The SFFaudio Podcast #863 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Messiah Of The Cylinder by Victor Rousseau

The SFFaudio Podcast #863 – The Messiah Of The Cylinder by Victor Rousseau, (8 hours 3 minutes) read by Brian Fullen for LibriVox, followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse and Will Emmons,

Talked about on today’s show:
Everybody’s Magazine, June – September 1917, a book, 2 years later The Apostle Of The Cylinder, who is the messiah?, 3 cylinders, our protagonist, a prophecy, who made the prophecy, serious problems with this book (it being good), intersting stuff in it, describing it to Eric [S. Rabkin], Brave New World, We, 1984, before those books, a response to When The Sleeper Awakes, The Sleeper Wakes, being a good book, The Marching Morons [by C.M. Kornbluth], transported into the future, finds the world different, in London, a chamber, a tube, his riff on that book, 18 years earlier, bad internet, request times out, messianic element, events happening, a tour of the place, this internet sucks, changed bands, except for us, media, a culture of lack of reading, a lot of speakers, mechanical or electric speakers transmitting ads and propaganda at all times in public places, vivisection, pushing a Christian ending, a one way response to Wells, a line in here, The World Set Free, an American magazine, set in London, set in 1917, written before WWI started, no revision in that serial publication, what part of 1917 were the czars wiped off the map, two 1917 revolutions, provisional government, old calendar, October Revolution in November, the socialist one, three months after, a strange book, it instantly gets things wrong, wrong before it starts, immediately outdated, the Russia stuff, most illiberal, the most rigid, no revolutions that stuck, terror attacks on government officials, a bulwark of stability, housing reform, if you give a mouse a cookie he’s gonna want democracy, eugenics, hate/annoyed by, what makes the book less good, future proof, in the same drawer as Brave New World, This Perfect Day, the protagonist and his romance with a lady, pining gets in the way, more of a generic story, not a science fiction magazine, a scientific romance, Wells doesn’t try to have sympathetic characters, our hero is supposed to be a good guy, duped into the tube, traits, he has no valuable traits, a rousing speech, the holy spirit takes him, The Time Machine, what do we know about the main character, wife or girlfriend, maybe he’s a time lord, meets Weena, not exactly a romance, finding the flower in his pocket, getting to the ideas, showing that sphinx, an ant on top of a pillar, innovative and responsive attack on Wells and pro-science, progress, fundamentally anti-enlightenment book, makes a list, innovative, reading an old book, what people were thinking about back then, this book is superinto eugenics as a thing, blues?, whites?, defectives and non-defectives, rewatching Rome (HBO series), Ivanhoe, brass plaques, slaves wore collars, I am the property of this person, I am a runaway slave, return me for a reward, airplane man, where’s your brass bro?, in the future people aren’t gonna be first name and last name, you’re going to be your social security number, they’re all fuckin slaves, less and more enslaved, the social movement going on in this book, the background, the years in the cylinder, by 1945, the explanation from how we got from 1914ish to 2015ish, were these real forces, if this goes on, eugenics was huge, just prior, eugenics programs, on the downlow, Christianity as a bulwark against eugenics, this force of holding back the horror, The Island Of Doctor Moreau, a horror, literally dogs barking in the vivisection chambers, live bodily into the future, we want Christianity, spiritual immortality, in tension, The Tissue Culture King by Julian Huxley, germ-plasm, lichy telepathic tissue, top-down horrible way, the priests aka the scientists running this stuff, these guys are corruptible, positive interesting stuff in it, not of the stature of Wells, still writing for girls and boys who want to fall in love, could have been really amazing, just interesting, structural problems, might not have chops, a response to Wells, the prophet, seething against Wells in this book, it is a book very much like Brave New World, what thr world building does, John Savage, the man from outside of society, from an Amish reserve, the old fashioned brutal way, no eugenics going on at all, fuck your mom, learn Shakespeare, hooked on drugs, baby making factory tour, Aldous Huxley, dystopia, a way to go, a much better book, 1984 has a romance in it, another subversion, another pulling away of the rug, escape, there’s a girl like me, she’s in the anti-sex league but is excited about sex, censorship business/hates censorship, she’s an op, carrying about her, Lazaroff, Samson, the Pole, on purpose, he’s not as good as those other guys, how programmatic it is, feelings about divorce, how divorce caused all this, a symptom, we have a choice, science priests or regular priests, not allowed to say he’s forgotten his name, takes on the title London, not corrupt, working honestly, major problem with religion, god’s existence, disprove a negative, interesting ideas in Christianity, a religion that worships power, becomes, glosses right over that, essays by Doris Lessing, pattern of medieval Christianity, totalizing regime, European history, accepting divorce, measuring people’s skulls, it used to be the province of a select few at the top, widespread, compared to what we got now, husband in the army, marriage is not the institution that it was, a Hollywood thing now, never been more expensive, life commitment expense vs. a lot of money, divorce is quick, dividing the house, if you don’t have stuff to divide, children, he’s pointing at something that’s real, liberalization of divorce laws, he’s anti-eugenics, even moreso than he is pro-Christianity, tamped down, these two laws, an ending, against socialism, mechanism for picking who the leaders are, hard to argue with him, he just tells you what it is, how this to relates to patterns in modern society, ancient Rome, a new Rome, striking, language changes, MAID, euthanasia, retiring room?, the rest cure, still bad, The Yellow Wallpaper, an insane asylum, the Doc Holiday disease, stinky smoky city, the rest cure is death, a threat, turn in your cash, other euphemisms, some of the mental defectives, some of them are the artists, an art factory, Andy Warhol, a good artist, I should put this on my wall, his Mao print, he’s terrible, a good person, a good artist, Virgil Finlay, Joseph Clement Coll, illustration, stageplay, poetry, fiction, a kind of art, visual art, sculpture, too much religious sculpture, comics are really cool, glutted on comics, what is he saying?, this is a dystopia, among other ways he’s saying it, the kind of artist in my dentist’s office, Thomas Kinkade, he’s the name associated with this style of art, he’s the factory master, make some money, way or reading it subversively, thinking about why is everything so shitty, too close to power, he’s a part of the political structure, regular proles, not his colleagues in the redaction factory, beer at the pub, don’t get involved in politics, policy changes, a new war, always at war with East Asia, Winston Smith, the only way of reading it subversively, going back to Rome, Mark Antony, Octavian, Ciero, Agrippa, characters from history, bad things happen to them, the reason all of this is happening, infighting, hidden political forces, Rome is glutted with slaves, back from Gaul, sending slaves back to the slave market in Rome, regular Romans can’t find work, discontented Rome, the populist candidate, free land, free grain, the forces against Julius Caesar, curry favour, the mob has a lot of power, automation, working on technology like ray guns, light planes, solar powered, electric planes?, cables for some things, storage for sunlight somehow, airplanes everywhere, airscouts, high class thing, airships, 1899, they look more like galleys with paddles, bird wings, a huge shift has come, automation and scientism and eugenics has radically changed the population, a lot of backstory, not super easy to follow, boring in parts, compare this to modern politics in Canada and the United States, Trump, on the side of scientism, Fauci, I am science, next booster, those people hate Trump, Brutus and Cassius and other conspirators kill Julius Caesar, the people backing him, back on team scientism, shifting alliances, don’t want to have a dictator for life, killed for the same reason people are trying to kill Trump, people they have contempt for, what’s going on in here, a trends and forces story hidden in here, my girlfriend back, decadent, the house of freedom, never been outside, Esther, girl from the second cylinder, she was into feminism, a suffragette, first wave feminism, suffragette proof cylinder, threw bombs, a disturbing force in the UK, it got rough, forced feedings, militant in the streets (not in a pussy hat way), Susan B. Anthony, very American version, dispensed with in the future, there’s nothing about it, they don’t want divorce either, largely about being equal to effect politics, his criticism of Wells, his criticism of democracy, a lot of sympathy for that, anarchy expect for these two laws, s a scientist and his beautiful daughter, guy writing cheques, over the coffee cups style dispute, love triangle, locked in a cylinder for 100 years, telegraphed, hoping it wouldn’t turn into a got a get my girl back, a pretty horrible book, very interesting, pretty terrible, points of view, needs Heinlein to step in, an old man argue with a young guy, this all happened as you know, Jim, a guy touring, people making mistakes, that’s how people were under that system, make assumptions all the time, bad writing, just bad writing, prophet terminology, fun, he’s not wrong, it’s hard to understate how important Wells is, “rules based order”, that’s not going on, a nominal, why does China exist?, by mid-1944 everything is about the United Nations, the allies, the winners of WWII, the propaganda of the term, vs. the Axis, let’s cement this, they do, China, Russia, United States, Britain, France, what the fuck did France do?, they’re represented just not by the Chinese, WTO, all sorts of systems, war is stupid, League Of Nations, that didn’t work out very well, United Nations worked out great, new boss same as a the old boss with new priests and new laws, not to benefit you and not to benefit me, Vietnam, take your complaint to the U.N., 4 out of 5 of the security council have attacked us, he is the prophet, foreseen, peace bombs, writing 2 serials at the time, got sick right before the final installments were gonna come out, released 10 years later, edited things out, make it less shitty, 4 “great novels”, War Of The Worlds, at least five more, more interesting than The Invisible Man, he’s attacking our prophet rather than being a prophet himself, vivisection bad, eugenics bad, divorce is bad, who are the people who initiate abortions, an