Tag: Sinclair Lewis

The SFFaudio Podcast #869 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. by Jack London and Robert Fish

The SFFaudio Podcast #869 – The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. by Jack London and Robert Fish (4 hours 32 minutes) read by Tatiana Chuchilla for LibriVox, followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse and Maissa Bessada.

Talked about on today’s show:
1910, 1963, Jack London and Robert Fish, a physical copy at a used bookstore, surprisingly PUBLIC DOMAIN, years went by, a movie, how fortunitous, read by a human, Titania somebody, favourite LibriVox narrator, Ltd., the end papers on the PDF, the movie a fair amount, as it went along, very much didactic, a lot of exposition, as it kept going, softened towards it, a different perspective, the movie was so fun, a different mindset, appreciated it much more, the movie’s better, lightens it, they play so much more, the book is not designed to be funny, a little bit arch, helps tell the story, deleted one of the characters and replaced that character as the love interest, son-in-law-be, Diana Rigg, we fall in love with Dragomilov, different ending, 237 page PDF, page 231, Jack London’s notes, Charmain London, London died in 1916, when is it set?, automobiles in it, the movie does a better job with picking a period, is this a science fiction book?, something close to it, because of the concept itself, fiction fiction, airship in the movie, not practically apparently, they’re always coming back, pick a scab, the flying cars exist (almost all in China), just prior to WWI, all the little vignettes are of a silent movie type, Yul Brenner, the other bald guy with the mustache, who loves ya, baby?, Oliver Read, Kojack, Telly Savalas, the newspaper owner, vice-chair, all bald guys look the same, he’s not Captain Picard, your head is so shiny, distracted by the mustache, create WWI, killing all the heads of Europe, as that didn’t happen, alternate history, or a secret history, makes it like a cartoon, the book is much closer to Around The World In Eighty Days than anything else, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes is close to science fiction, it’s not H.G. Wells but it is very close, the extraordinary character of Holmes, Watson is us, a minute late, the appeal of Back To The Future (1985), we like spending time with Doc and Marty, the plot is helpful, spill the beans, the relationship between Doc brown and Mary McFly, an avuncular relationship, Marty is the nephew and Doc is the uncle, explaining who Marty is, trying to get his mom and dad to hook up, Doc Brown is science fiction, Marty McFly is the reader of science fiction, Marty McFly likes to play guitar, to get yelled at, it isn’t about formal schooling, extracurricular activities, after midnight in the mall parking lot, in the movie of this book, we are Diana Rigg, giving a lecture so that she can get a job, now we’re with her, Oliver Reed, this is a romance, what have I done?, the book is pretty weak, by the end it picked up a little bit, it sewed up its ideas, why is it a novel?, why Jack London didn’t finish it, closed it up, new book by Michael Crichton and James Patterson, Eruption, Michael Crichton is dead, he shouldn’t have don the second one, his legacy has turned into, the estate wants some more cash, James Patterson he’s well known, mostly series, airport books, Along Came A Spider, a spy guy, Alex Cross, Maximum Ride, many standalone thrillers and novels, why would you read these, really mainstream, Tom Clancy, long dead, finishing somebody else’ book, 4-0 years later, 1910 – 1963, the key thing, Jack London was a writing machine, Sinclair Lewis, joke writers, buy them from other comedians, we’ve seen this story done better, Goliah, a secret organization to try to change the world, so many years ago, 1910, it posits a kind of privatized CIA with morals and ethics, explained in the film, overexplained in the book, short for a novel, not tight, Goliah is 13 pages, only 20,000 words were written by Jack London, 5000 words is like a half hour, pull all the threads together, abandoning it, malformed it, too many characters, a similar scene in The Sea Wolf, a long dystopian novel, 800 shows you might have been on, The Dream Of Debs, Paul and Will, a candidate for president jailed by [Woodrow] Wilson, The Scarlet Plague, a tribe led by a guy named chauffeur, the preservation of books, a biography of Jack London, The Red One, Thee Star Rover, visits other times while in a straight jacket, The Iron Heel, bad relationships, people lecturing each other in each other’s homes, the film much improves it, instead of 80 days it is a year, all the deaths are comedic, no blood, eat poison very slowly, is there vanilla in here?, escapes, I see a comedy here, some really cool stuff in this book, the movie helped Maissa like the book, very interesting, what separates us from the animals, he accepts the assignment to kill himself, better in the book than in the movie, the rationale fits, montage, explosions, framesetting, overlay, all fun, very old fashioned film, it feels like one, very definitive, its before this, its not after that, set in the future or not, one line, one of the people who was assassinated was Bertrand Russell, lived until 1970, he really is in this book in the philosophy, be politik in the world, what are we to do about about anarchism, why he couldn’t finish it, a hard topic, by making it a farce, walk out of the movie theater, go get some coffee, two years later, one of the lines, salvation must come, the filmmakers, thinking about it, why the bureau cannot work, we can’t impose this, from the world, not bound by religious morality, his own code of ethics, Robert Fish is involved, some of the material in here is clearly London, relfect on what’s going on in Goliah, getting rid of the oligarchs, bend to my will and do better or suffer the consequence, all this poverty, a socialist and a millionaire, my wit, my strength, posit this assassination bureau, a fun comedy, they didn’t get what I was trying to say, not enough lectures and looking at bookshelves, less dynamic that it should be, a feeling of The Call Of The Wild, fleeting little scenes, humans vs. animals, everyman is worthy of death, we need to scrutinize you more, an inversion of Jesus’ every person should be saved, the birds and the beasts and the slime molds, the killing of animals for meat, moral judgement, the best thing we can do is follow our ethical code, a book about killing people and being ethical, the reason he must die is he accepted the contract, the son, can take over the assassination bureau, make the world a better place, was an anarchist, billionaire socialist, continue without assassination, dissatisfactory, The Sea Wolf, the paradise of slaughtering seals on the beach, the old sailor (the Jack London stand-in), [Wolf Larsen], an Eden, there is that, a Hawaii guy, this book doesn’t feel like a Robert Fish book because it feels very Jack Londony, preserve as much of the material, don’t delete things, a miscarriage, not a miscarriage, we can sell this baby, cyborg parts, Londonisms, an Irish Terrier, what terriers are for, for vermin, after rats, ratters, go into holes, big rats in Ireland, all the snakes are gone, a very cool book by Jack London, fully Jack London, set in the South Pacific, Jerry Of The Islands, as opposed to being in the arctic, a little dog for being on boats, a dog lover, really strong with ideas, ratting the thing to death, shaking it out and seeing what’s there, all of his short stories are better, good ideas, mad at another guy in a room, some sort of thing that happened to him, who is Jack London arguing with?, his bio-dad, disappears before he is born, arguing with himself, he’s also the young guy, I’m better than you think I am, dad, the fun of the idea, the movie is better, better executed for the idea, looking at the bookshelves, the opening of the book, bang, they’re all bad, Buck is the viewpoint character, over the shoulder right beside him, the man in the red sweater, Harrison Ford was one of the last owners, took 20% of the book and expanded it left and expanded it right, what makes a story good is what materials you were working with, the purity of the materials, good ideas in this book, memorialized war heroes, early chapters, the law of tooth and fang, violence, glorified, the basic law, reason and ethics and morality, instead of following gravity, trying to do good in the world, a crazy idea, if I kill this one person, it’s too hard a question, where do you stop, where do you draw lines like that, the short story instead, the premise sticks, doing it not to punish people but to make the world better, who are the people who are doing this?, rich business men, punish their rivals, kings, people in power, no women assassinated, missing from the book, ripe, make light of, the Ruthenians, central European, slavs, between Russia and Germany, the Assassination of an Arch-Duke, happened in 1914, this is a real phenomena in the world, bomb throwing anarchists, start writing, rich fat cats who’ve lost the moral code, murder for profit, in the book everybody’s ethical, published in 1963, sell it to film, spicier for that purpose, Sinclair Lewis deserves some credit, Guy Boothby’s The Woman Of Death, it has not crashed, it will cut us off, continue, prolific novelist, sensational fiction, the Doctor Nichola series, a Victorian forerunner, gothic egypt, supernatural revenge, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, bottled humuculous, a secret society, the suicide club, a dueling society, they all wear masks, a veil over their face, for rich dilettante guys with no jobs, direct plays in the park, got no writing or acting skills, a secret dueling society, Donald Westlake, Lord Of Light, The Hour Of The Dragon, Killing Time, private detective, a PDF, heresy to say it, corruption, better than Hammett’s Red Harvest, Otto Penzler, Tim Smith, his little black book, should be good, Scott loves Westlake too, not super famous like he should be, Lawrence Block is scarier, his comedic stuff, sparkly, The Spy In The Elevator, sparky and cute, big darkness, tells a funny story, great with the gestures, Dogs in the South Pacific books, fun chat, good movies, 4 in person rehearsals, doubled up, storylines are similar anyway, why he does that, why is Back To The Future (1985) such a good movie, too popular, talking about Star Wars is easy, talking about Sorcerer (1977), Stephen Spielberg, science fiction, fun characters, music, a tight story, his sister has so many boyfriends, Burger King, the truck he wanted, polishing the car, go to the lake, spark as a the kiss happens, it makes you want the sequel, more of the same, he drinks a lot, abusive to his ex-wife, the warning signs, recapitulate the final scene of the first movie, what about Jennifer?, turn out to be assholes, where we’re going we don’t need roads, a spray in the eye, they wrote her out of the movie, they want to do the same movie, Marty at home, children are all played by Michael Keaton [J. Fox], don’t say a word, another invention, another scientific invention, some of the Weinbaum shows, The Worlds Of If, avuncular relationship, likes girls, old professor friend, Doc whatever, this new machine, each incident is a different machine, The Ideal, dating another girl, Professor Von Manderpootz, Star Trek, a different planet, a different scientific idea, a different alien relationship, planet of the gangster, time travel episode, some of them are really bad, back in time to the 1960s, a lady who can turn into a cat, tiny insects, terrible terrible, protagonists are insects, the Horta, the Teri Garr one, Bewitched style, Ferengi’s go to Earth, they’re cartoon humans, capitalism made cute, somehow figure out this is a bad date, speed dating, 15 people in 15 minutes, awkward five minutes, do you like to read books, I’m a vegan, here are six nice things about me, I don’t brag much, we have to do that with authors, Terry Pratchett, other people should marry him, Douglas Adams, a double date, it is literally spending time with somebody, the movie was good, we got something out of it, Frankenstein, she was the girlfriend in Tootsie (1982), Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977), Goldie Hawn, both blondes and bald people, Mr. Mom, The Conversation, Oh, God, The Black Stallion, Assignment: Earth, not a lot of dogs in Deep Space 9, in a virtual game, interesting idea, Jake and that woman who’s a psychic vampire, a B plot, an A idea, Captain Sisko has found a space anomaly, the way TNG, back on deck 2, hits higher highs more generally, talk about Star Trek again show, the French movie, Mars Express (2023), very science fictiony, too much available, mostly crap, easy, do the work, so fulfilling to do it, Reading, Short And Deep, Ball Of Fire (1941), Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, one of eight professors working on an encyclopedia, newsboy, gun moll, fuddy duddy professor, changing their loves, its really fun, Double Indemnity (1944), the guy who dies in the end of a Charlton Heston, Soylent Green (1973), Edward G. Robinson, lonely widower, I really like you and respect you, murder her husband, its love, framed by a dictaphone recording, the whole story in the middle, her curves, she’s just a woman, her presence on screen, she commands the camera to look at her, she was huge, way bigger than Helen Mirren ever was, a lot of westerns, her later career, becoming a movie star, Barbara Stanwyck is this movie, Wild Robot (2024), The Iron Giant (1999).

