Reading, Short And Deep #386
Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss The Ultimate One by John D. MacDonald
Here’s a link to a PDF of the story.
This story was first published in Super Science Stories, March 1950.
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The SFFaudio Podcast #729 – The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain – read by John Greenman for Librivox. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the novel (6 hours 42 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants include Jesse, Paul Weimer, and Trish E. Matson.
Talked about on today’s show:
1876, conflating some with Huckleberry Finn, the whitewashing of the fence, the whole business with the caves, the pirate incident, pretending to be dead, the business with the graves, Injun Joe, why people thought they were dead, play pirate, engaged, bosom friend Joe, what’s with his cousin, Sid, half-brother, Aunt Polly, single parent families, Judge Thatcher’s wife, Huck’s dad, gone, because the civil war, pre-civil war, set in the 1840s, disease?, pirates?, re-written as a science fiction book, there’s no outside communication with big cities, time placement with technology, lucifer matches, middle ages tech, St. Petersburg, Missouri, newfangled, no slavery we can see, the absence of industry, so kid oriented, so kid focused, a traditional plotted book, a bildungsroman, a picaresque, Twain’s first novel, incidents, a memory of growing up in this place at that time, not plot driven, Hannibal, Missouri, a made up town, the Illinois shore, going downriver to Illinois, he’s not making a mistake, we are making some misunderstanding, I had eleven toes, the bottom right hand corner, a fictionalization of his geography, an island, a sandbar, detailed fantasy map, how the cave system works, karst topography, mid-19th century American stuff, Ballou’s Dollar Monthly, right after Poe and before Twain, Atlantic Monthly, contemporary fiction magazine, a bent towards the fun, An Adventure Under Ground by W.D. Harrington, blooming for the grave, a story about a treasure in a cave, afeared, no companion Huck Finn, a body that has been covered in limestone, almost Lovecraftian cosmicism, stalactite dripping, a robber completely covered in limestone, turned into a statue, externally fossilized, locked inside of a tomb of limestone, a waterfall, the treasure was the escape, The Beast In The Cave by H.P. Lovecraft, Becky Thatcher, turned into a troglodyte, a C.H.U.D.?, a ghoul, The “Minions Of The Moon” by George L. Aiken, highborn noblemen rapists, pirates vs. robbers, the red handed, why he has to keep going to church, foster mom, you have to be a nobleman to be a robber, ancient tropes from the penny dreadfuls, Robin Hood, a Saxon nobleman, a lowborn local hero, pirates raid the triangle trade, pirates of the Caribbean, ex-slaves, Our Flag Means Death, unrealistic fantasy elements, Stede Bonnet, the romanticism of piracy, be and do that, all the fantasies that Tom and Huck have, what we remember vs. the majority of the book, fantasies interrupted by real events, keeping the guns in the cave, haunted house, adult versions of Tom and Huck are evil, actual robbers, murderers, low class people, absolute pronouncements, he’s read the books, overhearing adults, getting engaged, what’s consistently proven, blood oaths, children always report on each other, Huck’s rich!, when the beans are spilled, when Sid rats him our several times, a tattletale, preying on his conscience, jailed unjustly, the trial scene, “stealthy” or “stealthily”, I stealthily left the river, an interpretation, hiding behind a log, making silent agreements, things that would upset stories, when the murder quarrel sprung up, graverobbing, hidden agendas, through Tom’s eyes, protecting their own, strange dynamics of adults, male adult role models, judges, a source of awe, the senator isn’t 25 feet tall, a prize for excellent trading, an excellent businessman, so Twain, we’ll draw a veil over the rest of this, the meta-materials, that blue covered bible, Gustave Dore, that book didn’t exist yet, pre-Civil War, Mart Twain was in the Civil War for a brief period, when you read Mark Twain, using these racist epithets, this is not a racist book, the low class people use the n word, nobody but an injun, everybody who listening to this, the lack of racism with regards to blacks, one half-breed in this book, he’s about to name Injun Joe as the