, version 2, a mermaid, rescued from drowning, handsome but irresponsible, introduced into polite society, as an immortal, critical detachment, already engaged, a political career, other dreams, humorous fiction, fantasy fiction, Special Deliverance, sign me up for that, an Alex Pulpcovers book, in the Howard story, gorilla imagery, savage beast, viscous killer, The Grisly Horror aka Moon Of Zimbabwe, carnivorous gorilla, smuggled in by a cult, negros of the pinelands, Poe is not Robert E. Howard, more like Lovecraft, Lovecraft but horny, Clark Ashton Smith, there’s a girl in it, a girl who’s dead, Poe is focused on being married, in his art it is all about girls, pieces of affection, really smart?, teams sucks, maybe headphones are broken, troubleshooting in May, vacation to Deep Creek Lake, the whole fam, the inlaws, banging away, massive away, wired headphones, wired and no battery, her usual setup, in Maryland, built a dam long ago, springtime, go swimming/fishing, read some books, hydroelectric company, could be Japanese, also in Maryland, Baltimore bachelor party, science fiction convention, death metal festival, contacts from school days, good?, fiance is good, the Poe museum, Richmond, Virginia, they’re different aren’t they?, Mexico, Belize in North America?, not a continent, region, a really good atlas, neighborhood internet, everybody watching Netflix, gigabit fiber, Germany is falling apart, the old cables, Starlink available?, give your data, more than Elon Musk, Fort Mead, your money, your data, cellphone and landline phone, works great, more fun!, in a pulpy short story, way more fun, Wells is more interesting, someone could make a really good story, Lovecraft did, Shadows Over Innsmouth, it’s there, hinting at something that could be cool, doesn’t come together as a story, a better story, works as a story, goes by fast, blather about, strengths vs. flaws, Edward Page Mitchell, America’s future, vegetarian Chinese party, beautiful daughter, vacuum tubes, an amazing science fiction story, they’re funny, giving you drama and interesting ideas, The Man Without A Body, now he lives in a museum, collect heads, The Crystal Man, an invisible man story before H.G. Wells, C. August Dupin, I see and observe, an invisible man to be observed but not seen, The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, Costa Rica, Scott Miller, 4 or 5 other ones, The New York Sun, 1870s and 1880s, bangers all of them, no attribution to the author, the 1970s, a pioneer, The Clock That Went Backwards, the exact same plot as Back To The Future (1985), a siege in the Netherlands, the Tardis?, he’s his own grandpa, isn’t that amazing?, completely forgotten, line the birdcage, toilet paper for your dog, his magazine stories got put into book collections, Wells was quite well know, the most famous person in the world, histories of human civilization, a science fiction guy, a Virginia Woolf book, Sir Walter Scott, mostly forgotten, 1852-1927, his own journal, The Tachypomp, unlimited speed, also makes sense, no Einsteinian problem, The Ablest Man In The World, The Inside of the Earth, who wrote this, food pills, in 1973, Sam Moskowitz, the sort of person who would have done this, recorder, doing pretty good, German pickles, see you for The Sea Lady, steampunk convention, terrible traffic, public holidays, camper vans, a glut, it doesn’t have to be smart to be fun, Worldcon Seattle, arrested and thrown into jail, toy collector convention, going out more, industrial history stuff, North Sea coast, lots of places semi-nearby, better weather for it, on a podcast today.

In The Abyss by H.G. Wells

Black Hound Of Death by Robert E. Howard

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #859 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Eternal Savage by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The SFFaudio Podcast #859 – The Eternal Savage by Edgar Rice Burroughs, (7 hours 7 minutes) read by Mark Nelson for LibriVox, followed by a discussion of both. Participants in the discussion include Jesse and Will Emmons

Talked about on today’s show:
Eternal Lover, Eternal Savage, one of the Barney of something books, the second half Sweetheart Primeval, Barney Custer of Beatrice, a weird publication history, 1915, August 1915, The Mad King, separated, connected, The Mad King, Alex (pulpcovers), also a Tarzan book, written in 1914, Tarzan to come, Lord Greystoke, he’s in the book, the host for Barney and his sister Victoria, doesn’t say anything, an impression of what he would have said, in the room earlier, contractually obligated, I’ll stand there but, a weird stand-in, an easter egg, no strong reason for it to be there, also a book I wrote, you are aware of, Burroughsiana, a weird thing, stuff to think about, Nu is different than Tarzan, a red herring, multi-media universe, all the crossovers, the Burroughs Estate, the Pellucidar series, his own Alan Moore thing, League of Extraordinary Burroughsians, Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc., re-issue in an Ace-Double style with Cave Girl on the other side, big series, a mistake, make a lot of money doing it, he was good at doing that, part of a series but not really, stands-alone kind of, more prominent in, Nu Nu, Nu fitz Nu, having a mating on the nu moon, gotta get your cycles started to pump out some babies, baby, what’s going on with this book, legit confused, what’s going on, all explained in the end, what we actually have here, two books here, one isn’t fully realized, the narrative about Nu’s journey to the 20th century, cut-short, what happens at the very very end of this book, new timeline, last 4 paragraphs, a sudden halt, nothing more to be seen, crumbling skeleton, stone tipped spear, stone knife, stone axe, look!, feeble flame, the grinning skull of a great cat, 18inch curved fangs, Oo!, for his Natul for me, a really good ending, okay, more than 25 by Burroughs, he pointed out something, feel it, feel kinda dumb, they’re always the goddamn same, meet cute, girl gets kidnapped, happens twice in this book, in every Burroughs, really into kidnapping, the reason he’s into that, a big booklength book, he needs to fill pages, a science fiction story, an adventure story, the Encino Man, a white nigger?, not more that 17 times, he’s called that, this means that everybody around him is racist, not real dependable, when all the servants fled, a laybout asshole, using the n-word, what is lie?, so good, really fun, interrogates the story of what we hear about racist, more racist, Robert E. Howard, The Last White Man, bad on a number of levels, the manly exemplar, Barney is a good brother, Lord Greystoke is a nice host, Nu son of Nu, an innocent abroad, a super-muscular man like Tarzan used to be, incredibly muscular, intense, contrasted and compared, they never wrestle, he puts on Lord Greystoke’s clothes, a little too small for him, a direct comparison, take it a little bit deeper, Solomon Kane, the white savage, what he’s like, white savage vs. Tarzan, in this life, acculturated to the stone age, a ranch in Nebraska, it becomes a comedy after a certain point, learns horse-breaking, another kidnapping, a comedy, a Savage who becomes civilized, he was an English Lord, he learned to read, inherent, is even homo sapiens, bit the guy’s neck out, direct message, state tv in Sweden SVT, here are the first swedes, they’re all black, kind of a point, why are all the cavemen white?, what period is this set, he’s from the Niocene, the only thing that comes up is this book, eras, Pleistocene, smilodon and pterodactyls, a tiger in Africa, no homework, very pure for that reason, is this science fiction?, a conversation on twitter, he’s an unfrozen caveman, frozen in a cave somehow, I’m worried about earthquakes, mice and earthquakes, our guy gets trapped with the head of a smilodon, by suspended animation, Heinlein trick in The Door Into Summer, the gases that came in and froze him, a very popular one, 19th century novels, News From Nowhere, Just Imagine (1930), The Marching Morons, wakes up in the future, a Stanley