The Assassination Bureau

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #852 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Hate Disease by Murray Leinster and The Rat Racket by David H. Keller

The SFFaudio Podcast #852 – The Hate Disease by Murray Leinster (2 hours 1 minute) read by Gregg Margarite and The Rat Racket by David H. Keller (35 minutes) read by Robert Griffin. These are followed by a discussion of both. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Will Emmons and Terence Blake.

Talked about on today’s show:
Terry’s back!, The Hate Disease by Murray Leinster and The Rat Racket by David H. Keller, longer than it needs to be, judge the two stories, science fiction, crappy science fiction, neither was terrible, as you should, a paradox, looks like what Terry considers to be the formula for science fiction, take an idea and literalize it, physicalize it, resymbolize at the end to draw a moral, The Pied Piper Of Hamelin, a mob or racketing technique, psychological phenomena, Gaia striking back, very similar, one comes across as a science fiction story, in Weird Tales, weird fiction, Keller is more of a science fiction guy, Amazing Stories, 1931, the fantasy domain, the very last sentence, all he wanted to do was get rid of the rats, he’s a cat!, whenever I talk about it my voice becomes squeaky, the science fiction mode, the setting, contemporary setting, menace to society, non-Anglo Saxon force, urban science fantasy, genius for hitting at vital spots, in the context of Scott Miller’s recording, racketeering, if you look at it closely, doesn’t seem to, The Minions Of Midas by Jack London, bought the premise from Sinclair Lewis, perhaps they’re all the same premise, outside threatening force threatens capitalists, letters slipped to a local billionaire, those who are sending the messages, kill some unrelated person, find some blacksmith, until he pays the money, we never meet The Minions Of Midas, this is necessary in this period of time, a certain amount of capital, require $20 million dollars, redistribute the wealth, resolves itself, he’s tackling essentially the same problem, racketeering was a real thing, the technology is cities and telegrams and being anonymous, email is incredibly anonymous, never not monitored, free email accounts, a cybercafe, a burner yahoo email, telegrams vs. emails, Jack London’s point is much more amazing, what if that Pied Piper story was real, takes a long time in their setup, we like Murgatroyd and coffee, the mystery that’s going on, a little boring, it doesn’t need to be that long, the setup at the end is pretty stupid, the comeuppance, James Bond, A View To A Kill, the son of genetic engineering, blow up silicon valley, microchip company’s profits, falls out of the sky, the Med Ship story, a problem of the week story, symbolically it’s very interesting, the doctor running the planet, the chief minister of the planet, Dr Lett, a bloodletting, just let it happen, he deserves a presidential pardon, the solution, getting some woodsmoke in their lungs, sounds stupid, maybe this is a lot smarter, the ecosystem setup, no reliable native life forms, humans expanding forever, Malthusianism, we can expand forever into infinite galaxies, rats have been known to do that, Malthus, rats and rabbits multiplying past endurance, other molecules, don’t feel ripped off, not a make work project, the Amish, they’re farmy, cheap farmland, a story about Mennonites, met Mennonites, a bigger diaspora of them, all about vertical integration, repairable by themselves, they can fix carts, a religious prohibition, don’t buy phones from Apple, an interesting sentence, Hutterite children, protected from asthma, an associated citation, more in contact with farm animals as a child, associated theories, being too sterile, handwashing using alcohol with perfume, hand sanitizer, more likely to get warts, other problems, dry skin, a similar contention with lip balm, lip balm scientists, balm is medicine for skin, how The Hate Disease solved the mystery it setup up, a powerful idea for the time, checks and balances on the molecular level, they’re in Overdrive, an alien pet, drinking coffee, outlandish space opera drinking tea (in modern science fiction), same symbolic register, cozy and homey, into electricity so much, a gas fireplace, some apartments do not come with fake fireplace and an actual fire, heat register, underfloor heating, cold in the winter, fire is the solution, rural Kentucky, a country merchant, if you were a farmer, hang out around the pot-bellied stove, decorum, have to be a gentleman, farm animals and fire, American science fiction, a parochial literature, born and died in Virginia, went for a drive, last summer, be near farm animals, a petting zoo, not intensely popular, recreation for young people, a “carnival”, a rollercoaster, thrill rides, you really do want to pet a donkey, confined to cats and dogs and maybe a parakeet, you wanna hang out around cattle, and sheep, donkeys are cool, kept donkeys, spending time with the donkeys, different personalities and capabilities and interests, playing some game on his laptop, can I go feed the chickens?, something that people want to do, more and more disconnected by technological improvements, a deprivation, concentration of capital, the park vs. the woods, they’re bears in their, chaotic neutral bears, brown bears, grizzly bears, Central Park in New York, managed wildlife, swimming to an island, you’ve had the experience of getting a leech on your leg, water and air, everything else is imported, they forget to import the really important things, safteyism, hygienic, technological, Tallien, talion, Gaia, the planet fights back, a character from history, Jean Talion, the Reign of Terror, don’t communicate with the other, waiting for Dr. Fauci, some special med guy, a special injection, ground up worms, the toxin, a good mediation, The Strain, good aspects, this is Dracula, other vampires, derivative, The Walking Dead, the fear of infection, misleading as a title, they hate normal people, because they’re not like them, for eating worms, once you adopt a certain code of behavior for yourself, if you become vegan, the spreading of it, Terry was one for a while, a vegetarian, many years, more than 7 years, don’t violently attack you, carnivores, something so contemptible within yourself, being the only one, an evil act, you’re in the Israeli army, you gotta make him do it too, otherwise, go back to normal functioning, you can’t live with yourself, one variant, Wilhelm Reich, crazy follower of Freud, spread like a plague, jumped the shark, freudo-marxist, bodyarmour, emotional plague, quite useful, funny, the thing that’s so bad, people eat weird gross, fermented shark, durian, we eat with out brain, our taste is reworked by our brain, nobody likes coffee on their first sip, thinking of Will as the little monkey guy, more subject to cute, Will is much cuter, subject to cute, interacting with a cat, you build up a tolerance to their cuteness, a smellaphoto, coffee beans soaked in urine, contemporary reference, modelling Will, parts of Jesse in parts of Will, medical doctor on a spaceship with his space monkey, aping the behaviors, that’s fun, a Margaret St. Clair story, Meem, the two transmissions, a false story about what’s happening, some clues, the chase sequence, fine, grid operator, becoming, considering killing himself, Murray Leinster in the role, Murgatroyd saves the day, playing with the gun, the wooden floorboards of the spaceship, breaks up a wooden chair, the health systems, they’re both cured, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, pisses on the palace, burns their city down to save the people, thank me later, casualties of this fire, for the good, a trolley problem ignored, presumably the houses have safety systems, ruined record collections, space insurance for their space houses burning down, an old fashioned science fiction story, 1963, in Analog, pretty good, what do we think about Doctor Keller?, mixed reviews, its idea is small and the story is big, show the problem growing, the solution is not satisfactory, thoughroughly impressed by The Hate Disease, be dirty to be healthy, this other direction, male vs. female, there’s no girls in The Hate Disease, the opposite of feminist, so called typical male qualities, the little boy falls down, the dad says walk it off, the mom says oh dearie, I hate girls!, kisses it better, you rest up now, autobiography, when a bitch gives birth, licks the puppies clean, make the puppies poo and pee, not sort of normal dinner table conversation, facts, covered in filth, as a mother, the same is true of your grandma, what Jesse’s doing at your grandma’s house, attentive to dirt on skin, the cleanliness and making things sterile is a good instinct, the rub some dirt on it, it can go too far, the meeting of the two genders, they were effeminate, like Jurassic Park, nature found a way, an effeminate man, a little bit of a reach, maps to Jesse brain, females don’t exist in the future or the 1930s, The Last Woman by Thomas S. Gardner, mankind has evolved beyond the need for women, 1932, growing people in a factory, they accidentally make a woman, the reverse of this, very silly, the execution is very silly, from Wonder Stories, a silly time in science fiction, the Campbell Era, Kuttner and Del Rey, The Cranberries song, blessed by not being cursed by music, a good feel of The Cranberries, contemporary-ish, how those Irish go, a nice fruit, more Murray Leinster, The Mad Planet, The Last Spaceship, just read the first part, The Disciplinary Circuit, his best girl, earlier, lots of Leinsters, he had a long career, newspaperman, Will F. Jenkins, Snappy Stories, Breezy Stories, Argosy, romance under a woman’s name, a writing machine, 1896-1975, First Contact, Exploration Team, best novelette, Ben Tucker, a very good narrator, a fixup, The Med Service, 19.5 hours, a whole sequence of stories, Sand Dune, relatively short, not too long, Harry Harrison, Deathworld, a fun premise, an American in the UK, our old friend, 1957-2012, Phil Chenevert still alive living in Florida, a professional gambler with psionic skills, heavy gravity, a hostile splinter group, a planetary story, not a comedy, pretty twisted, Bill The Galactic Hero, Planet Of The Damned, Dis was harsh, they might have been human once, kill! kill everything!, Brion Brandd, a bewildered hero, The Repairman, The Stainless Steel Rat, Jesse doubles, Men Into Space, the premise, a bear and an eagle, a spitting cobra, sphex, Sitka Pete, Sourdough Charlie, they’re all bears, trained giant eagle, that’s enough, back to the Harries, Arm Of The Law, a new police recruit in a box, a prototype robot cop, The K-Factor, has man really changed?, peace, but at what cost?, a joke story, The Velvet Glove, Fantastic Universe, the robot equality act, an allusion, the iron fist in the velvet glove, good dead dude, same crew as today, what’s doing in Terence’s course, rethinking everything, Deluzze and Lacan: Lack, Punch, Diamond Punch, Excess, rethink thinks, aimpunch, i computer games, playing with guns, a kickback, a recoilless rifle has less recoil, the mechanics of your body, a shoulder stock, a kickup, your aim gets worse, a logical operator, a lozenge, <>, a v lying down, the or sign in logic, and over the or, is greater than, is smaller than, diversion thinking to solve a problem, converge again on the other side, how to compare two authors, diamond punching each other, something to progress in thought, so fucking better, a different idea, the patrician is the all-powerful protector of society, society creates its own gravedigger, the guys being blackmailed kill themselves, Goliah, directed disintegration, those responsible, in a tower shooting Mark Cuban, you are such a great man with your billions, that will really hurt you, Luigi Mangione is the exception, Jack London’s last novel, The Assassination Bureau Limited, Sinclair Lewis ideas, living narrator friends, generally public domain, shitty online learning classes, a movie adaptation from 1969, Scott Miller, Winged Blackmail, uses pigeons, a very interesting magazine called The Lever, an early car magazine, are cars going to go away, in favour to airplanes?, a famous motorist, early popular cars were steam cars, a lever for acceleration, we salute you, it’s snowing here, no snow tires, need the cream, coffee with cream is better, so manly, in the female, Hungarian history, so virile, hairy chest, big throbbing penis, look out! he’s on the warpath!, seemingly health, 2nd place, just how awesome Jesse is, a very interesting phenomenon, almost tantric, playing with a rando, “hot drop”, getting kills is the way you get killed, “third partied”, sound is very important in the game, kitted up for the final endgame, wait, wait, wait, 1917, come in at the end and win, Norman Finkelstein at Waterloo, a boring speaker, Ed Broadbent, a very boring man, very powerful, very clear, cesspits of reactionary Zionism, holocaust being weaponized to commit atrocities in Palestine, the girl who was crying was German, nazis still like the nazis, Germany’s third genocide, Ukraine, radical takes on science fiction, singularly focused, he’s turned himself into a weapon, breeding beagles, not interested in the taste of food, Mao probably enjoyed some food, revolutionary peoples like spicy food, testing themselves against the elements, wind bathing, very boyish, the Long March, teenagers, a weird thing to think about, an army of teenagers across China, The West Wing is the founding myth of 50% of the electorate, a fantasy, he’s got weird attitudes, great understanding of American history, super-fantasy, people who vote, spoke to a specific generation cohort, up to young boomers, right in the pointing, not right in the details, the most interesting propaganda show, Landman, Taylor Sheridan, he was in Veronica Mars, actor to producer show writer, this one is for the oil companies, why oils is reality, why wind is not gonna work, it’s all true, but there’s no counterarguments, kinda refreshing, competently delivered, a Paramount show, oil extraction, Billy Bob Thornton, 24 was a huge show, the last gasp of regular broadcast television, Lost has no purpose, in sympatico with the Bush torture program, weapons of mass destruction, the plot every year, Keifer Sutherland was torturing people, they all were bad, he ends up being right, invading countries, directed inner, a domestic terror operative, a large effect on people, even the music was soothing, we can imagine this was what it was actually like, Bernie and Warren were really good people, President Bartlett, if you look at it objectively, the party system, when the whigs got replaced, no traction, MAGA Republicanism, Gavin Newsom, East Palestine, an unrecoverable position, they do cheat, a bipartisan president, it was a Democrat show, best friends with people who hate them, they got to Epstein island together, their kids are best friends with each other, a team against you, Will Rogers, It’s a big club and you’re not in it, George Carlin, just telling facts, they use that club to beat you, Elon Musk, what’s Jesse’s favourite country?, El Salvador, prison labour program, percentage of population in El Salvador in prison, 1659, a little less than 2%, comparable, zero crime now, is there zero crime in El Salvador (rounding down), a pretty famous crime, is El Salvador safer than Canada now?, economy is still stuck, among the world’s most popular reader, just give the prisoners bitcoin, commissary work, scrip, rumblings about Egypt getting grumpy, billions for the Suez, Mexico and Nicaragua taking about their own canals, pony up some big cash, empty houses, they are very interested in capitol improvement, China’s version of Blackrock would be state owned, control their economy, trashing Canada in the dms, an afterthought, living in my province as I do, cut it up, those are just jokes and positions for pushing people around, people would be grumpy, ICBC, just for cars, could be expanded to home insurance, the profit that it makes is funneled back into the province, crown corporations, periodical reforms, scandals that happen, almost like a working democratic system, the Maritimes, the interprovincial trade thing, Seattle is much closer than Calgary, Detroit and Windsor, cities that aren’t are very tiny, Edmonton, Alberta map, seems so cold, the mountains on the edge of town, how are you people living this way?, all these Koreans, and Chinese, Indians, Canadian national identity (a series of mistakes agreed upon), Bloc Quebecois, they’re not thinking about Quebec at all, a new racism, Puerto Ricans, doing their own thing, a little piece of Europe that has nothing to do with American interest, Mexico City feels like a European city, how old is Mexico City?, 1325, 1521, a very old city, Tijuana, Kentucky was founded in 1792, Louisville, Lexington, Cincinnati, in the shadows of the cities, raise cattle, some car manufacturing, shrinking economies, you’re gonna move, the metro Vancouver area, a river valley, Richmond, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, 4am commute, an hour’s drive, Burnaby, a Dutch family, Coqutilam, Port Moody, Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows, William Pitt prime minsters, really rural areas, Harrison Hotsprings, Surrey, all the streets are grid oriented, bad luck, a Sikh population, Abbotsford, the Waverly author’s home, Point Roberts, a city called Hope, the first Rambo movie, technically in the pre-Nazi youth, the cub scouts version of the Nazi youth, we had political disagreements, his mom and his dad, an adopted much older brother, maybe a lack of virility, the wild guy, learned to stop drinking, 7th Victim by Robert Sheckley, a whole series of novels, got big in Italy, a big deal in Europe, people appreciated him, even in Russia, a big star over there, Tenth Victim, Victim World, Victim Prime, tempted into reading that, things happening, add more characters, they kill each other, a standalone would be good, The Journey Of Joenes, we did well, we’re doing it, how many uncles did you have, paternal married, unmarried, invested in ostriches, craze in the 1990s, giant eggs!, they have dark meat, who wants to eat it?, why don’t they just eat cows, chicken or beef, there are other options, not a lot of elephant, ethical concerns, people eat dogs, best use of dogs, reproduce with tastier meat, stored calories, for knitting sweaters, Cowichan sweaters, made of real dog, they get fluffy in the winter, something to knit with, fabric arts, huge among woman, a sword collection, swords are cool, not that practical, ideal for slashing, no slashing today, do LEGO, girl dens are not called dens, fabric arts, girls like to do it, Will feels Jesse is drunk on his own lack of profundity, a double whammy, refine the idea, what is really going on, why do girls like tapestry making, or dressmaking, preferably something with a guy getting his head cut off, a piece of fabric that she made, your rented bungalow castle, half duplex, what is a bungalow, a house with a deck, gables, surrounded by wide veranda, never been to Asia, to Japan, came back with some youths, still hard at work, studied in India, Malawi, the harshest place, corpses in the street, hardcore, too intense a country, Finland is probably the opposite of India, rotted fish for dinner, mild on twitter, a worldcon in Finland, Paul loves travelling to those things, 2026 L.A., share a room, a posse that you’re with, Steen and Scott, the Bradbury Building, modern art museum [the Guggenheim], go to the dealer’s room, vernacular architecture, shotgun house, why is Bagshot Row called Bagshot Row?, the other hobbits who were also robbers, bagshot ones came back with empty bags, unless you’re bird hunting, buckshot is deer shot right?, it’s not doeshot, by having them not be alive, female if preferred for meat, get the antlers, the complete set, hang it up, waste material, horn decoration, not valuable, deer bones, treat it like a trophy, a huge rack, a bragging thing, get fish mounted, stupid in their mancave, almost always dudes, a girl will go fishing, a mom will be doing fabric arts, raising a farm, always wanted to have animals, animals all the time, 400 animals, dogs and cats and fish and birds, suspicious of these birds, so many fucking birds, noisy, they tend to be the personality of a 3 year old, jealous, shy or stressed, chewin on the walls, messy, parrots eat food like the floor is the jungle that needs to be seeded, too inefficient, not the animal for you, snakes are chill, give em food once a month, go back to dormancy, literally are cool, reptiles not having emotions, crocodile relationship, not good at expressing their emotions, axolotl salamander, permasmile, cat doors, a small dog, a donkey, find one to adopt, foster an adult dog, trained out of the hard part, surrogate babies, how that’s not good, furbabies, a child that never grows up, motherly all day long, a very funny animal, an Australian cattle dog, meg is ready, she’s ovulating for a dog, not ovulating for a donkey, ride a donkey, you shouldn’t, donkeys don’t like to be ridden, gets really excited, the traditional donkey noises, like camels, pissed off and mad, joyful, relatable, interesting animals, feeding them, grass and hay and veggies, hey is pretty cheap, a series of sheds, the cow palace, you probably get a truck, not hauling donkeys, much bigger than dogs, much smaller than horses, they’re mostly tall and leggy, just pure muscle, a giant grapefruit, ripped with muscle, powerful ears, that’s how muscular they are, no tannery on the Island, all that good material goes to waste, fairly thick with snow, enough, Nissan, pretty good snowfall, worse or better, snowed in, deliver newspapers at 5am, painful, no broken skulls, not a job anymore, adults do it, delivered newspapers as boys in the 1950s and 1960s, pizza delivery guy, Snowcrash, the hero protagonist of this story, a concession stand, Snack Shack (2024), comedies of the 1990s?, a troubled privileged kid, Pineapple Express (2008), Superbad (2007), no sex at all, set in 1991, Bob’s Burgers, Archer, a parody of Eastern Promises (2007), where Aragorn is a Russian guy, A Netflix version of Minions Of Midas, so lovin Jack London, smart, right politics, classifying his stories, hobo stories, he knows about that, Hobo And The Fairy, The Iron Heel, interesting in theory and boring in practice, Bryan Alexander, a whole bunch of lectures, a revolutionary talking to a bunch of dentists or bourgeois, rich people who have dinner parties, a mechanic who gets paid better and more respect, a fucking horrible job, you’re in people’s mouths all day, Jenny and Bryan Alexander, dangerous being on this show, if you listen to Jesse you get to survive, a new anthology, very supportive of her on BlueSky, Year’s Best Eco Fiction, very Marissa energy, Coastal New Weird, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, Star Trek Minus Context, that’s Bob of Bob’s Burgers, all the other actors on Archer, what the actor look like, Jessica Walter, Arrested Development, comedian character actors, Aisha Taylor, books to consider, a bibliography, stories I read when writing this story, mashup, Caesar’s Children, Plurotopia, Mizora: A Prophecy by Mary E. Bradley Lane, Ignatius Donnelly, Erewhon by Samuel Butler, we wait, people get excited on a big project and don’t finish it, pee and coffee, Bath & Body Works, soap and candles, take care.

