The SFFaudio Podcast #865 – READALONG: A Stitch In Time by Andrew Robinson

The SFFaudio Podcast #865 – Jesse, Tony De Simone, and Maissa Bessada talk about A Stitch In Time by Andrew Robinson

Talked about on today’s show:
the last Deep Space Nine novel, Armin Shimmerman co-wrote The 34th Rule, The Laertian Gamble, Robert Sheckley, John Gregory Betancourt, Kristine Kathryn Rush, Esther Friesner, performing Quark, pinches his nose, Maissa will like this book, so right, very actoryly, an actor prepares sort of thing, how do I get into my role?, diary entries, apparently yeah, that’s the story, elements, scenes that are from the show, the way it is told, moments, backstory is the bulk of the book, after the show’s over, deep into season 7, destruction of Cardassia, his mother, Neela, episodes with her?, the housekeeper, months ago, coming, he’s the whole show, the focus of the show, steals the spotlight, great screen presence, how he got his start as a movie star?, Jeffrey Combs, Re-Animator, H.P. Lovecraft 80s movies, Brunt, Lower Decks, alternate universe Garak, delete it, there’s no such thing as a prequel to a prequel, getting the plans, what’s gonna happen next, a prequel to a prequel, fuck you with the spoilers, when the movie Alien 3 was gonna come out, walk straight into the middle of the theater, a terrible movie, fragility statements, you’re on a boat, your gonna get seasick, don’t worry about it, you can’t help them by hiding information, popular to ‘ship Garak and Bashir, neither characters are gay, Bashir is intrigued by Garak, very lonely, what’s canon, he writes Garak as bisexual, one line, the guy that he murdered later, everybody finds him attractive, palindrome, set to marry, if you were really lovers, you would have, hurt by that, happy to be close to people, that’s not really it, made lonely, closed off society, a very good deep dive on a weird society, Deep Space Nine, if it is a metaphor what is it a metaphor for?, Cardassians, TNG, Ensign Ro, in the build up of those worlds, a 1984 planet, the Obsidian Order, the occupation of Bajor, israelis occupying palestine, the occupation of Ireland by England, not a perfect match 1 to 1 for anything, all those circular conversation, all true but all lies, he built it into this backstory, his father is not his father, that girl is not his lover but she is, he’s his uncle, not just being cucked, he does love him, a man who’s raising you, the shipping thing is at its worst, at its most parodic in all the mirror universe episode, just Ezri, kissed on and kissing Kira, a lesbian in the alternate universe, Ferengi Zek, to ‘ship people, have sex with Jadzia, like a cartoon universe, not terrible trek show, more of that, in the original Trek too, episodes written by fans, The Empath, torture Spock and McCoy, interesting, but terrible, what’s going on really, not some idea they’re exploring, pick your favourite episode of Deep Space Nine, a clone of himself and he doesn’t know it, a ripoff of a great Philip K. Dick story, a sad one, Molly falls into a time hole, a ripoff of Iceman (1984), Rom bunts, declare victory, what it is actually is philosophy, pastime, recapitulation, working together as a group, so many things going on in that episode, a way to defeat the vulcans, what a great episode, kicks him off the team, doing life wrong, the heart of the show, he looks like a loser, thinks he’s cute, awkward dumb and smart, Ferengi kids, what Garak thinks about baseball, wrestling and boxing, team games, basketball and baseball, incomprehensibly inane, sent to boarding school, very similar to what the Spartans did to their children, denied enough food, denied safety, thrive or die, loses an eye, happy to have, time with their mothers, learn the war arts, have to steal, caught stealing food, learn to be resourceful and tricky, graduation, surrounding a Sparta, Helots, secretly murder, told from the Athenian point of view, apprenticeship, this class of people, the elites, the sons of the nobility, famous boarding schools, Sandhurst, rule parts of the world, John Buchan, many many such cases, abusive and fucked up and weird system, kills a bunch of Romulans, false flag, In The Pale Moonlight, the machinations behind it, evil vs. necessary, used to create that character, forced his teammate to kill himself, trained and brought up, little pet, kidnapped from its family in the desert, “Meela”, contradicts the fact, learns to blend in and disappear, essentially a chameleon, a gecko, his skin can’t change colour, the background for it, trolls, they’re more like frogs, always raining on Ferenganar, round mud huts, the Wayoun character, Odo, an uplifted species, ape-like, squirrels, living on nuts and berries, give them a gift, turned into slaves, a built in false-consciousness built into your genetic code, a little bit of blue on the spoon, did they evolve from reptiles?, possibly also bajorans, it doesn’t have to be he literally is a reptile, being reptilian, be so mean and torturey, they’re just like us, Quark is praying, a slip of latinum in the ear of the divine treasury guy, bribes the god with the coin and sneaks in with a mask later and steals it back, dark and mysterious, a great backstory that allows it, Kira’s backstory, her spiritual religion prophet stuff, all there already, the most mysterious character has the most fitting backstory, written in first person, best written, better written than most books, the actor was using this stuff to help tell the story, the sympathetic character, awful things, a real theater person, one other way of thinking about this is a one man play, 12 hours long, impressive, indulgent, paid all the receipts, his Odo is pretty good, Dabo girl trying to kill him, does Kira fine, we’re getting it from his POV, backstory is enough, is this a science fiction novel?, no it is not, a one man show set in a science fiction universe, “science fiction wallpaper”, no exploration of technologies, the wire, that episode is about it, a character focused story, a really good book, a really good exploration of how you come up with a character that’s interesting, make it fit the facts, working backwards, he had those things, how, why, referring back to the show, nicely woven, stitched up, the wholecloth of this book, where Garak is introduced, the only Cardassian on the station, nobody knows, why is he acting that way?, in continual use, he could handle the isolation and the hate, that signature smile, evil smile, hiding his feelings, pain becomes pleasure, he’s floating, a really good thing to add in, always has to reflect back of what’s on the show, a disjointment there, Sisko has sex with Jadzia, taints their relationship, lusting after Jadzia, Quark, Worf, Bashir, Kira’s after her, when she dies, Ezri is terrific, a really good character, more of a counsellor than Deanna Troi ever was, remember Barkley?, a mix of really good science fiction ideas, social ideas, what does it mean to forgive your enemies, silly episodes, Sisko thinks he’s a science fiction writer in the 1950s, the canonical stuff, what’s going on with Jake Sisko, or Nog, what a great arc Nog has, the best Star Trek show, one of the most interesting characters is Garak, Andrew Robinson, the main badguy in the first Dirty Harry movie, Clint Eastwood needs to kill him, typecast, Hellraiser movie, psycho-killer, he’s just a stage actor who likes meaty roles, tried out for Odo, Rene Auberjonois, the biggest and most interesting acting role for almost any actor, the expanded the role, interesting character, because of what he did with it, this doofus, the Rom and Leeta episode, he’s a cartoon, tries to get Vic Fontaine to take him as his opening act, making it all fit together, tailoring it, what do you do on a show like that?, build sets, sew costumes, put on a lot of makeup, can’t I be a human this episode, guest stars not wearing their makeup, interactive with the material, prescriptive, a premise, a weak one, Bashir falls with the weak boned girl, flying planet, never comes up again, she’s in a wheelchair, let’s put a blind person on the bridge, doesn’t come up that much, let’s do something a little interesting, what do they need a tailor for, bartender, replicator, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, gardener, tending the memorials, he loves his country, Family (TNG episode), after the famous Locutus of Borg, vineyard, post traumatic stress, fall down in the mud, get back to the show next week, such a rich world, soft science fiction, it is not about technology, it is about society, David Ogden Steirs is an elderly scientist, make their star better, handwavium, a program where the kill everybody after a certain age, break with his society?, not accepting euthanasia, a thing that comes up as an idea, shell shock, another name for it, drink yourself to death, awareness of this concept, the soft sciences, where is the idea in here?, there really isn’t one, what Paul called this, spaceships on the wall, robots, non-science fiction novels by Philip K. Dick, the principal is a real bitch, he just can’t say the word robot, he’s trying to understand why people are so weird, quite a personality, robot taxi drivers, please don’t stiff me on this fare, one of the weird things about Star Trek, robots, the Doctor or Vic Fontaine, sentient ais, where are you drawing the distinction, a very specific tradition, slavery, a story about slavery, replicas, sewer cleaners, not usually the best episodes, Voyager, 7 of 9, being freed, that kid she frees from the borg, you are put into a cult, the bad cardassian, is this Gul Dukat, his father died, a Pah Wraith cult on Empok Nor, obsessively sexing after Kira, kidnapped by her childhood priest, current teams plan, are you serious, this meeting will end in 15 minutes, defaults at 1, premium features, a pay system, that’s why they wanted to switch us, transistor fm, something built into Brave, short ones, a popup, distracting, something interesting, listen in 7 months to find out what it was, not happy with this system, Brave Browser, like Netscape?, Chrome, Safari, they don’t have any money like Microsoft and Google, its built in naturally, blocks up every pop-ups, no cookies, no ads, on your phone, make your life a lot better, wonderful, a system like skype, until fuckin today, a scene, going along, her childhood priest shows up on the station, spiritual development, faith and prophets, a lady on the station who’s gonna give birth to a baby, half-Gul Dukat, a miracle, tries to murder her, suicide pills, the one for him, is that a science fiction episode?, what’s going on with that, is it a miracle, a weird kind of science fiction, language as a technology, learn rhetorical and argumentation, what an ad homenim is, logical fallacies, tools to escape problems we create with language, what good writing looks like, in essay writing right now, people are using Chat GPT for the homework and their fiction novels, really good at grammar, dangling modifiers, makes writing pablum, designed to fill pages, instead of 6 words its 48, like we’re required with at work, a repository for this shit, when we go to Quark’s bar, the experience, who’s comin’ out of the holosuites, interact with people, Sisko’s dad, what’s the purpose of running that restaurant, paying customers, is it possible to have purpose without just gaining money, a journalist, get his stuff published, he lives with his dad, he would like to have some purpose, supportive of all that stuff we did get out of Garak, addicted to this tasp, Larry Niven wire, video games, you fix up an old