Weinbaum novel, a ranch in Africa, this is my destiny, shot in the head, learns languages, kidnapped by the arabs, arabs and white slavery, super-not Christian, compared to Howard, here’s how I’d have Christ do it, angry about being nailed to a cross, nailing them to a cross!, cave man monogamy, vs. the arabs, sold into a harem, for a sultan, interestingly contrasted, why it is not science fiction, a new kidnapping scenario, yoink!, the girl’s gone, this other girl, infanticide really bad, suicide, stabs herself and jumps off a cliff, used to sudden death, reading any more Burroughs, he does it well, not edified by any of this, because it is old, modelling his mind, got it now, more cavemany, hadn’t figured out grammar yet, moved to Spain, attempt to prove the unprovable about human nature, you and I today, made of wholecloth, no substance to it, a multi-decade mission to get inside the mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs, really against rape, the baby will be uglier, the boat people, hunters are noble, cowskins, they make their caves, seems suspicious to me, superior technology, the whims of nature, what we are supposed to conclude, chivalrous, kidnapped his girlfriend from the past, unfrozen caveman I love you, the man of my dreams, dogs on his side, let’s go after unfrozen now escaped cave man, tear out his throat, cut back to her waking up from a 3 minute coma, made a new timeline, trapped in a cave, the worst thing that can ever possibly happen, transmigration to a past life, Phra The Phoenician, She, all a dream, see the skeleton of a guy, our love from past ages, you didn’t hallucinate the first half of the book, hallucinate the last half of the book, work for hire, where you’re messing up, Victoria goes back to the Niocene, retain her 20th century consciousness more, she’s not herself, flashes she was just in the 20th century, that would make the book awesome, he’s the fish in his water again, how to re-integrate it at the end, the upshot of the new timeline, the previous timeline, suspended animation, not able to meet your soulmate, no genetic connection, Deep Space 9, the Tribbles episode, Bashir and O’Brien are in the elevator, you’re new here, are you a doctor, giving him the wink, gloms on to her name, his great grandmother, otherwise he won’t exist, Time Rider (1982), Edward Page Mitchell, The Clock That Went Backward, the soul transference, Nu always looks like a caveman, same body, barrettes and lipstick and earrings not made of bones, messier hair, bikini made of fur, speak the same language of monkeys, his theory of past lives and the eternal lover, all of Poe, The Raven, is their love so great that it transcends time, Somewhere In Time (1980), they never have sex, except in the fake timeline, maybe had sex with him in her past?, hit on the head, past life remembrance, die in an earthquake, he really didn’t think this through, not a theory of past lives, this is not science fiction, undercooked fantasy, adventure fiction, a terrible genre, Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981), why?, The High Road To China (1983), the answer is it has the supernatural stuff on top of the period setting, god literally exists and doesn’t like Nazis, the power of the contents of the Ark of the Covenant, don’t apply the ritual properly, not supposed to look at god, he went to Sunday school, what the Nazis want, other adventure stories, ancient Egypt, the power of god in this bucket, a burned hand, do the same thing, it’s got everything, same with Star Wars (1977), Luke Burrage argued it was science fiction, new technology was the Death Star, Star Destroyers and Death Stars, sabers are curved, all undercooked, all works for a child, this all works if you wanna pass some time and have some fun, sad story, it could be, rewrite it for him, cohere a little better, talking to the monkeys, me I’m friends of the monkeys, all the other Tarzan, in some respects, the species that raises Tarzan, not gorillas, talks to lions, Elephants, mean things, vocab is low, elephants are very sophisticated, more Mars books, the surgery one The Mastermind Of Mars, medical science fiction, medical adventure, Conan with his shirt off, standing on a pile of bones, not what the stories are like, one narrow aspect of it, Burroughs construction of these stories, strawman characters, a long tradition, Heinlein doing it, if we have good ideas, if you don’t have good ideas, ambiguous characters, helps Nu get out of bondage, I’m going to kill this baby, should I kill this baby, I wanna kill this baby, ladies driving their kid into the lake, minimize this, invest a lot in our offspring, 18 years, when your parents are no longer involved, kids were getting married and getting jobs at much younger ages, childhood is forever, that is odd, something to look at, be done with the child after 5 seconds, he can just fuck off, the baby literally will die without the mom, cats and dogs, lick up the poop, we have hands, we’re more like birds, or bears or elk, all about the nuclear family, how clams work, the dad is like a donor, goes to get shot, sport, food, most hunters are eating their meat these days, he hunts for food, the head is so he can marry her, in the father’s eyes, in her eyes, her behavior is pretty weird, not fleshed out, Victoria Custer, Nah-tool, this cave man is too horny, not that interesting, Victoria is an adult, how old are these characters?, 100,000 and 16 years old, not a cave-boy, much funnier, a pretty good movie, cave man comedies, lends itself to comedy, the concept, plot points, cave man pocket, 3 rocks to by an Arizona iced tea, why do people like it?, it hasn’t changed in price, its not from Arizona, it’s from New York, Arizona looking, the owner’s wife, a special half ice-tea half lemonade, Arnold Palmer, made it up, licensed him, a little bitterness, something mixed with lemonade, a shandy, if you’re into poison, it was okay, a podcaster recording them, what Burroughs was up to, Under The Moons Of Mars, Argosy and All-Story, a better rot writer, massive life experience, running around writing kidnapping plots, kiss each other, the women have eggs on Mars, the best setting to make the argument, so not science fiction, rockets were a thought in people’s heads, he didn’t have a rocket do it, the Martians in The War Of The Worlds, shot out of a cannon, space travel, chose not to do that, more novel, 4 arm green aliens, red indians that are not indians, colour interested, white apes, there’s stuff there, refreshing to talk to Jesse about Burroughs, deep in their guts, as a child, as an adult, Pirates Of Venus, a kidnapping plot with airships, tunnels, horsemen on the Moon, The Moon Maid, The First Men In The Moon by H.G. Wells, hefty intellectual, a comedy, a business man, giant history of humankind and everything, the original serialzed version in a magazine style on the newsstands, hot chocolate on the back, the formation of the Earth, up to Caesar, not interested in it, not writing the same kind of stuff, war correspondent during WWII, Damien Walter podcast, Feral Historian, The Dispossessed, with Evan, killed him and buried him, keep his bones in a cave, all those we’ve lost, when you read H.G. Wells, even when he’s not writing actual science fiction, not trying to ingratiate, The Island Of Doctor Moreau, a slice of H.G. Wells, him doing Jules Verne, on a spectrum where authors are, where Larry Niven is, The Cold Equations, floppy saggy science fiction, he’s juggling but they’re not hard batons, they’re bags full of sand, his stuff is weightier, communism bad, China is bad, a book which engages with ideas, conked on the head, dream books back to back, Robert E. Howard would have been on Instagram and lifting, suicidal ideation, posted videos of himself punching a side of beef, center of attention, businessman, cozying up to Trump sort of thing, spiritual affinity, real estate developers, sea to lake, orange man neutral, what his retreat is named, looks like it is in Florida, mystique, his grandson, Burroughs believed that all of the stories he