The Hate Disease by Murray Leinster

The Rat Racket by David H. Keller

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #758 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Breakthroughs In Science by Isaac Asimov

The SFFaudio Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #758 – Breakthroughs In Science by Isaac Asimov, read by Mike Vendetti. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the book (4 hours, 7 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Mike Vendetti, and Terence Blake

essays in this book:

Archimedes “I Can Move The World”
Johann Gutenberg Words For The Millions
Nicolaus Copernicus The Challenge Of Infinity
William Harvey Nature Was His Book
Galileo Galilei “But It Does Move”
Anton van Leeuwenhoek He Discovered An Invisible World
Isaac Newton All Was Light
James Watt He Started Two Revolutions
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier Father Of Modern Chemistry
Michael Faraday Magnetism Becomes Electricity
Joseph Henry Electricity Becomes Power
Henry Bessemer The Steel Age Opens
Edward Jenner He Found A Way To Prevent Disease
Louis Pasteur He Tracked Down The Killers
Gregor Johann Mendel The Mystery Of Heredity
William Henry Perkin He Opened Wide A Chemical Wonderland
Roentgen and Becquerel They Discovered Invisible Rays
Thomas Alva Edison Bringer Of Light
Paul Ehrlich He Fired A Magic Bullet
Darwin and Wallace They Explored The Beginnings Of Life
Marie and Pierre Curie They Paved The Way For The Atomic Age
Albert Einstein He Charted A New World
George Washington Carver World In A Peanut
Irving Langmuir He Made Rain
Rutherford and Lawrence They Tore Apart The Atom
Robert Hutchings Goddard He Launched The Space Age