murderer, escapes into the wilderness, revenge, free range, whatever, free ranging, greatly disappointed, she thought of him that way before, a hanging crime, testifying against a murderer, move towns and change your name, all sorts of crazy things we can’t imagine in our society today, missing kids, a known murderer escapes, casual and expected daily beatings of children, it is unbelievable, historical fact, if this were a fantasy novel, corporal punishment, distasteful as a reader, conflict, love, punishing for the good of his soul, spare the rod and spoil the child, Sid breaks the sugarbowl, refuses to apologize, her conscience reproached her, parallel with Becky, the noblest lie, George Washington and the cherry tree, how interesting Twain as a man is, Stephen King’s It, sympathizing with children, not a trauma book, the adventures of not the travails of, Tom has Agency, very 19th century thing, a politeness/impoliteness contest, if you cross this I’ll beat your head off, two soldiers confronting each other, two medieval knights, some random kid, equal contemporaries, is Huck Finn a little older?, how old are these boys?, a timeless age, not older than 12, his interest in Becky, a kiss, chivalrous love, no vestige of sexual attraction, a wife, girls are yucky, he’s too old for that, Tom gets it, Huck’s not there yet, what are girls good for, when you’re a high class robber, Huck Finn doesn’t hate that idea, when Becky and Tom are missing, they’ve run off to the cave to have sex, they’re dead, between 9 and 12, how much death is a part of life, orphans, drowned in the river, stabbed by a half-breed in the graveyard, he’s so funny, they trade everything, a rat on a string, you can swing it, weird superstitions, incantations, spells, step on crack you break your mother’s back, step on a line break your mother’s spine!, witches, pictures himself dead in great and loving detail, fantasize, when I’m dead people will appreciate me, part of the fantasy, I’ll show them!, coming back in the middle of the funeral, too strong a coincidence, bury a dead cat as a cure for warts, special spell, works great!, a kitten with one eye, my cat with one eye, a knife that doesn’t cut things, a doorknob, a piece of blue glass, I’ll trade you my tooth, if you were an alien, a little kid on the playground, getting clout, telling lies that could be true because they’re so authentic, complete lies all the time, not exactly hypocrisies, taking sweetmeats and apples is hooking vs. stealing a whole ham, piracy vs. stealing, what is going to keep Tom and Joe from becoming Injun Joe and the other guy, found dead, the whole town wanted him hung, they want to pardon him, eating bats and candles and dying of thirst, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, black racism, the plot intrigue, figure out the throughline, the plot, the resolution, the description of how he’s died, the unspoken thing, the natives: where are they?, its sad but they were savages, a most horrible thing in this book, they don’t exist anymore, he’s not a specific kind of indian, what was the reason Nigger Jim left with Tom, he’s a runaway slave, Huck’s conscience torments him, that’s stealing from the owner, friendship or basic respect, a love story, a fellow human being, Hook vs. Huck, another pirate story with children, living in barrels, he’s Diogenes, living in a hog’s head, somebody adopts him, he’s a homeless kid who loves the lifestyle of being homeless, all the other kids admire and respect and wish they were him, he can swear and smoke, he doesn’t have to go to school or church, no chores!, grotesquely and lovingly described clothing, the seat of his pants is empty, ultimately respected, good at tricking people into doing things, the famous fence scene, completely free, he had to do this he had to do this, I’m way more free than he is, I have to have a job, he gets money from his parents, childhood psychology, fantasy reality, beautifully and classically, three or four sequels, Tom Sawyer, Detective, League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, timelessness, anywhere and anywhen, he understands kids, one of the best books ever?, a very good book, so American, easy to fall into, completely immersive, Paul was a kid again, the world through Tom’s eyes, adult insights, “work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do”, a classic for sure, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a more “important” book, Huckleberry