wrote were ultimately true, that’s Heinlein too, gets that way at the end, mostly known as a novelist, The Pursuit Of The Pankera, honky, chonky, The Number Of The Beast, diary entries, Hilda Corners, the Barsoom novels, very Heinleinian thing to do, n-dimensional space, intimate tango, a space machine, alternate dimensions, 666, a googleplex or more of parallel universes, Oz, literary places, quasi-public domain literary places, a beleif that’s in your head even if it is only transitory, our worlds, unlike myna birds and cave sloths, an autists, a creed, never learned to talk, talking a vow of autism, a real world, people with autism, folksy, take the article off, persons of the semitic creed, we construct our worlds out of words, some penetration, very unusual, add it to your vocabulary, use it with your friend Will, learn vocab words, if you don’t control the vocab words they control you, you need to know, the manifold is broken, a barrier between the universe, find out what lies are, Lord Greystoke, I have red hair, a theory of mind thing, what the white n-word was, so pure hearted, so stupid, tablemanners and forks, language acquisition, standard Burroughs, what the plot of Robert Sheckley’s Deep Space 9 novel was, supportable, cute, knew what was up, savviness, working for Sears, The Efficiency Expert, the George R.R. Martin problem, Tarzan stories, getting conked on the head element, Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, convert you to spiritualism, believing in fairies, it would be cool if it was real, what’s going on with Musk and Mars, aspergersist, normal cognition, hard to interact with, modelling Musks mind, he really wants to go to Mars, get humans out of the one basket we’re in, poor excuse, imprinted on science fiction early, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, even if covered in diamonds, the real issue, really cool, cave diving, tour caves, climb Mount Everest, a goal like any other, living on the top of Mount Everest, like Walter White at the end of Breaking Bad, he wanted to be a success, billionaire owner, to prove that, huge mistake, powerful people brain damage, an atrophy thing, deferring to you, three Chicken Dinners in a row, showing tremendous skill, keep ego in check, other things, dude, you aint that great, become disconnected from reality, like a Hollywood celebrity, rock diva, externalize that, would you overestimate or underestimate your abilities, a trick question, I can do things I can’t do, preventing you from doing things you can do, I can lift that, I can’t lift that, ability to lift things, don’t ask for help, a good self-assessment, surgery on my own back even with a lot of mirrors, what if I do it wrong, standing by with a hose, we’re on the airplane, the pilots are dead, fly a plane, they work the same way, more engines, the radio is more difficult than the airplane, helicopter, a motorcycle accelerator, your yaw, the back and forth oscillation, compelling reason, when the engine goes, autorotation, falling at a slower rate, not a parachute, the airbrake, fixed wing aircraft, gliding, as long as you have altitude you have forward momentum, weather, your fine, land on the ocean, flying lessons, working for companies, a rich man’s ambition, to get the license, any kinda school, wealthy eye-doctors, military teaches it, working for a military, asking for permission, ride a bike, swim, drive a car, another thing to learn, very close to new flying car phenomena, mountain home, battery powered, to save weight, ultralight aircraft, make airplanes, under a certain weight, fixed propellers, [Pivotal Blackfly], they don’t swivel, a drone that you’re sitting in, high end dentists, drones as the way into flying cars, Jetson One, a license to ride a bicycle, nobody has a license to bicycle, insurance law, insurance is free money, scooters, mopeds, skirt the insurance laws, electric bicycles, not a helluva lot, electric motorcycle, torque for days, limiters, [electric unicycle], hoverboards, dangerously fast, in 2025, drone license, no seat, Segway, when motorcycles were went they first came out, chariot racing with motorcycles as the horses, Ben-Hurley Davidson, scared of skateboard, faster than walking, rollerskates, a commuter, the scrapheap of coolness, skiing, fun, cross country skiing, snowshoeing, horseback riding, the way you got places, Marissa’s Instagram, she and her man, cross country skiing with her dog, recreation, enjoying nature, downhill and cross country, ski and then shoot, slogging your way across territory, super dangerous but fun, recreation vs. necessity, rich dentist’s recreation, horses on the interstate, nothing drawn by animals, area Amish, everything is hamster, the default, cats were cool, hundreds?, negotiation, respects her feelings, runaway with a boyfriend, smilodon boyfriend, Amazon box, the lifestyle, the behavior continues, not a good solution, semi-domesticated, do better than the dogs, competing for prey, feral life, lose an eye, depth perception, your claws and your teeth, no birth certificate, breaking up the family, she had children, unrelated cats, fixed later, we know better than them is what we’re saying, we’re fixing them, ova-hystorectimy, Millions Of Cats by Wanda Gág, a very old Will and a very old Meg, so very lonely, smoking a pipe, goes on a walk, page 10, that’s a lot of cats, cats and kittens everywhere, all black and white, a fuzzy grey kitten, way down in the corner, too lovely to leave, black and very beautiful, one riding on his head, too many cats, the cats get to fighting, eat eachother to death until there’s no cats left, eaten each other all up, one little frightened kitten, dear little kitty, just a very homely little cat, nobody bothered about me, soft and shiny, plenty of milk, the most beautiful cat in the world, not one is a the pretty as this one, The Cats Of Ulthar by H.P. Lovecraft, H. Warner Munn, about 20 photos, The Lurking Fear, Catskills, remote northern place, interesting, definitely funny, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, a guy who doesn’t know he’s a member of the community, oh and I have heterochromia too, why the mole people didn’t eat him, one eye was blue the other was brown, wrestled with it, this is brilliant, super amazing, really good at mood, he’s one of them, go visit these backwoods people, takes his friend with him, lying in the same bed, the shadow on the chimney, a description of his friend, straight out of The Rats In The Walls, a guy who eats his friend, very muscly, he’s meaty, he’s bringing his family food from the outside, cannibal nutrition, really dig it, Wayne June’s audiobooks, The Thing At The Doorstep, one of his best, the movie, Suitable Flesh (2023), Re-Animator (1985), I like horror after-all, a pure comedy but a horror, army of dead that come and get him, he totally nailed it, a comedy magazine, Home Brew, almost like a zine, during prohibition, the joke is a nod and wink, The Haunter Of The Dark, the church steeple, vibing on it, Providence geography, a mythos story, the scan of Home Brew, the serialization, a peek of what it looked like, piquant gossip, illustrated by Clark Ashton Smith, the trees, penises and vaginas everywhere, how fucked up the scan is, undistorting it, Rhineheart Kleiner smoking a pipe, a complete scan of this, later publications, a secret about Wayne June now that he’s dead, not a fan of At The Mountains Of Madness, deep in his cups, strange hieroglyphics, the narrator is not a Lovecraft character, Scott Miller is going to put out The Call Of Cthulhu, its the one everyone is focused on, all his themes, art, artists, cosmic time, cosmic space, madness, almost the main thing, cares a lot about art and artists, he’s all about the art, The Music Of Erich Zann, The Outsider, “dreamlands” story?, The White Ship, Celephais, Ex Oblivione, reskinned name, Dark Worlds Of H.P. Lovecraft: Volume 5, The Shambler From The Stars by Robert Bloch, mythos or dreamlands, winks and nods, August Derleth fucked things around, big series, take the story individually, not a businessman, he