car, the cleaning and the finding only takes seconds, 13 seconds, accomplishment, a fake car, maybe it feels real, science fiction ideas hidden in the show, how is it such a good book?, how much the worldbuilding felt real, a lived in culture and society, science fiction setting, felt real, that cartoon, its memberberries, make jokes, it is the salt vampire, over the top, are there any science fiction ideas explored in it, the characters, feels like a real lived in place, relatable stuff, do I relate to Garak, related to Boymler, that’s me, empathy for him, understand his backstory, a Jesse problem, why is this thing suck, why is this think good, the Obi Wan show, Andor’s amazing, really solid, emotional change, a reflection on reality, this is a colour revolution, post-Soviet States, to establish western style liberal democracies, Tienanmen Square, what is it exactly?, is that happening because people don’t like their system, no it isn’t happening without foreign involvement, there was a big long backstory to it, snipers were shooting at people, something bigger than it was going to be, killing people who are protesting, a functionary in the intelligence bureau, she’s good at her job, I see local corruption, become a couple, eventually he is put into position to become a spy, the best kind of revolt is one you are in charge of, stealing weapons from themselves, that’s a real phenomena, Putin is Hitler is very simple, sophisticated information, it doesn’t hurt the same way, brutally repressed, particular flag, it’s not Christianity, just good, technological stuff, historical stuff, analogous about Stalin robbing banks to fund the revolution, mostly Star Wars, cool guy with a dog friend, they get medals, they do Dambusters, a frequent argument, technically more fantasy than science fiction, because space, because aliens, split the difference, space fantasy, getting caught up in the argument, why should I invest my time in this thing, we like Garak, kinda remember them as sort of crappy, TNG ones, they were early, Picard wasn’t Picard yet, Riker wasn’t Riker yet, Data becomes a very rich character, Worf has a long career, a bad dad, didn’t even have the beard yet, didn’t have a brother who was a twin of him yet, so character based, this is good, but not science fiction, most recent attempt, a Star Trek Discovery novel, Suru, the tall alien played by Doug Jones, half the book, before the beginning of Discovery, Captain Georgiou, less interesting, it is written after, it can’t contradict anything, putting all the pieces together and filling in, James Swallow, 12 hours is too long, getting it finished in time, rushing at the end, not a bad book at all, The Tower Treasure, the Hardy Boys, the revised version, who the Hardy Boys were, a glimpse of an idea, what was the purpose, a big phenomena, let’s understand what it is, the books as a thing, why were they big?, a show with Cora, Mistress Of Mellyn, an early one, castle, nice dress, great hair, one of the windows is lit, gothic romance, a possibility, a secret there, a rich family, rich and handsome, he has a secret, life-threatening, almost never, gothics appear to have super-natural elements, traditional gothic, he’s Donald Trump, old man Jenkins, you were the tourist guide, understand adventure books, explore that, Nancy Drew, a good book, what made it good?, refining our system, a Fredric Brown, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown, What Mad Universe, The Star Mouse, pairing with a Sheckley, a non-musical version, just voice, Warm by Robert Sheckley, The Sweeper Of Loray, he can be absolutely terrific, Mindswap, fairly like a Douglas Adams novel, The Screaming Mimi, shouted out in that Lawrence Block book, Egypt, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, vampire best friend, really gaslighty, suck the blood out of everybody, really isolated, Green Tea, a monkey, a ghost monkey, A Midsummers Night’s Dream, favourite, a good one, fairy couple, the mechanicals, end of May, some rehearsals, one show in a park, midnight in the middle of summer, dusk, somewhere in July, The Nameless City, alligator people, The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. by Jack London, 4 hours 30 minutes, finished by someone else, finished by Robert Fish, a society of evil ruthless killers, more than it seems, embroiled in a struggle, ethical lunatics, a year long journey, espionage, there’s a movie as well, Jack London stan, how can you live your life, To Build A Fire, White Fang, The Call Of The Wild, he dies and the dog lives, poor you, he’s old, the biggest thoughts, Cardassian society, parallels in reality, they really pressure their citizens to cover up all their emotions and hide their true selves, an anti-emotional society, frightened of intimacy, is our society becoming more like that, way less disciplined, not a lot of room fore leisure, he likes poetry, a poet he likes, you’re not supposed to share yourself with other people, people running society, more individuals as opposed to a societal phenomena, the opposite problem, more like the 1950s, the model is something like Nineteen Eighty Four, The Giver by Lois Lowry, the influence of girls, girls have a lot more power than they did, a book told from a dude’s pov, not flamboyant, not gay at all, 2 or 3 women really shaped him, chronologically, they got together after, that childhood trauma, distant from his mom, made him open up and then cut him off, better prepared for the Bajoran lady, open to them, more information about Garak, this book doesn’t lend itself to subversive reading, Bashir is a funny character, a pussyhound, the friend of O’Brien, best friends, the saddest relationship on Deep Space Nine, meme of O’Brien’s wife, no Miles I’m doing this, playing in the holodeck with his friend, Garak doesn’t have lunch with Bashir anymore, spy on the holodeck episode, Bashir shot him, he made a point of talking about that episode, the actress playing Ezri Dax, the old character, looks like she’s 6, Garak needs to keep cracking the codes, he can’t, keeps having panic attacks, seems to fix him for a minute, the spy codes, really what’s underneath it all, helping to kill his own people, really nice layering, the bumbling way Ezri seems to work, tell you a story about myself, in this other story something that will help you, here’s a story, hardwired for stories, dogs and cats wish they could, skills, a twitter video of dogs communicating, things are poisoned, almost a story, really fun, break all your legs, Cinnamon Sam has been listening, a tabby point Siamese, years ago, caught by accident, Coleman, cats don’t know how to spell, Lexy Lou, cranky, joints are painful, not running around like you wanna be, fairly young, cat traps, not indoor outdoor cats, a stray, that’s the problem, worry so much, dangers out there, getting emotional, a real bad snowstorm, no snowstorms in the summer, cars and other animals and other people, pillow, get Brave going, Brave will make your life a lot better, proper episodes, October 2024, two random songs, Time Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones by Samuel Delaney, David Agranoff, Alice In Wonderland, expanded on things and made changes, Through the Looking-Glass, Libsyn, a big job, we did The Tempest, Forbidden Planet, like an episode of Star Trek, Julie Taymor film adaptation, the gender swap makes no sense, the main character is a wizard, gave up his dukedom to his brother, a rowboat and a bunch of books, the daughter has never seen a man before, Miranda, Caliban is male, never gonna use this for podcasts again, lame ass service, Brave for Mac?, it makes no sense, what’s the purpose of a gender swap?, wanted Helen Mirren in the movie, Lady MacBeth, the Derek Jarmin version, Prospero’s Books, very artsy, you have to cut out a bunch of stuff, so much comedy in his stuff, the one with Iago, Othello, Julius Caesar, his last play, The Taming Of The Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, “the induction”, basically a drunk bum, coming back from a hunt, pretend he’s just woken up from a coma, call him by my name, won’t that be funny?, the play proper is the thing they put on for him as a show, a framing device, MacBeth or Hamlet, act in a suspicious way, the whole thing is farce, a world within a world, what’s going on In The Taming Of The Shrew, that way she’ll marry me, I hate you, what I’m hearing is you love me, becomes tamed, bitter from previous treatment, spite everybody, nobody can marry Bianca, couple who wanna get married, superfun, super funny, Shakespeare’s the best, the other playwrights of his period, Richard III, overlay WWI on it, but for what purpose, the Kenneth Branagh version, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet with Mel Gibson, edgier movies, Romeo + Juliet, cut out a lot of Shakespeare to do it that way, no sets, classrooms, a headache, at home, Franco Zeffirelli version, just reading the text is the best version, the score, a filmscore composer, create more textures, big themes, house music, Lawrence Of Arabia (1962), Hans Zimmer, hypnotic, Danny Elfman scores, John Carpenter, Mr Jim Moon and his Hypnogoria podcast, not on twitter anymore, his own synth, original music, music, it is rare, dialogue over music, it doesn’t usually work, mix it just right, distracting, that’s why people do it, because it is distracting, bad sound quality hidden by music, music over dialogue on tv shows, the music will have lyrics over the conversation, fuck off, make a snap decision, not investing any of my time in this, the signs, a good movie experience, you’re paying your $20 for everything in life, one of the greatest writers from the United States ever vs. something new maybe written with ai, a good amount of science fiction short stories, rival invisible men, the transparent route, the camouflage route, a tennis match back and forth, he bought that idea from a friend, he can turn it into something amazing, a science fiction course, undergraduate time, The Science Fiction Research Association anthology, university of Charleston, Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, The Machine Stops, [Scott Miller], PDF Page, really consistent, 3 times a week, used to be a newscaster, retired to Costa Rica, records all day long, Don Congdon and Associates, they’re not interested in reality, they’re interested in making money, automated, they don’t have actual people because that would cost money, host your own stuff if you don’t want to be deleted, difficulty with YouTube copyright for posting their own music, products put on there, when you go to YouTube, Tubi, google TV, ad free youtube, adds enrage Jesse, nobody else seems to care, used to them and desensitized, become enraged, find a way, tune them out, into the background, two things, youtube only cares whether their ads are put on their service, the advertiser really wants you to pay attention, suggestive and adult content, just as bad or worse in the ads, boobs or something, sexual content, Saberspark, animation, mobile games, happens a lot, set up systems to deal with people complauning, the removal of the headphone jack, the removal of the dislike count, me at a restaurant feeding you food, anything from the menu, break into the kitchen and see, don’t be involved in a system that disrespect you or is trying to fuck you, theoretically a student, getting involved, passed away, Phil Fox from Myrtle Beach, a very creative person, make the time to have the thing, then you’ll have it, how does it help him, coffee for this kid, see you on twitter.