Finn has a greater standing, a mighty theme, Moby-Dick, autobiographical, To Kill A Mockingbird, white knighting, look at it in its time, rewrite the book, maybe it is wonderful, it’s not one groups job to not write a book so another group can, who is To Kill A Mockingbird for?, who was it written by?, written by a white lady for a white audience, it’s a movie for a white audience, a book (and a movie) with a message, the message is don’t be asshole, help people when you can, that weird metaphor, killing of a bird vs. killing a rabid dog, a symbol, we don’t have anything like that in this book, an axe to grind, it has a huge axe to grind, more adventurey, much more memory, there’s no growing up, how do you end a book about children: they grow up and get married, Tom Sawyer, Abroad, bringing his experiences to this book, fun and funny, appreciating it as an adult after reading it as a kid, too young for Paul?, quite to the contrary, go back and listen to it, four different comic adaptations, caught up in the fence painting scene, in the trailer, a very personal memory, health problems, a stroke, visiting the hospital, reading the whitewashing scene chapter, she was crying, feeling nostalgic?, it moved her, a generational book, shared thoughts and feelings, thematically less important, a cliche, a trope, reverse psychology, why it is so iconic, it’s the trope maker, a lot of classic literature is dreck that got carried over, considered every now and again, “careful, Jesse”, she hid these signs with a forced gaiety, what her sex call a “good cry”, some things humans have that other animals don’t: language, thoughts that can’t be formulated into words, infer she wants water, yes and no, we are not just talking communicating narrative characters, we are also animals, moved to tears in a positive way, a funny scene, hanging out with Mark Twain is just delightful, Mark Twain’s relationship with Dorothy Quick, old men and young girls, a special empathy, a young person who thought he was amazing, he is his own character, a transatlantic crossing, a correspondence for the rest of his life, what makes this book so special, he’s mighty good at what he’s doing here, a pretty good narration, Nick Offerman, Mark Nelson, Becky Thatcher is barely in the book, quasi-fantasy, a Jules Verne spoof, across Africa, a long great writing career, delightful to read, The Curious Republic of Gondour, Robert A. Heinlein, Missouri boys, Heinlein’s cute not funny, wrote a lot of juveniles, Heinlein’s juveniles are 13 to 20ish, an octagonal writing shed, a podcasting shed, soundproof it from the dogs cows and chickens, John Greenman is pretty good, first novel thought to be written on a typewriter, a printer’s apprentice, super-interested in technology, inventions, running out of money so he wrote books, Tom Sawyer Abroad by Huck Finn by Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer is three people I know, he’s Becky Thatcher as well, Mark Twain is not his real name, a pretty good job getting in Becky Thatcher’s head, the very sympathetic Aunt Polly, how she feels, punishing for the wrong reason, that logic holds, Mark Twain thinking as an adult, an empathetic guy, he would have been a great dad, a troublesome husband, two daughters, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, Innocents Abroad, chunky, 25 hours!, how is this longer?, Grover Gardner, The Mysterious Stranger, what is existence really?, an unfinished collection, a supernatural character, No. 44, translated from the jug, The Mystery Of Edwin Drood, get Maissa or Evan.
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Reading, Short And Deep #334
Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss A Dark-Brown Dog by Stephen Crane
Here’s a link to a PDF of the story.
A Dark Brown Dog was first published in Cosmopolitan, March 1901.
Posted by Scott D. Danielson Become a Patron!
Reading, Short And Deep #319
Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss Legends For Lionel by Walter Crane
Here’s a link to a PDF of the book.
Legends For Lionel was first published by Cassell & Company in 1887.
Posted by Scott D. Danielson Become a Patron!
Reading, Short And Deep #239
Eric S. Rabkin and Jesse Willis discuss The Veldt by Ray Bradbury
Here’s a link to a PDF of the story.
The Veldt was first published as The World The Children Made in The Saturday Evening Post, September 23, 1950.
Posted by Scott D. Danielson Become a Patron!
