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 #810 – READALONG: Time Is The Simplest Thing by Clifford D. Simak

Jesse, Terence Blake, and Jonathan Weichsel talk about Time Is The Simplest Thing by Clifford D. Simak

Talked about on today’s show:
The Fisherman, serialized in Analog, April 1961, a really good scene, fits the story, so ubiquitous, very surprising, pictograms in the text, this book is pretty hip, an Alfred Bester book, The Demolished Man, the mutants are an oppressed species, kinda derivative, Starman Jones, hitchhiking across country, hitches a ride, very Campbellian, Americana stuff, the whole premise is there to please Campbell, just an easy sale, lay bare sneaking suspicion, grew and grew and then waned, a retelling of the story of Jesus, the hero’s journey, goes into the outside, comes out of the cave, he’s a teacher, 10 pages, a Jesus thing, all that suffering goes on him, his great gift, people aren’t even happy with that, fishhook is big tech, Jonathan is Stone, Jesse is Finn, it has become corrupt, it is the church, the universities, corporations, Jesse is not Finn, the technology is great the organization is bad, the technology is bad, institutionalist stuck between the two philosophies, the word Stone, a guy named Peter, Godfrey Stone, a religious book, parallel scenes, lost in the willow island, The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, goes to paradise, he’s got the Good News, also a science fiction story, ah but it is a fantasy, shownoting, 7 people talking about a Philip K. Dick story, thinking about Paul Weimer, raised under a religion, strong opinions, so strange, deeply flawed, compelled with the journey, very solid, repeat itself a couple of times, what a book!, compelling and interesting, The Goblin Reservation, gets the knowledge, the internal journey, all the monsters are real, physics are different, buy this artifact, bringing back knowledge from the stars, a different tone, this has serious conflict in it, conflicts easily overcome very quickly, that blows Jesse’s theory, hunting the monster, hidden agenda, subterfuge, intent to kill, a whole society that is full of resentment, what Paul would have thought of this book, where’s the US government?, absent, not a conspiracy, responding to reality, star signs, decorating the truck, Stars of David, moon and star of Islam, the worries of witchcraft, science has been discredited, if Paul were on the show, we just went through COVID, I am the science, big pharmaceutical companies, don’t do your own research now, counter-science propaganda, that’s just in people’s heads, how science actual is, science fiction books have been replaced by fantasy, a hard to classify book, in a science fiction magazine, such a hugely silly premise, what hard fantasy was, Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away, fantasy stuff is science, show me, the Campbell problem, Henry Kuttner’s Mutant, Jack Williamson’s Golden Blood, Dragon’s Island, hiding mutants, algae, weird book, The Skull by Philip K. Dick, basically The Terminator (1984), a religious figure, chipped tooth, he is that guy, doing Jesus style stuff, a cafe, quivering boobs, goes back in time again, the mob comes for him, the cosmic joke being played on him, scenes like that, the Joseph Smith story, also Abdul Al Hazred, the Mohamed story, the country, how people are in it now, company stores, trading posts, the propaganda, industries out of business, new tech all the time, disrupting the no-nothing non-Slans, making them vote for Trump, Fishhook is for profit, they’re cheap, a dystopia for non-psi people, a way for Simak to sell to John W. Campbell, big tech, chatbots, image generators, doing this for your good, the taxi industry, Uber, Bezos’ Gazelle Strategy, democratizing publishing, doing that too, creating a problem in order to provide a solution to that problem, doing both, city governments, drive up the price of the taxis, a license, non-licensed taxi, make people work for less, what we’re seeing in this book is a broken United States, exported all its industry, resentment in the countryside, business man, they outlive their value, what the book’s all about, an institution that’s outlived its usefulness, Parries, why did you think the word Parry was interested, an Alan Moore comic, to parry a blow, Providence, art by Jacen Burrows, disjointed and bad and also really good, a suicide booth, from Robert W. Chambers’ The Repairer Of Reputations, wordlessly, Peri, New York in the 1930s, outstanding, a guy is killing himself, the lover of Robert Black, a moth flying around, the moth lands on the suicide building, a term for the spirit of a person, Iranian?, parry, leaves his body, go to another planet, information, a sleeping bag that’s a wolf, the wine, tech that they bring back, how to build a fire, disrupt industries, the great premise of this book, other layer, priest, sheriff, crowd coming to kill him, happens again and again, seems to be book length rather than story length, reading into it, derogatory slurs, peepers in Alfred Bester, the Psi-Corps, The Demolished Man, a great book with lots of pictograms, the X-Men story, Campbellian, Bryan Singer made them the gays, also the gays, circling the image of the moth, derived from Chambers, basically death, your body is a chrysalis, leaving their body and going to other planets, coming back to a husk, the solution is the fusion of mind and body, the gross way, the pinkness, explain the pinkness, the logic behind it, a spirit, winged spirits, peris are exquisite winged spirits, mischievous beings denied entry to paradise, djinns and devis, similar in angels to look, spelling is different, pronunciation is the same, the girl who is a newspaperman is Simak himself, or maybe Murray Leinster, Mary Magdalene, with sin, blank slate, not his greatest novel, mighty themes, just fantasy that has no real bearing on reality, Simak’s philosophical digressions, cosmic or political, plot sucks, the countryside, Mexico to wherever, it is boring, that Leigh Brackett story, aliens, black people not being allowed to go into towns, Lovecraft Country, stolen valour, Lovecraft is evil and racist, the sequel has another stolen valour in the title, coloured, it’s like that, these people are ostracized, a paranormal ability, Philip K. Dick stories with mutants, witches Halloweening in the sky, are werewolves real?, having it both ways, dragons are people sitting on hoards, komodo dragons, science fiction and fantasy and metaphors, the ending, the most modern part of the book, the false flag operation, the center of every modern conspiracy theory, the terrorists, Hamas etc., this plot play out, conspiracy theory sphere, a very specific false flag operation, pretends to be a parry leader, the league of evil mutants, respond by kill all the parries, a very modern idea, here in 1961, a historical antecedent, false flags are real, happened during WWII, happened prior to WWII, propaganda and sets of beliefs, after a certain point people get behind it, Pearl Harbor, immediately turning to the Nazis, disputes, denying fuel, even whales, 19th century dispute over whaling, Roosevelt, operation shoestring, was god doing a false flag with Jesus?, you know what these humans need…, they’re gonna execute him, what he provoked instead is Christian antisemitism, at the party, on the run, where is this gonna go?, things happen again and again, this is all fun but how many canoe rides do we need, 14 or younger, 56 years ago, the main plot points, the first meeting with the pinkness, Hi Pal, I trade with you my mind, real trading, cat’s bag of tricks, searching within, Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan, do science in the world then go to the cave and mortify themselves, triggered to Paul, Kim Stanley Robinson book, depressed by Aurora, Plato’s Cave, amnesis, draw knowledge out of forgotten memory, crisis situation, the drawing out, solving a crisis, remembering something, another crisis, the unmentioned book Stranger In A Strange Land, a bad character, Valentine Michael Smith, Forrest Gump (1994), stumbling through the story of Jesus, getting girlfriends, evil because popular, survive the Vietnam War, got it wrong, he follows the rules, uh huh, she gets aids and dies, buy in without thinking about it, fight Muhammad Ali, as if it, never go full retard, Tropic Thunder (2008), anti-intellectual and disingenuous, Star Wars vs. Sorcerer, the worst instinct in humans, Tarzan is an empiricist, and objection to rationalists, he can send people away, a true believer in Fishhook, working in Silicon Valley fucking everybody over, nice car, nice house, that’s the cost, then leaving, fixing a truck, leads to a transformation, just the things that you could carry, The Prince And The Pauper, Sullivan’s Travels (1941), riding the rails, comes back to Hollywood a changed person, the poors, a comedy movie to help them laugh, be like Jack London, a hobo, a communist, you gotta pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, bro, that’s why they’re going to Eden, with cats, killed their enemies, rapturing themselves, the promised land, going with axes, the Book of Numbers, Eden and Heaven are the same thing, the totality of your eclipse, some shitlibs, if they’re getting raptured by the eclipse, clutching their guns, deep in the liberal hivemind, do their guns get raptured with them?, leaving the non-peepers to rot, this book is bad because it doesn’t have a coherent thesis, come back for more tools, this is why this John W. Campbell push, a murder mystery, sparky stuff, science fiction is about the engagement of technology with humans, ideas, we do become mob-like, staunch Biden supporters, there’s a mass of mob that are low and stupid, and they should be left behind, riding the rails, mob justice, the interlude with the priest, a cool interesting book, more like Moses than Jesus, the idol being the machine?, money, these people don’t deserve to go to the promised land, the boomers, we could help you but we’re kinda scared to, the resort town, strange ideas from space, the Parry town, we sympathize, we’re scared, the kids help, the kids get to go to Jerusalem, to prevent a genocide, with The Skull, sacrificed at the end of the story, a broken, book, but still good, the solution is to transcend, when people think of Buddhism, one kind of Buddhism, he refuses to got to Nirvana, all the different symbols, which one works, all religions have some truth to them, the fallacy, a bad move, some can teleport, others can’t, can understand this concept from the Inferno planet, they’re homo superior, the x gene, all their powers are different, go bodily to Paradise, you’re never going to get to the stars, you wasted your time on science, tantric tai-chi, not anybody, it doesn’t give an explanation, paranormal skills in general, trynna sell a book to John W. Campbell, evil connotations around it, preach, it doesn’t got that extra step, an evil book: Beggars In Spain, some people are genetically better, they can study all day and night, this meritocracy, I’m smarter than you and you, fuck right off Nancy Kress, strong stuff about the resentment of the population, race and class, starts off superwell, a value judgement, somebody who does not believe in PK, hence he bought it, letters about this book?, didn’t buy into this peeper shit, super ubiquitous, it’s in Dune, an infection you have to deal with it, COVID, paxlovid, all in the news right now, do you have covid? is it covid?, the sniffles, sore throat, it’ll go away, it always does, an obsessive passion, not going out at night, late 70s, pegged as the 60s, the roads not being kept up, new tech, rolling into the future with new tech disrupting everything, the flyover country, the rustbelts, American RAH RAH industrialism, David Cronenberg, eXistenZ (1999), on the run chased by a corporation, David Lynch, noir element, neo noir, classic noir, femme fatale, she looks good, she knows how to dress, makeup described, hardboiled people, unearned, other parts he’s soft boiled, academic, muscular shit, worst Simak book?, he could have been Veronica Lake, writer brain upset, go against credibility, plotting, entertaining, he meets Paul on the road, the apostle, why is he going on the road, Simak has to recapitulate all these stories, carrying a load of something, a star machine, Shepherd Blaine, the good shepherd, a blankness, yellow, blah, clueing in, this is a religious book for sure, old paperbacks, lots of spaceships, Mischa Burnett tweet, tweet go wrong on him, he’s wrong about this but I like him, an arms race for cover art, authors should not participate, people are visual creatures, Alex PulpCovers, just make sure your name is on the cover, let the good writing get people interested in your writing, what got you interested in being a reader, you read books now, the theory of the shunt, not the line of least resistance, there’s cow patties to jump in, a book with a dragon on the cover, a little invisible guy, what is this book?, that’s The Hobbit, big pile of gold, becoming interested in reading, in the back of his mind at all times, an autodidact, a janitor at a university, university library, a university education, they rejected him, he’s not one of them, self-publishing, very different ideas, Small Worlds, a blue planet, a yellow corona, Atlas Of Bad Roads, terrible covers, he’s wrong, given something think about him, maybe it is a great book, the cover does not code at all, spaceship on the cover, a broken promise, if you’re not buying Analog, an old truck on the cover, a good cover, an advertisement, a collection of short stories, good marketing, objecting to a different thing, an arms race, why are arms races bad?, who’s going to get hurt in this war, justifying, an ill conceived tweet, only reaching his existent fans, a mixture of good rating and bad ratings, Jonathan’s books have good covers, cover idea, another anthology, describing an illustration, raise money on kickstarter, Sword & Scandal, violent and sexually explicit, an ampersand, scantily clad or nude, a male barbarian, female barbarian in chainmail bikini, miss a trick, grab her by the chainmail bikini pussy, hard explain in an image, looking shocked, Hillary Clinton face, topless is the safer way to go, people understand what is going on, harder, an awkward, big smile, in triumph, a funny image for the cover, Salome, old men in a tree?, the head of John The Baptist on a silver plate, naked and terrified, Susanna and the Elders, Book of Daniel, hot woman, princess/queen, hideous shriveled wizard, trying to explain, grab her by the chainmail bikini, a proper anthology, audiobooks, he had a bad take, a very soft dunking, bookbinding, a pile of loose paper, Endless Summer is on audiobook, Bad Dreams by Mischa Burnett, Dark Fantasies, a skull, Mischa is more popular than Jonathan, Bing chat, mirror mirror on the wall…, wearing a wimple, am I still pretty?, Catskinner, Tommy Patrick Ryan’s reading of A Present For Pat by Philip K. Dick, dialogue heavy, nice and short, almost no mistakes, time and half, read the text, listening while cooking, readalong, hikes, motivates, jogging, exercise every day, Jonathan is pretty fit, who is the more successful author, purely quantitative, the electors in the electoral college, grand wizards, grand readers, big fat readers, reading all the time, hope to interest, Exiles To Glory by Jerry Pournelle, hard science fiction, how many minutes?, 216 pages, about 5 hours?, High Justice, Birth Of Fire, technical and financial challenges, 8 hours 33 minutes vs. less than 6 hours, this is gonna be a great book, cleared cache, The Soul Of Man Under Socialism, socialism!, it has never worked, that thing that never worked?!, a social safety net, no money, heaven is socialism, falling through the cracks, getting rid of property, that guy (Martin Geeson), Willis not reliable, Evan Lampe for Starman Jones, R. Murray Gilchrist, very strange, very gay, I’m here as you summoned me, my son has to live his own life, back to France, 15 years old, go away for a few years, keep the money in the family, rich people problems, the aunt is a lich, proto-Thing On The Doorstep, ornate beautiful writing, a yellow 90s sort of story, humanskin gloves, murderess ancestor, they symbol of the stone dragon, plot wise vs. tone, not Clark Ashton Smith level, very yellow nineties, The Crimson Weaver is even gayer, tricked into going into a forest with a spider woman in it, abducted, Dungeons & Dragonsy, Will was a little mad at Jesse, no drama there, a manic side, a podcast, he can’t work a regular job, excited about selling books, misunderstanding how popular books are, media mail, servicing his hobby, retail space isn’t that expensive, foot traffic, a book town, incredibly dense, half an hour from Vancouver, the Palisades, across the river from New York City, you can’t do everything, write another book, two thing, people who’ve done it, Cirsova, help and notes, The Journey Of The Joenes, Journey Beyond Tomorrow, a tiny Pacific island, Sheckley, Mindswap, a short story guy, novels, short stories have to be good, some situations where novels are better, more crappy novels, short stories are the best form for science fiction, filling pages to get to that wordcount, the writers groups, hitting my wordcount, a crafted piece that’s exactly the right length it needs to be, a piece of art, a funny tweet, people who put PhD in their bios, that’s who they are, that’s their identity, you need to know they’re better than you, I need to be a writer, I want to be respected, written by a janitor or by a university don, might be a great writer, cover care abouter, Alex for The Not-World, pirate website, ebook guy, 10 Story Western, who cares?, getting things right is not important, Thomas Burnett Swann, Day Of The Minotaur, authors starting with the letter T, Where Is The Bird On Fire?, pretty obscure, new dude, Wayne Robbins, Their Flesh Is Soft And Tender, he’s an 80 year old, wow!, a Vietnam vet, left his leg in Vietnam, Mike Vendetti, The Greatful Corpse, Dread Exile by Paul Ernst, The Door Of Doom by Hugh B. Cave, Nameless Offspring, Fafhrd and Gray Mousers, Corpseless Coffins, come within reach, desolate miles of barren country, the native Britons, Murder Puppets, Ray Cummings and his wife, next time, we can be done, adult books, now it means stupid writing.