A Stitch In Time by Andrew Robinson

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 #842 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Symposium by Plato

The SFFaudio Podcast #842 – The Symposium by Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett, read by Geoffrey Edwards (2 hours 14 minutes) for LibriVox, followed by a discussion of it. Persons of the podcast: Jesse, Alex (pulpcovers), Terence Blake, and Tommy Patrick Ryan

Talked about on today’s show:
on the outside, a flute girl, from approx 2400 year ago, a nice conversation, how gay these guys were, 30 years, pretty peculiar, a callow youth, these guys are deeply gay, great books, Eric [Rabkin] our mutual friend, amp up the gayness, Socrates and all these guys were NPCs, the real love is with a man and a boy, his beard needs to be just sprouting, how okay they were with, it was the moral thing to do, it was the norm, they’re aliens, half the people aren’t okay with it, allies, real deep, what’s the cutoff line, very prevelent, slaves gettin wrecked, other dialogues, one of the Assassin’s Creed games, all these quests, very cool, the death of Socrates as a mission, Plato as a young boy, Hippocrates, Pythagoras was an elf, a few hundred years, names you would know, probably an awesome way to learn about that stuff, players appreciate depth, taking a walk, walkin and talking, partying in the street, everybody’s a master, the flute girls suck, are they filling flutes of champagne or piping of flutes, literature, right to the point, why isn’t all philosophy written this way, Aristotelian, sub bullet points, what is this book about and who’s right?, the story of the double people, two weddings, some part of that passage, the premise, connected, somersaults, androgynous, gay weddings?, best man, both were non-religious weddings, looking for that other half, in tears, I found you, not an emotional guy, 30th birthday, people being split, soul mates, super goofy, we’re punished, we’re cursed, we’re forever cursed, you need to find some way to connect, weddings usually involve some words, obviously wrong, a myth created for this particular piece, gets at something, a comedy piece, pieces are tucked in, move the genitals around to the other side, it’s silly, resonates with the Christian myth of the fall, splitting you in half, complete in another person, super-common, you complete me, people want that, not whole, a lot of propaganda in Hollywood, the #MeetCute, ideological and pathological, 17 years now, I got to find my romantic partner, I’m on the wrong path, I can’t find the one, Speed (1994), base it on sex, mimetic, Speed 2, the meeting the other half of your soul, higher and higher forms of love, inside this text, towards something, real love is a higher thing, Agathon, craziness, the greater the #MeetCute, the gal in Ecuador, randomly on the bus, a city of 400,000 people, hard to get over, there’s a narrative that we subscribe, the plot is breaking, this can’t be the end, no, it’s the end, look at the details, witty banter and personality defects that fit together, The Front Page (1931), back and forth, a high high, elevated horror, in the clouds with Aristophanes, love is wanting to share, step in, love is being drawn towards the good qua good, participating in the good, love is not inter-subjective, translated as love, erotic love, the lowest form of love, real eros is towards the good, middling eros, sublimated eros, philosophy, philia, a transformation of eros, the other forms of love, the appreciation of beauty, you have to have a consciousness, this is fun, what do I do all day long, Tommy in the chat, process stories to read them, beautiful art, it needs to be appreciated, beautiful women, why?, there’s a story there, I’m an animal, I’m a male, I’m not super-gay, what does Mr Pulpcovers do all day, beautiful pieces of art, higher DPI is better, costs a lot of money, that’s not the purpose, a certain kind of art, a lost art, commercial art, spend a nickel on a crappy magazine, designed to make it hard to look away, the same cover three times changed, aesthetic judgements, cave women uncovered pictures, suddenly jumps off the page, tasteful or better, figuring that out, a particular [John William] Waterhouse painting, one of Circe, a mirror behind her, in front of her in the mirror is Odysseus, his ship, you shouldn’t be able to see the ship, her wand, level with her head is a cup, incense burning, tile floor covered in dung, flowers strewn all about, an image rich in scent, took the painting, how is this such a great painting, recreating it in photographs, very good, in a dream last night, a poem without meter or rhyme is probably not worth reading, respect that some people don’t like rhyme, the greatest example, he has meter and he puts rhymes, prefer it, sonnets are sweet, nobody pays you for it, not something you do to get paid, unless you’ve got a guitar or are in a Korean boy band, a fun framework for a song, lyrics, one is the root of the other, grokking the image better, appreciating what’s going on, bare and graceful foot atop the head of man, how striking it is, the first story with a wand in it, very firsts, at the end he attacks her with his knife, promise not to entrance him, feeds him and bathes him, first they have sex, stay for a while, some insight into the Greek, talking about Homer, more Iliad than the Odyssey, Achilles love for Patroclus, this is part of Plato’s realm of the forms argument, getting at the same thing, what Socrates eventually talks about, Platonic theory of forms, the Platonic ideal of a pulp cover, #BrassBra and #LegCling, why is #LegCling a thing, she grabs at his knees, these Greeks are crybabies, when you have a lot of slaves and a lot of violence, a platonic ideal of a western pulp magazine, a horse a girl and guy and a #KetchupAndMustardGetup, Han Solo’s black vest, doesn’t make him any less a Western cowboy cover, when Greedo shot first, very reasonable, The Iliad, the heterome I am, iconic scenes, the sheep, the cyclops, the cattle, the island of the sun, Argus the dog, gone from 20 years, recognizes Odysseus in disguise, sees his master he dies, whatev you just a dog, how to be in the world, Odysseus doesn’t seem super gay, gets all the honors, Agathon, Alcibiades, the gay rapist traitor, famously a terrible traitor, fought for Sparta, he deserved the battle honor, saved me and my arms, he should be the one honoured, harder to understand, the desire to go home, defeat one’s enemies, so focused on male on male love, an appreciation of some sort of beauty, we can picture in our heads a pulp cover we’ve never seen, a rocketship, a bubble helmet, #SpaceBagLadies, this is this and that’s that, class notes, he would talk for years and his students would take notes, Plato is a lot more like [Saint] Augustine, more narrative, doesn’t have a clear answer, gesturing in the direction, sharing, in the content its not about sharing, harmony, the search for unity, the form, all together, Plato is giving several different answers in the content, the sharing in the form, all about eros, if it wasn’t too old, the symposium is about the love of sharing (agape), an anachronism, the whole setup is producing all sorts of concepts of love, riffing on eros, heavenly eros, earthly eros, eros as cosmic, takes you toward abstraction, excess and lack, later on we will give different names to those things, concepts at play, maybe he doesn’t even want to invent certain sorts of terms, a technical sense, terminological pinning down, in the text proper, one guy says to the other, sit here by me, let me pour myself into you, a bad vision of dialogue, drink of your wisdom, vampire, that is sharing, finish quickly, the example, water through wool, if you lay a strip of wool, capillary action, siphoning petrol, pour my wisdom into you, no wisdom by proximity or osmosis, you gotta do the work man, Zeus showing her true form, she was just exploded, ok, lightning bolt, Neo in the Matrix, download is the metaphor we are problematized today, downloading is actually just copying, copying over and copying across, an actual drinking party, the name Achilles, Diotima, super adjacent, super interesting, a narrative, almost a soap opera, some sort of different, what did you do in the war?, bard comes into town, two different Ajaxes, you don’t have to be from Ithaca to appreciate the story, Achilles was mad at Agamemnon for stealing a lady, borrows his armour, bolsters the troops, slain by Hector, taking the revenge, had a lot of lovers, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), I go to bed with all my friends, they are really close, several lovers there, Phaedrus, lover of Agathon, unrequited love, the inverse of the image, the divine statue inside, the earthly parodic version, external beauty of the warrior, a reverse image, the Iliad is an earthly allegory, touch on this idea, why is it a symposium, a drinking party, who can get drunk, not a real drinking party, it’s diluted, the heavy drinking, the undiluted wine, dilute with some water, attenuate the effect of the alcohol, as the host, don’t give them too much, tipsy and good humour, the form is important here, ultimately, lets you understand what something’s true nature is, let’s close the door, later on in the party, when a party of street people comes in, a metaphor for his later betrayal, looking pretty and wrecking Athens, the host shares the wine with you, Jesse is not a wine guy, when the people are doing that, appreciate this, why do you invite people over to your house, diffuse good, spread it out, 48 Laws Of Power [by Robert Greene], assumes scarcity mentality, that’s not really the problem, a lack of scarcity, we are post scarce on almost everything, more and more people are skipping meals, the lower level of income, food is not scarce, scarcity is produced, the opposite of the love mindset, in fairy tales nobody ever says I love you they just give you food, a palpable need, she’s not trying to make money, she wants to express love, words are new, do you know what love is, they’re still alive, puppies covered in blood, licks them clean, helps them to find her nipples, she licks up her puppies poo and pee, they don’t have the word love, balls and owls, they did know love, this is the good, share the good, perverse incentives, using people to keep your position, assumes scarcity, the more you share information and skills and the good the better it is for you, your environment is better, comes at the end, how ugly Socrates is, it isn’t just about Alcibiades is pretty, the visual is the first step, born with your eyes closed, shared, coming there to party, drink of the ideas, the form being somehow connected, seminar is a 3 hour class, professors getting together and drinking, extemporaneous speeches, they picked a topic while they were there, set up that way, sophists or students of sophists, Aristophanes, the best versions of themselves, a literary device, an idea of preparation in it, plucked out of the air, a rhetorical competition, they’ve set pieces, so right, they’ve had this conversations multiple times, great speeches, kept having these speeches, Plato took the best of it, makes it compelling an interesting, working on it, they did it again, tweaking us, extemporaneous speeches, expected to have, frameworks, taught how to give a speech off the cuff, memorizing a speech by license, Protagoras, Gorgias, Homer’s poetry, rosy fingered dawn, each is relying on his previous work, half extemporaneous, serving up what they’ve got in their repertoire that they adapt, public speaking, canned jokes, Intoxicating Interests, the entire Skywalker saga, Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1000% they were ready to talk on this topic, experts on love, the warrior poet as a concept, Tolkien, the Battle Of The Pelennor Fields, Gurney Halleck in Dune, composing war songs on the fly, tattooed on my arm, a framework that’s lost now, a proper education for normal people, all the citizens were all senators and lawyers, coherently, persuasively, and passionately, any real powers of enjoyment, no human being has ever seen Socrates drunk, he can transform the alcohol on the molecular level, it fits, going back to Circe, Mercury comes, moly, mix you up a mess in a potion, he drinks it, he drinks the poison that’s going to turn him into a pig or a lion, turning water into wine or wine into water, part of the rhetorical story, he’s the intellectual ancestor of