was the opposite of a businessman, conservative guys, near the end, different directions, vital active businessman, trying to be pure, not commercial at all, a poet from the 17th century, amateur journalist, he’s a blogger who wouldn’t put ads on his blog, in the kitchen, Voluminous: The Letters Of H.P. Lovecraft, props, artifacts, a library card, postage stamps, a map, printed collectibles, German expressionism, The Call Of Cthulhu (2005), brain jar, The Whisperer In Darkness, 100 year old idea, that’s what you put on your t-shirt, good last name, change your jar water, they read the letter, that was edifying, a little liberal?, very worried about racism and stuff like that, so prevalent, his personality, dry and comical, funny opinions about things, holding court with his friends, couldabin fun, like spending time with that guy, Margaret St. Clair, my homie, Burroughs, see him at a party, I like his books, Burroughs wouldn’t like me, don’t want to worship Tarzan, Tarzan doesn’t want you to worship him, recruiting blah blah blah, when Hemingway is liberating Paris, his old haunts and liberate them and drink there, they go into the Ritz, please leave the Thompson at the door, go liberate another part of Paris, 16+, the one where Jake Sisko is now 18, war correspondent, Klingons are attacking some colony, an ambulance driver during WWII, Ernest Hemingway, Bobby Derie, Clark Ashton Smith and Margaret St. Clair’s correspondence, after Sir Richard Burton, 1001 Nights, the Lovecraft statement, Smith is largely responsible for liches, the names of his stories, collected fantasies, Empire Of The Necronmancers, Skull-Face, Scarlet Tears, cliche, undead things, the old meaning, in fantasy fiction, The Lord Of The Rings, the barrows in the barrow downs, “wights” – the barrow man, a ghost or a zombie, living dead bodies, something Jesse thinks about a lot, author estates, liches get stitches, Ambrose Bierce, puts you under a spell, who am I now?, that bullet ridden lich in the madhouse, a deeply weird story, the visualization, drive out to the countryside, go down some steps, the movie adaptation, kind of adaptations by Jacen Burrows and Alan Moore, a naked gold woman, a pillar, that elm arched darkness, the glub glub, real sad story, the Pit of Shoggoths, the way Alan Moore does it everything is sexual, a repressed homosexual, now he’s Irish, reinterprets all the stories, recapitulates the stories using one character, Robert Black, all these experience, he gets raped, very Alan Moore, a rape sequence, a man is raped by another man who’s a woman, another adventure, so mean to poor Lovecraft, not interested in women, anti-Burroughsian, not interested in the chase at all, her dad, a good surprise twist, hate Jesse if you don’t like it, a Will accent, from the makers of Re-Animator and From Beyond, Dennis Paoli, get bodies, just to collect bodies, comic and scary and great music, very stylish, winds you up great acting, one of the best movies of the 80s, Indiana Jones first movie, The Thing (1982), Big Trouble In Little China (1986), Escape From New York (1981), see my twitter feed for a long list, a student coming, another Bores story, so lucky he doesn’t even known, In Santiago there was once a dean, a good one 3 pages long, we need a Jesse out there, kinda high level?, is it science fiction?, The Library Of Babel doesn’t fit with Planet Stories, contains both, Jack London, all these dudes, the meeting between Borges and Burroughs, where Burroughs books would be found in the library, I’m blind, an honorarium, the official library of Argentina, the American canon has fucked up, missing the point of reading, not giving him the Nobel prize, do they throw in, The Killers by Ernest Hemingway, realism sort of stuff, guy comes back from WWI, sad ideas, a couple in a canoe, they’re gonna break up, realism literary fiction, he’s really good at it, unnecessary whipping scenes, a monster in the basement, a guy nailed to a cross, back to back, break it up, Mark Twain, Brian Lumley, The House Of Cthulhu, 80s sword and sorcery, favourite Californians, same.

Roy Krenkel - The Eternal Savage

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #858 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Tissue-Culture King by Julian Huxley and The Tachypomp by Edward Page Mitchell

The SFFaudio Podcast #858 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Tissue-Culture King by Julian Huxley, read by Brian Fullen (1 hour), AND The Tachypomp by Edward Page Mitchell, read by Ben Tucker (33 minutes), both for LibriVox. The discussion of both with Jesse, Will Emmons, and Tom Pace begins at 1 hour 33 minutes.

Talked about on today’s show:
a mistake at the end of the recording [excised], Steven Page Mitchell, musician?, Canadian band?, singer songwriter, Bare Naked Ladies, the music at Jack Layton’s funeral, narrator, weird story Will, even more racist, super rich with one central idea, publication, important to the text, 3 publications very early, Amazing, August 1927, Yale Review, 1926, Cornhill Magazine, suspicious, a different text, we’re getting the Amazing text, Yale and Amazing are in the states, 15,000 words, 6,000 words longer, the rest of the paragraph is missing, a swamp the size of Yorkshire, and so on throughout the day, steamy mess, at last we were out, dotted with big trees, like a fortification, a word change, spiky barricade, the green wall, trackway, alert, caravan, guttural exclamation, ponderosity, second head, remarkable monstrosity, supernumerary eyes, lost to view, a man-made path, abridging, doesn’t damage the text, redundant writing, some details, description of the man they’re peeping on, added stuff, the voice proceeded from an enormous negro man, 7 foot 6 or 8 foot high, prayer or incantation, a little carved ebony stand, about the size and shape of a microscope slide, what the fuck’s going on?, the exact location: equatorial Africa, cut down for the American publication, pretty amazing for some things, there’s stuff in it, tin-foil hat, not called tinfoil, not for microwaves, for telepathy, pretty interesting, what you want out of science fiction, a mishmash, biological ideas, hypnosis and psionics, interesting historically, not interesting as science fiction, can we treat it metaphorically, telepathy, Astounding, a dominant thing in science fiction, The Demolished Man, entirely dependent on telepathy, John Wyndham, as a metaphor, setting aside the racism, a little thread from January 2024 on last year, edited by Leonard Huxley, his dad?, subtitled “a biological fantasy”, a more general meaning, a science fiction story in the style of H.G. Wells, the father of Julian and Aldous, super dystopia book, utopian, before the white men got there, tissue culturing, I’m an old man, drops the mic and runs away, what the core of this story is, “tissue culture”, when it was getting really popular, late 19th and early 20th century, produced this way, tissue cultured garlic, a university in New York explicitly referenced, “an institution”, Halcombe, The Rockafeller Institutes, higher education for medical people, buncha women, service these cultures, make the king everywhere, culture the king’s flesh, focus on the really interesting part, a cellular network of mind control, alive or dead exists in tissue cultures and controls the state, genetic experiments on people, fat thighs, big asses, nicki minaj, making dwarves and giants, and perfect dwarves, metaphorical way of looking at it, science is evil, scientists are evil, propaganda, on the money?, science is integral to everything going on, this pure thing, I believe in science, always doing something, working for someone, one set of powerful people here, The Tachypomp, one tutor doing everything, Edisonian mythology, massive staff, prop up the god king stuff, ancestor worship, not exclusive to one group, pretty west African, China, burning money to give to your ancestors in the other place, the one word, pointed out to Boogala, the doctrines of kingship, archive.org, multiply the king’s tissues indefinitely, quantity, mode of