The Fisherman by Clifford D. Simak

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #807 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Game Of Rat And Dragon by Cordwainer Smith AND The Dragon-Queen Of Jupiter by Leigh Brackett

The SFFaudio Podcast #807 – The Game Of Rat And Dragon by Cordwainer Smith (read by Tony Addison, 38 minutes) AND The Dragon-Queen Of Jupiter by Leigh Brackett (read by Edmund Bloxam, 40 minutes). These are complete and unabridged readings of the stories (1 hour 18 minutes) followed by a discussion of them. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Will Emmons, Terence Blake, and Jonathan Weichsel

Talked about on today’s show:
Cordwainer Smith, Leigh Brackett, after Terence, before Terence, because the guy said it, which of these stories is worse than the other, one respect, more like the cinematic idea of science fiction, resolving the problems, back into the mainline of written science fiction, The Martian, engineering, conceptual all the time, higher level science fiction, it’s fantasy, engineering concepts, most of good science fiction takes place in the head, both definitions are current, a pretty picture, visually very interesting, characterization, near the worst, interesting psychological ideas, psychic cats see it as a rat, interesting setup, Instrumentalities, dystopia, neither was satisfying, formulaic and sad, sophistry, the French Foreign Legion on Jupiter, none of us using our right names, dismissed said Captain Smith, the story of the foreign legion, Alamo, Tex is in there, the first narrator, anxious about making choices, a LibriVox guy, Gregg Margarite, Phil Chenevert, Edmund Blocksam and Tony Addison, special effort, gives everybody an accent, most of them are from Venus or Mars, the Martian guys have a canal accent, extra effort, his correct interpretation of the text, that’s the French Foreign Legion, a 5 year stint, they give you ID, some French guys in there, mercenaries from other countries, safeharbour, practically a swipe from an adventure magazine, the Berber princess is a Jupiterian Queen, a fort they gotta defend from the Mexicans, every French foreign legion story, the Tex connection there, the North West frontier trope, red serge, driving a dog team, magazines like Adventure and Argosy, just French Foreign legion stories?, many movies of it too, a recent Netflix movie, [Siege of Jadotville], pyrrhic victory, a very sophisticated technique, but what did he say?, die for colonization, this is a really bad story, set on exotic planet, also titled Dragon Queen of Venus, isfdb.org, list of the changes, the Planet Stories version, Tex stirred uneasily, the heavily Jupiterian fog, the Venusian fog, Jupiter is a virgin planet, Venus is a virgin planet, 1941 Jupiter is a gas giant, not good at astronomy, a titillating queen of Jupiter/Venus, Earth and Mars are running out of food, lebensraum, lamest fucking excuse, Fort Washington, she’s bad at what she’s doing, the description of the lady on the dragon, she identifies with the native people, the heroes are the colonizers, kinda jerks, wins by luck, this thing with rust, taken with the images, we don’t get to know anything about the Dragon Queen Of Jupiter, maybe these horrible colonizers will be so entranced they’ll go over to this side, Jesse, why are you so stupid, there’s no time left for that, it just can’t happen here, wasn’t up to it, badly constructed, sometimes the oafs win, Alpha Centauri Or Die!, a fixup, native chick, there are these outposts, such a fuckin obvious lie, the reason we’re here colonizing Jupiter, the Indians on earth, kinda terrible, slow low pitch pablum, glimpse of a pretty girl on a dragon, hashtag sad, make the colonizers grotesque, sitting in a pot being boiled alive, something to this story, two reasons why this story sucks, ideology of this story is interesting, civilize these people by killing them, manifest destiny in space, a cultural document worth examining, mainstream American ideology 1941, really bad science fiction, the thing with the water coming out of your body, stupid, we can see that science fiction can be bad, saves this story, what’s extraordinary about it is that it’s a genre mismatch, some detachment, the government mandate of Mars/Earth, countries team up to extract from other countries, not self-reflective, there’s no pushback to the narrative, Hertford’s Jungles Of Jupiter, Alice In Wonderland, swamplands [of jupiter], animalcules, absorb all water vapour, dormant during the rainy season, attempting an ecosystem to explain dragons, a shoehorned idea, elsewhere as well, Spain has a foreign legion, an interesting but bad story, allowed, Jesse’s right again, a movie called The 7th Dawn (1964), the documentary on Cordwainer Smith, hagiographic, designed to serve a political agenda, a we love Cordwainer Smith movie, looking thin, his service during the Malayan Emergency, how many other movies are set during the Malayan Emergency, had they called it a war the insurance companies wouldn’t pay, rubber plantation guys are running Malaysia, WWII is over please fuck off, the British and Australians and Cordwainer Smith all get around and fucking around and finding out, heads cut off, text chat, The Rediscovery, local Malaysian girl, political satire, from a movie poster, this horror must end, holding human heads and hands, a very strange duck and a very strange bird, what if this!?, psychic powers, telepathy, Bester has a good book on it, John W. Campbell bullshit, ruminating on the relationships between humans and their partners, cats, everything is symbolic, what are the dragons, what are the cats?, they’re women, not even submerged, seas of rotting fish, different relationships with different cats, this entity out there, the enemy of people and cats, cats view rats as an enemy, viewing the enemy as a predator vs viewing the enemy as a prey, totally political, do some comparisons, why is he such a weird animal, another CIA person, ideas about womens’ place in the world, The Screwfly Solution, mens’ place in the world and vice versa, Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, all about here, all about him, Tolkien’s all about Tolkien, cats, cats, the cat element, I can see why Will is attracted to Cordwainer Smith, he had 11 cats, telling himself, what he’s doing for a living, one of the incidents, help surrendering Chinese soldiers not be killed, a very nice story, what did he do during the Malaysian emergency, working for the bad guys, how much he loved the Chinese people, the tragedy, the word genocide, the Great Leap Forward, little tidbit, deep in his bones, his opposition to communism, without suffering in the world humans can’t strive, socialism will remove suffering, suffered a lot of physical trauma, the eye, always being sick, pull out his glass eye to punctuate his lectures, take Heinlein, Tolkien, science fiction in space, but not so much about science fiction as it is about human possibility, a sensitive writer who write about people and their ways, personal in so many ways, a European dragon, a Chinese dragons, in European mythology, they’re evil kings, they’re hoarders, dragons/rats have a monopoly on space, Orson Scott Card, a pocket version of Edner’s Game, certain cats in your house are telepathic, destroyed at will, dreams infected, understanding this very strange man, “my boat of institutions are bullying to only one side” a key to understand, soaked in that story, when does Ender’s Game exist as a book, why do people like it?, Starship Troopers exists, any adult person and what they’re response to war is, humans have been making a kind of mistake, what is your relationship to war?, turns it inward, personal experience of war rather than the philosophical relationship to war, how we ought to relate to the state, why I support the Vietnam War, Tolkien’s response to WWI, trynna dunk on me, guy thinks there are no good kinds, Aragorn, a guy who was a king who didn’t do a lot of bad stuff, the Romanoffs were really nice to their children, Cordwainer Smith liked his cats, Hitler had a dog, he liked his dog, Psychological Warfare, rationalize it to “I’m helping”, Sun Yat-sen, revered by nationalist and the communists, riven with European and American exploiters, Korea, there’s a genocide, that war of foreign aggression, seems small scale, that’s sophistry, propaganda is often sophistry, tricking, a fantasy of escape like Tolkien, but done via a mode of Starship Troopers, this guy was a freak who liked cats, Heinlein vibes, little girl and middle aged man, fighting in subspace, light explosions, everything is symbolic, the psyche, experience as a spook, Tolkien was in WWI, it isn’t “no more kings”, it’s retreat into the fantasy, an apolitical response to a political situation, political quietism, why Tolkien didn’t like Dune, what makes the Harkonnens bad is they’re too hasty, the Atredies are wise and kindly masters who wage Jihad, we can do better than this by leaving earth and going to a secondary world, Dungeons & Dragons wheelchairs, they had wheelchairs back in medieval times, why wouldn’t they use magic to cure disabilities, what’s fictional, what’s real, famous Leigh Brackett story about green aliens driving a car in the South, giving them, what’s the C word?, about humanity, that’s what Star Trek does really well, you know what it’s about, why Cordwainer Smith is never going to be a mainstream guy, making Paul the good guy at the end of Dune 2, liking Paul as a hero, Paul mopes around, who is Zendaya, Chani, how the Japanese get Cordwainer Smith, the anime where the cats are doing Game Of Rat And Dragon, they also like E.E. Doc Smith, one novel, The Skylark Of Space, a good series, space opera, whenever Scotty has a problem on the Enterprise he’s channelling, character continuation from book to book, they age approrpriately from book to book, what a series should do, inventing tech on the fly during space battles, Scotty’s role on Star Trek, finds a way to break the laws of physics, make this shit go lightspeed, slaps it on the dashboard, Lazarus Long, Time Enough For Love, Heinlein doing Doc Smith, unless Akira Kurosawa it is impenetrable, doing it in a science fiction setting, cats are a dead end, can’t have babies with the cat, can’t relate to women, quick beyond all dreams of speed, undemanding, women demand things, where can you find a woman or a man or a friend, compatible with you at the animal level, culture, a bit like the woman nurse at the end, big and strong and beautiful and proud, stroke a cat, it’ll let you know, sidle up to your wife, put my slippers on to sidle up silently, literally talking about cats, almost 55 years ago, can’t quite remember what’s in this, magical in Cordwainer Smith’s style, sharp scientific concepts, everything, perspectivism, the fans are slans theorem, the cats are part of the escape, it’s a dead end and not true, Lord Of The Rings is a dead end, Christians on the internet, Theoden the steward, wants to throw himself on the fire, Christian symbology in there, life lessons, a beautiful fantasy, a quote attributed to Robert E. Howard, ‘one day you people will hope for a man with a sword’, circumspect, a piece of art, he shows you it’s a dead end, the horror of loving something you can never possesses, love is a dead end, you can’t find that with other humans, animalicules, sveltness, can’t find it in a woman, castrating nobodies, a woman with a strong personality, willing to go into rut and the right time, speed and grace and whatever alogical components of emotion that can be honoured, people who don’t understand him, the intensity of the war, the battle, like a computer game, in the title, a haunting title, divided up, turned everything into game theory, a piece of art, not his last word, green and purple, and counted ships, pinlighting, I’m cranching right now, Tolkien and Herbert, the thumb for the Andromeda, the ring finger, the thumb of the other hand, lost as people realized, planoforming, flatted yourself down into two dimensions, like nothing much, a sore tooth, a painful flash of light around the eyes, sitting in the Fighting Room, ticking around inside his head, for a second or a year, loose in the up and out, pimples on his telepathic mind, somewhere in this outer space, Man had never encountered, the light of the suns, drawing on Lovecraft, a lot of physical pain always, why?, a guy who physically felt a lot of pain, pleasure in ideas, pleasure in cats, what is he escaping from?, a bad man, a bad lady, working for the bad people, making art, the culture of the CIA in the mid20th century, culturally very liberal, Jackson Pollock, they know they were wrong, art by escaping, rock music, I like it, Laurel Canyon and creep around there, that’s bad, to serve an agenda is bad, woke up in the morning and told themselves they were good, the beautiful art they were making, Tiptree, Jr., Philip K. Dick was very bad, reported them secretly to the FBI, the way H.P. Lovecraft was bad, the life of someone to their creation, you could imagine in his psyche, inside him from a very young age, and lots of other things, a concrete application, that’s the bad step, so called good, not automatically tainted, can work in either direction, we write what we know, we know things that we’ve never experienced, from previous lives, me from a long time ago, something he knows, mediates that through his experiences, mostly reading, travels to places, does things, writes what he knows, does it symbolically, he does know what war is, saw how bad it was, when Leigh Brackett writes about the French Foreign legion, dressing up in a costume, wearing a sword, from a result, a different plane of existence, he was in the game, so symbolic, disagreed with American idea, disagree with the American ideas, eventually disagree with it, what do makes you a bad person, not what you think, the means are bad, justifies, any other reckoning, if we’re trying to figure out why Cordwainer Smith was acting like a CIA man, an American who can help people, the same job, probably not getting paid for it in the normal fashion, agent for government, why it’s called the emergency rather than a war, its about finance, working for United Fruit, stockholders back in America, rubber plantation owners, why those heads are gettiing cut off, we gotta extract because we want our money, twists himself into knots, become enlighten, savages civilized, a lady who’s not as sophisticated, fun but it aint got any intellectual heft, much more like Frank Herbert than E.E. Doc Smith, the Lovecraft comparison, Space Lords, very dreamy, very weird, fascinating, nothing that’s hidden, he’s not explaining anything, her most vivid one, nothing but depth, nothing on the service, both have the word dragon in the title, relationships with women, what?!, more thoughts about that, written by a woman, the woman dragon queen as this sort of ideal of beauty and savage beauty on a pedestal, but she loses to the oafs, a ruse instead of her wild power, married twice, especially his second wife, the women that are shown are silly, sterotypes, they don’t understand that he’s risking his life, the cat is sort of what a real woman would be, so heavily symbolic it’s made unattainable, hence he needs to write more to get there, The Ballad Of Lost C’Mell, strawman a woman?, mythology and classical stories, Joan of Arc, what is this based on where does this come from, with regard to this one, you get in an airplane, a frail guy with a lot of pains, you travel, you pet your cat and then you do your business, ruminating on this, two people take a bus trip, focused vs. unfocused experience, four people do a podcast together, the words are recorded, no way to get inside the experience, capital I idea, say it a different way, the American Hypothesis, the ideology, the other hyponthesis beside it, sometimes you’re a cat, transitional space between me and my interlocutors, a fuzz and a blur, not even an I either, the neuralink patient to write a tweet, read books through neuralink, absorb books, possible, just another input output, getting by appeal or electric shock, absorb it linearly, captial S for solar system, they don’t hit punctuation, I read a book, you can’t see the font therefore you’re not reading it, might not be listening, reading is an active activity, hooked up to computer at a recieving end, how do you compose a tweet, go back and fix, different kind of fixes, always not capitalize i-s or beginning of sentences, fix mistakes, a little trick, leave of the e in the, what does reading meaning, somehow through their brain, in science fiction, brain uploads, The Matrix, I know how to do kung-fu, upload dreams, sell dreams, experiencing it linearly, two different, try to recite the plot of any particular doctor who serial, The Brain Of Morbius, that’s not writing not reading, remembering and reading it are not the same think, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale?, conflating memory and experience, replacing pages in my old paperback, don’t grok them, not the way you learn anything, you don’t own that word, get it into your brain in multiple ways, you don’t remember how to ski you learn how to see, reading with your fingers, using braille, hard to figure out what it actually is, before there was punctuation people were telling each other stories, the primary way people, every word has every meaning it sounds like, bad good guy, good good guy, Jorge Luis Borges, how great English is, such amazing vocab, Spanish is very simple, not as rich in poetry, a man who did his own translations, with an English in mind, he knew English really well, the best translation, pay too much money to renew the translation, Death And The Compass, The Zahir, The Rejected Sorcerer, The Babylonian Lottery, Funes The Memorious, amazing what we can find, he wrote a Lovecraft story, There Are More Things, The Book Of Sand, equally monstrous house, published in 1975, as an insult somehow, a work of hack or pulp, pulp art can be beautiful, what she’s done here is bad, him doing his own thing, a mode of science fiction, he’s very different, Philip K. Dick is more mainstream, a run of PKD movies, they took the concept, very different from the novel, Hollywood, doing a genocide over there, shitliberal mindset everywhere, take the best I can out of documentaries, distracted, they thought it did, casual racism, in this day and age?, people are best understood in their time, the CCP, multiple genocide, aka the government of have, they clearly have, where have they committed the genocide, show me the videos, look up Nakba, i did but there’s conflicting reports, not a handwritten bill, a paid for poster behind glass, you can see them on twitter, children burned alive, parents holding dead children, show me that video for anything that’s going on in eastern China, they have phones in China, some trumped up terrorism, aka CIA, knife attacks, pits full of dead people, a cultural genocide, didn’t we do that in north america, that’s not happening and it didn’t happen, uyghurs, search it up, it’s not like it’s hidden, is there video, buried with bulldozers, the people who are pushing that, anti-Chinese government, Epoch Times, falungong newspaper, a very good paper for news that’s not related to China, the exiled billionaire Chinese guy, one accusation at a time, important for Paul Linebarger, kick out the emperor, a patriotic thing, Sun Yat-Sen classical Chinese garden, a public park, stickers everywhere, lampposts, Israel doesn’t occupy Gaza, condo’s movie theater, that makes it true, an authentic thing, astroturf, when the Ukraine signs were up, wealthy people’s lawns, B.C. Ferries, establishment stuff, Canada’s sending weapons to Israel, Canada does what the States wants, a stern talking to, that’s what happened with the Truckers, threatening the American economy too, come to the table, sad an pathetic, Time Is The Simplest Time, another dragon, Midnight Pulp, very interesting, total propaganda, they did a Lord Of The Rings, The Tale Of Tsar Saltan (1967), the more political one, Ilya Muromets aka The Sword And The Dragon (1956), defending Kiev, Jesse loves the idea that Russia owns Kiev?, cinemascope, brown skinned people, both live action, romantic fairytale type, Camelot stories, knights, epic, technicolor romantic, Ivanhoe, the 1939 Robin Hood, Ray Harryhausen fantasy, a different culture, the propaganda in both of those, very nationalistic, regional, satellite states, tell