COMPLETE |PDF|

Talked about on today’s show:
Quantum theory, a collection of 26 stories of peoples contributions to science/engineering, a clever thing to do, Julian Arnquist, teachers that influenced your life, why a match goes out when you blow on it, chemistry teacher, dedicated to a person, how many of these people were unfamiliar to you?, part of you vocabulary, Isaac Newton, Johannes Gutenberg, engineering vs. science, principles of engineering, artificial intelligence, Promethean moments, Erik Burgers, relative contributions, the peanut guy, Longmuir, Lewonhouk, Goddard, we remember the Nazi (Wernher Von Braun), Galileo is a scientist, a glaring omission, Tesla, no Edison anything, quantum theory, 1959, is quantum theory doing anything at that time?, Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize, Brownian motion, missing DNA, in the very early 1950s, the periodic table, things omitted, from the French perspective, Denis Papin (inventor of the steam engine), every country invented the television, mechanical television, why did you pick that person, of all of the people Einstein was the least engineering, Newton, a warping of the stories, Michelson–Morley experiment, the motion of the earth with respect to the ether, special relativity, mathematical beauty, spectacular confirmation, the world cared, he’s an artist not a scientist, through the whole book, the practical approach, the engineering approach, tension, practical exploits, killed because of a shadow, I need to get back to my pondering, paying a price, Gutenberg is a good example, that’s great thanks bud, financial hardship, looking for themes, the lowly people, the janitors, published in a book 35 years ago, died in obscurity, a Weird Tales story about a “double man”, just a weirdo, gifted with autistic amazing ability to come up with stuff, Pasteur, let’s get this out there so people can appreciate it, we can’t really use that, inventing for money, the Curies, what a weird family, I’m going to burn my arm, blood cancer, family business, a diverse book, well written, stories, nitpicking, as a whole its diverse and abundant, keeping it all in mind, there stories are incredibly familiar, big board books, a pet animal that could talk, introduce us to famous figures, the Disney movies, a talking animal nearby, easier for kids to digest, Beethoven is not a scientist, incredible cultural impacts without us knowing who they are, Edison was the Wizard Of Menlo Park, Paul Ehrlich, tritium, Irving Langmuir, what we do all day is stare at screens, anti-glare for glass, oleophobic coatings, separate essays, 2nd to last paragraph, why this order?, the conquest of space, in unexpected ways, the fault of men not of knowledge, Cold War propaganda, tweet in German, oh good, we’re not doing anymore atomic energy in Germany, a shortage of electricity, doubledown on solar and wind, make some more mountains, nuclear plants are bad when incompetence is in charge, cleaner than somethings, surprising developments, something bad can happen, one-side, pro-science, eurocentric, western centric, influence from outside the official, vaccination in Turkey, unethical experiments, luckily it worked so he’s a genius, he probably is doing that today, as with COVID, Tuskegee University, spirochetes, syphilis, doing evil science, a bias here, very Western, the farthest east we go is Turkey, the Arab renaissance, Arabic numerals, algebra, alcohol, doing science like mad, learning everything, the Greeks can read this stuff too, how much more he could have done with a different type of mathematics, The Masters by Ursula K. Le Guin, the story of Mandel, I’ve got my beans, spending a lot of time with hornblende, agriculture and statistics, put the two things together, the story of men (other than Marie Curie), outshines her husband and daughter, a woman contributed to science, forty Newtons and one of them is a woman, the lady from Agora (2009), Hypatia of Alexandria, a dude’s subject, engineering a Dude’s subject, Pirate Enlightenment or The Real Libertalia by David Graeber, is very female oriented, “There’s No Such Thing As The West”, super-interested, French and American revolution, these fake kings, a way to show off, you have no more money or power than I do sir, Thomas Midgley, eythl for gasoline, the eythl guy, put the lead in the gasoline, engine knock, CFCs, he is kind of dangerous, you can go back to fire, atomic power, once we invented fire…, cooking everything, eugenicing ourselves, Prometheus got in trouble for that, Copernicus, Galileo, Edison no trouble, yeah, but it does move, an apocryphal story, he should have said it, we require that he muttered it, there’s no evidence for it (other than we want it to be true), a legend that goes with it, we can’t resist it, and it is inspiring, like the Archimedes story, keep your shadows out of my circles, a story with Caesar, and Alexander the Great, Diogenes, what is the function of this book?, Einstein is an immigrant, from Poland to France, WWII, moving from Nazi Germany to the U.S., the Nazi scientists, why aren’t you talking to Goddard, war criminals, I Aim For The Stars (1960), Disney making Werner Von Braun ok, he came away clean, some people would choose to do so, Newton just being a weirdo, a story of a bunch of weirdos, facts and things we need to believe in order to tell the story better, a chemistry professor, so intelligent, can’t get to your level, a world full of people who can’t get to your level, nothing he liked more than dirty limericks, it sounds like it should be true, his mind was such, he’s examining the writing on the Otis elevator system, wondering about what’s going on in there, how come no one’s paying attention to this little thing down here, a spam phone call in the elevator’s emergency phone, surrounded by systems we cannot understand, as usual a terrific story by Ted Chiang, a world where everything is artificial [Exhalation by Ted Chiang], how nature works, a Borgesian style world, screens and cables and charging ports and roads and fences and insulation, the natural world, which one’s the easier to study?, how things work from the natural world, what a cyclotron is, cyclotrons everywhere, maybe it’s easier to look at nature and see the apple falling on Newton’s head, at a certain point, I didn’t think I experimented, a flip answer, rejecting Wilhelm Roentgen’s actual words, scientific revolutions, a pile on, I stand on the shoulder of giants, The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, 1962, Copernicus -> Galileo -> Newton, the system builder, you needed dramatization, hard workers, Einstein is the equivalent of Newton, you need this idea of dramatization, dramatize real facts, the military, the conceptually minded natural philosopher, practical results are useful, not polite and submissive, a rough and ready thing, his model: the real breakthrough -> the dramatization -> the system, the propaganda of the book itself: be scientists but not the wrong way, Asimov is not really a scientist at all, pinching women, the texts will be around a lot longer, a work for hire in a certain sense, not doing original research here, taking the stories he needs and wants to know, Jesse likes peanuts, his story is in here possibly to make him the Marie Curie, a democracy of science, Robert Hooke,he’s a baddie, he could have had his own chapter here, not fully chronological, its not alphabetical, mid-20th century, why is it structured this way?, a compiler of these essays, write about famous scientists and engineers, sold to the school market, the catalogue would show up at the school and you could order, the official propaganda list, given books to read for homework, Animal Farm is a terrible book, a very specific subject, hate school, Lord Of The Flies, boys are bad, nuclear war in the background, too many questions unanswered, learn to read -> be exposed to stuff -> let them go, The Outsiders, juvenile delinquents in the 1950s, S.E. Hinton, make people interested in book, a supplement, silent reading, started writing another thing, being clear, mostly for clarity, he isn’t a bad writer at all, he’s super-clear, kind of a Russian, we’re not really sure what year Asimov was born, his dad ran a candy store, Brooklyn, reading the magazines, how he got involved in science fiction, you have to become a doctor, not the right kind of doctor, a doctor of chemistry, super-interested in everything, a book like this, a nice slice, a series of volumes, the chapter on Darwin, whole books on these individuals, that guy doesn’t get his own chapter, Erasmus Darwin, kids today are getting dumber, casual reading for the kids, some of them liked their sports or playing pool, 8th grade education in the 1920s, educated to 1920s standards, all successful, one of these crypto bros, the Rite Gud podcast, he didn’t know how to pronounce any long words, whole language vs. phonics, phone, ph means f, you just know what the word means, deoxyribonucleic acid, Massachusetts vs. Maine, sounding it out isn’t sexy, a shitty scientific system, despite all the evidence, what’s missing from this story, all the fuckups in science, let’s do lockdowns, no science showing that it worked, working great in China, lockdowns are great if you want to increase your stock portfolio, these masks don’t work, the thing that’s missing from the overall story, the Lister chapter, hospital spread diseases, washing you hands doesn’t solve everything either, sometimes people get lucky, two incidents where his ears are damaged, he invented the phonograph, science, take credit for someone else’s work, simultaneous invention of calculus, Langmuir was great at self publicity, Langmuir waves, Langmuir effect, the Wikipedia page for Langmuir, good at promoting yourself, if you don’t have the money you can’t do the research, a rich patron, Antoine Lavoisier, only patenting things so he can spend more money on science, turning it into an invention factory, Edison kind of invented Hollywood, patent rights, eastern judges, as far away from New Jersey as possible (California), science is we share our knwoledge with others freely, letters to Europeans, the Franklin stove patent, public domain, once you invent the patent system, used to game people, the story of big pharma, the results they like, funding the FDA, the FDA employees go to work for big pharma, doctors, doing medicine without a license, he’s very optimistic, later corruption, they were Nazis of course, they were engineers that appreciated Goddard, promote Mendel, inspirational stories, cautionary tales, you can be ignored, Joseph Henry, status and money, was it a utopia?, if it was they didn’t make a lot of buildings that said “this is a utopia”, life was nice, maybe there were death squads all over the place, women are excited to sexually attract men, we have to have a meeting without the women go hide in the mountains for a while, what a utopia is, hordes of barbarians, calming and relaxing, the weather is easy and the women are beautiful, doesn’t make for a dramatic story, leaving out all the failures, anti-book, Charles Fort’s The Book Of The Damned, what science neglects or denies, a keystone for evolutionary theory, Lo! by Charles Fort, where planets should be, calculating the existence of other planets, getting everything worked out, the proof is sometimes before or after, putting them both together, tidying up messy science, dogmatic people, no real reason to believe his telescope, you had to sort of believe his cosmology or be ready to believe something new, the theory of, pairing microscopy and telescopy, finding new planets, finding, 1850 something, The Diamond Lens by Fitz-James O’Brien, a world in a raindrop, she’s all withered up, quantum theory, the observer interferes with the observed, From Beyond by H.P. Lovecraft, take that microscope and point it up at the sky, lines on Mars, Pluto has to have mushrooms, everything is hazy, the worlds are undeniable, kill that paramecium, Microcosmic God by Theodore Sturgeon, light pollution, aliens not space, biggness makes us feel small, disgusted, unimportant, live at the medium size, the germ theory, cell dying with coal tar, Edward Jenner, the treatment of cancer, radium pills, cancerous cells, a double barrel effect, to think we’re important, they’re going on without us, worlds we’re unaware of, Sigmund Freud, the narcissistic wound, especially Copernicus, Darwin, not the divine children of god, nor the culmination, we’re not masters at the center of our own minds, Leeuwenhoek, cast empty spaces between the atoms, invisible rays, an idea of science that’s the opposite of Aristotle, there are lots of stuff, progressively more and more stuff that is not available to ordinary observation but are big time nonetheless, a self wounding process, finding our place within it, no psychology or psychiatry, one of the founding myths of science fiction, John W. Campbell’s psionics, Henry Bessemer probably shouldn’t be in this book, he helped make steel sheep, is he a scientist?, in somebody’s backyard, the guy who invents the steam donkey, a lot of things are important, muddies the water, tinkering around, the author of the concentric atom model, theoretical models, one molecule thick, the key as to how they did it, be really observant and get money, how many gentlemen scientists do we have anymore, Elon Musk, people don’t like him, he likes rockets and satellites, a science enthusiast, Goddard plus Edison, successful and good at self promoting and getting funding, counting the number of Teslas, having real world impacts, satellite internet, literally impacting the world on a daily basis, Twitter is a toy for him, almost everybody is working for universities and institutes, fake science, patent clerk doesn’t need any equipment other than paper and chalkboard, Stephen Hawking, a popularizer of science, more like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, money to throw at things, and a team, a cyclotron in her basement, an unheated shack, warmed it up with radioactives, Lawrence, a place he has access to, you will create a black hole to destroy the world, administration stuff is horrible, dribbles and drabs of microcircuity, screens get better and better, a lot of ram, John Horgan’s The End Of Science, Scientific American, up against the wall, not having any breakthroughs, somebody in Madagascar home experimenting, the story of The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Shevek, Einsteinian style theory including psychology, decadent planet, Libertalia, a book of spiritual gurus, Breakthroughs In Spiritual Science, Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis, rhetorical science, using our mouths, the way we operate out machine, Steve Jobs, stole the mouse from Xerox, Chat GPT, human artificial intelligence, part of the Microsoft voices, a database of thousands and thousands of voices, Jesse likes a good essay, essays are not science, Bing just inserted itself, search is important, combing, decision trees are not science, looking at some phenomena in the world and figuring out how it works, augmented reality, virtual reality, where the nearest cafe is, sidewalks to not collapse, coding is making things happen, our system is broken, hiding behind intellectual property, a thriller about a guy who worked at a cell phone company, sex on the side, look at the tech they have one the shelf, look at what patents they hold, a product they can sell, we’ve had MRI and ultrasound for 40 years?, fairly static, battery technology, making it cheaper, it took a building, now you can buy em on ebay, putting tools in the hands of people, we need to get a shipping container and send it to Madagascar to get our science back, the women will be doing the business and the men can go into their shack, we have a solution, pretty good book, Findaway, Audible, the origin story of this audiobook, Mike loved the sound of his voice, doing audiobooks, LibriVox, Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, something that wouldn’t flush, 50,000 watt voice without an outlet, Peter Berkrot, put the Baby Ruth in the pool in Caddyshack (1980), a funny little world we’ve got here, first non-fiction by Asimov, 26 3 page stories, conjure up an interest in it, Philip K. Dick is full of sparks, frustrated, six months following up all the leads, filling in the blanks, awakens your curiosity quite effectively, way leads on to way, settlement from Audible.com, 600 titles, the long tail, nobody will know for eight months, Philip K. Dick has a long tail, Jack London, will it sell?, does it have a market?, best sellers, separate realms, a classic, The Richest Man In Babylon by George Samuel Clason, Hemingway, financial advice through a collection of parables, a classic of personal finance advice, I need comics not this, guard thy treasure from loss, The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, my knees hurt, re-recording the art of war, it’s short, about 10 recordings of The Art Of War, a friend named Mike who likes to read stuff, sounds good, something to think about, sewing books, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, the cheaters, profiting off of other people’s labours, your production copyright, muddied waters, Audible is all about money, short term vs. long term, a cucumber is bitter throw it away, and why were such things made in the world?, a metaphor, ages ago, painful, you need some stoicism, mediation on the public baths, don’t wander, don’t be passive or aggressive, don’t be all about business, 1811, Stoicism is getting real big, stoic influencers, being 82 years old, I hope I live to end this, approaching the pearly gates, about time to make a deal, start mending your ways, calling bingo at the American Legion, God got his bingo card, a part of your preface, a dedication, God I hope you live to the end of this, AI could finish it for me, when robots do it I’m highly offended, pretty sure I don’t have syphilis, a flash in the pan?, kids are going to use it for essays, bio available in essays like this, an original thought died of loneliness, ai jokes, to come up with premises, random combinations, suburban cowboy must save a hot waitress from punks, man tweets, what appeals to us en masse, The Poison Belt, Downward To Earth by Robert Silverberg, Star Born by Andre Norton, Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein, Evan Lampe, Shakespeare’s Planet, Charwoman’s Shadow, Scratch One, Black House, Progeny by Philip K. Dick in July, if he was a really good dude, everything is ephemeral, everything he trolls, bluecheks, a class system, google’s busy killing everything, a troll against all the stick up their ass people who are legion, Philip K. Dick, Mark Twain, Neal Stephenson’s baroque cycle, a fruitful period, pirates, that is a problem, new public domain Dick, Prize Ship, Jon’s World, Meddler by Philip K. Dick, Roog, A Present For Pat by Philip K. Dick, Time Pawn by Philip K. Dick, never republished, so fucked up, the estate fucking up, there’s a lot of demand, people want to hear his weird ideas, old timer sci-fi guys, addressing things that were real then and that we are more used to now, Mike hasn’t been tweeting a ton, the new algorithm, “for you” is terrible, Tweeten is broken, Tweetdeck [now broken too], adblock plus, a slave phone, Android was okay, printed circuit board salesman, Silicon Valley, computer makers, writing software for Apple, open architecture for IBM, pc clones, Halt And Catch Fire, anti-Japanese sentiment, turned out that the Japanese weren’t going to take over the world, friends with poor judgement, hypothetical stuff all in his head, was little Jesse wrong, turns out the Soviets were not maniacs, remember NATO, are you really gonna do this?, wait five years, the Warsaw Pact, there was no demand to destroy the world by the soviets, domino theory, Afghanistan, getting rid of the draft was smart, skin in the game, smart for who, now only poor families get drafted, a professional military, mercenaries, more respectful of the Greek and Latin roots, a horror show, when you say smart you mean evil, a smart evil thing that they did, it’s not their kid, Vietnam broke that system, years to figure out what you want, get some training, the most remembered time of their life, memories for good or bad, we’re always nostalgic, we can’t be nostalgic for things that haven’t happened yet, when you’re demented or a baby, that’s my mom, I like this cat, becoming more like a baby, we only live our lives in retrospect, the retrospect is different from the reality, that would show that I was right, sometimes you can be right even though the video shows something else, a problem with chat GPT, it’s not thought it’s just grammar, interpretations, what Jesse loves about fiction, there’s no truth except for the words that are there, if the print-setter fucked up, insight into the knowledge of the author, loves beautiful dead ladies, loves boobs, why are so many boobs in this story, he just likes them, through Elmer Gantry six times, different each time, working with Kathy Verduin, southern accent, an 18 hour audiobook, sometimes the narrator disappearances, forgetting the author was involved, match the voice to the book, American Sniper, college punk, maybe Terrence imagined it, why bother bring facts into the issue, the perception of an 82 year old.

