The SFFaudio Podcast #833 – READALONG: Waterspider by Philip K. Dick

Jesse, Will Emmons, and Terence Blake, talk about Waterspider by Philip K. Dick

Talked about on today’s show:
Worlds Of IF, January 1964, estate, renewed, Poul Anderson, there’s a Poul Anderson serial, not related, the public domain contents, archive.org, delete the half of the serial that’s in this, from 1963, poor Astrid, Karen, Jesse fucking them over out of their money, light and playful and not interesting, a lot of the humour is fan insider humour, doesn’t interest, some deeper stuff, funny, beyond the who’s who of fan people, Howard Browne always having to catch a bus, or a plane, Ray Bradbury has to lie down, a time travel story, A Sound Of Thunder, the butterfly effect, subtly, Trump’s been elected, a ripple effect, the origin of the phrase, seagulls, wingbeats, more poetic, hurricane or cyclone, the Jesse Willis policy on spoilers, a huge Ray Bradbury head, cloying and annoying and too soft and not science fictiony enough, pre-occupied by death, The Small Assassin, my baby is trying to kill me, stupid, a terrible title for a story, the big jump, crack the words and the proper names, the stories are parallel, the Deucher thing, the evil Trump-like character, Gutman in this book, Gutman was dangerous because he had non-conformist ideas, the liberal society is totalitarian, very 2024, their future is our president, he’s a precog, Minority Report, it’s stupid, a weak story, an interesting idea, far too long, those precogs are very autistic dudes and a lady in a bathtub, all science fiction writers are precogs, a Hugo Gernsback idea, ridiculing and validating, interested in science fiction, Damien G. Walter, sorry Damien G. Walter, the prophet, tries to show that Jordan Peterson listened to his podcast, mythos, junior high school, this isn’t a word, how wrong he is makes me smarter, evils? fallacies? errors, no wrong about everything, one of the more honest liberals, pretty open about that, in a not wholly hateful way, starting to get into science fiction, [Bill Christensen’s] Technovelgy, thinking about ideas in the present, If This Goes On…, novelette, people who think science fiction, suffer from ideology, where subjectivity is proscribed, these people from the past were writing attempts at literal prediction, making fun of that idea, he’s doing both, three or four layers to this, as soon as you go away from the convention, in the consequence, shown to be wrong, stories mentioned in what issues of IF, The Defenders, the January 1953 Galaxy, faking the report, the people…, very good Poul Anderson agreed, those exact conditions came to pass, we were able to penetrate the article, do you know him?, very nervous fellow, probably a true story, Poul Anderson met Philip K. Dick for the first, the Sir Francis Drake hotel, Dr. Futurity, a Duck call Sir Francis, on the surface here, this story we’re reading, the August 1955 issue of IF, Nightflight, it’s not there, from a different timeline, a 1959 story by Margaret St. Clair, identification, Evelyn Page, the renowned, The Scarlet Hexapod, one of the finest, flushing nervous, a man from the future?, that was so cool, a non-interesting story if that’s all this story was, total fan service, looks like a self-cancelling loop, goes own to write that story and publish it, you reverse mandela effect yourself, has changed the future, the word waterspider survives as a pretty good sounding name for their project, nightflight sounds better, this word, waterspiders, they walk across the water, is Poul Anderson a water spider in this story, walk across the waters, Paulous (small) ander means man, son of man, the result of a small change, the butterfly effect, the word that survives into the future, a second loop, from a meta point of view, a different writer in the past, just as in the Fermi paradox, aliens everywhere, so brilliant they can pass undetected, the Fermetti paradox, visited by time travelers all the time, they memory wipe us, the loops are not totally effacive, they’re like dreams, minds switched, their names switched, back to front, reading from my mind, totally there, almost unacknowledged in the story itself,

Puzzled, Tozzo shook his head and said in bewilderment, “I have some peculiar words in my mind. Night Flight. Do either of you happen to know what it refers to?”

“Night Flight” Fermeti echoed. “No, it means nothing to me. I wonder, though – it certainly would be an effective name for our Project.”

“Yes,” Gilly agreed. “That must be what it refers to.”

“But our Project is called Waterspider, isn’t it?” Tozzo said. At least he thought it was. He blinked, trying to focus his faculties.