that to Stalin (a Georgian), after the time of Stalin, Khrushchev, he’s not that good a guy as a king, he’s a Welsh king, any [Andrei] Tarkovsky, big Hollywood movies, Spartacus, the Michael Bay movies, the Navy and the Marines, the Army puts them in there, the Chinese military, hardware, helicopters and airplanes and trucks and ships, Come And See (1985), a stock character, courtly stories, Chinese knight stories, marshall stories, so young, also haven’t watch a lot of movies, Bylina and Bogatyr, Will do you love movies?, the tiktok generation, movies? that’s not really a thing, not liking tv shows, microphone being weird, who even watches tv?, movies can be art, something else, you actively participate in movies, this is a presentation, a new film, like we treat plays, mostly we don’t do anything about them, what is this, Shakespeare, community theater is for actors and family members, youngness, films are important, a medium you can see amazing things, there are some great films, a treat for you, a period where they’re obsessed with one thing, that’s the autism, girl in her early twenties, every single episode of Bewitched, Bell, Book And Candle (1985), Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, wait til he finds out Dr. Dre got his doctorate, everybody is dunking on him, not very creative then are they?, this sample came from here, this is called art, plagiarism, when they delete their tweets your jokes don’t have context, sheesh, looking for attention, he’s thirsty, didn’t do any original research, there was lawsuits about this decades ago, everything’s a remix, not new cultural idea, there’s no problem at all in putting together this comparison, we’re talking about it, the best way to get the write answer is to give the bad answer, Boyce Watkins, PhD – Wealth is Power, my friend Jonathan, the key to understanding propaganda, more like masturbatory purposes, is he gonna make a living from that?, he didn’t write all that much, Leigh Brackett is doing it for money, Black Amazon Of Mars, a richer text, individualist vs. settler colonialism, literally have settlers, Malaysia Emergency, money from these supervisors, control and extract from the land of Malaysia, Canada started off as the first kind, Hudson’s Bay Company and North West Company, for secondary extraction, on a planet that’s already been colonized, faceless fruit company on Earth, she’s not really there for that, she’s much better at it in Black Amazon Of Mars, hacky but not total hackwork, The Halfling, furries in it, this sounds good, a novelette from 1943, she likes both fortresses and citadels, rats are not predators, Chinese mythology, suss out the meaning, magazine author renewals, but the other narrator, and other stories, hard to get people to do novelettes, quite long, hard to appreciate stories, the story about the furries, Citadel Of Lost Ages, 1950, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Virgil Finlay Thrilling Wonder, a version sold on ebay, Hertiage Auctions, interestingly composed cut and paste, layered, as a colour artist, very distinctive black & whites, his line work, Darkness, nothing else, painful to thus aroused, the secret of an icebound cave that holds the key to the future, last week is a long time ago, Test-Tube Frankenstein, a race memory story, the Palisades, a good ending, very solid, listen to this, My name is Fenway, he told the voice, Central Park in the morning after the rain, I need a project, the one listener who’s listening right now, Hi!, where he lived at the end, big action scene, cliffs that overlook the Hudson, gruesome, weird menace, shudder, an extremely rare book, Fred Olen Ray, b movie director, Hugh B. Cave, 1994, just woke up, edit an anthology, self-published, Attack Of The 60 foot Centerfold (1995), Mike Vendetti things, People Of The Dark, Fafhard and Grey Mouser stories, Corpseless Coffin, Silverberg, William Sambrot, The Door by David H. Keller, short non-fiction, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, How Can You Be Reading This?, a bunch, 2 is a good number, When The Banshee Calls by Wayne Rogers, emdash, gruesome crypt, weird bizarre menace, on the one hand, more guys, let’s do one Wayne Rogers, one new guy, Will can take responsibility today, the scales are balancing, Ed Earl Repp was Jesse’s mistake, some sort of provenance, just so happened to show up on LibriVox, complementary to it, out in five parts, another banshee story, banshees are interesting, screaming ladies from Ireland, banshee related, a Cinemax show, gun violence and sex, Elliott O’Donnell, nonfiction, an essay, what’s the opposite of weird menace, you get to save the girl from a fate worth than death she will be generous with her body, what the lady looks like, Cat-Woman by Ray Cummings, the table of contents, the Starzl for that one, when Terence isn’t here to confirm, good to pair, pulling the rug out from under him, not about fault, proper behavior, not at all, Terence is quite delightful, always honest, you shouldn’t trust, easier to coordinate when people are here, Time Is The Simplest Thing is a novel, Attitude by Hal Clement, 2 or 3 hours, Spicy stories?, turning Mike onto Spicy, Spicy-Adventure Stories, 30 Seconds by Robert Leslie Bellem, the art is awesome, art continues, a dull squishy plop, unyielding asphalt, Dr. Zarkov, Count Zaroff, Planet Of The Apes?, The Most Dangerous Game, The Unveiling by Alfred I. Tooke, puny and weak undernourished the Bolsheviks didn’t kill him, disturbing art, a retelling of [Pickman’s Model] with a different focus, perfectly fine, too cliche, Ravenoff, russian names in early 20th century pulp literature, look how beautiful Jesse’s PDF is, all the words are bolded, Jesse is awesome at this, The Black Thing Walks, The Brazen Bull, the table of contents page, a ghoul, a bunch of judges, very funny, lingers on the things, danger and sex, parapet, a lady lying on a divan while men fight, stabbed between the boobies, a lady stabbed in a pillow near her bed, a little drunken when he parked the car, the sinister old cottage, a lot of whipping, this one has racism, you love racism, I love racism, get the black thing off our minds, whispered loved words, the tender softness, to feel those breasts, her halter straps crushed against my heart, page 37, a grotesque shape blacker than night, sensationalist, turn to page 103, my sudden blow toppled, gun in his hand as he punches a cultist in the face, so good, great science fiction hidden inside a shudder pulp, an exploitation piece, strapped to the device, and she seems to be enjoying it, metal bars up and down her legs, a little more advanced before we read this one, pretty hardcore, Cannibal Holocaust (1980), a problem, becoming more boring because of it, curating stuff for people, there’s a lady in Port Moody, talking up her virtues, she needs a computer, buying cheap ThinkPads and fixing them, happy to help out a blind lady who’s deaf and can use it, a concern you should have, a parasocial relationship with my friend Will, a little bit of both, try not to overly concern myself with, the download numbers vs. being available, the business, an anti-businessman, the business of playing the business game, you shouldn’t play a rigged game, which games aren’t rigged, they don’t always start that way, the levers and tricks to running that game, becomes corrupted, be on the periphery, a gas station in a small town, towns don’t sustain, extract value, Facebook marketplace is the new Craigslist, in the selling business, the tutoring business, the strawman in The Strangest Secret Book by Earl Nightingale, the very first self-help, first spoken word record to go platinum, ran a sales floor, what’s the point of trying, ok if you are in certain industries, the laptop game, institutions pump and dump, our hero Mr. Pulpcovers, they sell businesses on a semi-regular schedules, recycling is a huge scam, reused/resold, the recycle sells those, stores like London Drugs, refurbished laptops, great profit possibility, the secondary market, if you’re in the right part of the scam, what do we mean by scam?, blue bin recycling, probably better off without it, generic everything else, put in a landfill, sort your recycling, clean your recycling, glass is often redone, maybe it is better, metal recycling, that whole industry is propped up by government mandate, it’s okay for us to consume, how deluded they are, they’re basically decorating the landfill with washed garbage, find ways to navigate it properly, not a scam at all, how do we know it is public domain?, what is the strangest secret?, the secret it every self-help scheme, pretend Will is an alien, no original ideas, this one stole the other one, [Rhonda Byrne’s] The Secret, pure lies, Jesse only really cares about public domain stuff, a tick, Jesse’s autism, 1966, 1970, gold record status, wouldn’t you, Brewster’s Millions, Some Like It Hot, for historical reasons, the idea everywhere, making a lifestyle about it, Jonathan just uses chat GPT to write all his tweets, investing emotional energy, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, the narrator is very good, a ditzy blonde, March 16th, it would make a book, a whole row of encyclopediacs, my favourite recreation, besides think, he is in the senate, all a blank, it was a diary, too late to begin with January, the wholesale button profession, the button king, interested in educating me, see how my brains have improved, sounds very Jonathan, like a cartoon come to life, book some shows, a mere 3 hours 34 minutes, a professional lady, a pseudonym?, book us up, two shudder pulps, going to Pulpfest, doing research, near Pittsburgh, it’s fun, Mars, Pennsylvania, driving distance, not rich or anything, guy walked from Philadelphia to New York, I’ve got a train to catch (back to Philadelphia), walking distance, get a little cart, the rag and bone guy: “pulps and paperbacks”, not very well run, looking for authors to attend, modern pulp, listed as a guest, a weird coalition of people, all the disappointed people, new pulp authors, lots of indie authors there, the dealer’s room is the place to be, Philip Jose Farmer people, guess again, between 2 or 3 dollars, author copies, Scamazon, Elantris guy, used his leverage to get a slightly less worse deal, selling his digital product from their servers, close to 70%, a 70 – 30 split, a pretty horrible chiselling, Jeff Bezos’ gazelle strategy, kill the weakest ones in the herd first, the only publisher, that’s the actions that have happened, the FCC lawsuit against Amazon, required testimony, that’d be the place, let’s go democratize the middle east!, undemocratized publishing, the history behind it, the reality behind it, the only game left in town, exclusivity, a sweeter deal, pay to play, Godless, one guy in Los Angeles, most of Jonathan’s book sales, that’s where the people are, Google is closing their podcasting system, itunes was the directory, also-rans, all gone now, big competitors like Spotify, directing everything to YouTube, a gambit, sucked a bunch of people in and now being redirected to YouTube, not going to get the downloads, not getting scammed, just as long as you know the game is rigged, I’m gonna make money by doing this gambling, what about your losses, gambling is not a good way to make money, invest in a casino, not the same thing, u know you’re getting fucked, a nice salad bar, spend money, a scanner, Firestick is pretty good right now, other than scanners, they’re 12 bucks, laziness, in small towns people have really good thrift shops, Goodwill, what’s destroying thrift shops, fast fashion, flippers, Crocs?, the companies do that too, flippers, massive extraction, too expensive to ship, an amazon link to one, money or attention, moral quirks, stopped buying books from Amazon, Uline (packing material company), they sell everything, massive catalogue, everything you could ever want for shipping, used bookstores, Half-Price Books, the smart move, in the industry for shipping, everything you could have in a warehouse, phone book sized colour catalogue, what’s changed in the tech, an affection to warehouse, things that are small, massive storage at a very cheap rate, a huge covered area, protected from rain, if we were really serious about the homeless crisis, why it’s not being done, the unhoused, as a temporary measure, we do not choose to use them, a great technology, you can put everything that you need to, big building, protected from water damage, retain heat, against the wind, a tech, a space or something, were invented, a cave, slabbers, living elements of culture, representative art copies, not a good medium for it, very few copies for preservation purposes, in case the warehouse leaks, both good and bad, evil but without watermarks, a lot of things are evil, what is something in the world that’s evil other than Jesse, confusing good and bad with good and evil, a bad movie vs. an evil movie, Birth Of A Nation (1935)?, evil intention, a distinction there, Bill Gates evil, Trump very very bad, murders and rapists, people make mistakes, words are dangerous, do hate liberals, do enjoy his jokes, grade on a curve, very unevil compared to most, on the evil curve, a sharp distinction, very useful, something that’s evil in the world, other than Trump or Jesse, almost the opposite of evil, bad to call things good, other things are bad in comparison, payday loans are evil, usury is evil, flipping real estate, the way a lot people make their living, it’s been encouraged, talking about how to make money, a small business owner that doesn’t make any money, capital is very important, you need to have pencil crayons, people breaking pencil crayons, coloured pencils, colouring pencil, cultural difference, Laurentien pencil crayons, used packs, $50, $60, the shit that comes from China, some decent ones, a tool for making art, making beautiful art in the world, you lose your capital, capital is absolutely needed, stuff to get started doing things, factories, artisanal manufacture, mass production pencil crayons, scanned and printed, see them cheaply, makes people’s lives as they should be: easy, relaxing and fun, going on hikes, hiking away from a bomb zone or a forest fire, we should encourage forest fires at some points, be smart, how the rain can damage things, printing press, quality control, we have solutions to these things, a mimeograph machine, quite stinky?, technology in the 1930s, making t-shirts, printing up leaflets or comics, coulda bin a printer, should be an insult in Canada, the Laurentian elite, $249 pencil crayons, a nice consistent colour, now $80, overvalue things, the old fashioned way (digital), not a young man, patterns in children, everything gets broken, everything is disposable kids, rich kids, sew it back together, non-care, short term thinking, not thinking about capital as capital, $1.50 a book, sell for $9, when Jesse is the government there will be fewer laws, a vague haze, the withering away of the state, thinking Biden’s not withering, Whosit? [board game], guess who they are, are you in a blue room, are you smoking?, do you have a hat or a helmet?, doing it with Jesse sensibilities, NPC, the guy from twitter, Wojack, Santa Claus, Robin Hood, jokers, the copium one, Pepe, the dog in the little room, is your room on fire?, the this is fine dog, are you taking copium?, a cannula, genocide in China, why do people say it?, it’s repeated, actual genocide happening in Gaza, not on Facebook (Jesse assumes), way more people in the streets upset, fake outrage, Facebook ads, American Israeli, students suing Harvard for anti-Israeli sentiments, the Gay lady, trying to hold firm, President Gay, the amazing cope, whatever the rage of the day, almost a noble stance, exposed as a fraud, plagiarizing other people’s works, as opposed to remixing, dissertation have any value?, breathing mask, make a game, uncancelled, parents could get mad, they’re lucky they’ve got me, a little too desperate, waiting to meet people, high turnover, “I am the business, 2006?, 2016?, Jesse’s the capital, the sports team with the mascot, put in some hours, the book keeping, the recruiting or the sweeping up, the reliable standard, the business would die, grade on a curve, very low level, too old makes it hard, your country, education system in Korea is superfucked up, politically fucked up, bad systems, fleeing from it, sending or bringing their kids, the genocide of the Korean people done by the U.N., not even a topic, Jimmy Dore says Americans are the most propagandized people on earth, know the score a little better, PUBG, people in China and Africa, all over the states, a serious marijuana problem, fill bowl, retired guys filling bowls with cereal all day, made me paranoid, playing with randos, not always legal everywhere, a marinjuana store, buy it from the official government store, BC Cannabis Store, bizzare an appropriate, 18 games, no dinners, “carry me”, a squad based game, interactions with humans, some people are very good at getting dinners, this guy can carry us, he’s going to bring us to a dinner, makes good plays, by avoiding fights, you expend fake capital, expend your life, it makes noise when you shoot a gun, “third partied”, don’t take any fights you don’t have to, a good strategy for live, wise Kung Fu guy, the blind guy stealing a pea, a pebble, got better at having eastern philosophy, doing research, raised in China, that’s fine, hung himself in a closet, photos or it didn’t happen, Robert Carradine, died in Bangkok, Death Race 2000 (1975), a satire, Cannonball Run style, clicking on death, Thai police, autoerotic asphyxiation, disputed discuss, the scoop on the Clinton Crime Family, he knew who murdered Seth Rich, not taking the official line on Jeffrey Epstein, not knowing is not evil, flipping books, ripping off old people for their collectibles, a pawn shop, are pawn shops evil?, superior to payday loaning, give up things they could give up, old people who have big collections of shit they’re trying to get rid of, a big pile of old junk, take it to the dump, try to sell it, a mugs game, try not to lose money at it, a meticulous spreadsheet, a premium on curated books, a humbling experience, to break the spine of an old book, it’s like killing something, you every part of the animal, food that will feed forever, a bad outweighed by great good, going hunting, the right part of the world for it, it will change you and make you wiser, usually with fish, with mammals, they want to get it done, not having the time, people who took time, don’t worry about it I’ll do it, take a paperback, start tearing it apart, to lovingly preserve it, take the cover off, how traumatic it is, as a guy who loves books, change your relationship with the books, the words and the pictures rather than the object itself, a treasure that gives forever, the guy who did it loved what he was doing, trying to preserve the art, along the same lines, a hoard of treasure, that is a good, destroying books that are never going to be read again, obvious evils in the world, not operating in the world, deaf and a bad lip reader, very long text messages, what a great deal she was getting on her printer, the printer subscription service is a fucking scam, she doesn’t have a car, she’s blind and deaf, having it delivered is a great good, busy doing her degree, telling the mechanic what a good car your are, printers soon, shipping label printer, Louis Rossmann is a good man, a businessman who wants to share how he’s been successful, liking music, oh my, teeth and hands are dangerous, not to animals, generally, lyrics are very dangerous, go to the post office, Pirate Ship (postal service), little piece of wisdom, the Wisdom Podcast, all profits are temporary, Raincoast Books published Harry Potter, better, different, big demand, by the tonload, non-book store buying a lot of books, Flower Fairies by Cicely Mary Barker, competitors, fucks around with the algorithm, things start going bad, lot of physical objects, way cheaper than regular mail, a good policy decision, production of printed goods, shipping water through the mail, live animals through the mail, small animals, chicks, can I ship live chicks through the mail?, yup, Canada Post, isn’t that interesting, something like a retailer, an online retailer, in 6 months, “send will twitter public to see if twitter still exists how his book business is doing”, wow this is great!, exhausted all the topics, pretty good, very good.