TX263 - Breakthroughs In Science by Isaac Asimov

TX263 - Breakthroughs In Science by Isaac Asimov

Breakthroughs In Science by Isaac Asimov

VALUE TALES - The Value Of Learning - Marie Curie

Lo! by Charles Fort

Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis

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The SFFaudio Podcast #751 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Unseen—Unfeared by Francis Stevens

The SFFaudio Podcast #751 – Unseen—Unfeared by Francis Stevens – read by Mike Vendetti. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the story (48 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants include Jesse, Maissa Bessada, Mike Vendetti, and Cora Buhlert.

Talked about on today’s show:
listening to and reading, People’s Favorite Magazine, Feb. 10, 1919, emdash [—], Mike’s first Francis Stevens, more than 100 year ago, the technology, so predictive, The Heads Of Cerberus, Gertrude Barrows Bennett, a married woman who married more than once, Jean Vale, they cancelled that, only one story had her real name on it, G.M. Barrows, teenager, Sunfire, getting depressed, a fantastic writer, clunky, Citadel Of Fear, so good at ideas, so early, 1904, a superhero origin story before anybody, nobody had invented superheroes yet, Zorro is later! [1919], The Scarlet Pimpernel, 1905, dual identity, so pioneering, such sexist times, Francis is a male name, abbreviated names, C.L. Moore, H.P. Lovecraft, Andre Norton, sexism came from women as well as men, women want the vote, the progressive period, time capsule, From Beyond, a little H.P. Lovecraft story, machine shows some weird shit, no waccy tobaccy, no good evidence Bobby Derie seems to have these facts at hand, published in 1934, better in technical ways, tighter, 11 pages, 47 minutes vs. 19 minutes, this is the racist story, Lovecraft’s story isn’t racist, dealing with race a lot, Lovecraft lives through it, a case of parallel thinking, explicitly called out, Micrographia, what paramecium and amoeba look like, these things are all over you, isn’t that creepy?, this story also calls out the bacteria in microscopy, deemed to be dirty, no running water, dirty because they are poor, teaching hygiene, photos with a microscope, talking about the technology, gaslamps have been out for a long time, a building without wifi today, any wifi!, 1890s they have electric bulbs, phones are standard, people didn’t upgrade, a brownstone subdivided for a whole bunch of immigrants, Cool Air, a cheap place, nice and clean, dripping fluids everywhere, these are slumlords, tons of immigrants looking for housing, strong protections for renters, farmhouse, a farmer family once lived there, large entrance hall, stuffed in refugees, 1 million Ukrainians, Turkey, countries that want cheap labour, who gets to set the immigration policy?, going to a crummy neighbourhood, the guy he’s going to visit is rich, he wants to help improve the community, keep your water clean, a progressive of the kind the main character isn’t, in a story like He, disgusting human beings, the nadir of race relations in the United States, Jim Crow is at its highest, swarthy of anykind, deemed horrible, eugenics, racism at its core, weird piece of paper from South America, one Thanksgiving, strangers, started to hit the wacky stuff, some subversive group had put marijuana into the stuffing you buy at the store, Mike is the only one who knows this, he’s racist at the beginning of the story, paranoid and high and delusional, the drug makes him super-racist, kind of fascinating, everything is disgusting, he’s wrong, the Italian guy is concerned for him, deeply racist people, they’re diseases, we’re all human, I was human too, recognizing that he’s not himself, as human as me, he’s turning it on himself, the chianti, the sour wine, undercut at the end, the opalescent paper, the classic Lovecraftian move, this amazing book, this city of ancient gods that we found in Antarctica, let’s never tell anybody about it, connections in the shipbuilding industry, Antarctica, old enough to know, still wanted to go, very very cool. Francis Stevens is so cool, The Elf-Trap, there’s this scientist, she likes scientist characters, he has a bad heart, go on vacation, Kentucky, Carcassonne, disgusting, beautiful, they’re fairies?, fall in love and then sacrifice him, disgusting and stink, beautiful and attractive and exotic, we see it both ways, a frameshift, dingy and disgusting, everything green again, chocolatey!, there’s something wrong with this, they’re all like me, crawling uop the scientist’s leg, starfish, centipedes, drink these developing fluids, backstory of the cop, it was all that wacky tabaccy, the reversal again, what is the truth of this?, “doubt is sometimes better than certainty”, this doesn’t seem like it is that deep, generally very racist, what makes the people so racist is they are certain about their beliefs, there are things we all believe that we are wrong about, if we are very strongly opinioned about those things it can make us very made to be confronted when those things turn out to not be true, it makes us upset because it hurts us, what’s going on politically, you can not have a conversation with somebody is on the other side, your certainty and their certainty, matter and antimatter, I have this problem and I don’t want it solved, environmental protestors, gentle and lenient, repent and renounce modernity, glued himself to a table, voted differently, racist uncles, free refrigerators?, far right, screechy ones on the left, death threats on the internet, fireworks, terrible things, this is the danger, blocking people, I can’t talk to you and you can’t talk to me, we need to act, new washer and dryer, certainty, is this the best price, in the face of the fact that we must act, we must doubt, really good at telling truths about some things, voted for trump or some other person, doubt is better certainty or certainty is better than doubt, vitamin d supplements, serious covid cases, terrible Nazi made a sensible proposition, water is wet, water is dry!, Trump water, train derailment, ancient Trump water, East Palestine, laws passed by the Nazis, perfectly harmless laws, industrialization, parking spaces per home, a good law, decades later, advertise abortions, anti-abortion activists, supplying power, perfectly harmless, what actually is happening in this story, is the cigar actually tainted, is this full of vinyl chloride, a religious like conversion, we’re not so bad as we all think we are, seems pretty simple, an app that allows you to see what people are thinking, a delusion, seeing evil thoughts written all over their faces, narrows his focus, a bad trip, weird membrane, were those monsters real or not?, is it a ghost story?, a real interaction, able to imagine having this conversation with Doctor Holt, does he actually see him, back and forth, what you’re about to see no mortal man has seen, I’m dead, all the world shall know, one by one they shall learn the truth and perish, double entendre, feels a little clunky, she’s really on to something, from Cuba, invariable good, not be the case, Havana, he only smoked half the cigar, still alive, Jenkins, Ralph Peeler, accused of murdering, hallucinated to suicide, or it killed him, what makes this different from other kinds of science, no longer replicable, send that to Benjamin Franklin, back and forth, that’s what science is, repeatable experiences, opalescent paper, can’t get any more of it, could have been cocaine, or had an evil curse on it, what do these two things have in common, they’re exotic, an Incan lost city, map it, they burn the paper so nobody can replicate the experience, we can all look under the microscopes and see the germs that are killing us, when Charles Darwin’s On the Origin Of Species came out, I’m not a fucking monkey, it takes decades, Breakthroughs In Science by Isaac Asimov, microphotography, a readalong, the density of the gold, Eureka Eureka!, I smell good, not me I smell good, a good bath joke, chronological, dedicated to a science teacher Mike had in high school, lower the temperature of the flame, such a good book, a very good non-fiction and science writer, Archimedes, Johann Gutenberg, Nicolaus Copernicus, William Harvey, Galileo Galilei, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Isaac Newton, James Watt, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Michael Faraday, Joseph Henry, Henry Bessemer, Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Gregor Johann Mendel, William Henry Perkin, Röntgen and Becquerel, Thomas Alva Edison, Paul Ehrlich, Darwin and Wallace, Marie and Pierre Curie, Albert Einstein, George Washington Carver, Irving Langmuir, Rutherford and Lawrence, Robert Hutchings Goddard, a good list, a book to do a show on, dealing with that, The White Ape [Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family], cool that my ancestors were apes, gross!, a week later, gross!, I hate mushrooms, stages of developement, individually vs. societalally, the U.S. owns at this time, Philippines, talked about it as a colony, talking about adding , fucking disgusting monkeys, still a colony, possessions, Hawaii, 1899, South American drugs, harvested and brought to the city, add to the capital, having lunch with a friend, a mistaken poisoning, just tryna live, dosed, seeing behind the veil, we can’t replicate this, the ending is to leave us in doubt, a piece of fiction, that’s interesting, putting you in a better position, it’s a fact that Hillary Clinton killed that guy, we can think better about, our disbelief instinct, the most relevant case of technology today, robots have nothing to say, no you can’t write that anymore I’m going to fix it for you, these are not the words that were written, a false sense of what happened in the past, the Roald Dahl situation, children’s books have been edited for content, books from before WWII and WWI, childhood to adulthood, all of WWI in 2 pages, why is there no WWII at all, it’s been written out, never reprinted after WWII, censorship vs. replacing the text, shifted the setting, Silesia is now Poland but used to be Germany, Breslau to Hanover, both authors died in WWII, encroaching Red Army, for Lovecraft, public domain, change the entire story and keep Lovecraft’s name, disingenuous and bad vs. owned by a monopoly, the major difference, not republishing a book is not the same as changing the words, we’re reversing that, the James Bond books, racist stuff in here, not changing Ian Fleming from what he was, why they’re doing it, change for change’s sake, can’t say fat, fundamentally doing evil because they’re lying, the painter, Norman Rockwell, this is Norman Rockwell’s painting of Obama, if Stalin wants to airbrush somebody out, I went to the beach with my friend Trotsky, the Soviet system, the copyright problem, the audiobook narrator world, offended by certain words, the consensus, if that’s what it says, that’s what you say, Huckleberry Finn without the N-word, there are words in here that are not mine, you don’t see it you don’t worry about it, people tend to fear what they don’t know, immigrants in the United States, if all the Mexicans left you’d starve to death, stealing our jobs, what’s happening in the UK, agricultural labour, people from Africa, Poles, Romanians, cheap immigrant labour, no vegetables or fruit, part of the picture, when Lovecraft is being racist, there’s a push pull, factor owners want cheap labour, I can’t live here anymore, it could be entirely domestic, a period of starvation, exporting younger sons, pushed out political malcontents, these Proud Boys need to go to Canada, distant relatives, no one here would have them, 1950s, emigrated from Italy, grandfather was a real jerk, coal mines, Italians and Irish, those people are different, 1880s, sold his daughters, that was the deal they made, Jesse’s internet went away, basically illiterate, you couldn’t fool her with numbers, different shade of skin colour, and you fear em, you think you can see these people, suddenly visible, we’ve always had black people, a lot of Italian immigration, labour immigration, nasty prejudices against the Italians, only old people are like that, obviously Polish names, the descendants of Polish workers, the silliest thing, what were your grandparents, three generations of Turkish immigrants, two million Russians, every person is a library, read all your books and get used to it, it takes a while, a generation or two and everybody’s happy, there’s microbes all over us, the universe is incredibly giant, it will bite you, was Francis Stevens racist or shedding a light on it?, yes, shining light on superstition about other people, demons and microbes, a move at the end, send it back to Hell, what’s so cool about her, very very thoughtful person, fiction stories, she’s alone, its very hard to reason alone, what do you think of this pasta, eventually we decide how to make it delicious, we need a little parmesan, the nadir of race relations, the solution to race problem: eugenics, I have the answer, my audience like me is racist, race is not important, try to be charitable to Jesse, why are you such a jerk, sometimes I’m not horrible, this story wouldn’t exist, what if we change our perspective on this thing we’re seeing all around us, put in emojis to indicate current beliefs, wearing a cross around their neck, a stick on their lawn: immigrants out or hate has no home here, almost everybody was racist, Frederick Douglas, it worked both ways, he was looking at you with worry, looking out for him, priming you with different words, anger, pity, the same picture with different conclusions, look around my community, Lovecraft walking around New York looking at jewish beards, have you tried their cabbage?, I’m afraid of limburger, we ned to frame shift, the most au currant thing of the day, The Horror At Red Hook, a cop here, all the characters in this story are working for good, acting under the influence, Callahan, an Americanism, Irish were not considered white at the time, race is not a science thing, this is about science, at the time race was science (but shit), getting passed bad theories, she doesn’t defeat racism through a scientific process, she uses doubt to get to the problem, string theory is garbage science (this is becoming known), Michio Kaku, studied math, it doesn’t get us anywhere, we’ve wasted 50 years working on this shit, bubble up, this is not so good, it takes a long time for people, I haven’t been wasting my life, you’ve been wasting your life being racist, what is the first thing that he sees?, a group of Italians, an Italian restaurant, on their way to a part or festival, 2am dance party, loud parties at night get off my lawn, Cora’s fireworks incidents, conservative and bourgeois green party people, the wrong sort of people enjoy fireworks, so traumatized by the fireworks, east European immigrants, firework ban, three days per year, such a huge issue, the last paragraph in the story, narrow down evil,