unwanted baby, shoot some arrows, when was this, The Pre-Persons, compelling social reason, a lessening of the damage, people raising babies, bad for the cats, destabilizing, Meg-Will creature, Silverberg’s solution, trial marriage, if you let the time expire, a car you leased, the problem with marriage, for better or for worse, if Charlotte Perkins Gilman had written it, a much smarter lady, not as sharp as she was, not qualified to be a mom, Herland, unqualified, a huge commitment, hard to be in a relationship, do shit all the time, what you’re eating for dinner everyday for the rest of your life, crisis management, constant, lessens as time goes by, you can’t trap me into saying divorce is a good thing on the whole, terminate, unmitigated social good?, need to be in, a system that makes everything unstable, if you don’t move, two people have to work now instead of one, as a percentage, a lot of instability, women being in the workforce does the same thing as automation and importing a lot of slaves, breadwinner, what do we need men for?, raising babies, milk factories, other aspects of child rearing, put in daycare, the dude’s job is a support role, go to the grocery store and get some more diapers, change the diapers, through the milk, 7 or 8 or 10, the mom can go get a job then, women want to have the vote, it’s good that everybody have a vote?, provides legitimacy, upcoming election, provide that legitimacy, are they wise not to vote?, giving money, puts you on a team, the best of a bad set of choices, a multi-party system, least worst option, most don’t choose either option, even wise, a rational choice calculation, bad for everyone for a third of the population to say I will not be involved in civics, all bad, a good life decision, they’re excluded, the exclusion story, not excluded from the legitimation of the reins of power, Harvard writes a letter back, Bryan Alexander, diversity statement, not very compelling, in order to make them good they would have to lie, I’m the only black Korean, from a rooftop, we can do economic hardship, when Harvard and Yale and Princeton used to exclude Jews, so they can include you, you could pretend to be queer, they want to know what it is, Ivy League American universities, picking the elite for the government of the United States, they can’t, first of all you’re Chinese, if you were an American Chinese gay, diversity stuff, counteracted by legacy admissions, private institutions, it’s portfolio with a campus, second largest hedgefund, who’s really running the show there, I went to Harvard, I get to be president, they didn’t want him in the club, he’s not our material, right class, wrong way, not your turn, the trends and forces behind, doesn’t get human psychology correct, romance of the romance, a pretty bad movie, 55 Days At Peking (1963), 1900, foreign occupiers, boxer rebellion, semi-religious, righteous society of fists, disgruntled young men getting nationalism, a famine, incompetence, exploitation, Charlton Heston turns to David Niven, you guys think this is a good story, filmed in Spain, you couldn’t film it in China, the boxers are the bad guy, these stupid fools with no weapons, the ideology behind them, kinda like ISIS with no weapons, if you don’t have actual weapons, immune to bullets, an uprising to try and kick out people who carved China up into concessions, parts of China today, the German section, the Italian section, the Japanese, the Austrians and the Germans and the Americans are fighting together against the Chinese, years go buy, we gotta conquer this territory, China is very strong and not cut up and not divided, still the bad guy?, overthrow Grenada, Syria, the Soviets, North Korea, Vietnam a little bigger, he gets it wrong in this book, more of a romance than it is focused on an exploration of the dystopian ideas, Wells was super-wrong, Wells is not perfect, very fuckin smart, world government, corruption, how did the Roman republic end up in the Roman empire, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, triumvirate guys, adopted dad, changes his first name, bring in a new morality, our women need to be clean, not having divorces all the time, the golden days of the Republic, he’s an emperor, less corruption, making it less corrupt, compared to what, the file is not working, rot, they’re metaphors, most people don’t think Obama was corrupt, fondly remembered, not everybody agreed, disillusioned, the question, more corrupt than previous presidents?, acting like Israel’s got stuff on him, the art of the deal and golf, the businessman’s plot, something Paul doesn’t believe happened, FDR, Smedley Butler, when JFK is assassinated, a Julius Caesar style assassination, you can’t defy us, a patsy, the official narrative, a lot of this stuff going on all the time, subject to it, check out and not be involved, like Winston Smith, a responsibility, by being who he is in that position, much better off not reading the prole feed, the party propaganda is for the party members, kinda interesting, excited, late career, writing mostly for Spicys, sex books, Space Burial, 1941, he died in 1960, a little later than Wells, February 1941, Lew Merril, firing at a tower, abgrabbing a blonde, not that different, laser guns and romance, he can’t bother with it, history of mankind, plans for how to make the world a better place, the cult of science, decimilazation of the clocks, French revolutionary, decimalzed day, a rationalization of the priestly class, rationalization of the language, phonetic, King Sejong, the backstory of Khartoum, Chinese Gordon, an American playing a British named Chinese in Africa, the central badguy was a 3 or 4 time loser to the entrance exams to the civil service, a brother to Jesus Christ, commanding Chinese forces, brother to Mohamed, the Mahdi, Sudan, I am this figure, a prophet style figure, amps up a war, speared by Mahdi forces, ironies, putting out fires, I’m the fireman but the Ray Bradbury style fireman, why are the British involved in domestic Chinese civil wars that win as many people as WWII, gotta make some money, soldiers coming back from the war, captured slaves, Pompey had 100,000 slaves, mines bro, not body slaves, high end slaves, advisors to these guys, Greek tutors in, sexual escapades, they’re like family, free em in your will, hold up the values of the Roman republic, if you believe in it, the pontiffs are all politicians, pick a random roman general, age 9, Octavian was consul at age 19, they never said the Roman republic is over, is that corruption?, an informal thing, a mom and a dad, the dad goes away, maybe he’ll come back, there’s a lot of thoughtful things in this book, children outside of wedlock, scientist and his beautiful daughter, maybe she’s also kinda ugly, wrong centimeters, the E.F. Bleiler review, WWI, also lived in Canada, early science fiction, 1922, essentially a counterblast, the point of which Rousseau obviously missed, polemics, before Sarajevo, a Prussian pole, mandelian inheritance (genetics), suspending animation, rejects his suit, clamps the lid on, 100 years later, air patrol, taken to London, ruled by a diumvirate, twice in Roman history, Boss Lempkin, ward politician, New Republic, controls eugenics, blues and white, crank craniometric tests, phrenology, pinhead baby, having a brain in there, corruption, a better rating, work quota, Sanson, the secret of immortality, the abolition of family names, they’re illegal, in Korea, the wife doesn’t change her name, whichever family has the most prestigious name, Park and Kim, the list of last names, a sharp drop-off, Anna Park, a real thing, househunting, who is Michelle Park?, a white person last name, adopted, took the family name, older books can no longer be read, reading that into it, bootleg books, thought control, listening and broadcasting devices, overheard on a speaker, secreted books, powerful secret police, repress dissent, the utopia of H.G. Wells, venerated as a great prophet, the economy is socialized, “democracy”, mob rule, liberty, disintegrators, hovers beside the building, more of a helicopter, the human race has changed to, glow and mull, ultraviolet and infrared, to return to the story, grey robes, he’s a stranger, subversive religious underground, Christianity as the underground religion, a desperate struggle with the Russians, liberty loving Christians, accused of being a Spaniard, ambivalent status, a cult of the sleeper, destroy the new Republic, a strategic struggle, a civil war, planning an uprising, due to awaken at any moment, shock!, 35 years before the others, fairly similar to The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein, marriageable age, also a time machine, a much better novel, forceful and intelligent, the chaos of the 1980s, discovered the secret of immortality, the London mob, cries out for Christianity, a Russian airfleet appears, with Russian age, Robur The Conqueror, pulp adventure, omnipresent slogans, artificial language, thought control, Rousseau’s best work, The Eye of Balamok, Edgar Rice Burroughs, strength and self doubt and strength again, The Monster Men, south pacific island creations, not worthy of the girl, the daughter of the beautiful scientist, a real man, just had amnesia, more real ideas, this one is full of stuff, which is more dystopic?, both pretty dystopic, more likely to die violently, more likely to be a freak in the other one, freak is fine, butt’s to big, two heads, part of the telepathic battery, fake religion, making people out of you, priestly class is subverted, more vividly and much shorter, probably better written, both worth reading, pretty fuckin scary, very abstract and distracted, girl hunting, pining, 2nd Mars Barsoom book, getting to the girl, a good one, Terence or Mr. Pulpcovers, explained the Catholicism to us, high church?, T.S. Elliot, rejoining of the English church with the Russian church with the Vatican, Easter in the news and Gaza, the pope said, speech calling for a ceasefire, autopen for the 88 year old pope’s speeches written by chat gpt, archbishop reads, named after the hill, Romans are so interesting, institutions we would think of as corporations, collegia, local improvement, charitable things, an official thing, a lawyer for your college, like a guild, the thieves’ guild, levels of similarity that we have with them, the language, familarity and disfamiliarity, profs and a student body, self promotion, NGOs, so analoagous, people don’t really change, humans don’t really change, their brains work the same way, modes, not having the concept of evil, they do have the concept but don’t think about it the same way, Will doesn’t use “evil” very often if at all, keeping it in reserve, what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza, experienced personally, met evil people, very shocking, some people who don’t believe in it at all, cuts to the heart of things, just interests, the glee that people have in shooting babies, demonic, the program that runs in your head, ghosts, definitely a ghost, very much a ghost, getting drowsy, don’t do anything evil.