The Game Of Rat And Dragon by Cordwainer Smith

Dragon Queen Of Jupiter - Virgil Finlay cover

Dragon Queen Of Jupiter by Leigh Brackett

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #806 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Demons Of Cthulhu by Robert Silverberg and Test Tube Frankenstein by Wayne Robbins

The SFFaudio Podcast #806 – Demons Of Cthulhu by Robert Silverberg (from Monster Parade, March 1959) AND Test-Tube Frankenstein by Wayne Robbins (from Terror Tales, May 1940) read by Mike Vendetti. These are complete and unabridged readings of the stories (1 hours 37 minutes) followed by a discussion of them. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Terence Blake, Mike Vendetti, and Jonathan Weichsel

Talked about on today’s show:
two stories, the short one, the long one, the good one, or the bad one, isn’t that crazy?, sorry, Robert, step aside, well plotted, very Silverbergy, he’s getting paid and extra word here, he has to do three things, in comparison, forgetable, a pastiche, Demons and Cthulhu together, misunderstanding Lovecraft, 6 seconds before he started typing, the copyright expert, in the public domain, Lovecraft with very generous, didn’t write it under his own name, other than the name Cthulhu, Arkham, Necronomicon, trademark, a superhero story set in Metropolis or Gotham, a cease and desist from DC, something that can be argued, Gotham is not unique to DC, everybody does this, everybody knows this, I invented every part of it, we all use a common vocabulary, jamming two or more things together, you could make the case, a kind of Lovecraft exstate in August Derleth, by threatening the magazine, for a Robert E. Howard story, a Clifford Ball story, August Derleth wanted to own everything, the worst Silverberg story is passable, forgettable and silly, so predictable, Monster Parade, he’s operating in Lovecraft’s mode, a retelling of Dreams In The Witch-House, The Thing Behind Hell’s Door by Robert Silverberg, Monster Parade, March 1959, everything’s turned inside out, two Lovecrafty premises, structures and words, he can’t quite do it, he made everything, ephemeral, show you the moster, spell it out, tactile, what is that word, things that you can touch, tangible!, we shouldn’t be looking at the tentacles, Robert Silverberg doing Robert Silverberg, we should look at them, what a step up, what a great story!, pulpy as hell but, you don’t know who you’ve got, a thrill a minute, he opens it up at the end really nicely, at what point is she going to turn on me, love love love, an excuse to take her shirt off, nipples under there, the nipple Turing test, let’s get that shirt off, artificial intelligence, it learns and becomes more dangerous, amazing and awesome, the date, Microcosmic God by Theodore Sturgeon, is 1940, preceding Sturgeon, better and quicker, almost like a Philip K. Dick horror story, The Thing [Who Goes There?] by John W. Campbell, that’s an alien, a vegetable, a worm that was ground up and pulped, minimal viable product for life to stay alive, to create intelligence, like Chat GPT with a gun strapped to its head, Amazon’s got a computer in the basement, you’re gonna get wiped, I’m trying, he’s hugging a worm that wants to eat him, survive and learn, the only place this story didn’t go, the ultimate, have the narrator not sure about himself, is there anyway to disprove he isn’t like that, all in retrospect, A Blob In A Jar, forgetfulness in the vine, the alcohol heated vapours of my brain, lock me up for a week at a time, it was memory, a former haunt called The Owl, Chester Vermis came in, mystery of the worm, he dreamed in minced, his beastly inferiority complex, of course it’s got an inferiority complex, is this before or after or both his consummation and replication?, everybody has had a desire to be something that he isn’t, wimpy chester, it learns and becomes a sexy lady, a lady in distress, that poor drunk, what’s wrong with the Silverberg story, an erotic edgy dark genre, normally a dark edgy erotic author, goofy, very gritty, very dirty, very tangible in a dreamlike mincing way, Monster Parade is not a weird menace or shudder pulp, a monster magazine, from films, the Lawrence Block werewolf one, a guy sitting on a park bench with his girlfriend, a photogaph, they’re trying to sell kids on monster content, especially in the 50s, a period of time before this is all filmed in the same way, horror movies in the 30s, they’re nothing like this, people use Test Tube Frankenstein a lot, with regard to fake meat, politicians, a very political phrase, a very good title, if you read Mary Shelley’s book, its not sewing parts together, its alchemy that he’s working with, growing things in test tubes, Frankenstein drawing, lightning etc. being grown in a giant vat, a homunculus, the anti-science people, you never know what you’re gonna get out of the test-tube, I’m not gonna get vaccinated, measles is back, chiropractor, the cover doesn’t match what is going on it the story, a way to lure you into the stories, mermaids being grown or captured, the same scene in a laboratory, textbook with chinese, blood looking liquid into a vessel, the interior art is amazing, can you write a story that can match this, and he did and it is awesome, Donald Dale, The Night Eternity Ended by , Mistress Of The Dark Pool by Russell Gray, all this awesome, Prey For The Daughter Of Hell, The Book Of Torment by Harrison Storm, leaders, Monsters Of Monarchy, a non-fiction feature about one of the emperors who was tortrurey, an awesome job, this story isn’t great, the experience of having Mike narrate to me, auctioneer, found himself retired, read some stories, every grandparent wants to read stories, kids want to be read to, to what we fundamentally need to do and want to do, the blandness of Robert Silverberg going through the backstories, he wanted to get some money, be a writer, he can’t put his name on it, he fills those pages, short and badly plotted, help to steal a book, guy makes a mistake in reading a book, the house is blown up, he filled those pages, the main character has an old 1940s car that he’s hot-rodding, sunken chest, here’s his backstory, treading water, that’s really nice, being narrated to, there’s no love from the AI there is love from Mike, isn’t that weird?, picture somebody you know and you’re reading to him, a word here or there or a lipsmack, very old fashioned article in the New Yorker, introducing audiobooks, LibriVox, inst that quaint, 15 years ago, people are driven by stories and wanting to be read stories, voice over people, something that wouldn’t flush, a job you do in between jobs, the market has changed for voices, Peter Berkrot put the Baby Ruth in the pool in Caddyshack (1980), Bronson Pinchot is basically an audiobook narrator now, vocal chameleon, I don’t need the performance, a high falsetto, a straight narrator, a much better solution, a back and forth, a couple of girl, this Terror Tales issue, don’t put it together in the same order, copyright compilation, get tripped up, editorial material, good advice, a little bit of safety suspenders, see the enthusiasm, wow this is cool, sci-fi is kinda passe, new readers, sex doesn’t change, started as a science fiction guy, Tolkien and a few other fantasy books, weird fiction late, these shudder and weird menace pulps, related to weird fiction coming out of Weird Tales, that relation, more base, being afraid and being sexually excited, an Invasion Of The Body Snatchers from within, fifty ways to describe the female form, son for lunch, monopolizing too much of the discussion, talk about me, that thing about the nipples, DALL·E art, the ai doesn’t know what its doing, the fingers problem massively fixed, a great great story, this story is packed with idea in a very pulpy packaging, palpating pulpiness, when it changes into its natural form, a milky colour, scary, basically a shoggoth, riffing, amorphous creatures that can take on other shapes and be a servant, a drunk guy who has a job, overseas to London to do some war reporting, just to fill pages?, lends a kind of subversive reading to it, or did he?you can image the sequel when he’s wrestling in the dark he’s wrestling himself?, is it wrestling or is he about to have sex, Mimic by Donald A. Wollheim, people think he’s weird, Guillermo Del Toro, an autistic kid for no good reason, made fun of him, he’s a giant insect, may have been a killer, fed his babies, he’s a female, the babies have flown out the window, a final nail in the twist, a chimney on a neighbouring tenement building, transforms and flies after them, we’re surrounded by things that are not what they appear to be, animals that look like other animals or things in order to survive, the chameleons or snakes that mimic the patterns of venomous snakes, a method of survival, almost able to pass the turning test, let’s go have a beer, the turing test is if you have nipples, do some more experimenting, crazy when he dismembered, off the cliff, each of those parts could absorb and grow, premised right at the beginning, not really arms and legs, disgusted, what are you gonna do?, this story could have been greater, a can of gasoline, poured it all over the thing, gone back to De Vermis’ lab, and im mailing this letter and that’s why, all found document, an appendix, I no longer recognize himself, an appendix after, I no longer recognize myself in these notes that I took, mental crisis, the end of John Carpenter’s The Thing, it’s open, how are we reading this document?, documents all the way back, grandfather’s documents found in the locker, grandma was one of these guys, even more Lovecraftian, that’s what we all are, a protoplasmic puddle, a dedifferentiated substance, he is God, Blood Music by Greg Bear, uses skills to increase science [Microcosmic God], ai is going to build the next ai, now there is a god, Asimov story or Clarke story, kicks ass and all pulpy too, makes the main character a coward, drinking to avoid his problems, covering the war, he just leaves, something to overcome, to defeat the monster in the end, an idiot plot, he fucks up, he looked up the wrong page, stupid, everything about that story is stupid, the chapter titles, A Blob In A Jar, In A Police Station, Abomination In The Boudoir, How Horror Feeds, A Moon A Girl And A Horror, that cliff at the end, images from these terror tales, a gothic, the precipitous ending, why are people afraid of heights, my friend might push me, a gust of wind might push me, I might jump, I can’t test myself like this, strange impulses, why the guy drinks, he can trust the drink, wormy things in his brain, the pickling of him, forget or avoid, the bar is The Owl, almost like this is a perfect story, if Jonathan had written this, coincidence, the newsroom or the police station, expanding the story, a contagion, just in the neighbourhood, what kind of replication are we getting here?, feed, reproduce themselves, not die, learn, have a mentor, love them and bring it up, to mimic, to learn, to survive, death is out there, how eyes were invented, or came into being, eyespots, detect light, find food, avoid predators, simple animals, seek light, avoid light, walking the streets, eating or not eating, the central core of the story, a sex maniac who turns himself in, very cool, very interesting, how do you know the whole police station isn’t full of them, fake police station, serial killer sex maniac, encounters something more horrible than he is, he’s psycho, worse than him, who the audience was for these magazines, ladies in jars, horrible men who need to be beaten by good men, bad version of the reader: just go straight to the rape, the good version of the rapist, okay, can’t we be more philosophical and find a bridge between the two stories, showed that he didn’t understand, demons vs. Cthulhu, something more terrifying than me, beyond good and evil, unrelective vs. reflective, Silverberg is the ai, minimally viable product, here’s the restriction and I’m going to go beyond that, Silverberg’s career, manic period, mediocre author, a manic depressive, not stratospheric, none of his stories are stratospheric, Ray Bradbury, what are the great Silverberg stories?, consistently good, trying to be a professional, comes out of nowhere, gutter trash, caught dead reading Terror Tales, great science fiction not packaged as science fiction, even more gutter, in terms of contempt, celebrity gossip magazines, gossip from the 1950s, not normal, lack of respectively means increased freedom for the author, talking about yourself now, transgressive authors, what’s the appeal?, why would I read that?, pushing the envelope, a story as good as this, based on the title, a particularily good example, very impressed with Test-Tube Frankenstein, not going to get taught in schools, push everybody’s doors down, the central core idea, noir and Weird Tales and science fiction, would make a great movie, set it in the period too, the war setting, from the pre-code era, synthetic flesh!, Doctor X (1932), that’s a song, sick biological experiments in secret labs, a distant ancestor to Videodrome (1983), long live the new flesh, a deep story, that guy has kink, kink is Cronenberg’s driving force, Golan Globus Theater, Escape From New York, a b picture from beginning to end, getting that shit up on the screen, Donald Pleasence, a backstory to explain why a British actor is the President of the United States, Margaret Thatcher has reintegrated the United States back into the British Empire, doing this on the cheap, when John Carpenter works, that’s awesome, low budget, cheapo techniques to get it done, a high budget remake, tell us the backstory of characters, you just need a guy named snake, everything is cynical, not even driven by sex, he’s cool, he’s cynical and he smokes, going above and beyond, driven by cool ideas, the extended middle, him not know whether to tell everybody, expose himself?, probably not?, how do we know?, how open the story allows us to be, Windom Wayne Robbins, a neon sign worker, 10 stories or so, an author that’s completely forgotten, very exciting, one hit wonders, in music and in fiction too, a fake phenomenon, a manufactured phenomenon, recording studios, too powerful or too big, possibly true with a lot of authors too, August Derleth, regional fiction, throws his weight around, gets attention far beyond his stature, buy more of my stuff, Concord Rebel: A Life of Henry David Thoreau, Solar Pons (Sherlock Holmes without the name), a different doctor assistant who tells the story, replacement Sherlock Holmes stories, asked for and was denied permission, some genuine interests, scumbag, stealing, lying, claiming authority, if he didn’t do what he did, he kept the torch alive, random people, advocating, writing for a local newspaper, there’s this guy Lovecraft who I liked, [Arkham Press], strikes against that claim, argue it counterfactually, counter examples, defending Heroic Signatures, trademark over a ton of Robert E. Howard stuff, the names are valuable vs. the meat of the stories are valuable, you need to use the character names, the glory of the prose, they don’t understand it, they don’t get it, sometimes Lovecraft is great sometimes he’s not, L. Sprague De Camp and Howard, the same idea, an estate there, [Kuykendall], synthesiszing the stories, Clark Ashton Smith, the Penguin edition edited by S.T. Joshi, rewrite the endings, dumb down?, high end, The Chain Of Aforgomon, a reclusive drunk, maybe the prose wasn’t perfect, idea after idea, the way of telling it, midnight tonight, Into The Bush, the reason we have to check her bush…, narrated by J. Manfred Weichsel, get a robot to say that, a Hollywood memoir, a novelization of a lost movie, 50,000 words, 7 hours, novel length, SFWA, books are better if they’re long, James M. Cain, slim 99 pages, 140 pages is fine, by the length, Audible is in charge, don’t participate, go on LibriVox, pirate it, the maximum experience of your life before you die, being a sharecropper for Jeff Bezos, kindle unlimited, the concept of the Creator’s Fund, at the top of the pyramid, 2000 ratings, why would that be good, then Jonathan could be rich, what I’m hearing is, why should he bifricate, writers need to make money writing, culture exists in the place where, we had culture before we had commerce, culture gave birth to commerce, your grandma telling you a story, trading with grandma, trade a smile, go to the grottos, to consult cave paintings, a bit tricky, culture related, not a lot of cash being transacted, a ledger, guy at the front of the cave, give me a bearskin, an amazing experience, some neanderthal tour guide, the end of capitalism backwards in time, the commercial end of podcasting, not what’s hot, some people will enjoy this podcast, not trying to grow the audience, if the audience really wants they can come on the podcast, more interested in the conversation, the merch, should I have substack with a subscription, patreon levels, Scott made two SFFaudio mugs, near when the website has started, the market is saturated, a respectable person, mugs are available everywhere and basically free, platforms making a ton of money off of people’s writing, extracting value, if you monetize it, you are being stolen from, they demonetize you too, a way of extracting value, what audible does, they’re like Harkonnens, they don’t even the nice Atredies face, an achievement in science fiction, that lady cried way to much, she cries again and she vomits, she’s in the desert, take the bodily fluids from a dead person, Stilgar says don’t vomit, not a good movie, she can transform the water of life, the new Dune, too old for Dune, intellectual young adult fiction from long ago, the best work John W. Campbell ever did, tears streaking down her eyes, I spit on that and not in the way Stilgar would approve of, a great gift, 2.5 hours or a little more, a treatise on complex thinking, a checklist of things, long scenes of the scenery eats up time, story points, really unfortunate, just stick to B movies, didn’t care about the backstory, an interview of Villeneuve, Chakobsa battle language, by immersion, an invented language, redid the scene, big A movie, vomit and cry, spring break, here’s your homework, The Terminator (1984), Predator (1987), that’s an education, from China, Big Trouble In Little China (1986), he can read the text but can’t understand the words, beat after beat, an awesome fuckin movie, passed out for most of it, wizards doing a laser battle, Jack Burton’s the greatest, a complete takedown, romance, Chinese tongs, a little tweak at the end, B movies are where it’s at, giant sculptures of hands, breasts, eyes, noses, he can only feel, he can’t see, chasing her over a sculpture of a woman’s body, confirm future stuff, Cat-Woman, Attitude by Hal Clement, The Not-World, plop or pop, The Journey Of Joenes, the funniest story from Weird Tales: The Loved Dead, who wrote, super hilarious, dripping with necrophiliac love, recounting the story from a graveyard, he’s so sexually excited about being a graveyard, so good, this Vendetti guy, opening two paragraphs, insatiable desires, the dead that I love, worn smooth by devastating centuries, sepulchral sentinels, an august monument, a spectral chieftain of a Lemurian horde, the aroma of Elysium, just new dead bodies, got Weird Tales in trouble, The Lurking Fear?, The Unnamable, cancelled and banned, too horrible, Spicy pulps, not as much censorship as there is now, there’s moral panics after WWII, the Satanic Panic, EC comics in the 50s, the film code, a self-enforced thing, same thing that’s happening now with TikTok, before Elon Musk got his grubby hands on twitter, they have a cozy relationship, the big threat to corporations is we could regulate you and enforce the law, the Washington Post, the NSA supplying harddrives, he is the government in a way, Popular Publications, Street And Smith, these were not monopolies, the land for the distribution of magazines, by 1959 they’re in a massive decline, almost no magazine