The SFFaudio Podcast #125 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Horla by Guy de Maupassant

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #125 – The Horla by Guy de Maupassant, read by Gregg Margarite (of LibriVox), followed by a discussion of the story – participants include Jesse, Tamahome and Jenny Colvin (of the Reading Envy blog).

Talked about on today’s show:
“c’est magnifique!”, is this Jesse’s favourite story from the 19th century?, H.G. Wells, is The Horla Science Fiction, aliens, ghosts, Guy de Maupassant is crafting our feeling on how the story should be interpreted, Mont Saint-Michel, Ladyhawke, Second Life, Normandy, Paris, France, ghosts, goats with human faces, biblical stories of possessed pigs, metaphor of the wind, the wind as a telekinetic force, invisibility, personal experience vs. faith, succubi, vampires, Jim Moon’s Hypnobobs podcast (reading of The Horla and Dairy Of A Madman), was Guy de Maupassant interested in science?, his prolific output, Sigmund Freud, is this a psychological drama?, the character in the movie vs. the short story, sleep paralysis and depression, is the unnamed protagonist of The Horla bioplar?, syphilis, H.P. Lovecraft, Benjamin Franklin, the character has a Science Fiction attitude (a disposition towards science), a story of possession (like in The Exorcist), glowing eyes, Rouen, “excuse my French”, external confirmation, diagnose yourself, São Paulo, Brazil, The Horla means “the beyond”, what lives beyond the Earth?, Jenny wasn’t thinking aliens at all, creatures from other dimensions, the Predator’s cloaking device, is the horla really Santa Claus?, hypnotism and hypnotists, post-hypnotic suggestion, confabulation, its a quasi-phenomenon, why can’t everyone be hypnotized?, Hamlet, did he burn down his house or did the horla do it?, noir, movies demand the defeat of evil, “Son Of The Horla and Spawn Of The Horla“, science and skepticism, who broke all the drinking glasses?, the Futurama version of a Twilight Zone episode,

“The vulture has eaten the dove, and the wolf has eaten the lamb; the lion has devoured the sharp-horned buffalo, and man has killed the lion with arrow, sword and gun; but the Horla is going to make of man what we have made of the horse and the ox: his chattel, his servant and his food, by the mere exercise of his will. Woe to us.”

Tamahome should read some H.P. Lovecraft, here’s H.P. Lovecraft’s description of The Horla:

“Relating the advent in France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without peer in its particular department.”

Lovecraft is using deep time to scare us instead of the supernatural, The Statement Of Randolph Carter, sorry I cant talk right now I’m being digested, Cthulhu’s guest appearance on South Park, the elements, space butterfly,

“We are so weak, so powerless, so ignorant, so small — we who live on this particle of mud which revolves in liquid air.”

a cosmic view, the Carl Sagan view, evil is everywhere, an allegory for science, Frankenstein, “men ought not meddle in affairs normally deemed to women”, the Frankensteinian monster, a warning against science vs. science is our only way of understanding the universe, we have one place to look and that is to science, the propaganda he’s pushing, “there are things we can’t explain”, gentlemen did science back then, Library Of The World’s Best Mystery And Detective Stories on Wikisource, the case of my body being haunted, Edgar Allan Poe, Diary Of A Madman, turn us into batteries, “this is a looking glass”, the main character holding a photograph of himself, foreshadowing, out of body experience, Tama fails the quiz of the lesson earlier, when we don’t know – don’t conclude, we ought not conclude anything from this scene, we are not supposed to know we know the answer, Harvey Keitel’s appearance on Inside the Actor’s Studio, becoming comfortable with the unknown, The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jesse proceeds to recount the entire plot of The Necklace, like a really sad O. Henry story, Somerset Maugham, Henry James, A String Of Beads, “Mais oui.”

The Horla by Guy de Maupassant

The Horla by Guy de Maupassant - illustration by Julian-Damazy

The Horla by Guy de Maupassant - illustration by Julian-Damazy

Guy De Maupassant's Le Horla 1908 Edition

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #083 – TALK TO: Jeremy Keith

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #083 – Jesse talks with Jeremy Keith of HuffDuffer.com about his website. HuffDuffer can turn any MP3 file on the web into a podcast! HuffDuffer lets you make your own curated podcasts and share them with the world.