The Messiah Of The Cylinder

The Messiah Of The Cylinder

Posted by Jesse Willis

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

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

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

The Tissue-Culture King by Julian Huxley - AMAZING

The Tissue-Culture King by Julian Huxley

Abbie

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #854 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Candide by Voltaire

The SFFaudio Podcast #854 – Candide by Voltaire, (3 hours 49 minutes) read by Ted Delorme for LibriVox, followed by a discussion of both. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Will Emmons, and Tom Pace

Talked about on today’s show:
done in French, as a person, very European, very funny, a few digs on France, complaining about Canada, fighting over a few acres of snow, super-dense, an interesting introduction, a good argument, Michel Houellebecq, Lovecraft, Against The World Against Life, the only book most people ever read by him, notable works, The Maid Of Orleans, on the list since a teenager, apocryphal meeting, Benjamin Lay, Catherine The Great of Russia, very popular, a rock star to your inauguration, birthday dinners, I am the king of Poland, I am also the king of Poland, a lot of the jokes, you should read this book, really funny, nice and short, new jokes this time, slaves, hit with a bull’s pizzle, a whip, a pizzle is a penis, penne, pen and pencil, dog treats, cattle’s pizzles, not a valued menu item (except with dogs), the sex throughout, the rape jokes, the rude jokes, hit with a bull’s penis, makes so much sense, the names are all funny, candid, telling you the secrets, an offshoot from the story, in a library, 501 Must Read Books, classics, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, writings about his wife, Surprised By Joy, drawn from the name of the character, the etymology wrong, cunnagonde, good pussy, a naive narrator, horrible looking, gotten stubborn, a dig in on some Jesuits, throwin digs, really good at making pastry, all based on a real guy’s philosophy, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, all is for the best, the best of all, Spinoza, “the best of all possible worlds”, high end reading at the time, addressing the problem of evil in the world, how is that compatible with a loving god, it couldn’t be any better, the minimum number of horrible things happen, he could have made the world worse, people suffering, god did his best, a number of postulates, an important conclusion to have, a defense of god, god did his best, taking the piss on this idea, suffering is bad, a consolation, a baby run over by a truck, birth defects?, who are they good for?, god gave me this burden because I’m strong enough to carry it, a Robert Frippism, suffered in interesting ways, a grateful comearound, an opportunity to develop, especially addressive of the world, earthquake, a more beautiful or safer city, balcony collapse, kid got squished, so did a cat, just throw a cat or a racoon in there, operate on the assumption this is a silly idea, the universe is as best it could be, human beings being meat eaters, eating cows is mean to cows, you can’t have jesse without him being a carnivore, be like the Maasai turn their dicks into pizzles for whipping people, a dog nuzzling a duck, Leibniz is right, the corollary to this, the worst of all possible worlds, how so, there isn’t another world, we imagine another planet, if the laws of the universe are consistent across, implies alternatives, counterfactual, just as truthfully, the point of this philosophy is to give you consolation, balconies fall because of gravity, become better engineers, make earthquakes survivable, we didn’t make the world, god did his best, a convoluted way of making yourself feel better, re-meetings, misfortune, still beautiful, stomach cut open, ravished by work, he’s been hung, everything is okay in the end, it was for the best, cultivate your garden, a compatible and also good philosophy, worried about Jesse’s mental health with regard to the politics, Canadian flag bullshit, talking to boomers, people stuck in tv mode, upset about what’s happening that you can’t control, bitter and wrong, make some PDFs, to read some more books, the resources to watch the murder that’s happening in Gaza, reasons for sharing, a compatible philosophy, all the philosophies, very funny and fun book, ten thousand thoughts an hour, a bookshelf rooted, notes and biblography of Jordan Peterson’s Maps Of Meaning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 And The Final Solution In Poland, that book is 70 hours long, The Rape Of Nanking, committed suicide after wrioting it, Unit 731, more brutal, go cold, realistically a good framing, a blunt tool, having birthday cake, about as simple and effective, can’t they just have your cake it and eat too, it’s awesome, not a natural disaster, a human folly story, pride and empire, we are better people, huge human mistakes, as best He could, full of sin, choice, a dumb guy who thinks that a guy who’s a philosopher is much wiser than he, disabused, audited the others, the number 3 version on LibriVox, spot on, very solid [John Van Stan, narrator], more Voltaire, Zadig, interested in the origins of the detective story, Sherlock Holmes was ripping off Poe, Voltaire did a comedic detective before, in the same style of Sherlock Holmes, C. August Dupin, a series of misfortunes happen to him, he observes things correctly, the colour of the horse, missing a horseshoe, a bit of fur caught on a treebranch, dog ran away, Micromégas, Scott Miller’s podcast, busy making new stuff, hallucinating, he was really good, contacted, a breakdown, they went nuts, will you forgive me type message, their gut torn open, kicked out of the castle in Germany, Portugal, at the house of a woman, the person that you loved, let’s talk, two or three thousand words of response, a weird thing, the plot as it is, each chapter tells you what happens as the title, trunks, fartcastle, mooning over Cunégonde, maid, mistress to the Don in portugal, I can tell a story better than you, I only have one buttcheek, she’s not just the daughter of a king, she’s the daughter of a pope, Roman Catholics, that’s part of the joke, illegitimate children, everybody knows, the world in this book is very fallen, everything is full of sin, the enhancement, the story of misery, Brazil?, Argentina?, line up a whole bunch of dudes to tell their horror stories, horror stories of life, their horror story is they got bad service at a restaurant one time, never done something to a friend and regretted it for decades, that kind of punishment of yourself, out of duty, that’s hilarious, it points in every direction, the pain is in every direction, we’re all fools is the takeaway, people who’s trauma is so minimal, the worst thing we’ve ever experienced is the worst thing we’ve ever experienced, terrible things happen to them, live to tell the story, Pangloss still believes , it has to still be true, a very good mocking takedown, just tend to your garden, you can work on yourself a lot easier than other people, you should lift more, if lifiting is the thing you think is important, the manichaeism, Martin, in Suriname, El Dorado, Utopia by Thomas More, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, women chased by monkeys, the monkeys were biting their butts, sexual dimorphism, they breed with monkeys to a certain degree, quarterings back in your ancestry, one of the quarterings was missing 75 countings back, I am the rightful king of Brittany, a lot of people still believe in and operate, such a short amount of space, comparing it, a sleep after shooting, in the Bulgarian war, an ultramarksman, without rustling the leaves, whipped so hard, I was impressed by the British Navy’s recruiting methods, have some cash, nah man you’re good, how do you feel about the king of Bulgaria?, you’re in for life, you’re in the army now, boy, take the gauntlet, 9000 guys whip him, the honorable thing to do, please shoot me in the head, all the skin stripped from his back but he’s fine, it’d have to be a cartoon, too horrific otherwise, the cartoon version of this, hard cuts in comics, in French, it is cartoonish, there’s no talking animals, unbelievably fun and funny, he’s taking the piss, there’s nothing he doesn’t make fun of, tied down, he killed the Jesuit and proves that, a juncture, ridiculous, The Mission (1986), Black Robe (1991), continuous rape scenes, not being able to ride on horses very well, the juxtaposition, sold into slavery, stabbed open, that Monty Python sketch [the Four Yorkshiremen sketch], Deep Space 9, Bajor needs the energy, tamed earth, fingernails to plow, humour is the best solution to almost all problems, share that horror story, it makes you feel better, God did his best, when kittens get crushed, no help at all, I loved that kitten, the kitten’s mom, isn’t it hilarious, enough of a consolation, tell each other our horror stories and laugh about it, on a list of books to read, an internet friend, school is about reverence, an irreverent book, some fancy king, you’re not allowed to make fun of that guy, a particular heresy, the devil has creative powers in the world, in contrast, the Devil’s at work, the theory that Solomon Kane is insane, he commits genocide against vampires, The Moon Of Skulls, Red Shadows, demonic things, or vampires, crazed black people, their unholy idol, King Solomon, famous as a judge, and Cain is the killer, his own brother, condemned to walk the earth, the right hand of God, the normal reading, the subversive reading, deluded, a more fun reading, how interested Howard was in Cain, an alliance with a JuJu man, a Puritan in fact, by the devil’s active work in the world, that’s actually good actually, earthquakes are good actually, there’s an earthquake in this story, Lisbon gets earthquaked, make a meal, really good at burning people, without a philosopher to give him guidance, he picks up Martin, Jesse doesn’t describe to ideologies, are you sure about that?, is that an ideology?, more obligation to go along, basic team human behavior, tie yourself to the mast of a sinking ship, a huge mistake, the comparison is almost perfect, both abstractions and connectable, an up and down, trying to appease an idea of god by burning somebody at the state, punished by an earthquake, a good thing to do, the exact opposite happens, either god making a joke of it, the god of this book