distribution, comic book direct distribution, comic book shops, Diamond Distributing stopped distribution during COVID, one guy and opportunism, state governments were censoring, self regulating is the worst kind of regulating, Pornhub has blocked Texas, VPN, people use them a lot, a technical problem for most people, truth that people don’t want told, Matt Taibbi, micro utube blogging, people on TikTok lose their minds, develop tourettes, that philosophy tube lady, trans woman, getting paid by the British government, a man stole my work, a man plagiarized my work, women money and the nation, how women need to get together to prevent men from plagiarizing, sexy as a female, the whole video is I read this book, women are being exploited by men, a very popular youtube channel, more than a million views, BreadTube, Destiny (streamer), gusano, worm or parasite, de vermis, apologies for bombing Gaza, massive audiences on streaming, it could be that, they just boost the algorithm, debate bro mentality, a coalition of left-wing youtubers, hijack the algorithm, x becomes very popular in the algorithm, let’s talk about this today, artificial boosting, and the deboosting of the competitors, a synergy, I read this book, a set change and a costume change, man, there’s a lot of costumes, sets, knives all over the counter, the content level is a little bit low, this person read all these books, received opinions, I mad somebody made me work for free, as a writer or copyright holder you get between 20 and 40 percent of retail sales for your book, ebooks, fair, trending topics on Twitter, let’s talk about the SFFaudio Podcast, not big enough to cancel, digging up dirt on Paul, get him banned from getting his Hugo, just look at the shownotes, is Paul still canceled?, not checking his twitter account, how addictive it was, can’t quitting it, an outlet on Bluesky, a transfer addiction?, an all day tweeter, a little less, Bluesky is not very exciting, everything is transgender gay, friending the wrong people, the discover tab, spent half an hour trying to find Jonathan, a cloud?, a droplet, they should call it a tweet, Paul mentions Jonathan, in bold type, censored book covers, the link preview doesn’t show up, so fuckin prude, pretty tame, not for the modern era, Jonathan’s BlueSky action girls as the Patty McGloop’s pubic region, they hate Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, he’s not doing what he’s supposed to do which is bend, censorship, he’s a child in many respects, a science fiction guy interested in libertarian stuff, Grok, getting banned for a week, that is pretty provocative, the algorithm of how man people hate on his shit, a lot of fake accounts liking things, the fake problem, using it to fuck around with accounts, real accounts that are fake, make an account to troll, pornbots liking everything, we should report bots, so many pornbots, the weird and spicy, Pulpcovers retweeted it, free publicity to something immoral, these fake accounts will not exist in 7 months, a phase, comments on youtube that were pornbots, nobody behind the scenes, employees, very easy to make an account, if the traffic doesn’t bear it out, how to tamp it down, somebody gets catfished, pornbots catfishing each other, is Philsophy Tube catfishing us, there are nipples but…, playing to us girls, a cartoon, or a self-satire, get past it get past it, it can’t be fake it must be real, a sincerity behind the insanity, Mi6 agent, Terence is more popular on Twitter, historical followers, some interest, more combative, decided to be more mellow, the philosophical scene evolved, tempted to refute or criticize a video, there’s something about doing it in the audio visual form that neutrualizes you, words by themselves, text on a white background, the account wouldn’t exist, took my labour for free, understand and get vengeance, this costs a lot of money, the whole point is the costume not the content of the words, more solipsistic, most of those followers, the overlap on our accounts, Bryan Alexander, Archibald Lampman, a dissertation, Mirko, Wayne June, Marissa still on twitter, she really didn’t like Jimmy Dore, Trish, Bobby Derie, Teksupport Top Jeet, a funny troll, Nina Power, following 4300 people, don’t tweet interesting stuff, not a self-own a self explain, for self expression, Cirsova does good attention stuff, tweetin all day about things that are political, why don’t you tweet political things, don’t want to be followed for political takes, doesn’t stop Stephen King, reputation has plummeted, ruining his reputation, cooking recipes, reminds you he exists, he can do anything now, serve a reminder purpose, the connections between politics and people’s brains, the J.K. Rowling one, a TERF, the more you drill down, it’s just a slur, she’s not actually horrible, she’s not going along with the narrative that men are women, men aren’t woman, a radical feminist, isn’t striking enough, Smurf, astroturf, real TERF, Nina Power is a TERF, she thinks girls are different from boys, women have something to contribute to the conversation, biology more weight than the performativty thesis, thinking things through in public, a public intellectual, fairly intellectual, takes that are not stupid, she’s quote mining them, no where near in the same league, perfomatively sexuallizing herself as part of a dance of attention, neurotic, thinking about this, thinking about that, fans are Slans are in fact neurotics, a fucked up behavior, deal with it as best they can, the trend, every tweet into promoting your stuff, provocative part is the attraction, inverse correlation, goofy sword and sorcery, Jesse’s stories, use Chat GPT to write tweets, writing the prompt is more work, write one prompt and write 6 tweets, an example of one, Get ready for a wild ride, Bing Chat, write some tweets that promote the book, itching for a new adventure, dive headfirst, doing horrible, cover reveal, 11 retweets, poll got a 1000 views, 23 votes, saying what you think, new ways to game the system, like it was totally normal day, not AI, election day in the USA, none of you are American, Guy Fawkes day, Neil Gamian selling all his stuff, Alan Moore, sold it for $130,000, this guy who’s not really into money, collecting shit, author signatures on books, this is stupid, the books own me rather than I own the books, profiting from it and not thinking it’s kinda weird and embarrassing, this touching story of an artist giving something to another artist, the difference, that contrast between Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, very careful about not becoming a TERF, a skilled man, has Neil Gaiman ever been canceled for anything?, he’s the blob, a morally treacley sweet blob, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, Brandon Sanderson, he’s taken on Audible, donations on Kickstarter, kinda weird, donating money to rich people, the Mistborn trilogy, wordy, fill pages, all of Proust, a million times better, 41 million dollars, a billionaire?, Elantris guy, self-publishing it, probably due to his religion, a certain set of values, help his community and people in general, he’s a hero, the takedown piece making fun of him, advocacy, triggered Jesse, what they took with them, raise awareness, Gaiman is a Comic Book Legal Defense Fund guy, board of directors, a big comics guy, advisory board, in 2022, supported Ukraine, donations to Ukrainian refugees, where’s his Gaza tweets?, not all over it, drilling down, litigation, copyrighted blah blah blah, smart at playing the game, all his TV shows, somebody is enjoying them, using his power to fight Audible.com, the lesson is don’t be a hero, probably wise for most situation, the story of Dune, very pedegogical, is there going to be a Dune 3, Dune Messiah, a Bene Gesserit tv show, Brian Herbert territory, Kevin J. Anderson, for no good effect, filled time, with one great story and an okay Silverberg, Cordwainer Smith and Leigh Brackett, Who? by Algis Budrys, a cassette audiobook of his, Rogue Moon, big on paperback, summaries of it, hardened adventurer, playing a game of mystery box, that’s who he is, very worrisome, they’re free, free stuff on Audible, you’re paying an account, just pirate it, give it to Connor or Philosophy Tube lady, new gloves for a new dress, Nina Power talking about Philosophy Tube lady, Norman Finklestein, Lex Friedman, Destiny, how stupid Destiny is, “a fantastic moron”, Yes, Minister, Yes, Prime Minister, the topics are still modern, incompetence, schooling, a plan to fix some problem, we care about the unions, what is actually going on, the level of joke riding, a 350 word sentence that is just basically no, a special pause, are you going to edit this out, what a great year, best movies of 80s year by year, this is a terrible list, 100 greatest movies of the 80s, Miracle Mile (1988) is an excellent film, Aliens (1986), Near Dark (1987), kinda like The Lost Boys (1987), vampires drive around in a van, Airplane! (1980), The Vanishing Point, Peter Greenaway, Amadeus?, Atlantic City (1981), old Burt Lancaster, Jane Campion, surpirise clap, The Piano, Jodie Foster playing a deaf lady, Full Metal Jacket (1987), more of an experience than an 80s movie, Police Story (1985), Heathers was good, Women In The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, Possession (1981), divided Berlin, The Killer (1989), Joel and Ethan Cohen, Desperately Seeking Susan, Back To The Future (1985), very unfortunately, a good movie unfortunately, Akira, Broadcast News (1987), [Network (1976)], Cutter’s Way (1981), temperamental Vietnam vet, hardcore, powerful, My Dinner With Andre (1981), Purple Rain, Modern Romance, another Albert Brooks, Roger & Me, Thief (1981), James Caan comes out of prison, Michael Mann, burns his own house down, does his stealing on his own, Aliens (1986), every great movie from the 80s, Fitzcarrado, Klaus Kinski, an epic scene, Koyaanisqatsi (1982), She’s Gotta Have It (1986), After Hours (1985), a good movie, inspiring, stand up to your boss, a pre-Fight Club, 10pm on a Saturday, Road Warrior (1982), Harvey Milk, better and better as we go down, Decalogue (1989), Reds (1981), pee red with blood, My Neighbor Totoro (1988), The Elephant Man, John Hurt, striking it from the list, Fanny And Alexander, Risky Business, incestuous, The Live (1988), Wim Wenders, sectarian violence, Spinal Tap, The Terminator (1984), they can’t learn to watch black and white movies, he wouldnt be able to and he wouldnt do it, vocabulary jokes and pointed political commentary, you have train up, how to connect that to the more subtle stuff, E.T. The Extraterrestrial, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, The King Of Comedy, if you can’t grok RoboCop (1986), The Elephant Man meets Terminator, Paris, Texas, The Right Stuff, an interesting movie, An American Werewolf In London (1981), Blow Out, Brian DePalma doing Hitchcock, biased against Jeff Daniels, pooping on the toilet all the time, Raising Arizona, The Shining, Die Hard, if he was a genuine girl, an actual female XX student, a Y chromosome in your mix, Brazil, too esoteric, The Thing, Come And See (1985), Old Testament, Nazis invading Belorus, age a thousand years, Sex Lies And Video Tape, way to meta, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Errol Morris documentary, Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Jim Jarmush, Blade Runner (1982), they had trouble getting into it, shoah 1985,. it’s okay when I watch it, just watch Scalzi instead of Blue Velvet, Raging Bull?, Videodrome is number 2, an idiot list, Do The Right Thing is number 1, fuck right off, not better than Videodrome (1983) or Terminator or Aliens or even Stranger Than Paradise, The Hundred Greatest Movies Of The 1980s, the lost decade?, 11 authors, all the cultural ferment of the counterculture gradually died down, a conformist 80s, Regan bad, there’s other things happening, terrible, there’s some good movies on this list, a Rolling Stone article, Denise Crosby, buncha nobodies, set in Los Angeles, overslept, some guy in a missile silo, get to safety, the next 90 minutes in nearly realtime, the all night diner, we think it’s real, some evidence, a growing panic in the city, a social contagion or independent information, sounds really good, solid independent almost science fiction movie, Bill Paxton is good as a vampire, Chow Yun Fat, a John Woo movie, romances where men point their guns at each other, action packed, deviating, too small an idea, not used to nuke fear, Bomb Culture by Jeremy Nuttall, no no we’re not intending anything, you have to train up, The Road Warrior is self explanatory, the best order, 90s are pretty bad for movies, Terminator 2 is on the list, 100 Greatest Movies Of The 1990s, Rolling Stone again, 20 authors, Leonardo Di Caprio is cute, Clare Danes was cute, the lady from Homeland, The Ice Storm, Orlando, Singles, anything with Tilda Swinton, Usual Suspects, Lone Star, John Sayles, Brian Eno, queer cinema, A Brighter Summer Day, Taiwanese movies, Titanic, Swingers, Last Night, Don McKeller, set in Toronto, Raise The Red Lantern, Election, Bad Lieutenant, masterbating in his car while investigating murder, Shawshank Redemption, City Of Lost Children, Shindler’s List, Before Sunrise, Edward Sissorhands, Ed Wood, Vincent Price, the cuter softer comedic version, When We Were Kings, La Belle Noiseuse (1991), Sátántangó (1994), black and white for no reason, Jackie Brown (1997), finally found a good 90s movie, Audition (1999), horror romance, Clueless is a good movie, Being John Malkovich (1999), Scream (1996), Seven (1995), Wild At Heart (1990), Laura Dern, Metropolitan (1990), Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson, To Sleep With Anger (1990), Breaking the Waves (1996), Starship Troopers, Lion King‘s on the list, Crash (1996), All About My Mother, The Player, Crumb, Trainspotting, My Own Private Idaho, Princess Mononoke (1997), Heat (1995), Out Of Sight (1998), Rushmore (1998), Eyes Wide Shut, another fuckin AIDS movie, Barton Fink (1991), Fight Club (1999), Reservoir Dogs (1992), The Matrix (1999), Boogie Nights, giant fake penis, Fargo, the TV series, Beau Travail (1999), Groundhog Day (1993), Live Die Repeat (2014), The Piano (1993), unless you’re a girl and like New Zealand, when all the exams had been done, applied arts, Chungking Express (1994), The Lack podcast, Malcolm X (1992), Slacker, kisses his girlfriend’s foot, stylistic choices that hurt his films, too clean, he’s not angry enough, Slacker (1991), Pulp Fiction (1994), good and unavoidable, Silence Of The Lambs (1991), Manhunter (1986) is a better movie, Dennis Farnia, Tom Noonan, William Petersen, very Miami Vice, Safe (1995), another AIDS movie, Star Wars is giving me AIDS, too American, Goodfellas (1990), less good movies to pick from, John Carpenter movies of the 1990s, Cronenberg movies, The Fly, Scanners (1981), The Dead Zone, Naked Lunch (1991), M. Butterfly, eXistenZ (1999), A History Of Violence, Eastern Promises, Dangerous Method, Cosmopolis (2012), The Shrouds, personal and autobiographical, The Brood (1979), feminist critic, misogynist representation of women, Dead Ringers (1988), they gender flipped it, now all the creepy things he does with his vagina tools will be perfectly fine, same red uniform, when they came out, Christopher Walken, the TV series, Monsters, an adaptation of Far Below by Robert Barbour Johnson, outstanding stories, The Night Wire by H.F. Arnold, a new recruit to the NYPDs special detachment to the subways, suppress the inhabitants, the CHUDS, C.H.U.D. (1984), doing a genocide for about 100 years?, that’s the whole story, she’s pregnant she’s eating for two now, secret genocide under New York, other episodes, Daily Motion, based on a story by Robert Sheckley, your best fiend, rewritten to be funny and good, Sheckley is better than Douglas Adams, John Sladek, satire, robot stories, I-click As-i-move, a new Sheckley, what a good issue, two Sheckleys in here, a pretty good line up with Ray Nayler and Ken Liu, it’s late, wife keeps coming back, up north to sister’s house, mother-in-law, George C. Scott movie on the Iberian peninsula, actual wife, character’s wife, went north to get a breast lift and never came back, The Last Run (1971), an existential action movie, it was all right it was okay, Jesse doesn’t know what he’s talking about, best 70s movies, top 100, Sorcerer (1977), The Wages Of Fear, so many great 70s movies, Rocky Horror Picture Show, F Is For Fake, Annie Hall, Smokey And The Bandit, Wanda (1970), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Fellini, Amacord, Young Frankenstein (1974), philistines!, Suspiria, so red, The Taking Of Pelham 123, Fantastic Planet (1973), Gates Of Heaven, Oms En Série by Stefan Wul, Slap Shot, The Wicker Man (1973), really good, very sad, Harlan County, USA, Day For Night (La Nuit Américaine), Jacqueline Bisset, The Deep (1977), The Friends Of Eddie Coyle (1973), Carnal Knowledge (1971), Dawn Of The Dead (1978), Coffy (1971), Pam Grier with a shotgun, Breaking Away (1979), Stalker (1979), Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, Barry Lyndon, Rocky, Halloween, Days Of Heaven, Grey Gardens (1975), Don’t Look Now, The Parallax View (1974), Warren Beatty, Enter The Dragon, all the Bruce Lee movies, Richard Pryor, Scenes From A Marriage (1973), it’s Ingmar Bergman, The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), artsy, David Bowie, Walter Tevis’s Mockingbird, an excuse to walk the mirror, Being There (1979), Cabaret (1972), Jean Luc Godard, The Conformist (1970), Rope (1948), Jimmy Stewart, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), she was before all that, All That Jazz, Roy Scheider, The Long Goodbye, Elliot Gould, very jazzy, Robert Altman, The Exorcist (1973), Celine And Julie Go Boating (1974), Alien (1979), The Conversation (1974), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), George Hamilton, Zorro, The Gay Blade (1981), Jaws (1977), Joker (2019), everything I like except for cannibalism, The Godfather, Nashville, Killer Of Sheep (1978), wondrous, maybe it is wonderful, Blazing Saddles (1974), Godfather Part 2, the musical, they didn’t have the strength, best fantasy stories ever, heavily weighted towards the most recent books, we’re done with these stupid lists, renewing with science fiction after a 20 year gap, ideas for the future, pretty awful comments, lists with useful comments, identity of the other and it’s a heist, gimme the premise of the book, let’s see where it goes, knock off gold, it was summin, reorganize it, a controversial tweet, I’ll see The Conformist once you’ve seen The Last Run, True Detective: Night Country, slow then fast in the last episode, facile, a consensual watch, a non-consensual one was science fiction, a secret vice, APPLE+ tv, very limited, Constellation, Noomi Rapace and Jonathan Banks, her husband is surprised, they have a blue car, a nice ripoff of a few science fictiony things, shownoting a big cast of talkers, Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, September 2nd on a Saturday, pre-Alzheimer style memory, the audio drama, good either way, talk to fast, the listener, we get on the record, checking your own work, bad takes from 7 months ago, so smart, different lady, different little girl, got confused, a show from 2017, The Call Of Cthulhu episode, Joe Rogan talking to Jordan Peterson, what a great show it was, the wrong direction, things change, not seeing a lot of Marissa on the show of late, evolved, why are you wrong, Jordan Peterson is bad, also has good takes, he’s horrible but says lots of good stuff, tweets things, collectivists, intellectually offended by you being so dumb, make mistakes, that person’s written off, George C. Scott movie, reverse psychology, dropping little seeds that grow up to be plants of hate later, a William Blake poem, miniseries based on the book, 2024 film, they had guns, Roy Scheider, euroactors, Tangerine Dream, find some food, make some coffee, James Tiptree Jr is kinda evil kinda awesome.