The SFFaudio Podcast #542 – What’s Expected Of Us from Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang; This is an unabridged reading of What’s Expected Of Us (6 minutes) followed by a discussion of the Penguin Random House Audio audiobook of Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang.
participants in the discussion include Jesse, Paul Weimer, Maissa Bessada, Evan Lampe, Wayne June, and Terence Blake
Talked about on today’s show:
his second collection, 17 years to come out, The Merchant And The Alchemist’s Gate, squint hard, a lot of them have a focus on children, he had some kids?, a theme, teaching and growing, parenting, Anxiety Is The Dizziness Of Freedom, a science fiction story with mimetic fiction problems, Dacy’s Patent Automatic Nanny, childrearing, not the major theme, background thought processes, fate and destiny, an abiding theme, care and caring, finding truths closer to home, The Great Silence, dissecting one’s own brain, straight up science fiction, Kim Stanley Robinson, you fools, you’re wasting your life, Paul could rant, set on spaceships, making sense of reality, a test subject for another star, they’re all standouts, its not our universe, a creationist universe, a dread discovery, the center of the universe is elsewhere, Earth as a prototype for someone else, an epistolary manner, a crisis of faith, Poul Anderson, a mixed relationship, life after death, finding a way to be comfortable with that fact, approaching the subject of entropy, the universe is winding down, nobody is going to live forever, comforting ideas, all just whistling past the graveyard, a positive conclusion about it, how do you look into the abyss and come away with a happy attitude, be happy on the way down, Oomphalos, I’m in charge now, now she has free will, he explores free will from every direction, the audiobook from Tantor, it took a long time for audiobooks to become the dominant medium for people who actually read, I don’t get many ideas, most reviewers on YouTube: booktubers?, a whole universe of people, people who read books are really weird, every week you wanna be reading a new book? what a weirdo, the New York Times bestseller, books not designed to be read, overwritten, as any right thinking person would, these should be longer, very presumptuous, I want more of this, throwing down idea much bigger than the package he places them in, Wayne liked the shortest stories best, educated super-intelligent, deep thought, rigorous self-examination, tedious, on and on and on, 48 minutes, The Lifecycle Of Software Of Objects, concentrated science fiction, two drops in a cup of water, what it means, navel, center, a role playing anecdote, the enemy is the they (the center of the universe), we’re the center of the universe, The Middle Kingdom, Middle Sea, everywhere is the center, everybody’s stupid because their vision is so limited, a young earth, a parallel in our own history, reason for belief, mummies with no navels, obviously not created, his guiding philosophy, if there was a miracle, its on rails, preodomites, other people, The Truth Of Fact The Truth Of Feeling, deeply profound, a Black Mirror episode, some colonial guy getting colonized, writing and reading, auto text generator, no periods, Roman monuments used dots not spaces, pre-modern Chinese, getting it from context, cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, right in Jesse’s zone, Bros. Grimm concertizing, once in book form, Jesse doesn’t really take notes, one of the things going on, going back to an oral culture, Socrates, cost effective, the Romans were into copying and photo-copying each other’s works, questioning the nature of truth and reality, really cool, what truth is, Scott and Jesse conversations on truth, people complaining about truth, he’s more truthful about his lying, politician lying, not a wise man, wiser than some of the fools that have been so smart in the past, he was not the same, name recognition, you know exactly what his motivation is, truth is not one thing, your own memory of what reality was, science as being replicable, that whole diatribe, truth is that what is, there is an objective truth, we hope, touch the Eiffel Tower, a subjective conclusion, the objective truth, defining truth, relativistic, its subtle, tirade harangue fulmination, discursive, who designed it?, maybe he stole that plan, the more you don’t examine and are unable to reexamine stuff…, religious truth, truths which motivation action, William James, pragmatism, because it was false, smoke sacrifice to the gods was meaningless, intersecting with other science fiction stories, Living Space by Isaac Asimov, king of your own planet, a real estate story, jack hammering off the coast of