After six years of faithful service I’m closing the SFFaudio.com P.O. Box in Port Moody, British Columbia.
Anybody and everyone who sends physical stuff to it please make a note. Those who normally only send me psychic messages need make no change. My astral plane address will remain identical.
The new mailing address for physical stuff sent directly to me is:
SFFaudio.com (Jesse Willis)
#102-2978 Burlington Dr.
Coquitlam, BC
V3B 7S6
Canada
The SFFaudio Podcast #116 – Scott, Jesse, Tamahome and Professor Eric S. Rabkin talk about The Space Merchants (aka Gravy Planet) by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth
Talked about on today’s show:
Frederik Pohl’s blog, differences between Gravy Planet and The Space MerchantsCoca-Cola vs. Yummy Cola, com-pocalypse (a commercial apocalypse), advertizing, conservationists -> connies (or consies) is an analogue for communists -> commies, Tristan Und Isolde, Costa Rica, Chicken Little, Fowler Shocken, 1950s. Jews in “the Science Fiction ghetto”, H.L. Gold, Phlip Klass (William Tenn), Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, the Wikipedia entry for The Space Merchants, a study guide for The Space Merchants, Levittown, Man Plus, The Merchants War, Pohl’s interest in psychiatry, Gateway, structural problems in The Space Merchants, identity theft, a hero’s journey, The Odyssey, katabasis, banana republic, the United Fruit Company, Cuba, U.S. Marines in Columbia, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, Jack O’Shea, little people are the perfect astronauts, pilots tend to be small people, the continuing relevance of The Space Merchants, “transformed language”, The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, “the Glaciers didn’t freeze overnight” (Rome wasn’t built in a day), what side do you oil your bread on, pedaling your Cadillac into the future, are there more cars in the U.S.A. than people?, William Gibson, The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed, corporatocracy, Oliver Stone, does Wall Street run the world or is it Madison Avenue?, representative government per capita (per head) or ad valorem (to value), The Marching Morons, dystopia, utopia, citizen vs. consumer, CBC’s The Age Of Persuasion podcast, the effectiveness of advertizing, feminine hygine products, “it has wings”, coffiest vs. Starbucks, Jon Huntsman, Tim Pawlenty, how effective is advertizing?, saturation of advertizing vs. the message of advertizing itself, does advertizing work?, who consumes dog food?, soyaburger, Chlorella, algae, soylent red, despite what he says Eric is not a jerk vegetarian, seitan (wheat gluten food), Moby Dick, Mountain Dew in the U.S.A. vs. Mountain Dew in Canada, energy drinks, Jolt Cola, phial vs. vile, Philip K. Dick’s Do Android Dream Of Electric Sheep?, the Penfield Mood Organ, caffeine, Tamahome likes unsweetened chocolate, what did Montezuma drink all day long?, does has the internet lessen the impact of advertizing?, the spillage from penis enhancement, Eric bought a wide cross section of pornography, “genuine spurious placebo”, Boeing “forever new frontiers”, the Dubai Ports controversy, Cisco Systems, I, Robot, Minority Report, gesture recognition, Yelp, Wikileaks: U.S. diplomats pressed Boeing deals, Bombardier, “he came from an old family”, Kennedy, Bush, Heddy and Hester, Hedy Lamarr, Hester Prynne, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, The Stars My Destination, “Eight sir, seven sir, six sir, five sir, four sir, three sir, two sir, one. Tenser, said the Tensor, Tenser said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun.” Rebecca Black’s Friday is a train wreck, Arthur C. Clarke‘s Tales From The White Heart, colonizing your brain, “you haven’t read a book until you’ve talked about it”, is solitary reading a different kind of thing than social reading?, satire, Monty Python’s “The Funniest Joke In The World” sketch, advertizing in books, advertizing in paperback novels, propaganda, recommendation vs. advertizing, making something available vs. thrusting it upon you, metaSFFaudio, The Reapers Are The Angels by Alden Bell, Flannery O’Connor with zombies, why SFFaudio doesn’t link to Amazon.com, Morning Joe, Fox News, Scott is now a politician, Douglas Adams, political debate being replaced by sound bites, Jon Stewart vs. Sean Hannity, Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire, Will Rogers, communication vs. advertizing, jokes are revelations, brand awareness, why do kids want to see Transformers 3?, Cedar Rapids is a coming of age movie about the nature of friendship, why is there no commercial released audiobook of The Space Merchants?, The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein, Them!, anti-consumerism (anti-Americanism), tobacco packaging warning messages (are ads), the tobacco industry vs. the anti-tobacco industry, church advertizing, Scientology doesn’t sell the same message as many other religions, L. Ron Hubbard, A.E. van Vogt, Dianetics, the premise of Null-A, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Illustrations from the original serialization of Gravy Planet (aka The Space Merchants) in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine’s July August and September 1952 issues:
This post is off topic to our general subject. It was originally written in 2008, but was never posted because it was so off-topic. Sadly, it keeps having to be re-written as private emails. I have decided to save myself writing it over and over again.