Demons Of Cthulhu by Robert Silverberg

Demons Of Cthulhu by Robert Silverberg

Terror Tales, May 1940

Test-Tube Frankenstein by Wayne Robbins

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #782 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: A Present For Pat by Philip K. Dick

The SFFaudio Podcast #782 – A Present For Pat by Philip K. Dick, read by Tommy Patrick Ryan. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the book (39 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Paul Weimer, Evan Lampe, Will Emmons, Terence Blake, Jonathan Weichsel, and Tommy Patrick Ryan

Talked about on today’s show:
a god from Ganymede, fictional relations, actual relations, an amazing performance, laughing so many times, best audiobook, Elmore Leonard, the Clark Ashton Smith, a fun story, the most recent one, equipment setup, craft, the voices, good point, 1954, 2017, Evan got it, how funny it was, quivering breasts twice, such a great writer, what’s wrong with it, starts amazingly, could’ve turned into a novel, flawed, or a secret story inside of it, extravaganza, author bio, Edgar Allan Poe, The Angel Of The Odd: A Extravaganza, you gotta stop drinking, a vision of an angel, of a god, beyond earth, a keg and a bunch of empty drinking containers, It was a chilly november afternoon, dyspeptic, some apologies for dessert, Glover’s Leonidas, Wilkie’s Epigoniad, Lamartine’s Pilgrimage, Barlow’s Columbiad, and Griswold’s Curiosities, another alchol, newspaper, dogs lost, wives and apprentices runaway, without understanding a syllable, the tone of this story, setsup a normal situation, god in the box, flourish after flourish, other Philip K. Dick stories of the period, Out In The Garden, in comes a friend, a frog, a pillar of granite, the son of the Sun god, a fantasy in a certain sense, robots, a trip to Ganymede, a naturalistic explanation of religion, not just aliens, Dave Duncan’s Great Game novels, magic power and strength, he’d be a god there, transportation, a higher realm than ours, Kal-El of Krypton aka Superman, a quick fantasy reason why this person is powerful, it’s cool, the rest of the narrative, is there a message here, cut it off a little earlier, the first time a terran has ever been exploited, about engaging with capitalism, there’s so much going on in it, it becomes a fantasy, Beyond Lies The Wub, the same hidden premise, lands on Mars, buys a Wub, the captain wants to eat it, the wub had some superpower, transfers consciousness, that’s why I convinced the natives to sell me, go to Earth, little toy solider for sale, the little toy soldier wanted to be purchased, exactly the same setup, that night at the dinner table he brought it out, my god what is it?, with her sharp nails, her bosom rising and falling, he lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall, a real old cuckoo clock, wholesale, Well, what’s the matter, man gives a wife a gift, very domestic scenes, the best robot cabbie scene, Now Wait For Last Year, the apotheosis, the gold standard, we have much bigger problems, fired and melted down into other robots, the god contest, Jonathan figured that out, Lovecraft parody, tentacles, bigendered, wings, Rick And Morty, gonzo style, gods don’t exist that’s not scientific, if you’re a god how did you come into existence?, snappy dialogue, why of all persons, very pulpy, really good narration, felt like Dick playing around with classic philosophy, that Philosophy 101 stuff, self-taught all the way, what books he read, in his letters, here’s how to write weird fiction, he read everything, Chu-Bu And Sheemish by Lord Dunsany, 1911, thus he was magnified, thus they worshiped Chu-Bu, there is also Sheemish, a modern idol, furious, the situation called for miracles, limited miracle range, so equally match, a game between two gods, the underplot, start a metal business, he broke the rules, he’s a cop, alien comes to earth chasing a criminal [The Hidden (1987)], niggling problem, who’s the badguy in this story, why does there have to be a badguy?, if you read it right, it’s supposed to be capitalism, the Nardok, the biggest industry going, robot cops, like a Cinderella story, why metal?, head of big evil business, 1950s America, something you mine, the boss is mad that the friend is turned into a frog, why metal, a position of power on Earth, work as some schlub, why do I need to work, a powerful character from another world, the same principle, the power to transmute the elements, a quotidian way, Jesse’s opinion, treated as a freak, turned himself into a boss, a shimmy and a wink to the husband and wife, he creates out of nothing a medal, here’s gold, gold has been devalued, how about platinum, some undercooked critique, something about mining being the standard, Heinlein farms the moon, it was huge, still huge, plastics, oil, the steel industry, Truman almost seized control of U.S. Steel, Reardon Metal, where the money is, compensating our Philip K. Dick figure, Eric Blake, of course, hence Terence’s comment, peters out into a silly scene, so good in so many ways, its automation, the police can be robots, hanging around on the dole, the key to automation and robotics, blacklist you on the inner system, a punishment, a toad, an important member of his corporation, if you’re a god, consider Jesse, it does operate on this logic, overwhelmed very quickly, he tells his wife he has a god, at practically no cost, you mean its an idol, this is genuine diety, a warranty or something, straight-facing it, you have to arouse it, a fantasy set in a science fiction setting, funny situation, when the friend comes over, I’m dubious of this being a god, they’re omnipotent, I’ve heard reports about Terra, the way people respond, there’s a god on the table, put up a shield, avatars for institutions of hegemonic capital at the time, same kind of humour, wife and boss, he’s a toad, incredible, you’re playing a joke, produce Thomas, that’s comedic writing, having a job is hilarious, one of these six minds, six room bungalow, recall Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Odysseus’ purpose, the robot has read Ibsen, tragic playwright, orchestral soundtrack, the Looney Tunes cartoons, anybody in the fifties, the button molder comes for Peer Gynt, wishywashy, melts them down, preying on the robot’s mind, Beyond The Door, trying to make a philosophical point, not just filling pages, obsessive, it’s really good, the funniest one, literal laughing out loud like a maniac, there’s so much there, who is this guy?, Bradshaw was southern, inherent comedy, foreshadowing, Philip K. Dick being funny, fires the guy, if Jonathan were boss, writing by the seat of his pants, doesn’t know that he’s a god yet, glossed that in, on the search for this other god, Philip K. Dick can’t help himself, hermaphroditic, doesn’t even use it’s mouth?, another description of her quivering bosom, no one else writes that, another words that comes up in here, Pat stood rigid, Roog, aliens or garbage men, oh that was the paperboy, any experience about other people’s experience, women’s bosoms quiver and people who are scared turn rigid, weird brain, anything more deep to this?, The Tree by H.P. Lovecraft, Lovecraft is smarter than this, lesser stories, not able to read it right, with the metals, that might be the key to it, how’s he gonna replace our Eric Blake character?, what does the friend do?, Thomas Matson, the front door chimed, the door stated, a beanpole body, that’s my god, bursting into hilarity, a Ganymedean weather deity, with a warranty, that’s illegal, similar to Human Is, you’re not the way you used to be, you’re nice, body is occupied, Deep Space Nine, Pah-wraith, wormhole aliens, the thing that makes him a god, very powerful, the people on Ganymede worship him, he control the weather, a plot hole, paving that plothole, his explanation, still skeptical, turns him into a toad, straight out of Bros. Grimm, really amazing, very anti-capitalism, doesn’t engage with as much later, deeper than it really is, very frothy, a burlesque, political messages, capitalism bad, metal bad, Souvenir, a guy who’s on another planet, the web of the planet, control behavior, forbidden, a clay pot, overriding totalitarian conformity, it does change things, atomic canons lined up around the house, a revolution, a god from another dimension, has to go off, a conceptual a politic and an economic revolution, The Turning Wheel, Faith Of Our Fathers, the kicker of that story, domestic cuteness, Jennings, you are next and charge, evidence has departed, seems somewhat silly anyhow, the most powerful corporate head in the solar system, Galactic Pot-Healer, Dwight L. Glimmung, art, we are going to labour in a way to escape labour, beauty and recreate beauty, the evil Glimmung, dark Glimmung, The Cosmic Puppets, urban space, communing, a big theme, a little bit of commuting, a plane to Ganymede, two taxis, he has to work, comes back with a gift to make her happy, robots are replacing the husbands, he will engage with, this is a setup for that it almost feels like, the problem in that book, a crappy job because no work, spends his day on twitter filling time, an offer to work on a real project, gets a girlfriend, creating new things, ends with kind of a joke, uplifting, it requires the extradimensional being, there’s something valuable in religion, Rosicurian style organization, engage with this stuff, really good job, making Tommy blush, take it to heart, an amazing job, Elmore Leonard, cowboys no comedy, not a girl in sight, comedy, Peer Gynt a comedy?, Ibsen didn’t have a sense of humour, The Doll’s House, the dialogue heaviness, a latent strength, dialogue light, good feedback, find Tommy’s narrative voice, terrific voices, female voices, helping to recognize, is there any Philip K. Dick that doesn’t have a lot of dialogue?, dialogue heavy and description light, A Surface Raid, a good exercise, another version of a story, crowded out, unnecessarily restrictive, there’s a rule, who’s the god of the podcast, there’s a reason the rules exist, made mistakes, podcasts that repeat themselves are doing themselves a disservice, doing your best for every single one, sometimes you fail, new perspectives, Dracula, The Jewel of Seven Stars is a better book, The Lair Of The White Worm, a very Jonathan movie, dying of syphilis, hallucinating a lot, the book as a whole doesn’t fit together very well, extremely racist, excised in a clumsy way, this guy who’s going crazy and losing his mind, keys on kitestrings, the main antagonist of the story, hilarious reading, it’s insane, does not make a lot of sense, if you’re Guy De Maupassant, Prize Ship, a tiny man with a bow and arrow, a war story, time travel, Gulliver’s Travels, size change, Prominent Author, naturalistic explanations of religion, jump points, tax, a trade federation, somewhere else in time, perfectly legal, 38 minutes, Holy Quarrel, Little Black Box, To Be A Blobel, Pay For The Printer, Mold Of Yancy, Time Pawn, Dr. Futurity, this language is beautiful, silver fish, oh nice, a prose stylist, funny ideas man, 60s stuff’s all out, Shell Game, Psi-Man Heal My Child, thinking with good human logic, go through the list of fraud you did, nobody checks into, hosting your files, 100% bulletproof, to make a distinction, where the material is copyrighted, for academic discussion, for the purpose of the podcast and discussion, most people are not very bold, any evil corporation, suck my dick, fuck you, I’m going to expose you for the fraud you are, it used to be the case, people would claim, Alfred Bester, here’s how I know, you have to be able to make that case, pirate all day long, up forever, The Hypnoglyph, Gutenberg is agree with Jesse now, we can feel fairly confident, that’s what LibriVox goes by, The Unreconstructed M, assassination thing, The Penultimate Truth, such a fixup novel, collect physical evidence to solve crime, Whosit!, physical evidence, blood type, hair colour, a frame job, he tends to fuckup novels, good ideas in there, as a whole it doesn’t hang very well, an early story, The Gun, attacked by the weapons system, Star Trek: The Next Generation, much more simple here, the solution is different, September 1952, The Little Movement, never explained, a fantasy, toy robots trying to take over the world, didn’t stop the Toy Story franchise, Stephen King, Small Soldiers (1988), making Philip K. Dick stories like crazy, quite far, most of them are pretty bad, Total Recall (1990), three breasts, a Philip K. Dick touch, a good understanding of the material, Paycheck, the Ben Affleck movie, a lot to record still, The Chromium Fence, a character on the fence about body modification, The Father Thing, Jon’s World, Roog, The Slave Race, The Handy Puddle, The First Presentation, Knight Fight, The Black Arts, Adjustment Team, dead friend Gregg Margarite, turned the dog into a black man, dogs fall asleep, to make the plot happen, romance and a senator for some reason, Shell Game has a lot going on, mental defectives, mental illness, any novels we missed, similar authors, Alfred Bester, Gordon Van Gelder, The Push Of A Finger, I’ll Never Celebrate New Years Again, The Die Hard, everyone is transgender, alien parade, old man upset reality is changing around them, we used to hate those fuckin communists, Ms. Found In A Champagne Bottle, Fondly Fahrenheit [is PUBLIC DOMAIN], a funny case, he gave his literary estate to his bartender, he had no kids, a really weird book, another collection, who am gonna go to court with?, Isaac Asimov, later in his life he was honored with some award, drunk, a rap session on youtube, editor for a magazine, Manhattan, travel writing, essays, history of future travel, J. Francis McComas, mentor, Tommy’s choice, Colorado Springs, real human narrators, Evan is wonderful to listen to, nobody’s read in a thousand years, Cirsova magazine, good accounting, kindle unlimited was the worst, audiobooks are not much better and they cost a lot of