life, agreeable to the king, undreamt of power, such innovation, great resistance, the average businessman in their lack of prejudice, as a dig, read this subversively, the end, as to the best methods, in our scheme, scientific advertising, war propaganda, regal tissues, from the ranks of the nobles, sacred tissues, laborious and expensive, a portion of the royal anatomy, sub-culturing, a new way of doing your religion, totalitarianism, making the king everywhere, the television watching you in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Kira on Deep Space 9, the caste system, revert to that, damaging to our society, just goes along with it, a terrible artist, reintroducing the caste system, suspicion of religion, submission to authority greater than yours, do my own research, super-evil, using science to do the job of religion, science has more potent effects, a very valuable story, invented the *tinfoil hat*, where is the other story, abridged, story, tended to be the redundancy of the writing, getting to the ideas, overly long as it is, 40 minute long ideas, could have been shorter, the characters are horrible, some more clues, the Amazing text, a microscope, it’s a tissue culture being observed, why is the toad there, genuflecting to the god, pray to the god, growing properly, almost like a cargo-cult version of what’s going on at that Rockafeller Institute, African empire hidden by a swamp, a modern day lost world, intrigue stuff, important, this is the kind of tech, Facebook and Twitter and Bluesky, ai, television, radio, ai, influencing and mind controlling people, the complementary thing, public religion, research would be limited, more resistance, the state is controlling what science is doing, the way the state is fleshed out in this story, eugenics, they were racist about it, clung longer, after WWII, racists like it, too hubristic, the state telling people who should breed together, sterilize those people, the mistake is that it is unwise, unintelligent behavior, so called smart people, what good genes are, special susceptibility to hypnotism and telepathy, our ideas about losing themselves in weird primitive dances, bound up together, the Plateau of Leng, the deep darkest deserts of Australia, underground in Wales, not on any map, 3 days of swamp, 10 years later?, not Julian Huxley, Planet Stories, set on another planet, analog, bootstrapping stuff and using it to get to places farther ahead, even more impressive, early doing a lot of stuff, you could almost question, public domain, fell asleep, fell into a daze, imagined this situation, just like The Tachypomp, a nightmare, this Robert E. Howard story we started with, less seriously racist, hefty, a mature man wrote this, a plan rather than a story, this man should be fought, If I Were Dictator, Thyroid Dictator, evil on the level of Fauci evil, their religion, moderating thing, full of slaving, accidentally got time traveled to the American south during slaving, do something illegal, arm slaves, foment rebellion, monetary means, a colonialism story too, Rwanda, the outer scientist, Hascombe attained to an unsurpassed degree, but to what end did all this power serve?, will to power, a perfectly good end, fasten the yoke of a false religion, religions as true or false, true and false in this connection, truer or falser, the telepathy actually working, the obvious moral, gradually being accumulated for them, the truth about the way things work, condemning institution science, took a little piece of King Charles, when Ferengis die, tissue culture style trays, little discs with a lid, collectibles, pulp magazines in slabs, relics, a piece of Quark, a parody of us, they don’t even bury themselves, sell the body parts, a very solid story, not a good story for Scott Miller, what do I do with this story?, did a podcast on it, pre-show threads, much lighter and also fun, a Will problem, explain this story like I am dumb, not a math guy, it was all a dream, the tutor, the stand in for Edward Page Mitchell, C. August Dupin, Edgar Allan Poe, 1878, a precursor to Sherlock Holmes proper, the sweetest girl, the daughter of his math professor, reason to worry, experiences a dream, increasingly eccentric, not perpetual motion, how to reach infinite speed, layers of linear accelerators, the smoking car, keep stacking linear accelerators, wind resistance, making a vacuum tunnel, essentially invented a particle accelerator, a rail gun, the one at CERN, donut shaped one, they didn’t have the curves, near lightspeed, in inventing that, solved the problem of how to get to infinite speed, pretty simple, dream framework, the simplicity of the idea, square the circle, our inner hero, before he goes into the dream, like a Frank R. Stockton The Lady Or The Tiger?, electrically expensive, when electricity is just starting be the normal thing, all a thought experiment, an expectation that it is real, his friend, awesome excitement, get paid too, students who are not asleep, teach things and learn things, discounting ordinary intelligence, the stern father’s good will, crunchy writing, meager reward, Jean Marie Rivarol, Gutenberg Australia, Alsace, Teuton in nature, by education a German, the dumb guy, good vocab, bad math, Stanley G. Weinbaum’s, Von Manderpootz, Pygmallion’s Spectacles, Manderpootzian, Francis Stevens, half German half Japanese scientist, falls into a vat of some sort of metal, Samson, mix two races, two personalities, Jules Verne, this people are like this, the Germans are rockheaded, Professor Rockhead, Phileas Fogg = Fog Lover, obsessed with time, precision, clockwork, Paspartou, very French, stereotypes about people, mix them together and get science, Lorraine, profession: omniscience, foreordained mysteries, Tahoe water, Lake Tahoe?, unmitigated stupidity, the skirts of the university, a plethora of purse and paucity of ideas, the awesome Jesse hero, transplant brains, occasional in, the names have to be jokes, students good at math, just there, all the other students are good, injection, early Simpsons episode, the gifted school, all the kids laugh, Bart is bad is school, Lisa is good at school, high vocab, we’re dumb, we’re living in a time of stupidity, Polyp University, Professor Surd, Abbie Surd, fun stuff, a comedy piece, The Senator’s Daughter, The Man Without A Body, wired teleportation, a funny story, a science fiction idea, about the problem of how to get to infinite speed, as long as you don’t believe in later stuff like Einstein, this is impossible, a very fun fun thought experiment, what he cares about, my uncle is a judge, nothing to worry about, just needs to come from a good family and be rich, Mr. Furnace, an angle close to The Raven, Poe is influencing here, The Purloined Letter, Murders In The Rue Morgue, central Frenchman, a proto-Sherlock Holmes, sees and observes, one of the most popular characters ever created, explore the idea of can we get to infinite speed, an infinite number of cars, there’s problems with space that could prevent that, acceleration problems, energy required goes up, 40,000 trains going forward, what defeats this story’s idea ultimately, as a kid, nothing that can faster than the speed of light, The Raven is a psycho-pomp, speed, let us discuss the tachy-pomp, quickly send, takes your psyche to the place of the afterlife, the ferryman Charon is a psychopomp, the Neil Gaiman Sandman stories, still haven’t defeated this idea, a special triangular ruler, they tell me I can’t communicate faster than the speed of light, ansibles, subspace communications, make it as long as the distance to another star, instead of sending things along it you turn it left or right, received data on the other side faster than the speed of light, you can’t make a ruler that long, you can’t build one that long, sort of been replicated in some effects of twinning atoms and electrons, make them harmonize with each other, their reactions, what you do to one effects the other, a potential form of this kind of communication, on a subspace level, some fundamental law of the universe level, written