is Voltaire, a planet spanning book, Europe and South America, a cross section of travel, we gotta talk about El Dorado, jewels on the ground, have a meal, pay with pebbles, buildings made out of gold, they leave with sheep full of diamonds, spends that money continously, 10,000 peasters, 20,000 peasters!, nothing bad seems to happen there, how come the whole earth isn’t like that, engaging with Utopia, no accounting for taste, philosophy of optimism, what Thomas More is grappling with, internal themes, conversations, needs to join the court of a king, should we bow, should we scrape, should we lick the dust, go hug him, this is an anti-king, the live action version get Jeff Bridges wearing the bathrobe, couldn’t we all get along better?, making fun of Utopia, wouldn’t it better if we could be richer than other people, no need unmet, his quest, his slave, Cacombo, the native, why people buy expensive stuff, lord it over other people, I paid full price, the badge of the product, overpriced handbag, she wants to be upper-class, not wanting to be inferior, lording it over that girl at school, funny funny stuff, not a funny book, stuff written in the 20th century, time creates a barrier between us and our ancestors, the world we live in, the people are the same, same kinds of foibles and personality defects, the systems are different, shownoting The Aeneid, the story of the founding of Rome to fit within the mythology of the founding of Rome, a piece of propaganda for the Romans, figuring out the audience, see what these symbols mean, their religion is more leagalistic, a person 2000 years ago reading this book, hone in on it, glimmers, this book feels pretty modern, lots of kings, no electricity, more like Plato, more like Play-Doh?, not a novel exactly, a modern novel (except it is much shorter), more of that please, not Thomas More please, concise, to the point, the chapters are short, things happen immediately, cut some of the adventures out, the stories are pretty short, a series of unfortunate events, the beginning of the intro by Littel, 1759, in ridicule of the notion, the world has been a gayer place, written in 3 days, like the number 40, a magic number, not the right date, he’s right but not in the details, Lovecraft is channeling a certain mode in certain stories, every real person is a richer character than any fictional character, one named wonders, volt is electricity, he’s shocking, he’s playing a game, jokeism?, horrible tweet, Max Blumenthal from the Grayzone, they learned it from these guys, a horrible truth, put that star of David, they learned it from, Nakba, Holocaust, burnt sacrifice, the catastrophe, this ideal world, you can see why the argument make sense walking out of the Holocaust, built to help support the creation of Israel, settler colonialism, you can laugh, you’re crying, are you Joker?, the Joker, feels everything, wants to lash out violently, recent Joker movies, people who humiliated him, he’s laughing, in the second Nakba, Taxi Driver (1976), this baggage, DC Comics universe, salience, a morbid symptom, laugh or cry, not prescriptive, take this Candide and call me in the morning, that’s why we share it, busy lifting, doing more than cultivating your own garden, gardening tips, lifting videos on instagram, lifting bins of potatoes, sculpting, I got books to read, challenging yourself, interject, into the depths, avoid the analysis, J.R.R. Tolkien, the emotional effect of the story, have a garden, he does get a little farm, they’re all coming together, a bunch of diamonds hidden in somebody’s pocket, I think I still want to marry her, sell him back into slavery, and they’re bored, burn the garden down just to get his way, Candide is punished, he doesn’t like her personality, he doesn’t like her looks, good at baking desserts, Colony by Philip K. Dick, so bad at writing military stuff, goes into the bathroom for a shower, the towel tries to kill him, comparing notes, “I trusted the rug completely”, rugs all the way down, stable in the new meta, that’s true for us too, we learn to wiggle our legs and arms, runaround and grab cookies, why am I using this walker?, who I am again?, nobody gets out of this alive, the way to approach it, slavery is bad, let’s sell him into slavery, seems objectively more dangerous than ours, even with its problems Europe is more stable, we have other problems, he was right, laughter is the solution, not trusting anything, have a good laugh over it, is that an ism?, probably, you have an ideology, I like this, it’s not manicheanism, what is it?, lying is bad, first strategy, what is my ideology if I haven’t spelled it out, cosmicism, a follower of Jesseism, “there is no recognizable divine presence, such as a god, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence”, that’s fun, don’t worry about it, you’re nothing but a mote of dust in the beam of a sun with a short lifespan, does it require, ideology: define, “a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy”, against copyright, it’s used as a censoring tool, a free speech absolutist, give em 10 years if they want, why not?, making it infinite, reasonablism?, eclectic, between Jesse and Jesse, do dogs have ideologies, they like bones, a set of behaviors, bring animals into a conversation, we are talking weird chimps, dogs don’t have policy, a special and rare and precious person, a very strange lady, a nice person too, strong will, not good when you are a little kid and have no defenses, tricks and techniques, an anti-ideology, ideologies make you week by outsourcing, not wanting to be weak, I like being effete, do you have the power to be as weak as a baby, putting on diapers, a weak colon, if you have a fetish, you wanna be a weak baby seems insane, weak like an infant, we all start off as infants who are weak, a newborn child, protected from insects, it’s mind is innocent, weakness and strength together, being obsessed with not being weak, lifting seems kinda silly, the only what is happiness, for a bear, rubbin against trees, what is happiness for a human?, ships or airplanes or tacos, doing intellectual works, writing poems, the real place where strength is needed, in the intellectual realm vs. lifting crates, quit the gym, new popular fads, all sailor related, pulling ropes and flipping big tires, get stuff off the ship, these are not sailors, sit for 8 hours, just observing, what kinda car they’re driving, they wanna be buff, skin salons and teeth whitening and nail salons, not a lot of personality improvement stores, a philosopher who gives you good argument, that’s why you got to Socrates, you don’t want to be mentally weak, that would hurt you, Paul in the New Testament, being spiritually strong vs. being physically strong, criticizing the use of physical strength, the psychological and intellectual training, the name Plato, broad or wide, short, he looks like a plate, he’s wider than he is tall, he’s a wrestler, wide in his variety of thought, a soldier wrestler, that was his nickname, I’ll wrestle you actually, bro, what is Plato’s real name, Aristocles, slave, time to work on your body and your mind, wrestle at symposia, where everything happened, some CBC guy on BlueSky, obscure social media network, Stephen Quinn of CBC, those Convoy types, we’re not the 51st state, getting ready for Flag Day, the day they switched the flag, the Suez Crisis, “peacekeeping”, if you call soldiers peacekeepers, Lester B. Pearson, why does Australia have the same flag, and New Zealand, why do they all have the Union Jack, pretend they’re not part of the British empire, a distinct society, we’re just these friendly dudes, Canada’s third way is to be the bully’s best friend, take nukes on or Bomarc missiles, laugh at Canada, because the TV told you to, don’t listen to the TV or radio guy, everyday is Flag Day in the USA, Jesse is mentally strong, Candide can help you mentally strong, if they’re not a mental baby, re-readable for one, the chapters are really short, a few jokes per chapter, like an episode of Friends, the cast of Friends in the adaptation of Candide, Buenos Aires, Abraham and his wife Sarah, just my sister, their relationship as brother and sister, a Wikipedia, a pun referring to the female genitalia, they’re brought up in a castle together, Candide is the son of the sister of the baron, not fully quartered, missing one of his provenances, at the very least they’re cousins, the reason he was disabused he was hanging out with her, they were half-siblings, son of the baron from another mother, that would make him the heir, the bastard heir, avoid more incest, underreporting, some of the scenes are elided, they don’t say they ate her buttock (but that’s what happened to it), chased away from his uncle’s home, marauding soliders, a lot of what could be seen as anti-jew, did you finish your podcasting?, soon!, not offended by this Jew talk, more Jews to sell more diamonds, everybody is equally stupid and lame, a comedy of humanity, are they half-brother and sister legit?, quite reasonable, keep it in the family, keep the money, fucked up stuff, the philosopher is fine with it, the best of all possible incest, the worst of all possible incest?, the final question: who is the idiot?, who is the fool philosopher, Pangloss, we all murdered each other, it’s fine, he has to say he believes in it, clarified right at the end, is this truly the best of all possible worlds?, from Suriname to Bordeaux, the philosophical conversations, so much analysis and stories, the funniness, tend to your own garden, clean your room isn’t the end of the story, god you stink you really need a shower, smell yourself first, I wanna shave more, that beard looking real raggy, bro, in terms of nations too, what Canada should be saying to the United States, trying to fix what’s going on in Suriname, we’re not states, we’re individuals, clean your room, check your messages, email is a scam, the dollar, a podcast on The Declaration Of Independence, the Federalist Papers, it makes no sense, 51st through 63rd, does PEI get it’s own state?, potato wars, Greenland’s not getting a statehood, Panama wouldn’t get a statehood either, the Canal Zone, why we getting worked out about, covered in comic books and printer cartridges and toilet paper, thank you guys, a good story to read, makes you laugh and think.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #763 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The City Of The Singing Flame by Clark Ashton Smith