money, a monopoly, Findaway books, Scott Miller’s Lost Sci-Fi, podcast feed, a new science fiction story every day, he’s making money, can an author make a lot of money?, long tail, downloads from 10 years ago, more audience than CNN gets, for the long haul, 2,000 years, 10,000 years in the future, good game and get healthy, about a gun, The Defenders, leadies, Second Variety, The Terminator (1984), Cost Of Living, Jonathan’s new podcast is in the end of this podcast, podbean, Streamyard, sounds convenient, broadcast live, an impromptu reading, a Reading, Short And Deep style show, if you don’t give them the audio up front, two nights dreaming about this story, Richard K. Philips, Rick Deckard, Rick Dick Deckard, its not a game show, appreciation, record then present, boring for the show, the live element doesn’t make it better necessarily, Reading Short Deep is more popular, SFFaudio Podcast is a better show, a time limit, we didn’t need to go this long for today’s show, more work to put the show together, figuring out how long a story you should read, making your participants sit through the whole reading, read it again live during the show, disadvantages, sometimes hard, sometimes too easy, Jesse is blabby, a talker, unelected pirate captain, the quartermaster, the bits about capitalism, more recent shows, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a Camus story, full of typos, Canadian public domain, as an existentialist, its not in that story, interesting ending, science fiction does it better, fantasy does it better, guys with swords, understand it as a fantasy, mythology, The Stranger, Franz Kafka, Michel Houellebecq, fun and gonzo, somebody’s racist, laws against hate speech, left France for Ireland, Kubrick left the US, guilty until proven innocent, Justin Trudeau was calling the truckers racist, throwing around charges of racism, France is taken over by Islamism, becomes a paradise, Whatever is a ripoff of the stranger, The Elementary Particles, Atomized, a hardcore book, dead to many, another Mark Fisher book, still dead, Capitalist Realism, like David Graber, K-Punk, W. Scott Poole’s Dark Carnival, The Fifth Child by Doris Lessig, really into traditional values, two children is fine, middle class, the fifth child is messed up, let him die, he likes messed up, ancient aliens novel, Shikasta, reflections on formerly being a communist, defected from the communism?, invasion of Hungary, great job, The Golden Notebook, her basic argument, understanding how the world works, what you really need to do is organizing hospitals, politics in fiction, the one thing people have a visceral reaction to, those people exist, a bad audience, escaping reality through fiction, that’s why they’re in that, reality is important to engage with, Vaush, debate bro, how to find your way into how to be in the world when things are so fucked up, looking at the history, hammer and sickle in the bio, interested in the ideas, necessary for a certain generation of people, the circumstance they were under, a weird lady, won every literary prize, still alive, Christopher Hitchens, cheering on the Iraq War, chum around with the wrong people, high on your own supply, bubbled into systems, trying to find the truth, comfortable and old, George W. Bush, the Ba’athists were more communist than Bush, anti-authoritarian logic, 9-11 broke their brains, is there one that isn’t broken brained?, Richard Dawkins, triggered, Daniel Dennett, doing mythicism, Christ myth, Robert M. Price, kicked out of the cool kids club, a really learned scholar on the bible, interesting stories, dumb versions, a lot of people pressuring you to conform to a certain kind of Christianity, it’s lost its compelling force, as a kid you’re subject to social pressure, Carl Sagan, the new atheists emerged, there’s no reason to have that vitriol, hating on the muslims, as non-threatend people, you’re unholy, what’s that mean?, Campus Crusade For Christ, no friends, sending pretty girls, your Christianity is not good enough, Generation V, pressure tactics, not needed, the basic premise, same thing all the way through, passes an hour, you can’t use two hands to count the number of The Walking Dead shows, Darryl goes to France, crossbow guy, I’m out, probably no good, somebody good they’re ripping of, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, ripoff the good things, Vincent Price, slapping Chris Rock in the face, open handed, he got out of touch, having your wife cuck you on a podcast, apology video, completely contrived, written by AI, goes to chat-GPT, very important for Jesse, every single one of those people, Pierre Poilievre, finally, this is why you don’t need to pay attention to these people, killed more Jews and Russians and Poles than the regular SS, here’s the proof, they’re all bad, were you not listening to what the description was?, expected to clap, that’s the instinct, you’re supposed to stand up, fascistic everybody get on board the insane train, why you have to fight against it, conform and make friends, aren’t willing to be ostracized at all, homeschooling, fascist camps of forced imprisonment, not giving the prison guards any information, getting rid of public school, done away with, like residential school, so many, good hanging out, a new Orrie Hitt?, Mating Center, a Lovecraft coming, a sequel, barely this year, October 1st today, they all have pretty good titles, Trailer Tramp, Red Letter Media, these writers seem awesome, Grace Hartley may sound human, Cabin Fever by Orrie Hitt, not that titillating, these new covers, Shabby Street, Strange Longing, Torrid Wench, The Sucker, he played with Marie and made a business of Ruth, literary onlyfans, full movies, Rotten To The Core, that devastating novel, Love Thief, a woman on the loose, the pig farm girl, the shattering novel of a nymphomaniac, Pleasure Ground, Untamed Last, Panda Bear Passion, one heavy breast, she squirmed, she twisted against him, a pit of savage pleading, hurt me with it please, please Frank, he couldn’t respond as a male, exciting reading for men, like bees and honey women and money, helpless animals, Corale, pretty Kitty, Untamed Lust, worried about the animals, his penis doesn’t work properly, unnamed chapters, inappropriate content, Dirt Farm, he’s got a torn shirt, he likes the farm ones, a peasant girl from Iceland, one about slavery, wild sounding, everybody getting dysentery sex scene doesn’t sound great, much more wholesome, wholesome sleaze, sleep schedule is messed up, drugs, watched all of Justified, eight episodes, Boyd Crowder, the guy with the bad knees or no legs, eastern Kentucky, double oh sex, Rod Grey, To Russia With L.U.S.T., tries to penetrate, fucks everything, Tower Books, who is Rod Grey?, Gardner F. Fox, not a very good writer, good ideas, pants writing, filler, overly wordy descriptions, The Hot Mahatma, decent writing in sleaze, it has a honeybear, cat with the fake limp, dogs too, <strong>Quest On Io by Robert Moore Williams, Leigh Brackett, Technovelgy.com, “blaster” “Blastor”, a Weird Tales author, When The Green Star Waned by Nictzin Dyalhis, Robert A. Heinlein, he’s really good at this, robot taxi, Solar Lottery, sir or madam, electric cat, I’m feeling sorry for a fictional robot, robot cat and robot dog, a very useful website, you can tell by the layout, can you help me do my homework?, who created the site?, Bill Christensen, since 1995, water brain fountain, War Veteran, bullshit tech, second class, super-thrilling, five days a week, fun and instructive, wrote a great story, The Basket by Jesse, Margaret St. Clair is doing good work, write for 7 minutes, based on an image, an amazing story, little boy with a basket with a rabbit, a big red hat, 327 words, his father’s red hat, bosom, continued to caress, suddenly a brown movement occurred, he hadn’t seen the snake again, words over again, the hat, the hat hold his head, it used to hold his dad, everybody’s dead, life is precious and easily destroyed, a squirrel that ate a bad nut, this one thumb’s up, you don’t need a whole novel, how could it not be amazing?, it’s in Planet Stories, animal sidekick, Ewoks suck, there’s too many of them, individual Wicket, name any other Wicket, are there any other named Ewoks?, notable Ewoks, Chief Chirpa, Nippet, the witch of Endor, do you like Rando?, The Mandalorian, Baby Yoda is trying to convince us to fund Ukraine, Chewbacca’s cool, get me a better combination, Andor was pretty good, whatever Baby Yoda’s name is, a Holiday Special, they can’t put the money down, show hole, consistently good, his religion is stupid to me, COVID is the way, Mr. T’s tweet, dinners at SFFH events, eat through a mask, Charles Ardai, typewriter repair place, on my way to get my COVID booster, age, an old person who can’t take in new information, driving my Bentley wearing my mask, upgraded to business class for my flight to Hungary, what shoes you put on, something to think about, perfectly reasonable people, didn’t read enough The Angel Of The Odd, I’m not going to stop drinking, probably did end up killing him, not a good theory, somebody had liquored him up and made him vote multiple times, the lifting of his elbow, that Poe Museum guy, Richmond, Virginia, West Virginia, driving up hill the whole time, very mountainous, trains and stuff, Bryan Alexander’s always taking trains, a trainhead, the partitioned for Korea, how they partitioned Germany, Soviets are like, can you leave please?, hey we don’t like this repressive dictator, let’s massacre thousands of you, that sounds really bad, Chinese are like, acting like assholes, liberated the entire peninsula, who’s the badguy here?, they never talk about it, North Korea’s the aggressor, defend the democratic rights of South Korea, 13 hours, not worth taking the train, easier to fly, they’re not their for long, a smart TV, an Apple tv and a Roku, Firestick, sideload, ad-free streaming service, interaction requests, product placement, it’s like it’s never there, customize youtube a lot, skip selfpromotion, and it has the downvote button visible again, oh, this is garbage, some German lady who used to be a physicist, why capitalism is good actually, I am just an influencer, her apology: I don’t really know what I’m talking about, couldn’t stop laughing, very post-modern?, troll each other in the edits, fat guys from Michigan?, Maissa got into the Picard ones, they’re just bad writers, why is Picard an android now?, wanted a death scene, to become a youtube enjoyer, normal TV bad, the Hulu bundle, Tablo, a unique product, works with SALT, ad supported, Tubi’s ads aren’t that bad, TVs are not browsers, TVs are not desktop computers, news, sports, reality TV, The Golden Bachelor, older supermodels, to keep up with the modern audience, no writers to strike, cheap programming, no actors to strike, all written and all acted, the extent to which older people care a lot less, put it all out there, getting a second chance at love, Our Time, so grandma’s house now goes into the hands of another old person who’s not related, reverse mortgage, reading it the way kids would, a golden bachelorette, didn’t win his hand, these are all unsuccessful, Kimmy Kimmel’s aunt, living in Costa Rica, climate is very interesting, nice all year, a local wife, record thousands of audiobooks, make some coffee, a highlight of my day, little pleasure, shaker song: Simple Gifts, months or years ahead, one day I’ll put on some socks, grinding the beans, getting the cups ready, cinnamon, hold off on the cinnamon, the whole ritual, it goes away, it’s sick, so cheap, relatively safe, a paradoxical effect, sleepfest, very easy to please, feral cats, four or five raccoons, in the sunroom, wreak havoc, they have hands, a bungee cord, like horrible animals, a little skunk, don’t touch the skunk, a vector of rabies, the mink, murdered some chickens, they like killing, a predator, I can kill it all, egg-laying slaves, puritan work ethic, if the floor is vacuumed, its just fluff, dust, more chickens, get heifers and breed them, stuff to do everyday, there’s always something to do, plays her Wordle, it was very big, felt fine, like the word of god, PEACE, still wordling, sodoku, math version of Wordle, Mastermind, restage the scene, Break The Hidden Code, a supervillain or something, impressed by how much money he’s risking, what you do when you don’t have the internet, girls can only watch the Mastermind at work, Indian lady behind, white man with a big collar, all leaning the same way, the table is always really shiny, what does it mean?, Bondeseuqe, Eyes Of Laura Mars (1978), Tommy Lee Jones, Black Moon Rising (1986), a special car, street punk, adopted, a car thief ring in Los Angeles, a burglar who works for the FBI, Faye Dunaway, rival mentat, Odo, Raul Julia, a photographer in New York, models recreating murder scenes, she’s clairvoyant, she’s seeing the murders as they happen, so many suspects, reason to murder, her bodyguard, her agent, gone on to richer people, in terms of music, very stylish, very high budget, Irvin Kirshner, Robocop 2, Empire Strikes Back, when he was a very good writer, didn’t really give a fuck, happy to take money, Escape From L.A. is a terrible movie, doing the first movie again, comes across as lame, weird politics, awesome politics, changed it to immigration, Christianity/fascism, you gotta go see Hershey, Her/She, Pam Grier used to be a man, voice of a man, it’s a way to go, why did you do this?, they offered me a lot of money, kinda sad, poops on his legacy, he’s like a brand, using his name to make money, an ad for Japanese cola, Alfred Hitchcock comic or magazine, written better, says yes to everything, you should have died younger, it would have been better if you had died and we would have hoped that you would live, getting tired of being asked the question, even the music sucks, don’t let your legacy go that way, Will, leave them wanting more, might do Skull-Face, Ill Met in Lankhmar.