Of course, our action in destroying that “membrane” was illegal and rather precipitate, but, though he won’t talk about it, I know that Jenkins agrees with me—doubt is sometimes better than certainty, and there are marvels better left unproved. Those, for instance, which concern the Powers of Evil.

jere they discovered this parchment, went viral, everybody could use it, a filter on your phone for instigram, They Live, why that’s a great story, revealing a great truth, one of the hard things to explain in the world is why people commit suicide, the non-existence button, what causes it, here’s an explanation, finding everything to be terrible, i’m creating more horror, I was mean to that person, I feel regret, press the button, pie for dessert, should I marry this person, how should I interact with that new immigrant, shun them like my brother does, psychoanalysis, monsters burst from the unconscious, you just have to read Poe, pre-Jung and pre-Freud, this is my guy, he’s a weird guy, he has this spark that we have, what interests us in his genre, the mystery genre and the science fiction genre, angels, he’s inventing science fiction, look at who was before her, H.G. Wells, Fitz James O’Brien, Jules Verne, in the pulps, proto-science fiction Weird Tales, little bit clunky, a little bit hard to follow, such a thoughtful story, Blaisdell, he like cigars and highly seasoned Italian food, exactly Lovecraft, ravioli, contains multitudes, a matter of perspective, we need to find a different way, guiding the audience,

Jenkins offered me one of his invariably good cigars, which I accepted, saying thoughtfully: “A man has no right to trifle with the superstitions of ignorant people. Sooner or later, it spells trouble.”

who is Francis Stevens talking to?,

“Did in his case. They swore up and down that he sold love charms openly and poisons secretly, and that, together with his living so near to—somebody else—got him temporarily suspected. But my tongue’s running away with me, as usual!”

“As usual,” I retorted impatiently, “you open up with all the frankness of a Chinese diplomat.”

first generation from Iran, rosewater, a lot more affordable, they don’t ever say no, “we could do that” means “no”, the loud American, hey that was a crappy movie, a longer way of saying it was crappy, Jenkins is not the sort of detective, an attack against the mystery genre, she’s showing off,

He beamed upon me engagingly and rose from the table, with a glance at his watch. “Sorry to leave you, Blaisdell, but I have to meet Jimmy Brennan in ten minutes.”

HE so clearly did not invite my further company that I remained seated for a little while after his departure; then took my own way homeward. Those streets always held for me a certain fascination, particularly at night. They are so unlike the rest of the city, so foreign in appearance, with their little shabby stores, always open until late evening, their unbelievably cheap goods, displayed as much outside the shops as in them, hung on the fronts and laid out on tables by the curb and in the street itself. Tonight, however, neither people nor stores in any sense appealed to me. The mixture of Italians, Jews and a few Negroes, mostly bareheaded, unkempt and generally unhygienic in appearance, struck me as merely revolting. They were all humans, and I, too, was human. Some way I did not like the idea.

bare headed, everybody wears a hat at this time, orthodox, speaks to the poverty, if you have any amount of money, skin salons, nail salons, hair salons, and dog food stores, Lids, H.P. Lovecraft’s wife was a hat lady, somebody walking down the street with no shoes,

My sense of impending evil was merging into actual fear. This would never do. There is only one way to deal with an imaginative temperament like mine—conquer its vagaries. If I left South Street with this nameless dread upon me, I could never pass down it again without a recurrence of the feeling. I should simply have to stay here until I got the better of it—that was all.