that up as a giant triangular stick, knocked out by neptune and space debris, a metaphor for the understanding, he’s right, if Newtonian physics were the ruling physics of the actual universe, subsequent beliefs about what’s going on, made frivolousness, for the entertainment of it, a hole dug, a natural phenomenon, came up through a trap door, clogged up with financial creditors, Kerguelen Islands, the antipodes, what becomes of any poor devil, a comfy looking chair, skeletal arms wrap around you, the only thing you’ll ask for is the bill, a hole through earth’s center, suspected it, Huygens, 1400 fathoms, you stand upon it, Mrs. Grimler’s Cellar, a galvanic experiment on a cat, Re-Animator, a yawning shaft, came up again, the angry Grimler, acquired momentum, 8000 odd miles, time after time, oscillation of a pendulum, I am not slow, a creditor of the trap, a touch of rhyme, outside my chamber door, Poe was getting pretty popular, in the center of the hole, so much air resistance, over that long journey, even if he threw it, velocity in the other direction, follows the same logic, invents with his mind, the antipodes of the Kerguelen, near Antarctica, find Sri Lanka on a map, a couple Iles Crozet, Kerguelen cabbage, a lot of the places there are named after Jules Verne things, explored and named, the Kerguelenn archipelago, where this story is presumably set, to make the train happen, New York, the border of Saskatchewan and Alberta, real but fudging, electrical energy supply, what squaring the circle is, a mathematical thing, alchemy, hermetic philosophy, numbers are a real thing in that they are self consistent and predictable, Pi, what appears to be infinity, we’re doing approximates, the functional version of the theoretical approximate, the perfect perfection that is numbers, fallen asleep, perpetual motion, trip him up, entirely imaginary, tutored in his home, plaster busts of Artistotle, Archimedes and Comte, the benign brow of Martin Farquhar Tupper, he always roosts there, a bird of no ordinary mind, ab is a root meaning from, ab-stract, cut from, cut from the absurd, cut from the same cloth, so funny, my masterpiece, an android, only partially complete, confute the schools, Albert Magnus, Roger Bacon, Sylvester the 2nd, a Brazen Head that held discourses, Thomas Aquinus got wrathful, laws as definite, this is chatbots, this is ai chatbots, a manakin, Reverend Dr. Alchin, Paul Anapest, vulgar fractions, compose sonnets, talk to you about positivism, Mr. Mitchell is good at craft, supposed to be fluffy, startlingly early stuff, sending DMs to Bill Christensen, older science fiction stories, the tin-foil hat thing, not a household name with regard to people who know about science fiction, doesn’t take itself seriously, Douglas Adams is very good at science fiction, a discourse/conversation/fight on Red Dwarf, time travel, implanted memories, played for comedy, idiots and selfish, serious in that it takes its ideas seriously, it doesn’t negate the story, keeps it light, made Will have to do it, so be it, fantasy and science fiction and what the genres do, indie authors, indie publishers, science fiction as different window dressing for fantasy, boring and for nerds, dorks, disprove this point, we’re dorks, dorky, a third story, The Last White Man, not for dorks, for people who like adventure fiction, not fantasy, both of these are pure quill science fiction stories, 1878 no such thing existed, Julian Huxley, maybe H.G. Wells, need not be, scientific romances, for novels, science fiction after the fact, a real thing, do it without self-consciously doing it, seeing how they work, in the context of society, doing something totally different, gotta save the girl, the sword is I got some money, Kurt Metzger on Joe Rogan, Ctrl Alt History, The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton, a brain implant that fucked a guy up real good, ethical stuff, wrapping tinfoil around his head, microwave transmissions, to control his mind, mind control shit, the mind control implant, standing in front of a bull, brain-chip, a little transmitter, what happens in the book, a really great read, experimental brain surgery or face prison for murder, makes a plan to escape, a feedback loop, a killing machine, fugue states, very interesting, two meanings for terminal, through a remote terminal, a keyboard and a monitor, dumb machines that just connect to google.com, what google chromebooks are, none of the processing is happening on your computer, you are a terminal people, can program you remotely, programmed, i’m 50 now I need to get the shingles vaccine, just gonna cause a rift between us, gonna increase your chance of getting shingles, not the common knowledge, people are programmed by society and corporations and governments, perverse incentives, repeating talking points you heard from youtube, state funded media, a very unpopular youtube channel, or from RFK, a righteous underground, do you want to get shingles?, for you to get that, look into it, when you look into it, where’d you get that, lotsa research, wouldn’t give it if you asked for it, not the right age, shingles vaccine, BC health link, a series of 2 doses, flu vaccine, covid vaccine, CDC, all adults age 50 and older, what are the benefits?, the best way to protect you, prevents more than 90%, 70-90%, after being immunized, just so we’re clear, that’s not a traditional vaccine, the NDP has been paid off by Pfizer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, what’s the percentage of people who get shingles?, weakened immune systems, preservatives etc., what caused Paul to drop the podcast, the facts are COVID vaccines increase your chances of getting shingles, this isn’t a zero sum gain, gene therapy, bad things, blood clots, from personal experience, hurt from these lies, Fauci is not a good person, we knew this, not number one on Trump’s list, the flu vaccine, one cut above homeopathy, a reaction to bad medicine, huge abuses went on there, institutions are institutional, turning regular humans into robots, most doctors don’t do any research after they graduate, too uppity about it, why are they pushing it, time usually reveals, why were black people in the USA more resistant to COVID vaccines, they were experimented on before, maltreated by lying doctors, The Constant Gardner (2005), Kenya, a movie to watch, the fictionalized story is what literally happens, PayPal, ebay account, almost 30 years old, before ebay bought it, a reputation, stealing, banning, you can’t send money to truckers, get your account frozen, their Billpoint system, cheques, not an institution in the same sense, still owned by ebay?, probably an evil corporation public traded, an individual, the closely held, family owned business, very trusting of the family in general, grandma vs. a hospital, the bad outliers, bad grandmas, homeopathy grandma, needed a blood transfusion, the local newspaper (now gone), during COVID, a mother and father disputing whether their newborn should get the COVID shot, the judge did way less research than the dad did, this is how you get autism at the massive rates that we have, by what standard does the judge make the decision, two parents in dispute, set a precedent, not mandatory for babies to get vaccinated, 6 months olds and higher, developmental disabilities, the vaccine schedule, the amount of autism has matched, the reason we have more queer people, more free now, more autism friendly, we diagnose them more, a Philip K. Dick novel, it was rare, now it is normal, reboot of Doogie Hauser, The Good Doctor, idiot Savant, an American show based on a Korean show, such a serious problem now, what’s going on here, measles used to be considered a good thing, now it is considered a deadly disease, not yet, adult onset autism doesn’t appear to be a thing, less than 3%, aspergers included, not diagnosed anymore, sometimes the disease are defined away, a “dis ease” as opposed to a “syndrome”, downs disease vs. downs syndrome, old eggs?, just look into it, I should be more skeptical, a lot of money on the