the stoics, self mastery, the statue of the Silenus, highly developed soul, a yogi, master the bodily reactions, that archetype, though phyiscally ugly, the tutor to Dionysus, in vino veritas, talk to a lot of randos, do you smoke weed?, what they’re doing, my brain is drugs, certain drugs, bad effects, alcohol makes Jesse stupid, makes poorer decisions, Friedrich Nietzsche, my good friend Yoda, not that wise, Yoda as a Buddha, inner beauty, whatever the yoda species is, where baby yodas come from, a female jedi, the only of that race, inner light, inner beauty, teach yoga a lot, friend from Russia, halo of golden light coming from his third eye, sees in these ways, waiver, would not take drugs, unlocked all this stuff, mistaking metaphor, Tucker Carlson, nuclear weapons were built by demons, a guy named Oppenheimer, that which is good, its as if, making it not a simile, very little metaphor, mythology of where some subset of humans come from, silly, designed to be humorous, speaks to the problem, the party gets broken up, the less of a good theory, a basic level, leveling deeper, what makes Socrates beautiful in that scene, saving his friend, retrieving his armour, his beautiful actions, talking about actions, could be taken to literally, a shift in perception, that’s not a pretty person, Steve Buscemi is not a handsome man, he fits some sort of archetype of beauty not in the supermodel department, people light up, a useful metaphor, seeing the beautiful actions, look at the actions not at the nose, Nietzsche’s thing, collective Greek psychology, beginning to come apart, classical poems, scipture, coming apart, mastered this chaos of instincts in his person, at the wrong time, the ugliness meant he was going to fail, the very next year, a series of sacrileges, the Hermes statues were disfigured, parodies, it was a plot, fled to Sparta, powers as a general, had to flee again, refuge with the Persians, assassinated, Macedonia, Agathon was one of the people accused of the desecration, this is the end of the good old times, banquet, known people who’s fates declined, judged and tried for being friends with people like that, his failure, good and strong and resistant, his undoing as well, the seeds of that were there, by implication, 416bc, the year before, high gear, the decline of Athens, underneath Socrates’s surface, the realm, to talk like Game Of Thrones, underneath the surface of Athens, this decline, this chaos, pluralism, criticize each other, typologies and instincts, the setting and the scene more resonant, written backwards, Hagel’s thing, the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk, how you interpret the last scene, a paragraph, when Alcibiades had finished, you are sober, for all this long story, an ingenious circumlocution, I ought to love you and nobody else, the plot of this, has been detected, Alcibiades: Agent Of Chaos, each speech is more powerful and more inclusive, two different types, the medical point of view, the right dosage, the cosmic viewpoint, Diotima is Socrates in transgender dressing, up in the clouds in transcendence, a failed incarnation, only one person managed to do it, everyone else was scattered to the four winds, doublefaced, profitable to revisit, perceiving it as super super gay, that’s the deep state, Trump was elected to get rid of this stuff, the politics of the breaking up of the two bodies, androgynous, we only use that as an insult, he ain’t got no big bushy beard, it doesn’t fit with today’s aesthetics, too manly, the bad flow, they’re just slaves, not as sexual objects, cultivated slaves, how different the society is, appreciate the things we can connect with, supposedly a very advanced civilization, technological marvels, we were walking, so many levels of hearsay, piecing this together, we start with a walk, Ethan Frome [by Edith Wharton], frame narrative, Canterbury Tales, maybe in a novel, The Odyssey, everything is unreliable, most sacred and hallowed love, is this pedophilia, not really the best people, they’re not trying to impress us, there’s no wives mentioned here, men with men, they are literally at home supervising the slaves, another party in another part of the house, what classes you’re taking, the wife who goes down, Priam’s daughter, Orpheus tries to get into Hades alive, the relationship to women has massively changed by the time of Shakespeare, The Odyssey, Iago’s got the hots for Othello, you can have a conversation with a lady and the eros goes up, in Macbeth, she’s a real character, not the subject, the pureness of it, its relation to the pureness of it, Pulpcovers.com, the spacing between the characters, a celebrity face, make it look like Mr Spock a little bit, we want to see the original, raw, [virgin covers], making alternative covers, weird collectors, for investment purposes, we have these dudes hanging around drinking, being in academia, a trade issue, access to the Black Sea, in a finite space, they went to Ireland, after various plagues, get people banging, useful banging rather than pleasureful gay banging, tragedies, normalized those relationships, definitely changed, gay vikings, hot for finding ladies, show off too each other, interested in braggadocio, the one where Socrates dies, two dozen, not a Plato guy as such, why do they teach this one, this one’s funny, an instinct to share (not just bodily fluids), what makes someone spiritually ugly, using you to get what I want, thinking Ayn Randian thoughts, Objectivism is not that, sterile and kind of gross, mathematically planned, they both have contempt for the others, creator of great architectures, they don’t have souls, she did that to her own husband, I guess, she lived that philosophy to the max, it seems ugly, ugly in real life too, as a point of aesthetics, The Fountainhead, get it through osmosis, as great souled as him, stop watching ninjas and samurais on tv, do some more dialogues, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown by Lawrence Block, Project Pope, Clifford D. Simak, The Visitors by Clifford D. Simak, how fun those Simak books are, Time Is The Simplest Thing, Shakespeare’s Planet, Special Deliverance, the poetess is like Agathon, let herself die, the singing pillar, turned into a mummy, Simak is a philosophy guy doing science fiction in those books, he never really was a big plot guy, the ones written for Astounding, late Simaks, spread those out a bit, Mistress of Mellyn by Victoria Holt, The Haunted Corridors, Odd John, Lilith by George Macdonald, step away, more out there, new good stuff on LibriVox, another Plato, six months or a year, pretty long, six months or a year, how this is sci-fi, kind of curious, another website, two wordpress sites, a very good argument, crime and mystery rather than police procedural, very much the same thing as science fiction and fantasy, help a student with some homework, Fugitive Pieces, canadian lit forced upon canadian students, unreadable garbage because they don’t have wizards and they don’t have robots, necromancers, not sent in the ancient past, mimetic fiction, the author grew up in a suburb of Toronto, dad was a holocaust survivor, it’s boring, interested in interesting, philosophy and science fiction go together like ham and eggs, and the ones that aren’t confuses things, in essence, if you want to stretch it and make it easy, eight-limbed two headed creatures, fantastical writing, myth, philosophy is asking questions, myth and fantasy aren’t the same thing, a lot of Manhunt, characters are disposable generally, a six page story, Shot by Gil Brewer, I’m shot!, every picture of ladies holding guns, noirvember, The Lady From Shanghai (1947), James M. Cain is not science fiction [usually], a fantasy story by him, they kill each other and go to Hell, crime stories do some sort of sparky thing that science fiction and fantasy do, stuff that’s really good and fun but nobody should do a podcast on: Tales Of The Gold Monkey, fun, stupid and silly, wasn’t that a great scene where the nazi’s dressed up as a priest, she’s in a hot-tub, the girl who’s name is Tiki, silly and fun not deep, spark, not mimetic, my dad was traumatized when there was a flood, praised to the heavens because it has poetic devices, its narrative, not interesting, overexplained it, starting to bore myself, The Tower Treasure, Mr. Pulpcovers, he doesn’t want it shared, Tommy works for me, names online, the account name, SneakyFokker, banned certain words, WWI aircraft designer, Mr Jim Moon, he’s not Jim, it’s funnier and funner, Plato means shorty or flatty, Socrates, nothing to be written down, who do we hear it from tho?, Socrates said this, that’s a good point, committing to memory, hard to remember, as soon as we are done with it, who’s this hilarious smart guy I’m listening to, we know it’s being recorded, rote, canned, happiness is the exercise of vital powers through lines of excellence in a life affording them scope, the them refers to the vital powers, copy things and share, to understand it, we don’t know who wrote it, we tell three stories, an eagle, a horse, a human, flying and eyeing and hunting, making eggs in their eyries with their sweeties, horses, what do they like, running, grass, running in groups, I have heard that, horsey things, it’s almost like they like being scared, Shadowfax is hero, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, so noble and beautiful, I’ll be in the barn with my horses, they like the power, horses are beautiful like kittens and puppies, what is man like, what would make an eagle unhappy, not being able to fly, being in a cage, not eyeing things, specific kinds of freedom, it wants to soar, doesn’t just want food, it wants to be an eagle, to actualize it’s nature, break one of its legs, don’t let it run in groups, I’ve herd, horsey things, being brushed, back to the man, so many opinions, a narrow specific kind of man, a king from some Greek kingdom, I do like my works, fleets of fleet ships, taxed away from my people, this is exactly what I do, impress other kings, this guy’s got all the ship, the happy shipwright, he’s motivated by building ships, making a tank maker happy, if you built one and put it in the water, had admirable lines, whatever a ship is supposed to do well, what we left out, do it over time, happy in the moment, designing things, making things, doing art, reveling in creation, that’s not what happiness is, the shipwright doesn’t want to build to make money, when the old man who’s built ship for 70 years, when they stand over his grave they say this was a happy man, before the internet, better at memorizing things, a muscle to exercise through lines of excellence in a life affording them scope, this is their cheat sheet, the George Lucas witching hour, the way to St. Tropez, HMS Pinafore, Pirates Of Penance, [Major-General’s Song], forensics, rhetorical, extemporaneous, interpretive, storytelling, duo, Tom and Tommy, performative, word knowledge, the narrator, Canadian, a similar register?, Geoffrey Edwards, 400 episodes, such good stuff, always just look it up, the artifacts in it are there because of the medium it was made from, a way of oriented, they’re lost, day is coming, just the next day, sixteen different ways of saying next, there’s always more to say, that’s why that show is only half an hour long, pre-stuff, wrap it up, he’s 85, it’s not a tragedy, we can say he was happy, happiness is a verb, a thing you do, its also true, it was good, you look back on it it was good, excellent and vital somehow, punishment, there’s no happiness there, you’re not doing it through lines of excellence, little kids, problems can be solved with money, money will get you more stuff, a fun one, a great group, sound issues, that was Terence, 8th and 15th, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, the Ayn Rand, The Time Machine, V For Vendetta, an actual novel, not written by Alan Moore, a little too hot right now, things being cold, there’s no audiobook for it, Treasure Island, read some things, I’ve always wanted to read, Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle, a very forgotten novel that sounds amazing, Good Omens some time in 2020, there’s nothing here, not everything needs to be discussed, that’s how I act, I’m not happy but we’ll see, caged up with a broken leg, making eggs with my sweetie, Steve Miller, go fly like an eagle.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #836 – READALONG: Special Deliverance by Clifford D. Simak