The SFFaudio Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #763 – The City Of The Singing Flame by Clark Ashton Smith, read by Tommy Patrick Ryan. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the book (1 hours, 30 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Paul Weimer, Trish E. Matson, Connor Kaye, and Tommy Patrick Ryan

Talked about on today’s today’s show:
two these, Beyond The Singing Flame, it’s an onion, should Jesse have asked Tommy to record that too?, no novels, pretty famous guy for a guy with basically no novels, he’s 14 years old, bursting with ideas, reads like a D&D campaign set in the Arabian Nights, a flame like in She, the copyright status, Hippocampus Press, The Black Diamonds, he’s really hard too, his writing is very simple in this one, his vocabulary, give himself some feedback, supernal, an archaic word for supernatural, Eric S. Rabkin, a 3 sentence prose pastel, splenetic, iridescent, arabesque, nympholepsy, mien, rutilant, ill-tempered, the least difficult CAS story, sentence by sentence story, that might make a novel, becoming from high heaven, ethereal, rife with words, he’s masterful with the language, construction is good too, the shape of the plot is really excellent, a very interesting story, The Emperor Of Dreams documentary, accessible, why lots of writers like it, sidereal, lead astray, considering his vocabulary, lepidoperous, did you think of Logan’s Run?, swirling around, transcend and get reborn (or die), moth to a flame, exactly, multi dimensional higher dimensional transcendence, really into the body, really into material, obsessed with death and beauty, Lovecraft likes stars, immortality, architecture and burying the past, sexuality, reproduction through death, the beauty of those things, the siren call of the city, where’s it all going, he’s obsessed with thinking about it and telling about it, his structure is really good, sentence by sentence, he didn’t really do anything with it, the structure makes more appreciable, missing the last chapter, asking for the sequel, the narrator gets inserted into the story, no wrap up frame, disconcerting, he didn’t have an ending, kill the main characters, kind of Clark Ashton Smith but not really, this document is now found in a cylinder falling from the sky, I found this cylinder when taking a hike, Angarth more Smith, he’s the illustrator and the artist, his friend who’s also a weird fiction, never met in real life, the real life connections, EldritchDark, the best etext versions, Arkham House along with the sequel, published during his lifetime, July 1931, Wonder Stories, We had been friends for a decade or more, the journal, July 1st, 1938, July 31st, 1930, I’ve been gone for two years, set in the future, originally, Philip Hastane, there’s always a war in Europe, the reprint in Startling Stories, The Scientifiction Hall Of Fame, Harry Warner, Jr., of all the living writers of fantasy, A. Merritt, an alien planet, read around, the word that kept coming up, Carcosa, a bunch of layering on Carcosa, True Detective‘s first season, anything Yellow King related, Robert W. Chambers, Gene Wolfe’s vocab, The Wizard Knight, even deeper, circle back, cycle of stories, alien city on another world, not as sinister, more sirens, more sexy than horrific and compelling, this city is relatively safe place, Giles Angarth, he still brings his gun though, inner and outer narrator, sandwiches, coffee, and a gun, The Demoiselle DY’s, The Elf Trap, Ambrose Beirce, a friend of George Sterling, a continental famous kid, often on the front page, wunderkind child poet from California, newspapers were hungry, syndicated, The Vancouver Sun, every city paper had that story, a little bit like, A Wine Of Wizardry, Jack London, never met Ambrose Bierce, titans of American and international literature, An Inhabitant Of Carcosa, An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge, a death story, I don’t recognize this landscape, I have the illness, recognizing the landscape, it’s California, the animals, no birds, no insect, a lynx, transforming the landscape into a another world, literally a hike, the Lake Of Hali, Tathagoua, the Book of Eibon, Tsathoggua, are their lynx in Colorado, they go on the hike that inspires this story, central to that, a ski resort, a deep mountain tarn that’s never been sounded, seeing the landscape from the documentary, otherworldly, rock formations, been out on a hike, what if this was an alien world, walking makes your brain start going, Sedona, like an alien formation, episodes of Star Trek, where am I, substances Smith abused, the strongest drug, coffee, dream like drug trips, The Hashish Eater, Lord Dunsany, Confessions Of An English Opium Eater, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an excuse to let imagination run wild, psychedelic ideas, your brain is manufacturing drugs for itself, H.P. Lovecraft is the opposite, Bobby Derie took cocaine for a prescription, HPL: coke head, it’s not for you, warned Clark Ashton Smith not to take it, wine, Atlantean wine, the wine state, schizophrenia, first and second guy bring the third guy, the structure, a brief summary of the book, British enough, does a really good Irish, third or fourth time, we keep going back, changed somehow, brings the cotton balls, suicide, gonna be great, after that event, the siren song has wooed him completely, he’s an artist not a wordsmith, what’s on the other side, a total utopia, only humans come back, the flame dimension, everything is in ruins, a temperance story, a big popular thin in the city, gin, Marvel movies, whatever drug, we gotta lock this down, depopulate us, kill yourself with a friend, a horrible destructive lure, what’s beyond this flame, death is beyond this flame, a transformation, an ascension, Downward To The Earth by Robert Silverberg, rebirth, everybody dies, choose to rebirth yourself, if your hand isn’t flashing red, on your birthday, you’re young and strong, swiping left, or right, nu you, is this a fantasy or is it a science fiction?, weird fiction, psychedelic fiction, very spiritual, technological or magical, a teleporter, an ancient doorway, more Coruscant, the thermos of coffee and set a little bit in the future, wormholes in place, a science fiction writer as a character, in a science fiction magazine, moer super-science than regular science, transdimensional, Algol, sangfroid, struck with awe, a spiritual transformation, we’re all one now, this feeling of singularity, moth people, purified or made unified, very-Lovecraft, Ex Oblivione, love being non-existent, H. Rider Haggard, these science fiction writers and illustrators are better people, earthly pleasures, Ebbonly, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, matching haircuts, stepping through the pillars and falling, falls a different way, using the scientific methods, pilgrimage, the earplugs, numbing agent, can you numb your ears?, super-meta, words couldn’t possibly describe it, here’s how sweet I am, here’s some really excellent prose about it, all the names, things to work into a story, Angarth, a small town in Scotland, is that his real name?, Clark Smith seems like a pretty boring name, working the vocab mine, Hastur, the tamarack, mid-California, the Sierras, Kim Stanley Robinson, Zenna Henderson’s The People, on the shore of some foreign planet, alienation, vertiginous, determine our personalities, shut-in, his dad traveled the whole world, back to the library, reads The Arabian Nights, this landscape, Crater Ridge, stones of monolithic size and shape, an unknown vegetation, luminescent amber, Anakim, spire on giant spire, stepped through the looking glass into a fantasy world, this alien city with a yellow mist, best be done animated, much more illustrated than live action, Anakim are giant humanoids, basically giants, gargantuan, that’s a normal world, Darth Vader, where they steal all their names from, he just read the Bible, the people of the city, giant stone people, they do not have ears, a Las Vegas, popsicles and silver suits and haircuts, many roads to this city, alien creatures, their corridors, other Earths, other planets, a plane of portals, The Black Company by Glen Cook, Las Vegas for suicide/transcendence, the sinning has got to be stopped, why it’s so interesting and demands a sequel, humans center themselves in their stories, we’re a sideline, spectators and not really important, the gun never gets used, siege weaponry, a tower with legs, like our good friend Sauron, suicide cult, why are they so certain there’s something bad through the flame, obviously you’re going to die, immolated, smoke, instantly consumed, near the end, mesmeric lure, succumbed to the desire, immolate himself, a giant lepidoptery being, so good, smart moths, compassionate moths, fellow travelers, rather sweet, deadly enslavement, he ran forward in a series of leaps both solemn and frenzied, sacerdotal, headlong into the flame, more dazzling greenness, benumbed