line, the devil’s website, the NIH, that NPR chatbot podcast reader, convenient for that, a conversation about an audiobook, a better digestion, sometimes it glitches, the fake laugh, as Terence [Blake] pointed out, put Jesse out of work, for older kids?, more out of work, kids raised by LLMs, language learning model, a prison therapist, when kids have been institutionalized, sent to school, public or private, do these exercises, the hurt, goes in the trash, make a drawing of a horse, I’m putting this on the refrigerator, very rare, publish it in a journal or something, a litmag, The Capilano Review, the number of students, can’t really have care, student teachers ratios, most of the population involved in educating children, watching youtube videos, very obscure channel, very interested in reading, what he’s been reading about, very American based, conspiratorial, psychic surgery craze of the 1960s, dudes in the Philippines and Brazil, seems pretty sus, uses his hands to psychics remove tumors and stuff from your body, exposes after the fact, James Randi, famous for debunking claims of magic, fishguts, not doing it for money, non-financial incentives, the number of people want it, you really don’t want surgery, an invasive healthcare system, injections, replacements, forget about youutube and NIH, what doctors have done to her, left a drill bit in there, we’ll try to get it out another time, put bolts in your ankle, prednisone, a steroid, a whole bunch of that stuff, addictive, causes problems, my cat is on that, a shot every five weeks, the solution to muscles spasm is botox, kills the muscles, immensely painful, full of preservatives, hair falls out, horrible things happen, falling and breaking some ribs, second covid shot, almost die from bloodclots that immediately happen, all actually what happened, a frozen, leg, at age 70 whatever, if you’re just a regular person, not as skeptical as she should be, more interested in breeding chickens than finding out the truth of these things, cases where your relative gets cancer and they don’t have cancer after a number of years, incompetence and institutional stuff, re-reading, Edward Bernays’ propaganda, rich, 2004 introduction, all about real serous guiding, the invisible government, secret influencers of society, heavily invovled with the tobacco industry, poisonous, he made his money he could move on, turn the tables on it, how do you produce a true truth, a corporate truth, LibriVox, well worth doing, it has to be an active sonar or radar, it can’t be passive, actively trying to understand, going to buy a car, you’re fucked, what cars are being made where or why or how, was the case, Japanese cars were the best, year over year improvement, keep refining it, change the direction, this commitment to refinement, a Toyota from the 1990s you can’t go wrong, swapped the engine for a Ford, commitment to year over year improvement was unparalleled, people are there to try and fuck you, perverse incentives everywhere, okay dad, more of an uncle, beautifully naive, the canny individual, being wrong many times, defer to other people’s judgement, two kinds of oil, synthetic or regular, either one will work, fuck and find out, the consequences of that are possibly dangerous, take it to an expert, a corporate outlet, a mom and pop, in it for the longhaul, getting bought up and destroyed, sold his business to a chain of carguys, owned by Blackrock or Vanguard [or Blackstone], not a conspiracy or everybody knows everybody, New York real estate, they’re not owned by individuals, owned by corporations who own blocks of things, owned by stockholders, the company or companies have to crash for that land to get sold, that’s sort of the essential problem, mom and pop business, The Communist Manifesto, 1848, true in England but not in Germany in 1848, a pamphlet, a utopian novel, a manifesto and an essay, leave no Jesse unturned, vampire, children’s fiction, fantastic fiction, six in progress, sort by release date, Ham Jones: Scientist, 16 years, what class?, economics, philosophy, it wasn’t offered, a German studies class, German Socialism, East Germany, 19th century stuff, Dastardly Criminals In Space, Watchbird, Conspiracy On Callisto by Frederik Pohl, Manly Wade Wellman, The Incomplete Theft, Tom Godwin, Robert Silverberg, Bratton’s Idea, “Old Bratton, janitor at the studios of Station XCV in Hollywood, was as gaunt as Karloff, as saturnine as Rathbone, as enigmatic as Lugosi.”, what other radical science fiction authors could we dig up, is it good?, no way of knowing, about robots?, inventions fiction, robots, Mike Vendetti stuff, The Curious Experience OF Thomas Dunbar, the first superhero story, Edmond Hamilton, Weird Tales, apple books, audible listing, imagine if you will, age immediately or regress to when they were youths, nefarious inventor, a lot of money, sound familiar?, causing panic, more adventurey fiction, Spawn Of Inferno by Hugh B. Cave, Clark Ashton Smith, anything by him, a darkness that settled like a black cloud, blackness, a thing from the outer darkness, ghastly appetite, The Thing From Outside by George Allan England, like The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood, The Willows, badly told interesting idea, badly told?, not well told, we benefited it by being massively abridged, made it shorter, very short, from Connor [Kaye], Who Are The Dead?, we like that about him The Black Abbott Of Puthuum, Averoigne, nice art, Margaret St. Clair, corresponded, fuckin cool, she’s San Fransisco, a real homebody, Tommy Patrick Ryan, still be interesting to have read it, works for Margaret St. Clair as well, her story about fake meat, up on Bill Christensen’s website, Juciveal, technologies in stories, broad beamed, pleasantly easy to answer, Jucipork, Mr. Angst of Gourmond, a culinary editor, Veristeak, Lazarus, an interesting topic, the surprise, it’s alive, it’s made out of meat, Terry Bisson, Chicken Little, The Space Merchants, The End Of The Line, Clifford D. Simak, both Americans, provincial Americans, pastoral, countryside guys, not city-boys, loves the countryside, whole adult life, kept returning to the countryside, Talking Man by Terry Bisson, a wizard, time is a circle, fixing cars, a dude who knows how to do things, the first episode of Doctor Who, two teachers, math and history, a student they have, she’s so remarkable, she could teach the class, she’s fuckin time traveler, gets evasive, eager to learn, follow her home, parents wont meet, a junkyard, the sign above the junkyard, I.M. Foreman, her grandfather, three doctors down the road, John Smith, I’m from the future bro, an alien, subsequent stuff, no alien stuff at all, very fun, alternates between dystopian future or alien planet, historical entries, The Romans, weird episodes, the whole ocean is acid, a puzzle planet, weird amazing science fiction, the closest thing it starts off as is a rip off of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, companion viewpoint characters, cave people times, the secret of fire, 11, 12, 13?, really well done, science fiction windowdressing, monster of the week, The Pyramids Of Mars, 19th century England, re-doing The Mummy, the mummies are aliens, a tomb on Mars, Osiris was a real character, The Mummy (1932), ancient aliens are gods story, entombed on Mars, 1 tv show a day with dinner with Meg, comedy about a hospital, The Office, St. Denis Medical, animals doing stuff, The Henryiod, straight adaptations, Shakespeare, old school, women played by men, pretty straight, Shakespeare’s great, the histories, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Marlon Brando, British accents for the Romans, I, Claudius, among the top 5 tv shows ever done, if not in the first slot, Derek Jacobi, 6 hours maybe, shot on videotape, stupid British, amazing performances, great blocking, where they place the camera, helps tell the story, receiving the speech, help tell a story, old Claudius, Robert Graves, Augustus through Tiberius, Nero, Caligula, the story of the story, Patrick Stewart plays Sejanus, good acting, getting