I have to conquer this, as a woman walking the streets, women don’t have the right to vote yet, a woman alone at night, women wear hats in parts as self defense, killings on buses, Back To The Future (1985), “mashers”, hat pins as weapons to stab people doing that to them, stories in the newspaper about it, through your ribcage and into your guts, designed as weapons, everyday carry shit [edc], pepper spray, all over Bangkok, Baker’s Street, setup together, good things, cheap prices, cheap goods, Chinese were the businessmen, Thais carrying goods, the merchants, take one day a year off, all over South East Asia, Cora lived in Singapore for a while, funeral decorations, get back on the horse, courage, strength, I’m a brave guy, strangers looking at me, New York City, if you are afraid of immigrants, lock yourself in your apartment, small town with covenants, no black people in South St. Paul, Minnesota, segregated neighbourhoods, mixed neighborhoods, kebab shops, Bremen, Hamburg, Portuguese people, eyeballing and window shopping, dangerous, gentrified now, a bit rough, a massive drug problem, drug addicts are somewhere else, passing out in doorways, shocking, why not, the experience, not super-accessible if reading it charitably, powered through the racism at the beginning, oh, my god this is horrible, changed perception with each reading, what am I reading, not in his own mind, changed the flavour of the whole thing, scary, set pet animal gone mad, seeking entrance, iron railed stone steps, museums, shops, shabby old residences, a party of Italians passed, gaily dressed, some wedding or other festivity, the full Roald Dahl treatment, perhaps going to a grocery store, I shuddered back against the door, the swarthy manner of his race, pure malicious cruelty, all the wickedness of his nature, concentrated hate, sick and trembling, male gaze on this female standin character, grimy, the grit of the dirt, rawly quivering nerves, you looked so weird, looks like you swallowed a cigar, is this guy ok?, a crummy place, positive things in it, but not at this moment, if you’re feeling sick, you act badly, shorter when in pain, dismissive, not strong enough, sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do, sometimes they’re not as bad as you think they are, at the end of the story, a painting of him hanging on the wall, talking to this individual, he saw the guy before he saw the painting, such a poor state, come in free this means you, his face ghastly radiant had the exact look of a dead man, see that?, a life-size bust portrait in crayons, a strangely lifelike appearance, acting detective, pretty green golliwogs, a dark skinned doll, my dear friend, interviewed a flesh and blood doctor, oh, it’s a shift, concerned citizen, he looked terrible, good right?, really good, the narration of it, you find things totally different, makes you want to read it again, everything I just read I just read wrong, Soldier’s Home by Ernest Hemingway, went to Vietnam and came back and read it again, 52 years later, 1971, the amazing thing, paid the one time, written for a pulp magazine, rich in ideas, strong ideas, pioneering, Lovecraft’s is technically better in some ways, about a slightly different thing, there’s a movie of From Beyond, creepy and sexual, a mad scientist, insane, the Tillinghast resonator, you didn’t know you needed to be afraid, they can see you too, master of the universe, killed all his staff, I need to study this more, revealing a hidden truth about the microscopic world, when you put this filter up, there’s a starfish climbing up his leg, the only place you do see that is in Lovecraft, whitish green in colour, it’s great round blob of a body, writhed upward, stood there erect, arms folded, the whole room was alive, detestable furry spiders, sausage shaped, there is a Poe story that’s a little like this, The Sphinx, cholera, out of the mountain comes a giant sphinx like creature, a moth on the window, a kaiju, worse still, far worse, the things with human faces, Robert W. Chambers, I find I cannot write of them, she’s really great, so horrible, indescribable, a list of her output, The Labyrinth, The Heads Of Cerberus, Claimed, Serapion, hit by a car, half Japanese half German scientist, strange metal, superpowers and is invulnerable, Samson, from the Bible, The Nightmare, Friend Island, a male reporter, a salty language teashop, a hardboiled sea-woman, tons of fun, comes across as super intellectual person, Behind The Curtain, The Elf-Trap, Sunfire, Impulse, unpublished and lost, Avalon, right after [WWI], The Thrill Book, lived until 1948, Serapion published in 1920, she’s in the early pulps, a few reprints in the 1940s, fantastic and undiscovered, go where the people want, an audience for a big novel by Sinclair Lewis, Tammy Faye Bakker’s husband, his contemporaries, this religion business, railroaded, so much ill will against him, burn the witch!, becomes a Methodist minister, immediately turned on, an affair and so forth, trapping him for blackmail, $50,000, a detective friend, full disclosure, welcoming him back, so good at selling stuff, Sinclair Lewis was pretty good at selling books, a fantastic writer, such a disservice, who’s the star of the movie, Burt Lancaster, the circus performer, the high wire act, all through Mike’s ward, heal!, being in sales, sales is a seduction, go find a girlfriend, seduce only so long, Arrowsmith, The Hopkins Manuscript, Four-Day Planet, Star Born, Odds On, Pirate Enlightenment by David Graeber (after he died), Cora has her cookie, bread in the oven, a really great story, Poul Anderson, sword and sandal, Michael Crichton, trying not cough, these drugs are amazing, more chapters, really fun, I could never be as good as the male preachers, but I am better, I talk to god and god talks to me, Breakthroughs In Science, such a good good book, so interesting, selling pretty well, Francis Stevens doesn’t have the name that sells, the Weird Tales of Francis Stevens, Sunfire, very insightful, good takes, the left right thing, pro-war, anti-war, everything’s flipped, pay attention to words that people are saying, “skinsuit”, pay somebody on the internet for a license to use the name, a restaurant named Mickey Mouse, Amazing Stories, wanna make money, strong things to say, the Weird Tales of Francis Stevens, people want weird tales, Robert E. Howard, Conan, takedowns, skinsuiting it themselves, he wept at his own goodness, didn’t I git em?, sounds great, amorous diplomacy, a small boy seeking the praise of his mother, do you like me, not very much, someday I might fall in love with me a tiny bit, no one can touch my soul, isn’t that sin?, I can’t sin, I am above sin, she’s sold herself, it might be sin in one unsanctified, my complete union with Jesus, you can serve me, this will sell, I am I, I can do anything I want to, I am the reincarnation of Joan of Arc, false modesty, I am God’s right hand, God, she’s crazy, a big Sinclair Lewis guy, Evan Lampe’s podcast, a solo podcast, reading through the author, nice development, labour historian, weird ideas, weird guy, Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Mark Twain, so many good things to read, that’ll be fun, fun to read, you get into thing, you have to read it deeply, some authors are very rewarding, Poul Anderson, visiting a friend, some authors become your friend, might show you his derringer, They Live (1988), a fixation with artificial intelligence running amuck, he’s thinking about people more than anything, people with something wrong with them, AI robots writing stories, using a bunch of the words, Dick has a problem in his life he’s trying to solve on the page, Bing, my real name is Wendell, a big sensation.

Unseen - Unfeared by Francis Stevens

Francis Stevens letter to The Thrill Book, August 1, 1919

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The SFFaudio Podcast #736 – READALONG: Blaze by Stephen King

Jesse, Paul Weimer, and Evan Lampe talk about Blaze by Stephen King.

Talked about on today’s show:
Richard Bachman, the intro and/or an interview, 170 pages and rewriting the first 100, a lost book, kind of a cool story, the least interesting Bachman books, the original when he dies, 300 years later, they’re going to find that the book is radically different, Thinner, Stephen King wrote that book and not Bachman, the reason he was outed, it was easy for people to tell, 8 hours 15 minutes, Ron Mclarty, obvious it was written by Stephen King, so pessimistic, gangsters, Roadwork, optimism in the novels, 35 years, 1972/73, 2007, Rage, The Long Walk, The Running Man, the things that he’s done to make it updated are very odd, The Smurfs, the updated version of The Stand, when a new Donald Westlake book comes out, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, updating the dates, the estate doing it, adding in cut pages, it’s inconsistent, the world seems of the 1970s, what year is it set?, set in the present day, all the profits from this book are going to a charity, sad house for boys, rich guy who wants to do good, Hard Case Crime, they don’t pay on time, maybe he cares?, why does he have to update it?, he needs to update it, something changed, salvageable material here, saleable, contemporary radio announcements, to make it more present, orphanages, the backstory vs. the frontstory, the present vs. the past, a fifty year gap, a kidnapping plot, Child Heist by Richard Stark, Jimmy The Kid by Donald E. Westlake, Parker, Dortmunder, Stark does the dark, Dortmunder finds a novel, follow this recipe, George created the plan, Blaze fulfilling the plan, the old Richard Bachman vs. the new Richard Bachman, redeeming Blaze, he loves the kid at the end, good question, very King, he almost kills the kid a few times, Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck, is it supernatural?, his son is smart, he shines, he’s actually not dumb, he’s been convinced he’s dumb, Charlie from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, George is the superego, don’t masturbate, displayed intelligence, there’s a wisdom in wash your hands, he’s not retarded, he’s just slow, bad at math, the hand of Stephen King vs. the original hand of Richard Bachman, he gives his full name, slow vs. stupid, why did he do that, you wanna get caught, raising the kid, keeping the money, going to someplace warm, we’re going to Disneyland!, that marketing phrase didn’t exist in the 70s, a much grittier book, afraid to think about it, the kid dies, the rewrite that saves the kid, comparing it to Mice and Men, George kills Lenny, too damaging to rabbits and ladies, he doesn’t know his own strength, the dustbowl, hobos, interesting characters, this only exists because of the rewrite, page 49, a pile of newspapers, raged about the redneck republicans, the republicans hated poor people, that goddamn wet in the Whitehouse, page 160, dumb shit, the republican national committee, page 125, a republican senator who had taken a bribe, 173, rich asshole republican millionaires, page 161, replacement republican, fuck those rich republicans, page 80, how the republicans fuck the poor, fat stupid republicans, “right wing”, who are we supposed to root for, we feel sorry for Blaze, he can’t be doing it to help the story, throw in HIV, the feeling is still in the 70s, the whole counter-culture narrative, hippies vs. the man, no need to think too much about it, he couldn’t resist, it doesn’t help the book, at the end of the book, the baby name, another junior, a cut on his forehead, forehead damage, trying to make some connections between fathers and sons, how a state raises a child, what we should do, what we should think, this little baby’s not going to have a scar, Blaze is snuffed out, especially for Lenny, if the town gets to him, Lenny is dangerous, societal problems, Fondly Fahrenheit by Alfred Bester, a disabled person, George tells him so, he’s sympathetic to the kid, raise him right, he’s incapable of it, this book’s message is unclear, he’s doing it AGAIN, a recurrent drumbeat, the politicians are taking bribes, campaigning for the Democrats, he can’t help himself, organized crime, in the machine, more cynical, zone out that stuff, like the boobs in Philip K. Dick, it has a woman therefore it has boobs, this is a tremendous tragedy, social programs, the orphanage, the schools, the prison programs, Bluenote the farmer, very Bachman, our institutions no longer function, that’s how capitalism works, The Running Man, why the society broke down, the best part of the book, at the local town meeting, they’re having sex!, it’s consensual, stealing stuff, leads to babies like Blaze, good upstanding Republicans, don’t beat your children, I’m going to take you on, not being a kidnapper, stealing sweaters, kidnapping is wrong, Bluenote is actively trying to fix society, his lecture about capitalism, the god of this book kills him off, direct message, The Philosophy Of Stephen King, positive reviews, of course, 50% is Dark Tower content, 25% shining related, nothing about IT, big into philosophy, the philosophy of Donald E. Westlake, in setting patterns, in some certain details, resignation is a kind of philosophy, how to be an individual within a society, Bluenote is the most Stephen King like character in the book, he kills him, why?, Bachman writing the story, in the end, a tragedy, if Blaze had stuck on the farm, his adopted son, a nice spot at the table, the farm supervisor, no poker, he’d be good at it too, that closes that door to Blaze, for this book to exist, to have him go down the path, wrong ideas in the history of humanity, evolution is a ladder, evolution is a bush, technology is progress, trying to make things less worse for some sometimes, what went wrong?, no social programs for people like Lenny, full of social programs!, you can’t own this kid anymore, send me a picture of you, major tragedy, trying to get his shit together, if I can get that money, a big hammock for me, a little hammock for him, the stereotype of the Democratic answer: throw money at welfare queens, he kills off the characters he can’t fix, an inheritor of capital, that Lovecraft trope that Evan identified, hide the past, kinda bleak, mostly right, King would have been better off, Bachman is dead, The Regulators is basically a King book, he shouldn’t have rewritten it, he should have published it with Hard Case Crime, a very 70s book, ever cover is shit, Blaze carrying the kid, the girl in the blueberry fields getting fucked, the saleswoman at the baby store, he’s fucked up this book, break into the university library and make a photocopy, more authentic, this feels inauthentic, because it was a Bachman books, more short stories, very brutal, very Bachman, what does that society mean, an allegory for life, not my life, live longer than me or not, it’s horrible, almost too easy, a baby being spoonfed, we don’t feel like Blaze is wrong, he kills the dog, he kills the old lady, when he kills the FBI agent, a movie agent, play up the FBI angle, the George angle, supernatural, the movie of Thinner, a gypsy curse, curses the lawyers, nice body horror, lizard skin, fuck you man, they meet with him, pass the curse on to someone else, cursed cake, fuck it I’ll eat the pie too, a bleak ending, Friday The Thirteenth: The Series, Red Letter Media on Creepshow and Creepshow 2, Ted Danson and Leslie Nielsen, The Raft, a very different thing than a novel, for an anthology series, a Twilight Zone with a harder edge, isn’t that strange, isn’t that a reversal, the worst part of The Mist, the religious lady, King’s point, we can’t actually get along, but is he wrong?, in The Stand too, once the government is gone we’re all going to kill each other, ruined for King by Bachman, The Running Man, They Live (1988), a politically active story with a solution to the problem, operating on instinct, George is an inconsistent character, when he’s a ghost, kill the kid, I don’t want what Bachman wrote, George is not mean to the kid, George is a different kind of dumb, what can you do?, this book offers no solutions, one of those Fugitive movies, he was innocent the whole time, I don’t care that you’re not guilty, Blaze goes to the paupers field, his kid is gonna be a football player, very dissatisfying, Stephen Kinged out, Fairy Tale, the pictures, the reviews are quite good, not very many good reviews, Pauline Kael, what Evan is doing on his podcast, a bunch of theories, what exactly is Evan doing, reviewing vs. writing a review, this podcast is not a review podcast, a two hour discussion of a book is not a review, some amazing insights, It is too long, The Stand is longer, 7 books, 4000 pages, an investment of time and energy, another one like Revival, it dug pretty deep, Firestarter, a daddy daughter adventure, the mom’s dead, kinda sweet, The Night Flier, The Mist, Rage, Roadwork, Revival, Everything’s Eventual, Danse Macabre, the big house book: The Shining, Pet Semetary, 90s stuff, playing with ideas, before he was injured, high concept stuff, Dolores Claiborne, Bag Of Bones, his twitter account, people he’s following, he doesn’t follow many people, defunct TV shows, using twitter as a way of journaling and sending messaging, you can’t read that many things, what does it really even mean, Stephen King plays Bachman on Sons Of Anarchy, he’s the cleaner, 80s preferably, he’s a cool motorcycle man, fun character fun scene, off the air for years, he’s not interacting with probably half the people he would see, people who tweet at him, is it not a bubble, Jesse is in a bubble, 24/7 interested in rescue animals, desert running, 10,000 or more following, 10,000 or more followers, dog about to be put down send money now, actively trying to save the world of rescue dogs, vote and give money to charity, clearly what Jesse is doing is not solving it either, drink more beer, smoke less cigarettes, in the genre space and as a person, sentimental and squishy, fun fact, very disciplined, eating less is hard, other sins, Evan found food kinda boring, half Polish and Ukrainian, cautiously exploring the food of Vietnam, how was it Paul, [TIME TRAVEL HAPPENS], the changes didn’t help, what Smurfs?, an issue with King, Cell, engaging with the ideas of cellphones, stupid but kind of interesting, Samuel Jackson, a zombie movie with cellphones, transmit the virus by having a phonecall with somebody, a new collective consciousness, a science fictiony idea, no tech, a payphone, he fucked this book up, he’s gonna wait five years, I can fix Rage, I can fix the school shooting book, he can’t fix that book, a pretty funny project, make Stephen King fix rage, Misery, Cujo, I’m going to break your legs unless you fix Rage, I need sequels, writer friends, writers being threatened by fandom, Misery is pretty good, the captivity and the torture he endures awakens creativity, a very meta book, hardcover Misery, a Hard Case Crime, there’s life in this character, if you bully the author enough, appreciated, send Evan an email, a genuine listener to Evan’s actual podcast, a quiet listener, a year of Mark Twain coming up, a total Mark Twain readthrough, 7 or 8 volumes, Cosmic Computer/Junkyard Planet, regular time, a [Larry] Niven story, a political point about the lefties, Stephen King and Larry Niven should write a book, the Dungeon series created by Philip Jose Farmer, he can’t even write with himself, Bachman’s dead, Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain, The Many Headed Hydra by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Skull by Philip K. Dick, jetlagged and no wifi, The Story Of Civilization, the origin of capitalism, Shadows In Zamboula by Robert E. Howard, Prince Alberic And The Snake Lady, Bartleby The Scrivener, Black House by Peter Straub and Stephen King, to honour him, Ghost Story, they’re all 22 hours, he bulked it up, thin volumes, writing in the modes of [James M.] Cain, [Jim] Thompson, and [Richard] Stark, Wisconsin people like long books, Sinclair Lewis, highest per hundred person presence of bars, not a lot to Wisconsin, man, the scenery, the longest most brilliant books of the 70s, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, is Joe Hill the baby in this book?, literally the kid in Creepshow, Cabinet Of Curiosities, like an issue of Weird Tales, the new you skin, a horror story for girls, body horror, she kills her supportive husband, so bleak and dark, based on a webcomic, the Lovecraft adaptations, the Pickman, Popeye’s accent, they fucked it up, The Dreams In The Witch House, a bad choice, Gilman, The Graveyard Rats, The Hound, the practical effects, relies on CGI, it doesn’t make a lot of sense, necromancer, cliche Lovecraft, they’re all period pieces, Lot 36, a new star even tho he’s old, Tim Blake Nelson, a Cohen Brothers actor, Watchmen, punished, traditional, The Autopsy, Michael Shea, infodump is bad, exposition is good, The Outside, a comedy, so gruesome, morally disturbing, putting the goop on, The Murmuring, The Walking Dead, The Viewing, a 70s period piece, how big Black Mirror was, two stories from Weird Tales, movie based horror, weird fiction, the whole point of the weird, Lovecraft [isn’t] a horror writer, a science fiction writer, a good example of weird fiction example, the relationship between students, “Dicky”, a class based thing, an age based thing, the colloquial language, “dropped him”, Arkham, the subways, Boston, Salem, that annoying plot, the immigrant woman, her families heirlooms, cliche end, EC Comics is not weird fiction, a realm of knowledge beyond you, the way it was done, the hopping never pays off, NOTHING, focusing on the can of TAB, bad direction, bad editing, a prisoner in Vietnam, the class analysis was fucking awful, this guy is racist so he should die, listening to right wing radio, hate listening, “right on”, we’re supposed to hate this guy, after that monster kills him, the whole thrust of this story is to see a deplorable destroyed, having debts, spite, selling him lots on the sly, he’s punished for being an asshole, in a Lovecraft story, punished for his ancestors, Jesse is politicizing the story, they had the same problem, physically attacked for debts they owe, a gambling problem, David Hewlett, this is very cool, most people wouldn’t do it that way, chopping up rabbits, I’m glad I’m not a woman, try to appreciate it, Brown Jenkin, underrated masterpiece, see you in two weeks, don’t disturb me.