brain centers, annul the perilous mesmerism, fled from the shrine, envying my companion’s fate, fiery dissolution, more people going in from coming out, this is very attractive, enjoying wine, not for me, ice cream, fomo, a hilarious short story [And All The Earth A Grave] by C.C. MaCapp, a computer slips a cog, two coffin garage, this face tattoo is very fashionable, emigration, people living the country, a moral upset, even maybe mention, telepathy, the incoming army, the foundation of the flame, Reno trying to steal Las Vegas’ business, the last pilgrims, the rulers of the outer lands, obeyed the lure of the singing fountain and vanished into the higher sphere, the story leans that way, you don’t know, one moth to the other moth, I used to be a caterpillar, many legends in the outer lands, guessed by only a few, the inner dimension is hated, a lethal and pernicious chimera, an opium paradise, a mecca for this?, suicide boothing, the build up the city, built up around it?, larger or more impressive than other buildings, like a beautiful waterfall for Paul, it’s too dangerous, we can’t have too many people being happy here, into a higher state of consciousness, a VR fountain, live in your basement a VR all day, hippies, spiritual higher stare of consciousness, the great resignation, there’s more to life, the religion vs. a cog in the machine, our viewpoint characters, lashed to the mast of the ship like Odysseus was, timeless concept, war on a peaceful nation, can they destroy it?, like a laser beam, a geyser, a geological force, the scoriac stuff, gotta read the sequel, when you read Conan, those were the days, jump onto a new ideal, Conan never revisits the same place, Poseidonis stories, 2 or other stories like that, that Averoigne series, why is this happening, the letters pages, is this really possible, we should ask, more by the same author, the nature of this world and the purpose of the flame, if Tommy wants to record it, professional grade, keep using that, The Black Abbot Of Puthuum, on my phone in a farm in Ecuador, a checklist, an excuse to read a story, read it at a level, getting to share that, accents, Irish to Scottish to British, theatre, Saturday Night Live, Alec Guinness and Obi Wan Kenobi with Yorkshire, all the British characters from Star Wars, a City Of The Singing Flame tattoo, explaining Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft is in the Marvel Universe, Clark Ashton Smith movies, a TV adaptation, he’s difficult, he’s high level, incredible vocab, the imagery the colours, chalcedony, they love their art, they’re art men, rectilinear architecture, the nod to Lovecraft, cyclopedia, a Lovecraft vocab database, why Jesse does the podcast, an appointment, J. Manfred Weichsel, William Jeffrey Rankin, it is up to individuals, denying the attraction of the flame, just another drug problem like heroin, gin, or marvel movies, your AI friends, my AI girlfriend likes the same AI movies I like, you learn stuff, what people think they want, just read Clark Ashton Smith, customized stuff, opt out, everybody’s an AI, too new of a book, the best science fiction books, AI generated, 23 books on the list, 1 book from 2016, some listicle website, integrated and got rid of duplicates, Arthur C. Clarke, Blake Crouch’s 2016 book, The Martian, best?, you’d do pretty well, full circle, The Sunken Land Rises Again by M. John Harrison, Viriconium, weird fiction, pretty damn weird, an assistant to a mad scientist, super dense and very prosey, light on plot, he’s on the long list, Light novels, an unsettling atmosphere, feels very very modern, Nova Swing, 19 hour collection of stories, Neil Gaiman, Jack Vance’s Green Magic, get magic, bitter and tragic, recursive worlds, not quite getting what you want, poignant and good, dying earth wizards, the Zothique series stories, William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land, sad story, Subterranean Press, premium paper, Logan’s Run, Shakespeare’s Planet, Invitation To The Game, The Charwoman’s Shadow, Scratch One, Progeny by Philip K. Dick, getting back to Philip K. Dick, 53-57 stories, always exciting, these incredible authors, Le Guin once, Arthur C. Clarke, Elmore Leonard, nobody knows they’re public domain yet, all the weight of the world is on your shoulders, it’s exciting, or gals, its nice to be appreciated, there for somebody, its not just for the moment, its for the ages, share it with somebody 30 years from now, put it on a bookshelf, big box computer games, selling it for $86, an arc of nostalgia, 286sx, Future Shop, couldn’t afford a 28.8, $0.99, nostalgic for their youth, an old broken 286, feel the floppy going in, become valueless and then come back, the Harlan Ellison version, an L.A. based radio show, not for the ages, an enthusiastic and emotive, very very elderly, the narrator of the film, Harlan Ellison claimed to have read it 200 times, that’s how he learned to read aloud, narrated some Ben Bova, Run For The Stars, passionate, going to Hollywood and getting cynical, born into a world weary wisdom about reality, he went his own way, a passion project, a Hippocampus Press DVD, shill for publishers, passionate people, sharing the materials, solid contents, effort into their covers, the complete poems of Lovecraft, a really handy reference, S.T. Joshi finds some scrap of poem, The Hashish Eater poem, delectable, makes reading delicious, so rich, the lightest and most accessible, 101 Clark Ashton Smith, high level, for bibliophiles, all this prose, a lot of sugar, a slice of cake, small desserts, you have to like that, niche, if you don’t like honey you’re not going to like it, the richest Tommy has ever read, Ambrose Bierce, challenging the reader, why are you trying to make your prose…, making jokes, carving magnificent sculptures out of mountainsides, he really does have something, why Lovecraft was his biggest fan, Robert E. Howard was a great poet, translations of Charles Baudelaire, Poe and Dunsany, Baudelaire and Poe, taproot, undeniable, the first Sherlock Holmes short story, A Scandal In Bohemia, The Purloined Letter, Conan Doyle is the accessible and dumb version of Poe, this hidden photograph, I will have her show me, we love Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson and London and Irene Adler, we don’t love Dupin, the contents of the letter are sick evil and twisted, the photograph is of the king of Bohemia, I’m doing a tribute to Poe and nobody knows, Harry Potter vs. Tolkien, J.K. Rowling, super entertaining, no Harry Potter tattoos, Harry Potter is breezy, Tolkien is fun but not breezy, an afternoon’s entertainment, Clark Ashton Smith: guaranteed enjoyment, intellectually interesting, attentive, tickles a different part of the brain, high art, good art, most art is good, one of his best plots, well that happened, Lovecraft’s plots are much better, not much of a plotter, 700 pages to explore this concept is cool but nothing happened, Pacific Edge, guy tries to get girlfriend at baseball game, not playing the same game, just a weird guy, how popular he was, talked this one to death, Pirates Of Venus, A Meeting With Medusa, Sailing To Byzantium, Farnham’s Freehold, northern Minnesota, almost Canada, just about out May, The Thing On The Roof, No Man’s Land, pick in August, 2 years is fine but 5 years is too long, lost tribe of cave people, troggies, chuddies, surprise chuds, Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers, lick and nip, Paul Sings The Classics, a singing voice for silent musicals, Nerds Of A Feather get together, Gather Yourselves Together by Philip K. Dick, from 1994, posting photos, Jesse misses Connor on twitter, usually eastern, an awful awful dream, discombobulated, very fun, that sentence sounds like he put a space in it, disjointed, a snip in the file, mouth noises, get closer to your mic, get a better mic, not all for the audience, caring a lot about art, Cat Killer by Donald E. Westlake, brutal an interesting sounding, Clive Barker, Jonathan is not a murder as far as I know, collecting human heads, Tales To Make You Vomit, not all horrific, that weird, you guys should be DMing each other, some sort of money arrangement, throwing around numbers, probably not even 4 hours, an hour and a half recording, relatively cold, ACX pays per finished hour, the going rate, $200 or $300 per finished hour, wordcounter.net, sell them not on audible.com, revenue sharing, Planet Of The Wage Slaves, diverse ideas and lots of nudity, amazing covers, their text over my art, Warrior Soul looks great, the lady’s hair in front of the title of the book, art direction vs. being an artist, coming up with interesting ideas, Five Maidens On A Pentagram, gothic horror sex-farce, Hasatan, sex-crazed demon, just sounds fun and pulpy, our reality, cycling through Smith/Howard/Dick, millions of great things, how to get this stuff out there, enough bundled together, anthologies based on themes, teaching the occasional yoga class.

