Tony Smith’s revived The Sofanauts podcast includes a recent interview with legendary narrator Stefan Rudnicki!
|MP3|
Podcast feed: http://sofanauts.com/category/podcast/feed/
Posted by Jesse Willis
Tag: interview
Hunter’s Planet Of the Apes Archive: BBC interview with Hunter Goatley
Hunter Goatley’s Planet Of The Apes Archive has been on my radar since 2007. That’s when I discovered the abridged audiobook reading of Pierre Boulle’s Planet Of The Apes (La Planète Des Singes) original novel there. It’s still available and still excellent.
What’s new over there is this BBC Radio 3 Three Counties Radio interview, by Roberto Perron, with Hunter Goatley. Among other things Goatley discusses Rise Of The Planet of the Apes. |MP3|
1979 Philip K. Dick interview with Charles Platt (Santa Ana, California)
This essential interview with Philip K. Dick, conducted by Charles Platt and recorded in 1979 in Santa Ana, California, is sure to be immensely important for Dick scholars. It was recorded for Platt’s book Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction.
Here’s the video converted back to audio, |MP3| and although it isn’t huffduffable, it is downloadable.
Notes:
-Dick was “plenty peculiar” because he read books
-he wasn’t gay despite his hanging around with gay friends
-Quakers were about the only group in the world Dick didn’t have some sort of grievance against
-Dick claims to have been kicked out of university for failing mandatory ROTC training
-Dick read The World Of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt and found in it great inspiration for his ideas about the perception of reality and reality itself
-Dick perceived his high school geometry teacher as a mechanism
–Roog and other “interior projection stories”
-Dick’s fiction can be incomprehensible if you do not accept his premise (namely that “each of us lives in a unique world.”)
–Martian Time Slip.
-When Dick went to a psychotherapist he was told he was an alcoholic (despite his being a teetotaler)
-“attack therapy”
-totalitarian communities
-why Dick writes about anti-heroes
-paranoia
-“I am inevitably persuaded by every argument that is brought to bare”
-private worlds
–The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch
–Time Out Of Joint
-artificial memories / false memories
-the influence of drugs on Dick’s writing was only in the output (using amphetamines he was completing 60 finished pages per day)
-Dick’s one real acid trip
–A Scanner Darkly
-cats and cat curiosity
-Carl Jung and “the collective unconscious”
-John Belushi (on Saturday Night Live)
-WWI and the battle of The Marne
-Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky
-WWI and the battle of The Marne
-Dick’s father fought in WWI (in the 5th Marines) and told Philip the stories about it
–All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
-“the god of this world is evil”
–Maze Of Death
–Ubik
–Eye In The Sky
-WWII
-something is terrible is wrong (when everyone cheers a burning man)
-empathy for animals (human and rodent)
-the killing of a rat (haunted Dick)
-Buddha
–Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
-lambs and sheep
–Valis (his then latest novel)
-standing on the shoulders of giants
-disorder (evil) -> order (benign)
-Dick claims to have been eccentric but not insane
-“it fired my agent, it fired my publisher” (it being the spirit that was possessing him)
-Dick’s letter to the Roman Catholic Church (about the miracle that occurred)
-conspiracies
-the Cumaean Sibyl informed Dick that the American Republic is in danger of turning into the American Empire (in 1974)
-PKD on censorship (he’s against it, unless you aren’t)
-the War Of The Spanish Lowlands
-Congressman Charles E. Wiggins got letters from Dick (written while he was possessed by the spirit of the Cumaean Sibyl)
-the Nixon tape transcripts were forgeries (according to Dick’s Cumaean Sibyl)
-the Paul Williams article in Rolling Stone on Dick
-Dick’s tutelary spirit promised to return Dick to a garden upon his deathbed
–Diana
-Norman Spinrad
-“I’m in the Portuguese States Of America”
-a Chinese finger trap
–We Can Build You
-Platt: “Do you recognize the possibility that you were talking to yourself?” Dick: “Yes.”
-multiple personalities
-Archimedes principle
–Faith Of Our Fathers
-Ursula K. Le Guin thought Dick was crazy
-pre-socratic philosophy
[via SFSignal.com and youtubemp3.tv]
Posted by Jesse Willis
CBC Q: Interview with Margaret Atwood
Host Jian Ghomeshi of CBC Radio One’s Q has an astounding new interview with Margaret Atwood. Atwood’s latest book, In Other Worlds: SF And The Human Imagination, can be found in the “Literary Criticism” section of your local paperbook store.
Gomeshi talked to Atwood about the realistic novel, comics, Weird Tales and the “sluttish” reputation of SF.
One point in the interview left me confused and asking questions. Atwood claimed that “Conan the Barbarian is the literary descendant of Walt Whitman … and Henry James”.
I am floored.
What the fuck is she talking about?
Seriously, did she misspeak?
Did she mean to say that Robert E. Howard himself was their literary descendant?
Surely she didn’t mean the the character. Either way I don’t get it.
Or maybe she meant the stories themselves were somehow in the tradition of Walt Whitman and Henry James??? How could that be?
No matter how I look at it I don’t see how either Walt Whitman or Henry James ties into Howard. It just doesn’t make any kind of sense to me.
Does anybody know what the hell Atwood meant by that?
Seriously, I do not get it.
Will I have to buy her book to understand this thesis?
Have a listen |MP3|.
Podcast feed: http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/qpodcast.xml
Posted by Jesse Willis
P.S. CBC, please release Apocalypse Al. You can call it “scientific romance” or something else, just release it.
Inkstuds: Interview with Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra of Y: The Last Man
There’s an interesting 2008 interview with Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, the writer and artist behind Y: the Last Man, right here |MP3|. Here’s the description:
The inkstuds were joined by two stellar creators today. Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra have been doing Y the Last Man for the 5 years, and just released the last issue of their acclaimed series. It was a really neat chat about there collaborative work and the series.
Posted by Jesse Willis
FiveBooks Interviews – Orson Scott Card
One of the blogs I follow is FiveBooks, a segment of The Browser: Writing Worth Reading. The site features a daily interview of a renowned authority, invited to discuss his or her area of expertise and provide his or her choice of the best five books to read on that topic. It ranges from fiction to non-fiction, across all genres and subject matters. I like having it in my Google reader because I can just skip the topics that don’t interest me, while those that do have added to my to-read list exponentially.
Recently, Orson Scott Card was given this opportunity. He chose five books that will get readers hooked on science fiction, even if they are new to the genre. Card also briefly discusses the development of the genre itself. Check it out and tell me if these are the five you would have chosen. I thought it might be a slight cop-out to choose two anthologies as two of his five selections, except I keep hearing about one of them as a volume that drew science fiction fans into the genre as children.
Posted by Jenny Colvin