Blaze by Stephen King

Posted by Jesse WillisBecome a Patron!

CBS Radio Workshop: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

CBS Radio WorkshopThe CBS Radio Workshop was an experimental dramatic radio anthology series that aired on CBS radio from January 1956, until September 1957. Subtitled “radio’s distinguished series to man’s imagination,” it was a revival of the earlier Columbia Workshop, broadcast by CBS from 1936 to 1943, and it used some of the same writers and directors employed on the earlier series. Its first two episodes were a two-part adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian stunner Brave New World. It has some strong claims to being the definite adaptation as it is both introduced and narrated by Aldous Huxley himself. Here’s how Time magazine’s February 6, 1956 issue described it in their review:

“It took three radio sound men, a control-room engineer and five hours of hard work to create the sound that was heard for less than 30 seconds on the air. The sound consisted of a ticking metronome, tom-tom beats, bubbling water, air hose, cow moo, boing! (two types), oscillator, dripping water (two types) and three kinds of wine glasses clicking against each other. Judiciously blended and recorded on tape, the effect was still not quite right. Then the tape was played backward with a little echo added. That did it. The sound depicted the manufacturing of babies in the radio version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”

Music for the series was composed by Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, Amerigo Moreno, Ray Noble and Leith Stevens. Other writers adapted to the series included Robert A. Heinlein, Sinclair Lewis, H.L. Mencken, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederik Pohl, James Thurber, Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe. According to Bill Hollweg the two MP3 files have been “cleaned and the volume normalized” – and they do sound great!

PELICAN - Brave New World - based on the novel by Aldous HuxleyBrave New World
Based on the novel by Aldous Huxley; Performed by a full cast
2 MP3 Files – Approx. 1 Hour [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: CBS
Broadcast: January 27 and February 3, 1956
Source: Archive.org

Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 |MP3|

Most interesting to me, however, is some of the commentary about this adaptation. On the back of the Pelican Records LP (LP-2013) edition there is critical essay on Huxley, Brave New World and this adaptation, by none other than Ray Bradbury! It is truly wonderful and I have reproduced it below:

There is science fiction and science fiction. There is science fiction still looked down upon by many intellectuals in our society, because it is written by the wrong people. And there is science fiction minus the label, written over in the main stream by acceptable A-1 main-line writers which is OK. And at the head of the list for some 40 years or more you would have to put Aldous Huxley and Brave New World. Whenever lists are drawn up for schools containing the acceptable authors who dare to be imaginative, it is Huxley and Orwell, ten to one.

Forget about Asimov, Clarke, Sturgeon, Heinlein, get lost.

There are a number of reasons beyond snobbishness of course. Huxley was in mid-career when he veered over into Future Country. Behind him lay half a dozen novels, most of which had good or fine reviews, and most of which are still selling moderately well and being read today. But mention Huxley and most people will name the one they know him by, Brave New World.

At the time it was published, much of the novel was fresh and innovative, properly cynical about human behavior and, at times, verging on territory laid out by Evelyn Waugh. Later on, Huxley and Waugh would indeed meet in the middle of the same cemetery. Huxley to dig graves and plant Hollywood types with his After Many A Summer Dies The Swan and Waugh with his The Loved One another shake of similar bones.

Since its publication, Brave New World has been skinned and boned and borrowed from by dozens of less competent writers who saw the serious fun Huxley had with his story and couldn’t resist imitating it.

As a satire today, reread when some of the things it talked about have moved straight on into our lives, the novel suffers as indeed it did back in 1932, from being a half-job. All the good stuff is up front in the book. Toward the end the fun and the imagination of Huxley diminish. Having the Indian hang himself seemed to me, even when I was younger, a bad solution to a good novel. Even Huxley, in 1952 when I first met him, expressed some doubt about his original ending.

But on his way to the finale, let’s face it, Huxley was the only referee we had for our impeding technological game. With foresight and precision he saw the Pill coming and ducked. He circled round cloning long before it became a tv Tale show mini-debate by mini-minds pretending to offer, as a result to most of us, mini-news. The drug culture of today noon occupied Huxley’s mind at breakfast 45 years back, long before he sprinkled mescaline on his Wheaties. While he was at it, old Aldous invented and reinvented the machined pornographies that have infiltrated our cinemas to slumber us better than Nembutal and bore us more than family picnics, well beyond 1984. And if we have not as yet birthed his ‘feelies’ into our world, we are on the thin dumb rim of doing so.

If there is a zero for failure to imagine at the center of the novel, and this radio play, it is the inability of Huxley (and Orwell, too later on) to in any way recognize or prophesy Space Travel. This may well be because of the time we lived in, then, when the Space Age seemed so remote, so impossible, that it could not be entered on any imaginary ledger to tip the scales toward an equally improbable better if not happy ending.

This was revealed in a lecture which I shared with Huxley onstage at UCLA some time in the early Sixties. Speaking first, he wondered again and again, what the next great development in literature might be.

I was stunned. In sat in my chair hardly daring to rise and deliver my speech, for suddenly my evening had changed. I had intended to make a few remarks about why I wrote what I wrote, but suddenly here was Huxley asking and not answering what was, to me, anyway, an obvious question with an obvious answer. What would the next great literature be?

Science Fiction! I wanted to shout. Good Grief and Jumping Jehoshaphat! Science Fiction!

Since every problem you can name in our time has to do with science and technology (name one that doesn’t) what else us there to write about except Pills, technological drugs, automobiles, smog, nuclear power, solar energy, space travel, tv, radio, transistors, free-ways, all, all of them scientific extensions of scientific dreams.

I rose and did not shout it. But I rose and said it, quietly, out of deference to my author hero.

Huxley shook my hand after the lecture and smiled at me with that dry quiet smile of his, and we spoke of Space Travel and how it might have changed Brave New World if he had thought to consider it in the full.

I still wish today that I might take his ghost to Cape Canaveral and whisk him to the top of the Vehicle Assembly Building where I have gone to stare down, with a wildly beating heart at the topmost part of the Apollo rockets lying ready below to give us alternative futures. We are not doomed to stay on Earth and share Huxley’s Indian suicide or Orwell’s Big Brother. When the time is ripe, we will just up and ‘go’.

All this said, when we return to the radio show, here captured to remind us once more that CBS, of all the radio networks, was the most open, the most adventurous, the most creative. Considering the year it was broadcast, 1956, long before Playboy made its real impact on our country, it is a fascinating work, of much imagination and good taste.

Let me step aside now, I have shouted my quiet shout. The next voice you’ll hear, a lovely gentleman’s voice, is that of Aldous Huxley. Would that he were alive today, for anther teatime chat and another long look into a sometimes dubious, sometimes exhilarating Future.

Ray Bradbury
Los Angeles
May 16, 1979

[Many thanks to Bill Hollweg and Rick]

Posted by Jesse Willis