Why The City Of The Singing Flame Is My Favorite by Harry Warner, Jr.

The City Of The Singing Flame by Clark Ashton Smith

The City Of The Singing Flame - editorial introduction

The City Of The Singing Flame art by Frank R. Paul

The City Of The Singing Flame by Clark Ashton Smith

Rowena Morrill - The City Of The Singing Flame

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The SFFaudio Podcast #755 – READALONG: Pirate Enlightenment by David Graeber


The SFFaudio Podcast #755 – Jesse, Paul Weimer, Evan Lampe, and Bryan Alexander talk about Pirate Enlightenment; Or The Real Libertalia by David Graeber

Talked about on today’s show:
Universities On Fire, January 2023, no you didn’t you’re dead, those are changes made by the publisher, the book you’re listening to, a slippery slope, every book gets edited, many opinions, cute, The Dawn Of Everything, Agatha Christie’s and Roald Dahl, they stick their toe in the door, not if you’re dead, your estate negotiates, sensitivity readers were the toe in the door, hand written by David Graeber, abridgements, small font, everything is unabridged, make them as long as possible, not a kind of fidelity, this virtual reality book, changing and changing and changing, making the reader dumber than they are, multiple editions, Ian Fleming changes?, Fleming Classic and Fleming Sensitive, eager for sales, the long tail, anti-robot racist, David Graeber died far too young, puckishness, rubble up, a conversation with Paul, Villains Of All Nations, pirates are good guys, the truth about them is they are anti-slavers, bikers can be rough, that Marcus Rediker book, Villains Of All Nations, pirates are the good guys, the tale of two terrors, class conflict, a better book, different traditions, anthropological writing, enlightenment from the periphery to the core, Rediker is pushing his pro-pirate view, looking at women, two women, communities, building of societies, what’s the first thing you ever learned about Madagascar?, where it is, the biggest island in the Indian Ocean, strange trees and bio-geography, strange vs. unusual, meerkats, Africa, politics, Congo and politics, European Colonization, this pirate aspect, Against All Flags (1952), evil Errol Flynn works for the East India Company, fast and the furious with cutlasses and cutters, ripe trade, this haven, a history of a people, these ethnic groups, the history or behaviors, why is that?, the French, the island of Reunion, Zanzibar, Swahili, African traditions and Arabic, pirate where the money is, pirates today, Red Sea, lack of a state, to pirate, the horn of Africa, the South China Sea, this fencing issue (the selling of the goods), a shipload of sugar, you can dress your many wives, connected to the economy at large, taxation, why tax at all?, you want markets, the Ming Dynasty, silver, the thesis and if you buy it or not, the practices upon ship, pirate codes, how shares were doled out, already existing behavior, was taken up by the French Revolutionists, the pirates are the Enlightenment, still doesn’t see it, Daniel Defoe, A General History of the Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson, a very thin read, enlightenment reads, the introduction, a historiographic interest, the enlightenment comes out of Europe, the Enlightenment was evil, the Enlightenment brought modernity, because he’s good, from the periphery revolutionizes the core, Napoleon, Corsica, written by Montesquieu, love magic or sex magic, what do they do with that money, they wear their silks, bling, oral history, traditions, history of the Hawaiians before the Europeans, happy life for hundreds of years, very tame wars, going through the minds of people, the scientific revolution, the Reformation, to the Renaissance, we on the jury here, withhold judgement, not a clear cut case they caused it, Denis Diderot’s Le Supplément Au Voyage De Bougainville, Tahitian women didn’t start European feminism, dialogue, people sitting around talking has effects, some people aren’t listening, some have dementia, for weeks, for years, that isn’t nothing, hashing things out, Debt and something else, do you have a pirate bibliography, scholarship wise, ready access memory, Chinese pirates, much better than Rediker’s weakest book, so focused on the sea, doesn’t know about talking about the land, it paints a fuller picture, between 1989 and 1991, had a brief affair with a woman there, a lot of his tutoring, she’s one sixteenth pirate, wouldn’t everyone be?, ingroups and outgroups, Madagascar Jews?, members of the tribe in Madagascar?, unusual Muslims, heretical Muslims, the Swahili coast, God’s Chinese Son by Jonathan D. Spence, overblowing?, look to the ethnic, Taiping Rebellion, anarchists within the Chinese empire, the subtitle, a utopian book, Typee by Herman Melivlle, easy food, easy women and not a lot of horrible work, enjoy yourself, go swimming, go fishing, orchard culture, a bodily utopia, ritualized wife trading, to great heroes, Ajax and the other dude, the war is over, what people personally want, simple stuff, space communism Star Trek utopia, military stuff, world history, why does Cortez win?, the Spanish invited the Aztec in for a dinner and Red Weddinged them, talking it out, finding excuses to make peace, a mafia, ancestor stuff, our goal is to enslave as much of the enemy as possible, different philosophy of what war is about, war is good for slavery, trading wives, the Achilles Hector thing, reclaim the body, claim back Ajax’s body, refunded at the end, not even about the exchanging of slaves, forming a new foundation, the kind of slavery you see around British Columbia, these women are slaves for about 10 minutes, not chattel slavery, Debt by David Graeber, heavily involved with the 99% phrase and the occupy movement, the consensus making thing that was happening, sit around and talk about it forever, lots of chiefs, a chairperson, they don’t have war authority, pirate kings, pirate captaincys, the old chief dies, my granddaughter you’re going to have to learn to do this, an essay inside a book about the legitimacy of kinds, a performative thing, show up on the coinage, failed to achieve anything, a Canadian exports, AdBusters, only powerful amongst the people who read it, what did it get us?, it ran wild in New York, Democratic city and state governments crushed it, Occupy Sandy, opened up a left wing space in American policy, the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, dissipated, beloved