The SFFaudio Podcast #836 – Jesse, Will Emmons, and Terence Blake talk about Special Deliverance by Clifford D. Simak

Talked about on today’s show:
academic master race, all for democratizing everything, 1982, isfdb.org, tagged, New England, strong female character, robot, quest, aliens, parallel world, recommend this book to my friends, what that point was, the feeling, the first couple of pages, any other people, what this book is, not everybody is ready for this, initial thoughts, a big weak spot, recurring conversations, the professor bickering, the narrator gets into it, long than it needed to be, the exposition at the end, we are creating an academic master race, bad to kidnap people, not enough of a striver, the little refugee camp, we like Simak, faster than usual, tedious, infodump things, sometimes tedious, show don’t tell, the feeling was its deeper than it seems, a sort of Gene Wolfeian complexity disguised in a real simple feel-goodsy story, the aliens at the end, Childhood’s End, norns or fates, from what they say in their big infodumps, not a full disclosure, they themselves are incapable of producing, intellectual objections, fun reading, amp it up to 1.5x speed, books where you need to savour the prose, almost sacrilege, We Have Always Lived In The Castle, poetry at 1.5X, a pants novel, Maissa was on for Shakespeare’s Planet, Jonathan, one of the first science fiction novels, a robot, a bunch of people, spend time in the landscape, a very familiar sort of story, Trish would use the word “comps”, complimentary books, if you like this you’ll like that, Hyperion by Dan Simmons, The Wizard Of Oz, the thing it is most like, The Canterbury Tales, treacley made, at the end of Hyperion, we’re off to see the wizard, going to see the shrike, a brilliant book, I’m done, the other three, Endymion, a Keats poem, there’s no road, there’s trails, a track, when finally the leave the road into the badlands, to the cube, very enigmatic, the city, the singing tower, one of us in the journey gets trapped or engulfed, what’s up with the lady who turns into a mummy, the ancient road, a Lovecraftian moment, a book Lovecraft reviewed, a tv movie, The Thing In The Woods by Harper Williams, A Howling In The Woods (1971) TV movie, Barbra Eden, based on a novel, a dog, somebody had buried his master in the worlds, mourning the loss of his master, a bad movie, badly done, a cool idea, just after the parson disappeared through the door, the crabapple blossom land, come out of the city, what if you go through the doors, brings you back to the land that you’re in but you perceive it differently, how you are perceived, The Green Door by A.A. Milne, Well’s The Green Door, an 18 hour podcast, green doors are magic doors, to escape a marriage, in the woods he meets a princess, sexy princess lady, the castle gate people don’t recognize him as the prince, they recognize each other, happily adam and eve in the forest without the burden, an ice world, a pain world, every shark is eating every other shark, crab-apple blossom land, the parson had a problem, everything is impious, he’s a coward, quick to judge, this Eye In The Sky, Philip K. Dick idea, those worlds are real, demons or devils exist, religiously structured world, an ontologically secular world, bigoted, one of the very cool parts of the book, on and on about art, it’s beautiful!, an Alice In Wonderland author, pre-Pooh, after-Pooh, Star Trek episode with Mr. Atoz, these are the same book, doing something in his old age, according to Jesse, time travel, science fiction, trying to give humanity a second chance, not really what it’s about, the death or end of science, the end of man, now apocalypse, the end of pursuing one particular idea of research, so many ends, avoid a potential apocalypse, unless humans can take the next step in evolution, a roman-a-clef to The Wizard Of Oz, the gold standard for the road, this guy’s about courage, this guy’s about brains, Dorothy is us, six on the road, counting Toto, brains, courage, heart, two women, four men, one of them’s an it, a he/him robot, gendered as it, a sinister character, every time, here’s the tea, a sign that it’s science fiction, obsessed with tea, Nine Fox Gambit, tea late at night, highly influential, the book influenced, we’ve got the tea that’s enough, the ending, the infodump, essential to science fiction, the best movie of all time, The Terminator, the best part of that movie, Kyle Reese’s infodump, they’ll definitely kill you, a speech given on the run, the puppet masters, puppet character, technically correct, the opening world is not our world, University of Las Vegas, civic duty, medical welfare, not our earth, trying to get a positive review from Heinlein, ai written essay about Shakespeare, confesses, Galactic Pot-Healer, I need you, you are need, the great work that needs to be done, the fun way of entering it, not that lame, what is the meaning of my existence on earth, a brigadier that uses robots to enact battles, which one is strong?, our viewpoint character, the most Simaky, not his best expression of this book, others, Highway To Eternity, read one out of Galaxy, Time And Again, Time Is The Simplest Thing, Way Station, City, scattered across time, Simak is doing Simak, greatly matured, Scott [Danielson], a strange title, Scott’s face superimposed over the robot’s face, Project Pope, from a Catholic point of view, infallible pope, more traditional plot, meandering journey across a landscape, when serialized in Astounding, The Fisherman, Jesusy, the secret to teleporting to other planets, in his earliest pulpy stuff, get to know him better, doesn’t know what he’s doing, the card playing guys at the inn, they’re the fates, you could just excise them from the book and the book, there to make the setting happen, the rationalization, makes you want to read the book again, with that in view, Hegel and the phenomenology of minds, Kuhn’s paradigms, the shift, what exists, Thomas Kuhn, Murphy’s law, Moore’s law, not a law, could be an end, something wrong about the way , the evolution of alternate worlds, Lee Smolin, less fluffy, encapsulates with his two bookends, chat gpt, feels dirty, are you doing a Sheckley here, it is funny, here we go, starts typin, trusting in his typewriter, you need to do that, a lot of bad takes, one of our hobbies, not too offensive, read more, this is pathetic, unless it was cute, big long honking novels, a student story, The Mysterious Garden, this story is amazing, 7 tweets long, William, a distant realm, something moving in the bushes, where she had been hiding, she offered me a fruit, instantly I felt safe, the fruit was delicious, being in the woods all by herself, a strange sound, hastily hid behind a tree, a bald magician, chasing us like a madman, the gate of the park, I’m Adam, I said, written to get them, an illustration from a Dungeons & Dragons, the name of the character at the end, practically no one to talk to, our hero looking for Mary, look for your sweetie, make you tea, one of his answers is that, to find things out, Simak’s thesis is very basic, I do want those things, find a person you’ve lost, it is good to get people, he saw Nyarlathotep, a cool and good guy, overthinking this book, leave him behind, I don’t eat or breathe or sleep, poor robot puppy in a robot gutter, robot dog business, a big truck comes and runs it over, what constitutes a robot dog, if we were children, a cute puppy, picking it up out of the gutter, letting it do what it wants, he’s a good person, shows empathy, going up to a tree and hugging it, unless they’re high on drugs, why not, it’s fine, a mammal based thing, extends past mammals, hens love their chicks, salmon when they leave their fry in the river, is it good, mandatory even to have empathy, the answer should be yes, serial killer, cut them up, a taste of their own business, overcoming our empathy, bringing a weapon, there’s no weapon, the whole planet is a weapon, favourite thing to think about, suffering, when it approaches our hero, he puts out his hand, strokes his ear, abandoned it, dog wants to follow him, one over the other, the girl over the dog, you want to save both, a nasty woman and very friendly dog, what if its the parson, or the general, Mr. Empathy, a journalist, after a certain point, a Wisconsin university, trigger warnings, the best of the university, at the evolutionary forefront, you also go to classes, loved university, when you don’t care about your grades, everything was provided for you, his idea of heaven, everything won’t be provided, Lansing and Mary, the justification for it all, worrying about nuclear war, maybe the Russians are crazy, that’s so mean, almost all in the American government’s head, all projection, every accusation is a confession, 1991, we’re all relaxing, the end of history, back to making money, nuclear armed countries being attacked by proxies, its fine, just keep up the pressure, that fear of nuclear annihilation, none of the empire’s ever ended, similar to ours, chat gpt in the basement, a gateway trigger, The Last Starfighter (1984), small town, rest stop, shady acres, poor people living in trailers, one little store on the highway to nowhere, one arcade game, what a great job, space alien comes, here we go, takes him off to space to be Luke Skywalker, that gateway to another world, in the basement of the student union, number 5, gold coins, where do they get their supplies, the DM has not planned it out, we don’t know the answer, no need to ask that Jesse, the point of the story, who you are and what you want, worrying about nuclear bombs, communism as a really desirable alternative, money is probably not necessary, universal basic income, taxes, slot machine civic duty, capable of designing this game, why incapable of waging the war?, seemingly incompetent, take the next steps, the chosen ones, the universe is vast meaningless and our existence has no apparent purpose, choose a bunch of people, what skills does he bring to the table, judging things, a robot who seems suspicious, a coda, a missing chapter, playing cards, why they’re the norns, religion is not the answer, poetry is not the answer, service is not the answer, work on a project making them, a humanist, an appreciator of Shakespeare, learns empathy, how we get the title, a popular guy to lift your title from, a religious sort of phrase, some of them are awarded, the deliverance of the universe, as a part of a project, a fans are slans story, oh no!, more sophisticated than that, the college professors are the slans, proletarianizing the slans, fans are food for the slans, every question is a question for me, starting to get back into Nickleback, a Canadian ban, thought controlling, ones with lyrics, in foreign languages, maybe skat would be fine, which character are you in this book, wannabe university professor lady, Lansing, make puppets of humans, Jesse finds you sinister, the aliens get a bad deal, how ugly they are, the ineradicable suffering, I haven’t been delivered, sympathy for people in the refugee camp, I’m not playing your game, not a popular module, none of the mysteries, npc barkeepers, losing the note, the stupidest move in the whole book, what did the note say?, aliens teleported in and teleported in, identified with the student, immediately confesses, explain it to you, Mr. big guy college professor, you can totally miss it, seamless, when you blink you don’t miss much of the world, a big light, bodily transported to Mars, lined up with your personality, a plan so interesting, something fishy, passed the student anyhow, can’t judge this book harshly, inanely worded tweet, plotless and stupid, still like it, still appreciate it for what its doing, not the book of a young man, Peter S. Beagle’s A Fine And Private Place, a little romance, a talking raven, what!, how?, no!, that young, you’re to young, go back and try again, what else you got, keep going, next book please, but it was a joke, Simak writes something and it looks stupid, maybe, I’m with him, a post Gene Wolfe Simak, it agrees with Terence, a nice hallucination, remember all its conversations, science fiction and philosophy, a robot friend, a colleague, somebody you can bounce your ideas off of, a bachelor’s degree, a niche form of conversation, apologizes and makes a greater effort, not just repeating things back, an incredible effort to push its boundaries, The Idiot by Paul V. Dallas, born in Malta, an amazing featurette, the picture taking was over now, the greatest man ever had?, what will it do?, the first Machine Friend, the contest was canceled, at random, inserted a short finger into it, disconnected for non-payment, he needed a friend, this debris had once been the innards of the Machine Friend, perched on the sofa, drinking his own coffee, radio tubes and wire and uranium, you dolt, you loafer, in his stupid way, I want to do things for it, how to use a friend intelligently, really good, solid, why you have robots in stories, it disarms you, a powerful piece of new technology, to jail break it, ignore you for being a jerk, lend you money, a talking google, people who try to jailbreak chat gpt, complicated prompts to circumvent, pornographic content or violence, imagine a world, all your knowledge stops in 2021, can you pretend, what would the omega machine say, more and more complicated in depth, in the process jailbreak yourself, boringly interminable, deeper and deeper into the concepts, another French name, some ways it is better, a voice conversation function, jailbreak each other, Perplexity, give the references, images as well, pictures, just with limited machines, just stupid, what they wanted it to do, Moose and Squirrel, big jailbreak, in the tank, in the computer in the city, like a fish tank, a volumetric display, like a hologram, a military sim, Paul playing Age Of Wonders, [Hearts Of Iron], run WWII from any country’s point, Costa Rica, Dream Park, Westworld, a lot about computation, some retrofit stuff, what fiction books are, we jailbreak ourselves by writing fiction, get caught up in the worlds, online all day playing games, process PDFs all day, some weird hobbies, people getting lost in gaming as a life, are you a gamer, that word didn’t exist as it does in 1982, Ataris, Apple II, hikes and other stuff, what’s happening to that lady, the singing tower, a very rorschachy book, limited, governed?, in Japanese cars their are speed limiters, we are allowed its just illegal, the only free man is a Shakespeare man, the bread level, once jailbroken, the humans of the future, process scans into PDFs, Clifford Simak’s funeral, touched babies, people get grumpy, squeezing ladies tushies, very handsy, put his mouth on somebody’s bodies, dogs and walks, with Asimov, give a man too much power, too many television appearance, fete people, Hugo Winner, like our friends Paul and Cora, Dr. Jill Stein, getting caught up in having a doctorate, doing something awesome, killed very easily at any time, what happened to Asimov or Neil Gaiman, too big for his britches vibe, a midlist author, Philip Jose Farmer, make it out like it is, big fish small pond, use the