stabbed, Praetorian, suicided, poisoned, slaves running around in the background, 4 different versions of Ben-Hur, well dressed, no outdoor scenes, in tents, inside a hall, the Senate, by torrenting, that’s drama for you bro, it was huge, so many good actors, John Hurt, Sian Phillips, The Elephant Man (1980), British stage actors, become iconic, high quality production, shot on videotape, they’ve lost episodes of it, animating missing episodes, real science fiction stories, it was illegal to pirate the show, happy to take your pirate copies, owned by the British government, revenue bro, all on tubi right now, the best streaming service, The King Tide (2023), shot in Newfoundland, hard to see things, living on an island, fishermen, mainlanders, a baby crying, 10 years later, miraculously heals, cut-off from the rest of the world, the secret, a child who can heal sickness, adoptive parents, amazing baby resource, human resource, the center of the island’s attention, weirdo drunk guy, while she’s reading a book, lineup to get in, the healthcare provider, having fistfights for fun, poison themselves, she loses her power to heal, she was spending time with some bees, all the bees died, only while she’s asleep, take sleeping pills, this island is fucked, promised never to leave, a kid being abused, this doesn’t go well, everybody on the island dies and maybe the whole planet, the execution was poor but the idea was good, a little bit Lovecraftian, maybe a fishkid, giving her sleeping pills, serving Omelas, make fish appear in the nets, the enrichment, Labrador, on the mainland, a special kind of rum, kiss a fish before you drink the rum, videogames might have been a mistake, kissing the fish, a time suck, accent is similar to Irish, not apart of Canada until 1949, a colony of Britain, out of work, 2-4, 3 hours, too much time writing a few days a week, drink some coffee, smoke a little bit, dive right in, exhausting yourself, a break, accomplished something, 5am for every start, before church, a paper route, still morning, a nice feeling, it’s so late, bedtime, staying up pretty late, awake quite late, up at 4am, when the sun goes down, various weasels, doing stuff since 4am, sick in December, missing work, felt really useless being sick, contempt, drifting from thing to thing, twitter accounts, bitter about Ukraine, angry about Israel, do some stuff, write a book, why video games are a mistake, huge mistake, they’re so fun and non-productive, productive in Minecraft, it’s fake, use it in moderation as a reward for actual production, immediately became obsessed with it, girls and boys, boys love to dig, sandbox, because you’re boy, stacking, chopping, stacked and chopped, housebuilders, natural, monkey with tools, tie things together, Gilligan’s Island, bamboo and string, also Ginger’s cool, the rich guy, the doofus and the boss, girl next door, Mrs. Howell, lovey-dovey, all they have is money, do you ever think about the Black Death?, Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman, gruff knight, very gently, spoil it for me, secretly God, sounds bad, really good, you don’t have the Christianity background, Will’s biggest deficit, Flesh + Blood (1985), the Heinlein movie, Paul Verhoven, lock themselves up in a castle, a statue of St. Martin, their totem to keep them safe, degenerates, contamination, Rutger Hauer is amazing, Brion James, a pretty long movie for 1985, semi-produced by Hollywood, he’s got a lot of good movies, Hollow Man (2000), Showgirls (1995), Black Book (2006), dutch WWII stuff, Soldier Of Orange (1977), national colour, The 4th Man (1983), bisexual writer, ignorant of one of the greatest artforms around, Basic Instinct (1992), Total Recall (1990), RoboCop (1987), become disciplined about it, 4 movies everyday, The Last Emperor(1987), quite amazing spectacle, you don’t watch it for fun, become edified by it, Death Wish (1974), to understand the concept, why there were 8 Death Wish sequels, a Bronson disciple, produced in, I don’t care about Jill Ireland, he really does, that’s interesting, an interesting character, roughest background imaginable, beating eachother for breakfast, coal mine at age 9, a real something to see, 15 – 20 years ago, I have a certain set of skills, Irish actor, Liam Neeson, Taken (2008), spends the rest of the movie killing people, set decades apart, a thread that started a long time ago, dismiss whole categories of movies, have met many men, an example, Lawrence Of Arabia (1962), colonialism in Dune, the personal story, a beautiful film, tube tv, on laserdisc, stunning on a 55 inch widescreen tv, there’s an intermission, really good book, the 1959 Ben-Hur, the 1925, the cartoon version, narrated and performed by Charlton Heston, the 2016 version, they didn’t have movies in 1888, had to do it through books, cast of thousands, before it was a movie it was a stageplay, treadmills, how the medium has changed, on Broadway, the number of horses that died, so round, took a long time to film, seize the medium while it is ripe, get to it before you die, Sorcerer (1977), Tangerine Dream, The Wages Of Fear, driving rotten dynamite across Brazil, the worst roads, leaking nitroglycerine, mostly no talk, William Friedkin, backstory, reasons to flee to Brazil, on the poster is a truck crossing a rope bridge, what’s going to happen, came out the same week as Star Wars (1977), The French Connection (1971), To Live And Die In L.A. (1985), musicals, Jonathan Weichsel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), fucked women up, Marilyn Monroe, imaginary reasons, conspiracy theory, backed by stuff, feels right, probably true, Will had trouble with the subtlety, “dumb bitch”, she’s a nice girl, dam, ewe, dam, ewe, the projection is hilarious, maybe he’s doing something right, tv work, SVU, victim’s fathers, so for boomers, Law & Order, the one that is so dominant, very special rape, what makes the special, 26 seasons, it’s got what the people want: raped from the headlines, Criminal Intent, Organized Crime, Hate Crimes, this is the one about sexual assault, Law & Order Sex Crimes, Sex Criminals, the first volume, some lurid thing going on, Americans are special in that they’re more prudish, love violence, shaped, broken glass as a standin for blood, everybody has had the experience, cut their foot, it means blood, streaming clips, blood is turned green, when mom walks into the room, paying for your Prime, green mist, green spurt, that’s not blood, reality is shaped by the requirements of the prudishness of a certain set of people, in 15 years, radio stations, exactly 100 years old, first radio stations, Hugo Gernsback, ham radio guys, KDKA, in the car, to avoid commercials, BBC radio, it shouldn’t be, declined during covid, if television is around in 15 years, radio is dead, in the car, an old car, drive around town, it was a thing, SNL, vanishingly rare, half the year, Timothee Chalamet, what the current liberal hivemind is thinking, who’s famous right now, that one video, vote for Kamala, reviews phones or cars, Jerry Rig Everything, breaking phones apart, a Mormon, pretty diverse, a disabled wife, wheelchairs, wealthy from youtube, always getting wealthy, busy getting married and networking, supports getting rich, support, a nation within a nation, busy breaking phones, what phone should I get, ads for phones on tv, phone services, drugs, insurance, car and house, iphones and samsungs, free phone, phone plans, co-op advertising, talk over the ads, while the tv is yapping at you, while the tissue culture king is praying on your mind, actors from SNL, tattoos and dates, tattoos removed, other reasons, Sarah Sherman, droopy dry, dandruff shampoo, subject, fancy bath products, a nice experience in the shower, go beyond a neutral experience, if this were the middle ages, a perfumed bath, audiobooks in the shower, racing the alarm, just stop showering, sorry to listeners, pee and coffee, Eternal Lover/Savage.

The Tissue-Culture King by Julian Huxley - AMAZING

The Tissue-Culture King by Julian Huxley

Abbie

Posted by Jesse Willis