politicians, generation z, skeptical, a Biden fan, surprisingly progressive things, the Inflation Reduction Act, some line of influence, receptive to left wing thinking, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, vilified by the right and a lot of moderates, the impeachment of Justice Thomas, Nazi paraphernalia, just like Indiana Jones, the Green New Deal, European action, the target of occupy was the Democratic party, a living thing, it was defeated, people saw the fire of occupy, what’s come out of it, The Many Headed Hydra by Peter Linebaugh, the hyrda is the good guy, Hercules, welcomed for reasons endogenous to the place, love magicd into marriage, very Prester Johny, grifting European kings, exotic clothes, exotic story, kingly control more legitimate seeming, half of startup people, royalty, make alliances, to make a lot of people happy, what we heard after WWII, Seabee, cargo cult, some people need that, this documentaion shows what a utopia can look like, a pirate utopia, pirates get to do what they want, be free, drank themselves to death, fucked themselves to death, diseases, where would it have been great at that time, The Wire season 3, another sign of Evan’s supremacy, The Sopranos, the Hamsterdam sequence, drug-seeker, terrible costs, the liberty utopia, how are people controlled in this?, will not talk it out, how we behave, they’ll be killed, an anarchist utopia, the glory to be named captain, the glory to be called a chief, it don’t make you better than me, political arrangements are less serious and less solid, play kingship, temporary kingship, Against The Grain, Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott, state formation, warding off the state, swamps on mountains, Zomia, contingent and silly, gaga for the British monarchy, celebrities, pirates improvise, occasionally lethal, faces on coins, you dropped this, crown emoji, give em a crown, they have the approval of some persons, here you dropped your crown sir, Cory Doctorow’s whuffie thing, what influencers are in a horrible way, the guy’s mom was the queen, for some reason we’re still putting crowns, coronation sometime convenient, capitalism, Philip K. Dick’s Black Iron Prison, the school season, unreformable, you’re just in hell, just dystopia, their power is informal, several kings, a fake king for the real king to hide behind, Uncle Junior, no borders, negotiated on a constant basis, heroic combat vs. total war of states, the empire never ended, a pirate utopia hidden within, they’re free in a way, the bigger gangster that is the regular government, FBI pivots to the war on terror, changing the title credits to remove the twin towers through the rearview mirror, Providence, RI, admiring the mafia, Casino (1995), Goodfellas (1990), free people working within the laws, the laws are asses, the origins of biker gangs, Nazi paraphernalia, forced to wear helmets, they put on old stahlhelms, war trophies, Hells Angels, these are not tutored men, war is a meatgrinder, The Wild One (1953), Lee Marvin, ptsd guys, saw all their friends killed, they can’t live the normal life, compelled to get on the road, rebel, rebelling by drinking to much, cutting the belly, brotherhood, hang around for a long time, do enough sweeping the floors, a male club of people, as depicted in films, women who like the manly men, Sons Of Anarchy, what happens when you get old, no health care, when your an old biker, you carry our junk, for one last ride, like the Elks club for guys who had more ptsd, a spinoff, addressing the racism issue, eastern style mafia, Hells Angels with no apostrophe, the United Nations gang, the Jewish mafia in Montreal, the Bronfmans, the Nxivm cult, generational decline, around the time copyright is invented, the complete Dafoe project, A Journal Of The Plague Year, plague wardens, a memoir, Connor Kaye, Robinson Crusoe, insanely religious, not seeing the insanity, truncated, a sequel coming, Friday fights a bear, the world he creates is improvised, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, Nemo being god, integrate themselves into the culture, Dafoe is utter fantasy, an uncountable number of books, Swiss Family Robinson, Tarzan, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, The Martian by Andy Weir, My Side Of The Mountain by Jean Craighead George, all the lies they’ve been told, build up the horrors in their imagination, women who want to love them, they conform to that society, an ethnographic study, maybe he will it, copyright 2023 (dead 3 years), pirated very happily, Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, a whole series on The Baroque Cycle, huge, 28 episodes or so, top ten lists, Jack Shaftoe, Malay or Malagasy?, the long 18th century, Isaac Newton’s vengeful counterfeiting, Jesse likes ideas, ideas per page, the shortest book in that series?, 80 hours or so, Dune, do Quicksilver, a natural philosopher who becomes a socialite, Heinlein is annoying as fuck, don’t worry about him, triggered by the word triggered, slave narratives, you shouldn’t use triggered because it is too violent, new ptsd bikers, ptsd homeless, there’s always consequences, you can’t do nothing without having something happen, thank you, as soon as it came out, only liking old books, a default to old books, everything becomes old instantly, recorded in April 2023, “fix” something, ai storytelling, that’s the past, a Soylent Green joke that nobody gets, storytelling is made out of people, most of Bryan’s students havent seen Soylent Green, film literacy, TUBI is the best streaming service, Criterion, Rollerball (1975), a terrifically interesting movie, they can watch them on their phones, watch them on their Apple glasses?, 1am, Sixth Column, Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub, that has biker gang, Dark Tower adjacent, The Talisman, pour one out for Straub, pouring out was in this book, Frank Muller, he got head injury, 26 hours, Scratch One by Michael Crichton.

Pirate Enlightenment Or The Real Libertalia by David Graeber

Against All Flags (1952)

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Reading, Short And Deep #388 – Chronicle Of The Year 1850 by Anonymous

Reading, Short And Deep

Reading, Short And Deep #388

Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss Chronicle Of The Year 1850 by Anonymous

Here’s a link to a PDF of the story.

This story was first published in The Columbia Magazine, September 1786.

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