Labrador, a Nazi universe, Genghis Khan, mythological pseudo-historical figure, the universe does and doesn’t care about you, making a connection with science, those most interested in religion were scientists, Isaac Newton, the original Bible Code person, the impact might have been diluted, these people don’t die, there is no biology, this culture built up around air-stations, eating as a cultural event, if you get this you can tell the story, The Nine Billion Names Of God and The Star by Arthur C. Clarke, sacrificed, hits Paul in the feels, the three narcissistic wounds, Sigmund Freud, the Earth is not the center, Darwin and evolution, that the ego thinks it is free is an illusion, strong with archaeological proofs, freedom, no final answer, interesting concepts, Olaf Stapledon, a whole book from one paragraph of Starmaker, Jorge Luis Borges, The Library Of Babel, standing room for sleeping, why this illusory duplication, this is not our world, there’s no food, they’re more like robots in a certain sense, all the argon is coming to them from something beneath them, who invented the robots?, a blank slate, the robot equivalent, an analogy of the heat death of the universe, “we existed we were real”, a self contained universe, a navel gazing story, working the same theme, Jesus in South America (the God of Dreams) [The Circular Ruins], teaching the A.I.s consciousness, self-dissecting, a good example that doesn’t exist in the same way as ours does, the transference between universes, the prism, Anxiety Is The Dizziness Of Freedom, Until The End Of The World (1999), replaying your dreams, so much about them, the perfect obsessive movie for you, gazing into who you are, the machine allows you to navel gaze, fomo = fear of missing out, the grass is greener, a simple idea, fragmenting kaleidoscopic versions of reality, only a few months old and it was going up in value, diminishing returns, amazing sparky thoughts, pirated songs, I’d make so much money, information is the only thing passed between universes, copyrighted specifically for you, the same wound, possible yous, not being paralyzed, why not?, one of me is going to do it, destroys your ordinary criteria for action, a high dose of neg-entropy, the school shooters, what effect would it have, Jesse derives solace from being (sort of) a determinist, science fiction about the difficulty of weather prediction, are there more murders now?, outliers, fads, more of the same, All The Myriad Ways by Larry Niven, you might lose your will to do things, What’s Expected Of Us, whichever universe you’re in, Vanessa, an unstable person, Counterpart, A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, as Evan pointed out on his podcast, the universe is very small, seeing what’s going on outside, they’re all blending together, he thought he had done so much work, that’s much to harsh, words can sometimes resonate very deeply, the non-simple truth, a reality we are distantly connected to, poor connections, emergent things, to know what truth is (is tough), a longer meditation, the longest thing he’s ever written, either these people are wasting their lives or we’re all wasting our lives, where’s the truth there WAYNE?, to leap into agnosticism, relate to our interpretation of reality, we can only do what we can do, the motif of harmful sensation, The Imp Of The Perverse, physical or mental damage you can suffer, explicitly shoutsout to H.P. Lovecraft, akinetic mutism, won’t or can’t speak or won’t or can’t move, the motif of harmful sensation, a truly convincing argument that life is pointless might qualify, it doesn’t matter, a thread running through (or more than one), Ted Chiang has got a brain, the Lovecraftian horror, like a cognitive plague, a thought that explores the thinker, a Godel sentence, I try to act as if or rather action happens, pretend you have free will, believing the lie is the only way to avoid this waking coma, civilization relies on self-deception (perhaps it always has), The Merchant And The Alchemist’s Gate, living it, this universe might have slipped into equilibrium with nothing more than a quiet hiss, that in itself is beauty, in the next bottle over, the Complete Works of Shakespeare except it’s “Shmamlet”, the meaning is fake, Paul’s fear, robot descendants,
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