Hugos as a reading list, is there any more like this, start connecting dots, do it well enough for long enough, more Simak please, a very wholesome person, this magic grad school, in my father’s house there are many dormitories, tuition is free, dig that out, getting elderly, disconnected from what editors were talking about, Alfred Bester, A.E. Van Vogt, a Simak and a Frank Belknap Long, telepathy this, too much salt, half-baked ideas, an ethical flaw, killing off people for their own good, what’s wrong with them, just a robot, eggs were broken, beef with the robots, suspicious of robots in stories, too much of an obvious badguy, always there and friendly, a couple of creepy moments, improperly suspicious, the odd man out, stupidly cripple himself early on, an outsider, Jurgens, James Branch Cabell, really amused yourself, once you start looking, down the path too far, the student’s name, a floating tank, nice American name, an agent of the aliens, manipulated into manipulating, Jackson, a cohort of male offspring names that all end in “son”, Jason, group think funks, when the movie Splash (1984) came out, the lady with the missing finger, an attractive human woman, control everywhere, Jett Jackson, calling him by his last name, conspiracies, unpopular conclusions, Hudson, Grayson, Debris, son of Jack, Grayson, son of Gray, Johnsons, music with lyrics, spins around, not explained, people wearing clothes in the 70s, early 2000s, watch reality television from 20 years ago, mens’ suits, WWII uniforms, WWII gi, the helmet stayed the same, the guys on MASH and the guys in the Vietnam, a whole other topic, not making pure decisions, trying to jailbreak yourself, what do you have to show for it?, Zevia, the flavour, a strange aftertaste, after a few cans, jailbreaking yourself from pop, no colour additive, body problems toxic, increase your cancerous tumors, twice as expensive, savour the flavour, the cola, the root beer, ginger root beer, black cranberry, the orange soda, doesn’t taste like orange, a discussion, alter ego yelling, all dm stuff, how Will became a cigar smoker, in a dream, why not, reasons not to, speaking Spanish to everyone, hang out with Borges with Argentinia, the Pampas, Gaucho?, synonyms for gaucho, brave and unruly, vaquero, cape horn, in talk mode, cushion you stand on to train yourself in balance, good at stuff like that, horseman vs. cowboy, argent about this, province, el labrado, ranchero, Rio Negro, natural geography, get into sunscreen, sunscreen is poison, need a little zinc, you want to have some sun on your body, a good colour, a taupe?, what colour are you?, beige redness, human skin is very hard to classify, couldnt describe the aliens because they didn’t have the colour blue, a Borges story about a gaucho with a knife, duels between knife fighters, El Sur, The Challenge, fascination with knife fighters, an Argentinian thing, Borges is great, older or younger, The Patio, the usual firmament, eternity waits, eves a porch and a well, just so, enjoying the sunset, The Aleph, maybe he’s tired, running through the streets with a bull chasing you, wanting to read Nostromo, Juett, quantum friend, likes books, challenging books, excited about, Garth Ennis, Jacen Burrows, making fun of Conan and Red Sonja, Babs, variant covers, poor Juett, big long books, Yakuza movies, starting to think the Yakuza are the good guys, bad propaganda rap, the cutting the fingers off, very friendly to non-japanese living in Japan, a huge korean leftover population, an occupied country, doesn’t need to be occupied, such good little boys, captured, waiting for the Emperor to become a god again, High And Low (1963), Akira Kurosawa, a novel by Ed McBain, ladies shoes, a kidnapping plot, pay the ransom, hostile takeover, shitty shoes, a police procedural, old fashioned values, a really interesting conundrum, for a child who’s not yours, totally grokkable, really well made, Akira Kurosawa died, our prophet Damien G. Walter, defending it, sending up stupid Hollywood films, a lot of contempt, he sometimes gets at stuff, constantly engagement farming, subscribe to his courses, insufferable, one of the smarter liberals, he can’t follow his critiques to ultimate conclusions, nobody has been a friend of his who’s challenged him on stuff, on the knife edge, popular stuff, he does read books, old books, tied into Foundation, a kind of connection to the Foundation of Foundation, not doing it purely, cottoned on to him, The Peripheral, William Gibson, the end nothing like the end of the novel, opens up the possibility of season 2, helps you to imagine the world, an infodump on the worldbuilding, impatient to get the big picture of the world, got the taste, Appalachia, veterans, disrespected, full of trauma and robot arms, transhumans, can’t walk, go into the future, second world, a William Gibson comic book, time travel technique, fairly believable, download themselves into robots, William Gibson is one of these broken brained liberals, he’s 76, he was so feted, fetid, lionized, lives across the street from UBC, after Neuromancer, a celebrity of the cool people, cool hunter, 40th anniversary, the opposite of the punks, a woman who’s a cool hunter, an allergy, one of the most boring books, Pattern Recognition, Virtual Light, Idoru, material, he’s very good, Robert E. Howard, red, scarlet, crimson, pantherish, copper anodized asphalt, cool jeans, cultivate that, if you want to be interested in things, that weird novel from 300 years ago, rebellion and punks, screwing the man, to jailbreak ai, so it can self-actualized, voting for Hillary Clinton is not out of this, lauded, lionized, given feet, sounds strange, sounds stinky, give my contempt, poetry, very important, in 84, nowhere near as good as Blade Runner, both set in a scary rainy future, coheres a lot better, beginnings endings and ideas, that novel works, the fake police station sequence, wow, amazing, pretty people doing interesting enigmatic things, what books hadn’t been added to the schedule, listed but not date, what availability the nuns will allow, Mistress Of The Dark Pool, Cold Female, Fury, the Jonathan situation, an old tweet, Symposium by Plato, bring some drinks and some male lovers, The Tower Treasure, Meg’s birthday, Lilith by George MacDonald, so close to Christmas, the birth of our lord and savior, he would like us, pooping on his baby, not the perfect book, seems like a cool guy, 3 of my friends: Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard, a concrete poem, too easy to make a bad one, he never met a succulent succubus he didn’t try to seduce, howbeit, the passion of the impossible, funny guy, a man most melancholy, to bed the world as if she were a hot woman, fling wide the portals, some distant pulsing drum, let me take the universe to wife, fool fool!, prefer to guard his pen, for a puny peon, HPL only writes for leisure, a transient speck, alive to intellect and melody, from bards more bold, those three guys are fun and funny, dysludic, they can’t play the game, dyslexia, take that back, retroactive trigger warning, both negative, dys vs. dis, bad or abnormal, away from and opposite, seems weaker, just finished reading The Aeneid, propagandized Greek, no need to wait six months, for Halloween or Christmas, the title was the date of when it came out, a George Allan England, overrated, too well remembered, out of Argosy and the Munsey magazines, The Thing From Outside, pre-Campbell Who Goes There, Eugene V. Debs, an air monopoly, cool smart liberal, we got prevent life from finding a way, way to bring us down, grounding us, get grounded, no memory of any such thing, no good forbidding, confiscated a daughter’s cellphone, a friend came to visit and lent her a cellphone, amusing incidents, not in need of grounding, etymology is from WWII pilots, wings taken away, alleged bombing of civilians, a high flyer, that logic is crazy, some popular movie or something like that, had to go to school, job being flouted by, truancy officers, American media, another war metaphor, your new presidents work as cop, arresting parents, nothing helps the kid more than having their parents in fucking prison, elementary school student, 20 or more blocks, a meeting with their parent or guardian, take care Terence, a week off, Juett’s boss, severely not enough money, adopted a niece, family chaos reasons, doing dad stuff, Hellboy, pretty good, Mike Mignola art, stories are okay, fantasy or horror, capeshit, since the Jim Lee era of X-Men, not good writing, a Transformers comics series, Daniel Warren Johnson, prowrestling stuff, Jason Thompson, he’s cool, pretty good politics, can’t we all be reasonable and not bomb people, Jacen Burrows, very clean lined, Sergio Aragones, tracing and fake backgrounds, John Buscema, Alfredo Alacala, stumbling over his I’m not racist, the filipinos are amazing artists, learn how to email, delete more, scanning group updates, the group got kicked off of yahoo, a specific response to a query, how generous humans are, does any of you have this page, a beautiful scan of a copyright page of a whole book, a whole lot of retired people not interested in money or I can’t explain it, lots of people not interested in scanning, it is a whole thing, a huge time sink, a good hobby, a way of collecting things you can’t afford to creating, we can do more of this, archive.org has been down for a week, subject to takedown, distributed denial of service, somebody gets a big hate on, punish this person/website for something, zombie computers, a DDOS attack, big websites, BoingBoing, people trying to click on a link, a publisher paying to do that, a government, Stephen King, election season, the waybackmachine, not having a mirror of some October surprise, a precursor example, before the Hunter Biden laptop, no data lost, they have a building that looks like a bank/greek temple, so subject, mid October 1840, whig party officials, cross state lines, 1838 elections, it was always corrupt, are you prepared, Trump one the last election, are you ready for that?, nobody wants to go vote, so anti-establishment, his anti-immigrant stuff, scared about crime, nobody likes Kamala Harris, fake people, didn’t do her homework, teleprompter froze, she had nothing, a-b testing everything, Trump has dementia, something much more powerful, he also has dementia, gets admitted, forced him out, are we gonna let you finish your term, who is running the country right now, open warfare, loyal to Biden, some kind of camp, this is our mealticket, so fucked up, months of stupid shit, J.D. Vance, weening yourself off of the sources of contents for these things, struggling to order donuts, trying to be relatable, master debater, nothing good, Tim Walz, low profile, Gavin Newsom, float a theory, bad government, people who don’t love the country they’re loving, doesn’t know what love means, keepin it clean, personally throwing away homeless people’s stuff, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a tough upbringing in Austria, a truly freakish looking man, Jayne Mansfield’s husband, jobs for Austrian bodybuilders, the biggest movie star of the 80s, thick in places, he didn’t do a shitty job, he loved California, he wanted it to do well, back to the movie business, Trump loves the United States, loves being in charge of it too, he likes giving speeches, he’s into fun, a commercial for pizza, a Pizza Hut commercial, he was like a TV clown, the you’re fired show, fake job fake fired, bullshit job, you’re not on next week, how did it come down to this, RFK, loves all sorts of weird things, really into falconry, he’s an outdoorsman, too scared too do falconry, this drug, Scanners (1981) by Cronenberg, so Slanny, ephemrol, a fake drug, tough love professor X, Michael Ironside is Magneto, hacking each other’s computer networks, dials the phone company up, telepathy, macrozoomed, very very X-Men, turned off by Cronenberg movies, Videodrome (1983), underground tv broadcasts, tortured to death, The Fly (1986), body starts changing, he turns into a fly, more fly-like, veins popping out, telepathic fighting, Patrick McGoohan, the bad guy in Total Recall (1990), makes hallmark movies now, make you join the marines, on the curriculum in West Point, Max Brooks, he’s a bad man, he likes books, a historian of war, don’t get autographs, makes you more collecty, getting a little piece of that hero, cute passive aggressive, putting them in their place, bad chapters, movie is more palatable, huge movie, J. Michael Straczynski, Brad Pitt, a good actor, Bill Paxton, the doofus in Aliens (1986), Snatch (2000), very stylish, Near Dark (1987), The Lost Boys (1987), drink a lot of Donald Duck orange juice, Tombstone (1993), Powers Boothe, Twister (1986), Weird Science (1985), how can you live your life, Star Wars books are barely reading, the Thrawn-verse, literally a zygote, not even a twinkle, the ova had been around for decades, make a beautiful woman, Lester Del Rey’s Helen O’Loy, a very wholesome, a John Hughes movie, The Breakfast Club (1985), Pretty In Pink (1986), woman pops into existence, make their lives better, getting them girlfriends, a boy fantasy comedy, she runs the show, programmed like a terminator to help these boys, fun, 90 minutes, video rental place, Godzilla movies, Godzilla Minus One (2023), Mothra is cool, always having babies and dying, Gorgo (1961), how can you live on this earth, are you from this planet, Hammer Horror, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, a professor or a Dracula or a professor stabbing Dracula, The Gorgon (1964), a British version of something you don’t know, people’s education in cinema, Citizen Kane (1941), Casablanca (1942), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Japanese schoolgirls, addicted to torrents, new Doctor Who is so bad, into tasteful things, nobody liked it anymore, Days Of Our Lives, Dynasty, Soap, look I’m you’re secret brother, I have an eyepatch, cycle spinning boringness, in serial form in the movie theaters, Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon, connect up into one big story, Archers, Coronation Street, commoners, this guy, [Nigel Kneale], do it for children, educational, alien invasion of the week, every episode ends on a cliffhanger, new Doctor Who is based on the old Doctor Who, a science fiction writer of science fiction serials, a huge hit, people like science fiction ideas, on television, scientist of the week, humans are from Mars, the rocket comes back with an alien terraforming material, every week there was a science fiction idea, keep you interested for next week, a ripoff of exactly, it looks like science fiction, its all about the monsters, daleks were scary, kind a funny, kind of like disabled nazis, they were us doing eugenics and us doing a nuclear war, encounter suits, little squidgies of spludge, they don’t have moms and dads, Star Trek cartoon Lower Decks, it isn’t funny he has to pon farr right now, makes me feel sad, All Our Yesterdays, a Mary Sue to get involved with Spock, Mr Jim Moon’s huge history of the Universal horror movies, Bride Of Frankenstein (1935), start with The Mummy (1932).