How shall I put this? I might as well say I hate puppies and rainbows as say it. But it is the truth so I’ll just come right out and say it.
I hate music.
Can we still be friends? I’m being honest here.
For as long as I can remember I’ve hated music. I certainly didn’t always classify my feelings as hate. I had a mixture of emotions: Indifference, perplexity, boredom. Now I classify that entire block of feelings all as hate. Now hate is a pretty strong word. But I think it’s justifiable. See, it’s hate because music is a block in my path towards whatever isn’t music.
It isn’t that there isn’t any music I appreciate. There is, but I feel like I’m the world’s only homosexual living in a 100% heterosexual world. If it isn’t funny, isn’t literary, if it isn’t connected to some emotional or visual memory already in me, I just refuse to music. Music without those things honestly bores the shit out of me and always has. And I feel utterly alone in this. Apparently there is a psychological condition called, melophobia. It’s sufferers reportedly have symptoms of:
“breathlessness, excessive sweating, nausea, dry mouth, feeling sick, shaking, heart palpitations, inability to speak or think clearly, a fear of dying, becoming mad or losing control, a sensation of detachment from reality or a full blown anxiety attack.”
But I have none of those symptoms. I simply become annoyed and seek to turn off the offending noise. There isn’t a Wikipedia entry on melophobia, so it can’t be very common. Apparently Sigmund Freud had the same reaction to music. That’s one thing we have in common.
Everyone else seems to love or at least like music to some degree or other, and I really just don’t. It isn’t that I haven’t tried to like music. I have, I’ve tried over and over and over again. I even attempted to learn to play an instrument (a dismal failure). I tried listening to music – like all my friends did – but I never really connected with it the way almost everyone else seems to have. As a kid, when my peers were ooh-ing and aww-ing about the latest Michael Jackson song or carving “Def Leppard” into their desks, I’d be rebelling by reading books. I also discovered a few audio dramas as a kid.
I did listen to music. But it was never something I did with any zest. I’d listen to Weird Al Yankovic, Cream or The Beatles. I enjoyed the humor in Yankovic’s songs, his making fun of regular music, I loved the literary references in Cream songs and I loved everything about The Beatles. I connected with a few bands here and there, a few songs here or there, but my general disdain for music never felt at all normal. A couple friends of mine grew up to be professional musicians. One of them didn’t write lyrics (or when he did it wasn’t with enthusiasm). I hate his music. My other friend did write lyrics, and I can connect with his song lyrics. They have his sense of humor and his personality. Listening to his music is like spending time with him. It’s the personal connection in the lyrics – the shared experiences. But everyone I know, even people who don’t listen to music often – still claim to love music – as a kind of general thing. I never did.
In my youthful attempts to become “normal” I went to concerts.
Barenaked Ladies (middling funny music – but why watch them play it?)
Lenny Kravitz (utterly sucked – I’ll pay not to go again!)
Concerts all seemed more like a punishment than pleasure to me.
I have friends who are musicians, I have musicians in my family. I just don’t get the appeal of music.
One strange thing though, I’ve found I can connect with music that appears on screen. No problem there. I like Clannad from watching Robin Of Sherwood, and Vangelis from Blade Runner, and even the lyric-less Tangerine Dream from some of Michael Mann’s movies. Even classical music can work for me, Wagner from Apocalypse Now. But sitting down and listening to music? Guh.
I think the way I can best explain my relationship to music is by analogy. I see music as color in comic books. Its nice, it can enhance an image, but without the bold inks, without the story, and the word balloons it is an utter nothing. To get what I’m saying, think of yourself sitting around with your friends staring at colour chips – everyone else loves the colours, thinks they’re worth starting at for hours on end. Does that sound fun to you? That’s how it feels to me when I try to just listen to music – it’s an intellectual desert.
This is probably one of the reasons I’m so passionate about audiobooks.
Specifically, we’re doing a readalong. That is, we get a few podcasters and bloggers together reading the same book (or listening to the same audiobook) and then talk about it on the SFFaudio Podcast.
Our first official readalong will be:
The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley (read the |WIKIPEDIA| entry)
First published as Omega! in the August and September 1960 issues (a two-part serial) of Amazing Science Fiction Stories, The Status Civilization has been reprinted more than a dozen times.
If you’d like to have read the novel by the time of the podcast’s release, on April 26, you can either find a paper edition, get the ebook from |PROJECT GUTENBERG| and/or get the unabridged audiobook from Audible.com or iTunes:
The Status Civilization
By Robert Sheckley; Read by Mark Douglas Nelson
5.5 hrs. – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Wonder Audio
Availiable at Audible and iTunes Will Barrent has no memory of the murder for which he was convicted. He will now have to live his life sentence on the prison planet Omega. The few that survive there do it by committing crimes. And the more adept the planet inmates are at higher crime, the more they climb their bizarre anti-social ladder. They all must live in a society where drug addiction is mandatory, as is the worship of the Dark One. Barrent’s goal is to find why he was sent to this mad world and to clear his name and return to Earth. But first he must survive – for a life sentence on Omega is usually a short sentence indeed.