Talked about on today’s show:
HuffDuffer.com, turning loose mp3 files on the web into podcasts, “the benefit of the website happens when you’re not at the website”, maybe planning ahead just isn’t popular?, the HuffDuffer extension for Firefox, Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome, Bookmarklet, “HuffDuffer is the perfectly developed website”, website design, “all software evolves until it becomes an email client” (or Facebook), interacting with iTunes, “it just works”, you can HuffDuff any audio extension (no video thanks very much), audio vs. video, the stigma of audio (and radio), adactio.com (Jeremy Keith’s website), SalterCane.com, BBC, CBC, tagging your podcasts, the Science Fiction tag on HuffDuffer, Sage an RSS catcher for Firefox, the HuffDuffer people page, the HuffDuffer tag cloud page, the use of machine tags, flickr.com, the Philip K. Dick tag, each tag makes its own feed, the Orson Scott Card Selects podcast feed, get satisfaction from HuffDuffer, HuffDuffing computer voiced MP3 files (please don’t), exploring HuffDuffer as a social network, ClearLeft.com and Jeremy Keith’s profile there, the philosophy of website design, how to design a website for every browser, designing SFFaudio’s design, inertia of website design and designers, “website development is the most hostile environments”, three things have changed the internet for me: 1. podcasting 2. HuffDuffer 3. RSS readers, consuming the content the way you want, the Readability bookmarklet, Safari 5, sustainable business models, Dark Roasted Blend, why isn’t HuffDuffer HUGE?, you aren’t competing on the web, niche websites are empowering, what happens if Jeremy Keith gets hit by a bus?, the demise of websites, is Wikipedia too big to fail?, the further demise of websites, “feature creep“, you don’t buy a domain name (you rent it), the Seeing Ear Theatre story, Archive.org, the Science Fiction mindset, The Wayback Machine, the death of Geocities was a tragedy for the future archaeologists of the web, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., Anathem by Neal Stephenson, The Long Now Foundation, we need servers on the moon, bury archive.org under the Sea Of Tranquility, Carl Sagan, the Voyager record (it’s the longest of the LPs), reconstructing the phonograph 10,000 years down the road, does Science Fiction make you smarter? Jeremy Keith’s answer: “Only Science Fiction fans can be smart.”

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Mars Phoenix lander brought Science Fiction audio to Mars

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Mars Phoenix DVD - Messages From EarthThe Mars Phoenix lander carries a mini-DVD loaded with art, produced on Earth, about Mars. And very coolly the audio end of Science Fiction is well represented on the disc! Here’s the official word:

“Radio has been associated with Mars ever since Marconi, Tesla, and Edison each expressed interest in the possibility of radio messages coming from Mars to Earth in the early part of the 20th century. In 1938 Orson Welles and Howard Koch reinterpreted the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds for radio, with unexpected and dramatic results. In a section of this disk called RADIO MARS we present some of that and other broadcasts. Arthur C. Clarke supplied us with the rare radio interview featuring a discussion between H. G. Wells and Orson Welles. The radio documentary about the Viking landing is part of a program I made for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1976, as part of its documentary radio series IDEAS. The producer was Max Allen of the CBC. Allen helped me organize over 100 hours of material recorded on tape cassettes, and mix it into the audio tapestry heard on this disk. The program includes interviews with many of the important science fiction writers who witnessed this historic event at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was a thrilling occasion — a moment when science fiction and real space exploration truly came together. We hope that this program will convey what it was like on the night when the history of human presence on Mars really began. Seventeen years later, Max Allen played an important role in the creation of this disk: locating the original master tapes of our Viking documentary, remixing and editing the Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, and recording the greetings from Judith Merril and Carl Sagan. In general he put the impressive technical and studio facilities of the CBC’s then new national headquarters in Toronto at our disposal. Lorne Tulk, a consummate recording engineer at the CBC, who had mixed the Viking program, lent his skills to the assembly of the RADIO MARS portion of this disk. We are also extremely grateful to the distinguished actor Patrick Stewart, well known in our time for his role on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, for providing the narration for the audio section. In 1993 it was much easier to store sound than to store moving images on CDs. That is the principal reason for including a section on RADIO MARS as opposed to sequences from film or video images of Mars. Radio as a medium has much to recommend it. You can listen to it while driving, for example. Nothing delights the makers of RADIO MARS more than the thought that one day someone might listen to the Welles or Viking broadcast while piloting a vehicle across the martian deserts or through the martian skies!”

The Mars Phoenix Lander Deck May 26th 2008

And there it is, attached to the deck of the lander (next to the flag), the “Phoenix DVD.” I’ve managed to round up some of the audio found on the disc, from around the net. Check it out…

Carl Sagan |LISTEN|

Arthur C. Clarke |LISTEN|

War of the Worlds |MP3| The 1938 radio drama.

Wells and Welles |MP3| A 1940 non-fiction radio piece in which H.G. Wells and Orson Welles met to discuss War of the Worlds.

The Viking Landings |REALAUDIO EXCERPT| Jon Lomberg’s report on the Viking landing on Mars, July 20, 1976. Includes live recordings from mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and interviews with science fiction writers and actors.

By the way, the DVD is made of a silica glass (instead of regular plastic) so as to withstand long-term exposure on the Martian surface. Now all those Martians will need is a DVD player.

Also, for those curious about what else the lander is doing on Mars; the latest Planetary Radio podcast (put out by the Planetary Society) talks about the lander’s landing and what it’s going to do now that it has landed |MP3|.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Visit Worldcon via NPR’s Weekend America

SFFaudio @ Worldcon 2006

Podcast - Weekend AmericaIt seems Weekend America (NPR) correspondent Krissy Clark dropped in at Worldcon and we’ve got the link to audio story she broadcast on Saturday August 26th. Krissy talked to panelists Nick Sagan (SF author and son of Carl Sagan), the legendary James Gunn and Paolo Bacigalupi (who was nominated for a Hugo in the Novelette category), and a few other folks.

You can listen to the eight minute segment via Realaudio HERE or you can subscribe to the Weekend America podcast via this feed (the segment can be found near the begining of hour one):

http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/rss/podcast/podcast.xml