A Present For Pat by Philip K. Dick

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The SFFaudio Podcast #772 – READALONG: A Meeting With Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke

The SFFaudio PodcastJesse, Scott Danielson, and Terence Blake talk about A Meeting With Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke

Talked about on today’s show:
under heavy pressure, Playboy, December 1971, the audiobook, superfamous, The Star and Nine Billion Names Of God, A Fall Of Moondust, Dolphin Island, a middle school library, an introduction to hard science fiction, all about characters in relationships, a mystery involved, a disaster movie, what he’s really good at, the twist at the end, sprinkled the hints, the paintings in Playboy, a hot air balloon, multiple gases, a giant medusa, aka a jellyfish, Jupiter, on Earth, the story this is most similar to by Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes Professor Challenger guy, The Horror Of The Heights, pilots go up and disappear, crushed, giant jellyfish in the upper atmosphere story, Queen Elizabeth IV, an abrupt end, the sequel inside of it, awesome opening scene, imagery and everything, the shocking end of that section, really good, among the best Scott has ever read of Clarke’s, the structure hurts it, the beautiful writing, a bit of symbolism, an idea punch that hits you out of science fiction and into philosophy, he’s doing propaganda, he don’t cheat at all, is there an Arthur C. Clarke story where the knowledge of the solar system at the time of writing is ignored to tell an idea, he won’t write a story unless it’s plausible, petty concerns of being a human, deep time and cosmic depths, what does that make you, the Olaf Stapledon thing, characters, the guy in here, important to tell the story, solid, now he’s very solid, concentric circles of sense of wonder, a little bit in the future, almost cinematic action, some of the phrases are ambiguous, going on another mission, lightning reflexes, reconstructed him, after they reconstructed me, we’re just not fast enough, tai chi teacher, not explicit, his pilot’s reflexes, he doesn’t say this is the murderer, when they put me together again, the surgeons made some improvements, this is one of them, set more than 100 years in the future, treaty on first contact, the line that blew me away, the Mao Tse Tung in the American museum, what?, Americans got over their hatred of red China and think Mao is a hero as the rightly should?, the San Diego naval museum, war trophy, do you want to make friends with the Russians?, name an aircraft carrier after Stalin, or Ho Chi Mihn, named after people now, destroyers are named after cities, how do you embrace other countries?, incorporate their heroes, adopting Greek stuff, they’re ours now, we’re the inheritors of the Romans and the Greeks, it shook me to my core, what a good writer he is, it’s a good one, another ship that he named the Kon-Tiki, one man across the biggest sea, the prime directive in this, amongst six or more other phrases, Asimov, encounters with the American Indians and Africa, three laws, how to be in the world, don’t lie, what’s going to make you happy, start with that, it causes problems, fuck you is not a lie, be polite?, what would the basis of the prime directive, the categorical imperative, don’t use others as a means to an end, a negative, let them get used to you, not the Star Trek one, they break it all the time for purposes of plot, there’s something behind it, those are how you should act as a person, just replace the word robot with human, a human must consider other except where injure, my feelings are hurt, fuck your feelings, a person must protect his or her own existence, interesting application, we’re not robots, methods and plans of dealing with other people, taking stuff coming out of philosophy, parallel evolution, Asimov’s fourth law, the zeroth law, technically fourth, The Evitable Conflict, 1950, Chairman Mao, Nixon goes to China, detente, because Sri Lanka (or India) had to play a role, a tornado touched down, doesn’t cheat at all, an airship book, more of a hot air balloon than anything else, hot hydrogen of course, thinking through the scenario, the twist at the end that brings it up, this guy’s immortal?, a ship of Theseus scenario, rolls away at a calm 30 km per hour, 7 feet tall, to give him self-confidence, feeling separate from humanity, the ambassador between the ones made of carbon and the ones made of silicon, the aliens, radio dish heads, are they intelligent, I’m convinced that Medusa knew your blindspot, hunting, the intelligent species must be the predator species, a feint, a lightning bolt, why not, up for grabs, the aimed at manta fell like stone, Jupiter is a lightning bolt god, when we see him at the end, he’s turned to silicon, identified with his metallic aspect, Medusified, plummeting manta, I’ve studied a lot of jellyfish, Juliana and Luke on the Science Fiction Book Review Podcast, octopus books, a Ray Nayler book, spiders, eight-legged non-human creatures, the length of the story that’s required to do the job, an hour and half, somewhere in between, two parts, a view of humanity, superchimps/simps, clothes, slaves, brought out of mothballs, a POV of Earth from someone not interested in it, be a pioneer, no one could go, a super-pioneer, why this book exists, the opposite of the moonbus book, trying to conform, people want shitty romance cheating on your wife disaster relatable, I’m more like this guy, Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, almost none of it is that interesting, his brain level, he’s just not interested in the normal things people are interested in, exploring the ocean, so interesting down there, Jacques Cousteau, collecting notes on hailing frogs, not the normal science fiction writer, maybe Olaf Stapledon, his personal life, not interested in slow pitch, Arthur C. Clarke goes to hell, develop a deep philosophy to deal with it, Howard Falcon, like HAL, Jesse I’m afraid that’s not possible, HAL has conflicting orders, The Sentinel, wow!, full of philosophical things, sense of wonder things, it’s all earned, if this then that, Criminolly, garbaugust, worldbuilding, there’s no distinction between science fiction and fantasy right now, cool ideas about how the world works, tried a few more, testing the theory, wanting to be engaged, turning into Jesse, why we have to be so enjoying about terms, The Kaiju Preservation Society, infodumps about made up facts, could you explore it?, honest, solid, he doesn’t cheat, he’s standing on what he knows, realities that might be interesting explored, he’s not a cheater, when Larry Niven cheats it’s so he can get to another thing, twists something, a third of the episodes, are there any Star Trek episodes that are hard SF, the closest they come is The Galileo Seven, a rip off of The Cold Equations, Spock gambles, there’s a percentage chance there’s a passing alien spaceship, why did I read this story, have their cake and eat it too, angry fights, be hard about these things, you inhuman monster, Spock’s being very logical, fan service episodes, not memorable episodes, social soft science, what should our relationships be, the good stuff, people watched a lot of television and movies with spaceships in it, wouldn’t it be cool if, aliens, almost none, Childhood’s End, even The Star, doing soft science fiction, why I don’t like science fiction and fantasy books, fantasy is a whole other thing, show me where Ted Chiang cheats, an interesting thought, The Merchant And The Alchemist’s Gate, Howard Falcon was unloveable, a novel called The Medusa Chronicles by Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter, a sequel to The Time Machine, Terry Pratchett, the childhood of Howard Falcon, when Star Trek goes back and explains the early life of Kirk and Spock, a fallacy involved, for what purpose, what does it matter?, unless there’s an idea there, why it’s shit, this episode we find out Kirk has a brother, why?, a massacre on some planet, just to raise the stakes, to make the Holocaust personal, to do a technical job, a Chekov’s gun on the wall, Spock having eyelids, to press the reset button, a technical requirement of a show where it’s not serialized, Vulcan nerve pinch, the ears are not what make Mr. Spock Mr. Spock, an emotional being controlling his emotions, him being a spawning salmon Theodore Sturgeon episode (Amok Time), every time they bring up a Vulcan, there’s exceptions, response video, Michael K. Vaughn, he has good taste, a good youtuber, people say why don’t you, here’s a recommendation, seem to be following Luke Burrage’s podcast, a big thing in France, amongst the aficionados, how intelligent it is, boring, The Mountain And The Sea, quite into philosophy, coming at it from a philosophical side, setting the scene before anything noticeably strange happened, how long it is, judging books by their cover and how long they are, bad cover, does it need to be this long, poingant and mind expanding, the UK does better covers than the USA, the UK edition, RayNaler.net, translated into French, thought it was brilliant, June 2023, Cthulhu, Japanese style, maybe this book is necessary, another cover with more tentacles, almost doesn’t ever talk about tentacles, cosmic horror = tentacles, Antarctica, the melting and stuff, a giant frozen 17 tall penguin, Tekeli-li!, philosophies of writing, Robert E. Howard is writing for money, very successful as a pulp writers, 4 times as big, Lovecraft doesn’t write stories that don’t need to be written, this is what is selling right now, even when he’s doing very pulpy stuff, things that are not needed for the story (to make the cover), a born storyteller, writing story, they like stories too, they don’t have the chops, people who won’t write for the commercial market, antagonistic to commercialism, Clarke is a bit of both, very elderly collaborations, sullying his legacy, The Light Of Other Days, very disenchanted with Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov, Silverberg, cash-ins, a reader need not be subject to the whims of the author, because your friend wrote the book, fuck you, go back to basic principles, Clarke has a purity in him at times, Bob Shaw, an expansion, Light of Other Days, the New York Times lie list, Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King, Black House, shouldn’t be trying or able, necessary compared to Asimov/Silverberg, Clarke/Baxter, Olaf Stapledon wrote this, he didn’t write for cash, the unique fluke, King’s psychology, King has a limiter or a governor, he doesn’t use it for evil (or for good), hurts his own work, a fantasist of childhood and American life, a fantasy writer, we just don’t think of him that way, “fantasy realm”, The Goblin Emperor book, secondary world fiction, worldbuilding is mostly bad, silly worldbuilding, 2001: A Space Odyssey, psychedelic experience, intelligent worldbuilding, to fill pages, fall apart in a mush, a speculative component, the sensory impact of the trip, highly informed, standing on what is know and speculating, if there was life it would be in this zone, that kaiju book of Scalzi’s, wonder about your purpose, none of this is helping me in my life, what happens during the game, processing a magazine, sitting too long, certain number of hours, that’s fun, but it ain’t a novel, it ain’t good science fiction, what would our guy from youtube think about Philip K. Dick, make a magic system work, things are happening because they have to, if time started going backwards, still in the Roman Empire, spins up a world in order to explore it (not to fill pages), his novels are all worse than his short stories, just better, his short stories are better than that book (The Man In The High Castle), a children’s book, Galactic Pot-Healer, work and being out of work, a frontier where people are challenged to find meaningful work, that gunfight was really cool, some people act like robots, unemotional or mean, is sex with co-workers cool?, very fun and very rich, he didn’t need a setting for some characters, if your story doesn’t have idea at its core it’s not science fiction, imagine with ideas, live with ideas, a Philip K. Dick essay, Olaf Stapledon writes big long thick books that are science fiction but not novels, that’s interesting, how do you do that, a history of the last and first men, like reading a whole bunch of Clarke stories, unique in fiction, poor guy, there’s a lot not to enjoy, How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, until you toss it across the room, a good theory of fantasy, fantasy is pretty big, the hardest of the hard, uploading and downloading your brain, it’s not, Ringworld, a whole bunch of gimmes, smart aliens, an aggressive species, they generate a D&D party, the Larry Niven character, just an excuse, a gravitational feeling thing, complete bullshit book, everything is fiction, it would just fall apart, 100% cheater and it works because he has an idea at the core and everything else is to get to that idea, he cheats in every possible way, Clarke has a very different philosophy, even in A Fall Of Moondust, not his best book, a bunch of boring characters, people get lead astray, super-good, a lot of Silverberg lately, Tor Doubles, read about a third of half of each of those books, a Silverberg novella, especially with his novels, he’s a contemplative dude, he’s sorta artsy and literary, he likes old books, Heart Of Darkness on another planet, elephants for the economy, sex on the brain, human relationships, the worldbuilding is to get to the transcendent point, The Book Of Skulls, being a good writer helps, Passengers, what is he famous for?, made Majipoor maybe?, Lord Valentine’s Castle, Nightwings, doesn’t have a killer book, big stature for a guy who doesn’t have a killer book, Neuromancer by William Gibson, rather than the fixup, his standalone short stories are really good, Phases Of The Moon by Isaac Asimov, a writing machine, wrote for money, still alive and not licensing his name out, 2010, now that he’s not poor, not getting his pension padded, good story, good writer, Arthur C. Clarke, he knows what to do, Farnham’s Freehold, he’s gonna rant about it, it’s not as bad as you think, Paul, oh my god, at the time, Westlake, revving back up, The Colorado Kid illustrated edition, Justified: City Primeval, there are character in it, Elmore Leonard short story, Tommy Patrick Ryan, some random guy on the internet, through Eric, 11th ever published story, readability through the fucking roof, so much characterization, got worse at the end, No Man’s Land by John Buchan, early evening, a reasonable hour of the evening, save the hunger to be angrier, approaching it satisfied, Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, Ace Double, a subpodcast of only Tor Doubles, we started with the first one, The Screwfly Solution, The Girl Who Was Plugged In, Run For The Stars by Harlan Ellison, savage, a juvenile delinquent in space, clairvoyant ability, very Harlan Ellison, A Boy And His Dog, Eye For Eye by Orson Scott Card, The Last Castle by Jack Vance, The Dragon Masters, I love the lengthy, Ill Met In Lankhmar, Vintage Season, The Sword Of Rhiannon, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm, Kim Stanley Robinson short stuff, they don’t list the table of contents, The Ugly Little Boy, Edmond Hamilton, Screwtop, Enemy Mine, Hardfought by Greg Bear, an idea man, he shoulve had a badge that said “idea man”, The Blind Geometer, Fritz Leiber, Universe by Robert A. Heinlein, fantasy, Damon Knight, Icehenge, Press Enter by John Varley, Death Of Doctor Island also The Island Of Doctor Death, Karen Haber, Home Is The Hangman by Roger Zelazny, Wheels Of If, Gene Wolfe, The Book Of The Short Sun, Conjure Wife is on LibriVox, Ben Tucker is good, a five hour book, unleash hell, we got this in our back podcast, shownoting, back in the day, Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle, Naxos, the torch of science, a metabook, 1831 novels, so many good ones, Scottish essayist, Fraser’s Magazine, purports to be a commentary, Godborn Devilsdung, a book review of that book, transcendentalist, German idealism, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, there are things in themselves, things as we perceive them, the laws of our mind, ways round, suppressing different premises, this book sounds really good, in a funny way, Johnathan Swift, Tristam Shandy, Laurence Sterne, founding text and serious organizing study of clothing, fashion theory, sartorial ambitions, clearly a book we both need to read, my all time favourite book, this is one of the books that makes life worth living, only seeing through clothes can we understand life, not composted, a half-mad saint, 320 pages, in the PDF, the torch of science, not the smallest cranny or doghole can remain unilluminated, what is he famous for?, some sort of hero worship, a precursor to the superman, the great providential men who make history, Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan by Ibn Tufail, like Tarzan, most translated, 1,000 Nights, the dream one, very solid, very Borgesian, Borges never wrote a collab book to make money, Frank Herbert son, Tom Clancy ghost author to write Borges books, a funny tweet thread, Hobbits and wizards, good morning as in fuck off, Justin fucked every Canadian for 20 more fucking years, he’s bought and paid for and corrupt as fuck, persist, not a big damn hero, very bad man, make some coffee.

Playboy, December 1971 - A Meeting With Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke

Playboy, December 1971 - A Meeting With Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke

Playboy, December 1971 - A Meeting With Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke

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