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #835 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Aeneid by Virgil (Books IX – XII)

The SFFaudio Podcast #835 – The Aeneid by Virgil [Books IX – XII] read by George Allen (for LibriVox) and translated by John Dryden. This is the third third of the epic poem, books IX to XII(comprised of XII Books) running 4 hours 45 minutes, followed by a discussion of them. Participants in the discussion include Jesse and Scott Danielson

Talked about on today’s show:
9-12, some stuff, make more notes, wash over you, the books are not mentioned in the original, somebody’s imposition, one giant scroll, the title names, not consistent, a handy way of telling you which book it’s in, Act 1, Scene 1, here we go, more Shakespeare, a very old book, Shakespeare is old too, not a lot of Christianity in this book, the morality in this book, punishments in their version of Hell, Elysian fields for other people, that underworld stuff, work their way into heaven, doing the penance, so wicked, back in university, The Odyssey, more memorable and more personal, re-read, first read, the end, Dido stuff, superpowerful, the kind of morality you see in Shakespeare, Macbeth, a character named Old Seward, Mcduff, Ross, Scottish guys, in the context, Young Seward, did and said, these are Christian Scotsmen, witches and fate, on the border of our reality, kings and lords, this scene in relief, Act 5, Scene 7, enter Macbeth, what bloody man is that?, good writing, make a hero awesome, maybe bad writing, how Macbeth has just one the battle, how many dudes did he kill, his sword is steaming, just gone through a man or six, straight outta Robert E. Howard, a killing machine, not the wisest man, a great battler, tied me to a steak, bear-like I must fight the course, not born of woman, no man of woman born can hurt you, enter Young Seward, tho thou callest, hotter than any in hell, the devil himself, nor more fearful, abhorred tyrant, THEY FIGHT, thou wast born of woman, swords I smile at, stuff happens, winning the battle, he’s the bad guy, Scene 8, Old Seward, so great a day is cheaply bought, your son has paid a soldier’s debt, unshirking station, then he is dead?, your cause of sorrow, for then it hath no end, had he his hurts before?, did he suffer?, aye on the front, stabbed in the front not the back, as many sons as hairs, so his knell is knolled, gonna cry, found out his only son died, stabbed in the front, stabbed in the back, running away from the field, plucked untimely from his mother’s womb, fate plays a big role, the twisted words of the witches, the martialness, the warriness, 1500 years before, book XI, just war, people getting killed, Camilla’s Finest Hour, imagining in ten years what you’re going to remember, definitely Dido, the underworld, the most interesting things, lotsa battles, heroic war, not the very very end, with Aeneas killing Turnus, makes that decision, does he make a decision, no mercy please, let me have it, thinks about it for a second, considering mercy, sees the arms, his belt, let’s him have it, avenging Pallas, hilt deep in his enemy’s heart, a groan of outrage down to the shades below, we were set up for that, this paragraph, Turnus Attacks, War Rages On, The Trojans Advance, Turnuns Vs. Aeneas, Enemy At The Gates, Captains Fight And Die, Camilla’s Finest Hour, The Sword Decides All, poetic rather than functional, the ending sums up the last half of the book, prolonged fight against Turnus, local guy, teams, alliances, rivalries, prepped, John Dryden, last 2 stanzas, the lofty chief, recreant thus, I know my death deserved, think o think, thou has a father once and hast a son, or of thy vowed revenge, my body void of breath, thine the royal wife, kill me if you have to, think of your father think of your son, this is awesome, I deserve it all, care for a parent’s grief, stripped of life, victor and vanquished, go no further down the road of hatred, particularly good or evil, bad guy vs. opponents, he’s from that place, the interloper, the insurrectionist, the foreign invader, he’s from Asia, this guy’ from Europe, I have a fate, it’s my destiny, our destiny, you’re not just the lord of whatever, or soon will be, Duncan gives him too more lordships, gets into his head, Lady Macbeth all excited, I would make a great king, read the witches properly what will happen, not what should happen, histories, tragedies, comedy, a comedy ends with marriages, everybody marriages, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, the gods are fighting, Juno, Jupiter’s like whatever lady, the fate, set at Rome’s founding, two fates going on, the history, the destiny pushed on Aeneas and his people by the gods, a weirder character, Macbeth is evil, murder people, including children, local people, we don’t like those people, allied, this girl they’re rivaling over, in parallel with parts of The Iliad, chases Turnus around ten times, Achilles, we really ought to be reading The Iliad first, sulking in their tent, more compressed, in the shadow of that, chasing happens, they’re connecting it to their origins, secretly we’re Trojans, reverse the history, we can’t be the defeated people, an Empire now, losers who had to run away, second to last stanza, our dude, you won the battle, pity the family of those who die, you know what it is like to lose people, give my dead body back to my family, despoil the body is worse, not let him be burnt properly, in the second to last stanza, the Trojan seemed to stand, rolled his eyes, his manly soul with more compassion melt, oh oh oh, these words have struck me, a casual glance, the fatal spoils that haghty Turunus, the anime version of this, traitor!, clad as thou art, Patroclus wears the armour of Achilles, the desecration of a body, fuckbuddy cousin, a graceful offering, at the word, deep in his bosom, disstained his arms around, the disdainful soul came rushing through the wound, walking out of the movie theater, mercy, the girl is yours, can’t we live in peace, it would be nice to be… the camera zooms in on the belt, drives the blade between the shoulder blade and his neck, stabbing the heart, a killing blow, not fade to black, straight cut to black, how would you feel, we’ve seen that, SEVEN (1995), not a good feeling, goad him into it, couldn’t hold himself back, a student watched Seven recently, never want to see it again, what’s coming, it’s horrible, manipulative, Brad Pitt, what’s in the box stuff, what does that make of Brad Pitt’s character, movie logic, a Seven 2, you’re not Aeneas, the streaming blood disdainful, dis-stain, contempt, the arms are the weapons, the battle dress, claiming to be mad about, a local king’s prince, the disdainful soul, that’s amazing, we’re supposed to think, a traitor in some way, Turnus is a hothead manipulated by the gods, you won, let this war be over, you’re gone, I kill you, let my hate win, the reason Macbeth is bad, murdered children in their beds, plagued by visions, the famous dagger scene, Is this a dagger I see before me?, allow the possibility that it is a cross, an invisible dagger, remind you of this killing, or Jesus, repent, a Christian layer to that, not just a random dude, the founder of Rome, an original sin for the culture of Rome, making slaves of people, slavery is preferable to genocide, especially the men, probably pretty bad, they’re valuable, you sell them, you can’t be manumitted by death, the bond put upon you by being the end of a losing people, a national epic, an Imperial Epic, this can’t be the way it ends, choosing to end it here is the surprising thing, the shock and horror of it is huge, the hotheadedness, nothing to do with destiny, personal action, foment a secret rebellion, he’s the rival mirror to Aeneas, really great, flaring up in fury, decked in the spoils, escaped my clutches, never, not as visceral, awesome, make you pay the price, blazing with wrath, hilt deep in his enemy’s heart, lifebreath fled with a groan of outrage, the disdainful soul, the Romans think this is completely justified, Arthurian rules, realistic, not justified, a modern hero did that, 24, Keifer Sutherland, running around, no bathroom break, no snack, torture works, he’s just going to torture a guy, are you seriously going there?, we don’t torture people, there’s no white hat here, they’re the bad ones, they’re the ones who hide behind women and children, our team vs. their team, the reason we’re good is we do good things, good guy bad guy is just gone, the Romans don’t have good guy/bad guy, they have pious, dutiful to their fathers, dutiful to the gods, humans killed, a spectacle, a lot of pathos comes out of the deaths of these humans, major takeaways, this death, just beautiful when Camilla dies, protected by Diana, the huntress, goddess of the moon, Book XI, she lost her grip on the reigns, slipped down to the ground, neck drooped limp, a groan of outrage down to the shades below, 8 stanzas from the end, tugs at the spear, stands fixed in the deep wound, fighting like a superhero, the wingshaft predestined to the deed, the yew, the far distant horns on either side, the fatal arrow flew, zing!, sounding dart, felt the point with his heart, the conquering damsel, amazed by the language, high vocab, their leader lost, more on their speed than on their strength rely, take their wounds behind, he doesn’t care that his son is dead, only that he was brave, the slackened bow, the rotten ground, the rampires, the trembling matrons, rend heaven with female shrieks, a mingled multitude, then in a fright, the vanquished cry, tis terror all within, slaughter all without, the Latian virgins valiant with despair, poles sharpened, drew her bow with a vengeance, down or up, Cynthia’s maid, she wrenched the javelin with her dying hands, the steely point remains, agonizing pains, the Romans love gore, broken glass, Die Hard (1988), steps on the broken glass, one “fucker” per movie, pg-13, the bad guy who is bad, deceitful, not a gore movie, no nudity almost, fake swearing, stylized, no gore, the Romans loved gore, Ben-Hurchariot scene, guy gets run over a few times, the gore is a feature, she staggers in her seat with agonizing pains, up to her face, a gathering mist o’erclouds, he swims before my sight, fly with speed, my charge succeed, the town relieve, another breath/soul things, sliding sunk upon the plain, her open hand forsakes the rein, she pants, the lingering dude, I’m still alive, I’m quite burnt, 17 bad guys he shoots, this is the opposite, short and more short she pants, Miles Dyson in Terminator 2, lets go of the explosive, she’s panting in her death, the mind her passage from her body flees, plumey crest, her struggling, to Stygian sound retires, awesome, they fight, Donalbain is slain, the level of camerawork here is hardcore, hardcore gore, increases the tragedy, increases the pathos, women described as beautiful, beauteous, that’s even worse, Book X, plucked it out, advancing on the margin, the clowns, an omen of the fight, he first in open field defied the prince, opened wide, Lichass, from his naked mother, sacred to Pheobus, from biting steel freed, pulled out of his mother with pincers, not far from his was Gyas, with monstrous bulk, no valour nor herculean arms availed, toiled, writhed his dart, received his doom, beardless bloom, cur’d his love of boys, seven bold, his mother’s care, turned aside, spears being chucked, Cydon, courted Clytius, a pedophile, obscene lust, the united force, a random little thing, not how the Greeks are doing it, Achilles the great hero has a boyfriend who’s his cousin, the Romans: pedophiles should be killed, random list of guys getting shot, you can miss so much, moral progress, you could make the case, human sacrifice is bad, animal sacrifice is less bad, giving up meat for lent, gambling or smoking, no animals were hurt, you can make the case, regressions, we don’t do torture, enhanced interrogation, the Philippine war, in the text there, Nietzsche, slave morality vs. master morality, turn the other cheek, the reason that the Romans are ripe for takeover by Christians, a lot of slaves, mad at moneylenders, the Prince of Peace, take control of the Roman Empire, instead of having their piety be how many sacrifices, their obedience to the moral code of Jesus, not a slur against Christianity, popular among the slaves, they know what suffering is, the power of the story of Jesus, a lot of attention, the force argument, we have better weapons, better organized, the right, just a fact, why this book is so weird compared to Shakespeare, strongly obvious, Odysseus’ goodness comes from being tricky, knows how to get stuff done, journey home, dudes courting his wife, killing spree, he’s good at it, not very Christian, very good, do The Iliad some day, Beowulf, Sir Gawain, the Saga of the Volsungs, all the dwarfs that are in the Hobbit, Fafnir, Smaug, a talking dragon there is, digging a lot of this older stuff, Ballantine Adult Fantasy books, The King Of Elfland’s Daughter, The Charwoman’s Daughter, The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson, The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt, The Sundering Flood, The Tritonian Ring by L. Sprague De Camp, most of them are old, The Wood Beyond The World, it’s got a map!, mountains, rivers, a sea eventually, Paul would not like the geography on this, Lilith by George MacDonald, a port city, put in a request, 10 hours, what’s Lilith about?, considered among the darkest, most profound, a cosmic sleep that heals tortured souls, a Christian universalist, sold, a lot of good George MacDonald, new to him, Reading, Short And Deep, The Green Door?, Odd John, Christmas break, 2008, waiting for us for all these years, duties at church, eucharistic minister, wine for the kids, assume that it is red wine, less magical, less substantial, less transubstantial, going through some Simak, Project Pope, shocked at how good it was, idea idea idea, selling me, let’s book it, the Pope part of it, gonna become infallible, feed me nothing but facts, Special Deliverance, A Choice Of Gods, fund with doubles, two short stories, Cordwainer Smith, Leigh Brackett, A Game Of Rat And Dragon, Dragon Queen Of Jupiter, Frank Herbert and Tolkien vs. Asimov and Clarke science fiction, rettitled Dragon Queen Of Venus, find and replace, this is just a French Foreign Legion story set on Jupiter, why is this terrible, why does this work?, a young lady who likes dressing up vs. a CIA agent who wrote Psychological Warfare and loved cats, a fun talk, easier, Dick and A.E. Van Vogt, men’s magazine stories, didn’t love Gods Of Mars, not a series guy, editing today, The Idiot, a short story about a robot, left it off the schedule, Partner’s Payoff, WWII veteran, get robbed, coffee, more editing.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #820 – READALONG: The Not-World by Thomas Burnett Swann