We here at SFFaudio Headquarters have been working to get more accurate subscriber numbers for the blog and the podcast, so we added our feeds to Feedburner. I don’t see an easy way to get everyone switched over to those feeds, though. My attempts to forward the current feeds using WordPress add-ins have failed because we have two separate feeds here – a blog feed and a podcast feed. When I kick on an add-in, it forwards BOTH feeds to the same Feedburner feed. Anyone know a workaround?
In the meantime, may I encourage you to switch to our new feeds?
After three recent podcasts (two for SFBRP, one for the SFFaudio Podcast) I’ve prepared a listening list of the topic of INVISIBILITY. Invisibility is, I argue, ultimately not a scientific phenomenon but rather a literary one. When we use the word “visible” we are referring to something that is either seen or see-able. I can say something is more (or less) visible than something else and be correct. This concept of gradations of visibility is quite legitimate, and doesn’t often lead to any conceptual difficulty. But, we also have a tradition of negating concepts that we think we understand well – and then expecting that negation to exist too.
For instance. First consider the concept of pressure. Then consider these two sentences:
“This bottle is pressurized.” <-(Looks ok)
"That bottle is unpressurized.” <-(Looks ok)
Now consider the concept of visibility. And consider two more sentences:
"This feather is visible." <-(Looks ok)
"That feather is invisible.” <-(Looks... no wait! It's not ok.)
So what's the difference between these two concepts and their respective negations?
First, there is the problem of a conceptual equivocation in the concepts. The adjectives "pressurized" and "unpressurized" actually refer to the contents (or lack thereof) in the bottle, and not the bottle itself. Whereas in the second pair the adjectives “visible” and “invisible” refer only to the feather.
No matter, as you might be thinking, is 100% transparent. This is not completely obvious. Air seems invisible to us, but in reality even air isn’t actually 100% transparent. One strange, if incomplete, definition of MATTER might be “that which cannot be invisible.” Invisibility, therefore, can be only properly attributed to the absence of something. A perfect vacuum would be perfectly transparent, but as you are probably now realizing a vacuum is not actually a thing. It is the absence of anything.
To be sure there can be, and certainly are: unseen feathers (a black feather in an unoccupied cave), feathers that are hidden (behind something else), or even a feather that is camouflaged to look like something else. And that is the extent of feathers and their non-visibleness. The only further kind of feather we could imagine that is actually invisible must therefore be a wholly fictional feather.
So when we say things like “a glass cup is invisible in water” we can only be speaking metaphorically.
What we really mean is that the glass cup is hidden from us, it is camouflaged. This kind of invisibility is no more persuasive than saying a large city is invisible to a blind man. The city is of course visible, it is just not visible to him. And likewise the cup is visible, just not to our eyes in that medium. So the question then becomes, is it ever conceivably possible to make a man non-visible in the medium of air?
And that’s when we come to my answer.
Only in fiction.
The best expression of this is probably in the movie Mystery Men (1999). Wherein the Invisible Boy is “able to turn invisible, but only when no one is looking at him.”
So here finally, in chronological order of imagination, are just a few of the many uses of the fictional concept of invisibility:
The Ring Of Gyges (extracted from Book II Part I of The Republic)
By Plato; Read by Sibella Denton
1 |MP3| – Approx. 31 Minutes [PHILOSOPHY]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 22, 2009 Gyges, a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia, discovers a gold ring that can make him invisible. It, along with his covetous nature are the means by which he murdered the King and won the affection of the Queen.
Written 360 B.C..
What Was It?
Based on a story by Fitz-James O’Brien; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 30 Minutes [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: Syndicated to radio stations including
Broadcast: October 10, 1943
Provider: Archive.org
The story upon which this radio play was based was first published in 1859. The Weird Circle was a 1940s half hour radio drama series that ran 78 episodes in syndication from 1943 to 1945 in the USA.
The Invisible Man
By H.G. Wells; Read by Alex Foster 13 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 4 Hours 54 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: 2006 The Invisible Man (1897) is one of the most famous science fiction novels of all time. Written by H.G. Wells (1866-1946), it tells the story of a scientist who discovers the secret of invisibility and uses it on himself. The story begins as the Invisible Man, with a bandaged face and a heavy coat and gloves, takes a train to lodge in a country inn whilst he tries to discover the antidote and make himself visible again. The book inspired several films and is notable for its vivid descriptions of the invisible man–no mean feat, given that you can’t see him!
Miss Pim’s Camouflage
By Lady Stanley; Read by Grant Hurlock 31 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 7 Hours 49 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: September 28, 2009 Mid-WWI, staid Englishwoman Miss Perdita Pim suffers a sunstroke gardening and gains the power of invisibility. She becomes a super-secret agent, going behind German lines, sometimes visible, sometimes not, witnessing atrocities & gleaning valuable war information
After six years of faithful service I’m closing the SFFaudio.com P.O. Box in Port Moody, British Columbia. 
What Was It?
Miss Pim’s Camouflage