not a horror story but a science fiction truth, truths always in refinement, David Hume, past behavior, Robert Wright’s interview with Ted Chiang, The Story Of Your Life, a silly seeming story, Arrival, are you going to roll up into a little ball or are you going to affirm it?, the pharmacon, poison and medicine, make you a paralyzed mute or a creative, it takes all that time or that care to make that stuff literary, Wayne’s in a little ball, Wayne’s gonna complain, some stuff’s going to happen, get some jokes in there, WTF, we’re all gonna be specks in a layer of basalt, Tony C. Smith’s StarShipSofa, a Ted Chiang fan forever now, four stories, nested stories, Arabian Nights, Scheherazade, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, The Garden Of Forking Paths, you can read it forever, a story that’s circular, in the exact middle you have a point around which everything swirls, the knowledge for where the treasure under the tree came from, super symmetrical, so wonderful, a time travel story in which there’s no technological difference, no traditional time travel tropes, there’s no predicting eclipse, he steals from himself, he predicts the albino baby and gets out of prison, The Diamond Necklace or The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant, there’s the pit of despair, the story is the treasure, we as the prince get the benefit, why the title is Exhalation: Stories, The Great Silence, John Paul Sartre with possible worlds, Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny, whatever works is true, the suppression of this technology because of the ruling class, nowhere for that to go, a remaking of humanity, thinking about childrearing while childrearing, mimetic fiction is all about divorces, my experience with my marriage, different parents have different levels of interest in their own child’s rearing, would have benefited the working class, the washing machine is liberatory, television as the babysitter, smartphones, is that wrong, a typical Ted Chiang thing, an actual syndrome: psychosocial dwarfism, growth hormones stop operating, emotional malnutrition, not an ideal human state, really bougie, homeschooling, unschooling, the class dimension, a survival strategy, a metaphor for public schooling, The Electric Ant by Philip K. Dick, Nanny by Philip K. Dick, the planned obsolescence angle, aloof parents, more attached to the nanny than to the parents, gladiatorial nannies, what if they trigger while raising the kids, if you follow police state logic, hands are dangerous weapons, tape their mouths up, and kill everybody (to be safe), the rational childcare device, a more cutesy vignette
reading, or being read, Ted Chiang stories, is like quaffing pure liters of undiluted SCIENCE FICTION from the fount in which it was first forged. And I tell you, without hyperbole, that Science Fiction absolutely cannot die as long as TED CHIANG lives and writes it.
asking and posing the big questions, natural science, parallel universes, asking questions, collecting and systematizing, that guy we didn’t like, The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, “proving things”, weapons of mass destruction, 17 intelligence agencies, how can we falsify this?, holy shit he was right!, thought experiments, thinking them through completely, exploring a philosophical point, you can’t do it with mimetic fiction, what happens if…, that’s what they all are, the author afterwords offer insight, that I’m taking my head apart scene, a reverse infodump, we can’t understand ourselves, arguments like proverbs (suck), limiting understanding, refusing that limit, there’s no Godellian self-impossibility, what Dick does, almost like a drug metaphor, the thought’s he’s having and the thoughts he’s expressing, if you want to get into a big fight, tell me my hand is not my hand, memory, Hal, the difference, Ted Chiang doesn’t have this paranoia, adjacent to technology, the guy measuring the ether, how do we know what we know, the art installation for The Great Silence, Alex the talking parrot, very emotional, their beak is kind of their hand, emotional realities, those Alex videos, a whole other mind we have access to through regular English, these humans are looking for intelligence in the universe, the search for terrestrial intelligence, pretty cool, kinda heartbreaking, the whole Alex thing, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish by Douglas Adams, Arecibo, it hears the voice of creation, the lasting breath, spirit as the breath of God, the breath is not me, he’s having it both ways, these copper plates, audio versus text, in another five years, Wayne would personally recommend the book and the audiobook, here’s where I got the idea, at the end of every story, as a collection, this book we can hand off to people, I feel stupid when I’m reading stupid, reading this makes me feel like I’m the genius that I am, I’m sophisticated, I’m so stupid, not having brilliant ideas all day long, a guy practicing his words for his sermon, thinking on aloud, thinking on paper, writing therapy, cast them out of you, people are made of stories.
Posted by Jesse Willis