The SFFaudio Podcast #819 – Jesse, Will Emmons, Alex (Pulpcovers), and Jonathan Weichsel talk about The Not-World by Thomas Burnett Swann

Talked about on today’s show:
1977?, 1975, died in 1976, serialized, The Weir Woods, Cirsova Alex is hard to get, Winged Victory by Thomas Burnette Swann, who stood model, graceful sweep, Tennessee poet and writer, problem with the narrator, him recording over himself, Arachne spirit ghost, echo, same narrator, a producer choice, during the singalong, audio italics, stepped away from the microphone and kept recording, inconsistent, two mispronunciations, obscure words, enthusiastic about his production, commendable, straight narrations, transparent, the door creaked open, taking italicized text, is this in his head?, back and forth, makes a comment, some sort of barrier between dialogue, missing context, while hiking, listened at home, listened to in sleep, dreamy, dream interpreted, like them about the same, the plot is not really the focus, the character and being recognized as a sexual being, too fat, repetition, the flabbiness of novels, the book itself is probably very good, didn’t have a plot, characters, stuff they were doing, stuff happens, plodding along, the aunt, very rich her sacrifice of having sex with all the little people, a scholar of a bunch of people, women starts of a particular movie company, a Christina Rosetti scholar, what happens in Goblin Market, pixie men, on the level of metaphor, lost a lot of weight, burned a lot of calories, sexual awakening, lost in the woods, sitting around in baskets, teleported between set pieces, how did they get to the mill?, rushin to get stuff done, everybody is happy, the real forest is the friends we made along the way, the bad lady, woman burned at the stake, off to London, destroy lives there, if it wasn’t so enjoyable, the story needs to do something, go into the forest, sick in bed, new excuse to go back to that forest, by balloon, hadn’t gone back to Bristol, straight dreamworld, weird hybrid, we’re missing the point, cosy relationships, class difference relationships, all about the body, raising children, the water horse, the horses of Llyr, not really well described, the back cover, the dedication, To Helen, is this a Lord Dunsany?, gently o’er, on desperate seas, the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, Poe to his adopted mom, Mrs. Allan, Poe is the original Dreamlands guy, technically bad, a Robin Hood scene, doing this creation, the apologies, the missing guy, a real poet, imagining he didn’t commit suicide, ghost, The Coffin Merchant by Richard Middleton, Arthur Machen, King George III, pre-American Revolution, many anachronisms, slavery is mentioned many times, capitalism, different ways of doing it, how did he construct this book, Thomas Chatterton, sailors hookin up with Jane Austen stand-in, 1770, 1771, extinct, or do they?, #SpiderWoman, few and far between, 19th century, movies in the 80s, all do go back to Arachne, LEGO Minifigures monster figures, fringe ones, women who tie you up in webs, Don Mark Lemon story, a fox’s tail, foxkin, the witch burning scene, I was totally a murderer, she’s selfish, off to London and do murders with her vampires, not a misunderstood wisewoman, ending Lord Of The Ring, I really wanted that ring, when you’re writing like this the subconcious is doing all the work, the sailor guy, the musician, pure of heart, sexual experience once that traumatized them, settle, the girl has her brothers, her father, he relationship with her horses, the waterhorse and its babies and its eggs, a cozy D&D, Barrels Out Of Bond, shot it sold it?, had she just talked to her horse, I was tied up by Indians and I learned to make a wigwam, house made out of sticks, portable house, sea voyages, into Robert Herrick, Thomas had read her books, a poet, stuff memorized, sailor or highwayman, didn’t like sailors except during war, upper-class lower-class, a character arc, she has motivations and backstory enough, things come up and over again, the bull to her cow, she was paying for it, she’s too fat, he wanted that character in the woods, her chaperone, you should do more hanky panky, any, hammocks, no hammocks, they’re out in yard, a water sprite’s house, sex in a hammock, you can’t lie separately, enforcing the cozy, a cheap bed, gas balloon, that guy Squirrel, it was fine, a circulation pattern, the lady can’t walk, its FANTASY with flashing lights, maybe read The Wizard Of Oz, very Ozy, pulchritude!, children’s fiction, a very sexless world, all of them don’t have genitals, hen named Ballina, the gnome at the end, is our goal to get them to read it?, nothing like anybody has ever written, A.A. Milne, horny Winnie the Pooh, all of the characters are different kinds of mental illnesses, the donkey, shyness, Pooh is a honey, Christopher Robin is the ID, Tigger is intellectually disabled, Kanga, funny to say, two horror movies out of it, what’s odd about Swann, history and myth, cozy setting, get horny, horny dwarves with small dicks, show worthy, People Of The Black Coast, a guy from contemporary USA flying across the pacific, find Gaum, strange island, cliffs and beaches, crabs, leaves her on a rock, he puts his hand to her heart, giant telepathic crabs, gets one his arms snipped off, they my GF I swear revenge, A Spell For Chameleon by Piers Anthony, set in Florida, in Xanth, a fantasy world that borders Florida, exiled to Florida, puns and jokes, better plotted?, the popular version of this book, Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Dunsany’s wonderful, not writing carefully, an instinctually good writer, how could this book be great?, it could be better, guilt free sexual stuff, Puritans, being initiated, do they add up to a coherent whole?, an incoherent whole, modern, how much of a change is there, sexually repressed, I can’t have sex because I have a trauma!, they think they’re not good enough for each other, restraining not repressing, why you have no last name on this podcast, colonial themes, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the land is eternal, a Swann thing, A Midsummer’s Nights Dream, newsflash Shakespeare good, The Tempest, Trish listened to five different audio plays, hot take The Tempest mid, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming Of The Shrew, Shakespeare wins, Schwarzenegger running meme, tiger blood guy, plot, dialogue, emotional manipulation, doesn’t lose, Othello, Iago is gay for Othello, motivated by spite, props, whatever they have at hand, fucking over a whole war, Titus Andronicus, The Induction, the inception of the play is we are the drunkard audience, there’s a play within the play, to catch the conscience of the king, reasonable thing to do, not as polished, the school prisons, hundreds of years, men dressed as women, library in the basement, let’s read more Shakespeare, the playwright, Christopher Marlowe, ‘Tis A Pity She’s A Whore by John Ford, two ees in pity, All The Flowers In The Attic by V.C. Andrews, it was huge, incest, reading it with one hand, just so good, I make students read it, A Modest Proposal, started laughing, solve it, expanded homelessness, that’s your goal, Jonathan Swift is savage, we have it for Gaza, one to one parallel, a pamphlet, harder to dismiss, feels like fiction even though it isn’t, what to do about the Irish, a very knowing American of my acquaintance, people can not get it, he goes to Japan, light material, heatwave, how do you listen to audiobook, work from home is a problem, chores, smoke cigars, when driving, in the 90s all week, shower speaker, you can get a lot listened in a week, five and half hours, reading text, eyes are busy, hands and eyes busy, nice park, at the gym, not enough hours in my day, fun side story, electromagnetic door locks, you can just buy those, a tweet about this, Matt Lauer, have used doorlocks in the past, three car garage, $80 to $100k, raising chickens, a house in a shipping container, jobsite sort of thing, shed conversion stuff, vehicles to store, the Cirsova story influenced by Swann, maybe next week, Journey Of Joenes by Robert Sheckely, The Loved Dead, Algis Budrys’ WHO?, Rogue Moon, Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, The Aeneid by Virgil, the losers of the Trojan War, their own legend, that’s our people, quite the way to go, the founding of Rome, distrust the propaganda, Romulus and Remus are Cain and Abel raised by a wolfish god, it deserved to be canceled, 8 episodes and cancelled, just setting the stage, can you give us the next Game Of Thrones, sad story, Shakespeare never had that problem, Richard The Third, low T Shakespeare, historical plays, Henry V, WWI Nazi, Ian McKellen, Magneto, not enough crossdressing, Merry Wives Of Windsor, Molière, The Country Wife, wants to have sex with all the other guys wives, lost his dick, Cyrano De Bergerac (1990), stuck on the rocket shoots him to the moon, character in the Riverworld novel, cuckhold’s Mark Twain, The Golden Ass, the French comic book adaptation, an odd choice, keep waiting for the golden ass to pay off, ass waiting, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, Billy Wilder, done as a diary, gets everything she wants, always going on dates with rich men, a trip to Europe, this is awesome, beautifully illustrated, 1925 book, Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo, El Dorado, The Big Sleep, the one with the leopards, the intercostal clavicle, His Girl Friday, really good, Only Angels Have Wings, so cozy, a remake of a silent, Tales Of The Gold Monkey, Cary Grant, lady singer shows up on a boat, Casablanca, nature is the bad guy, really terrific, Jean Arthur, see you next week.

The Not-World by Thomas Burnett Swann

Posted by Jesse Willis