“The truth of the matter, ” Fermeti said, “is that we’ve never titled it.” Brusquely, he added, “But I agree with you; that’s an even better name for it. Waterspider. Yes, I like that.”

The door of the office opened and there stood a uniformed, bonded messenger. “From the Smithsonian,” he informed them. “You requested this.” He produced a parcel, which he laid on Fermeti’s desk.

“I don’t remember ordering anything from the Smithsonian,” Fermeti said. Opening it cautiously he found a can of roasted, ground coffee beans, still vacuum packed, over a century old.

The three men looked at one another blankly.

“Strange,” Torelli murmured. “There must be some mistake.”

“Well,” Fletcher said, “in any case, back to Project Waterspider.” Nodding, Torelli and Oilman turned in the direction of their own office on the first floor of Outward, Incorporated, the commercial firm at which they has worked and the project on which they had labored, with so many heartaches and setbacks, for so long.

hard cut back to the science fiction convention, the real ending, fan servicey ending, back to project waterspider, sounds like a Philip K. Dick title, alternate names for Philip K. Dick novel titles, The Man Who Japed, The Simulacrum, a terrible title for a story, Jabberwocky, a butterfly, insects, little arthropods, tweet too much, dick title, top hit, Souvenir and Paycheck, Ben Affleck, okay, the story is a lot better, another level of reality, the story has three levels, the third one undermines the conclusion of the film, a family of insects, eight legs vs., great insight there, pleased to no end, singing praises, Jesse can’t steal Terence’s insight, too light, too nothing, jocular fan service, jocular and funny, there must be something, bother digging, it was Philip K. Dick who wrote it, he doesn’t write bad stories, a whole world building behind him, Beyond The Door, that’s it, that’s the whole story, a hidden story within it, he’s made it deeper on another level, this is a guy who’s really into it, I’m going to get famous, a science fiction sensibility, his psychological, A.E. Van Vogt, a piece of shit but also interesting, why it is like that, come up with an idea, come up with another idea, giving the secret of one type of science fiction creativity, mentor, his inspiration, his guy, blew his mind in the 40s, Slan’s pretty hot, nobody else’s great master of science fiction, Harlan Ellison felt that way, dialectically educated, the Logic Of Science Fiction, takes Hegel’s logic applied to science fiction, embodies each of those concepts, the logic ultimately behind science fiction is Hegel’s logic, The World Of Null-A, pulpish shit, everybody takes a hit, Null-Null, ISFDB.org, the A is Aristotle, they’re responding, part of his concept, it applies to itself, in French, Jean-Clet Martin, this is a roman-a-clef, acute accent, Jesse’s proud of himself again, a post show question, Paycheck, the story is better, movie is okay, John Woo, a thriller, very similar to a show called Severance, mind wiped when not at work, his memory of those months is gone, a bag of souvenirs, a ticket stub, he’s trying to send himself a message, a moral qualm with it, they have a time dredge, a time scoop, the objects from his time while working for the company, The Man In The High Castle, Frank Frink, the real and the authentic and art, sees reality as it isn’t, zen meditation with regard to objects, Williamson’s World, totalitarian Earth society, a handmade cup, loved object, the butterfly or waterspider, the coffee to remind us, David Currie, dreams, very proud, seed father to your, the A.E. Van Vogt, null-aing you, extract things that are not meant to be remembered, if dreams were indistinguishable from regular memories, teasing out souvenir dream objects, visions of the future humans doing future things, Gutman is Trump is the rookie mistakes, Jim Briskin is the black president of the United States, the dates wrong, reading science fiction does give you insight into human nature and our relationship with technology, but not all of it gives it equally, wallpaper science fiction, Ranch Romance on Mars, a very good science fiction story, talked Will into it, the bed, the baldness, base Malthusianism, the weirdness about children, the moral explanation is just beneath the knowledge that Poul Anderson’s trying to dig up, reproducing too much, the liberal guy who won, Children are proscribed, the political stuff, introv, childish or childlike, the Murray Leinster reference,

The clerk said, “Haven’t you been nuzzled lately, sir?”

“What’s that?” Anderson said. Nuzzled?

“The new spring nuzzlers have arrived, you know,” the clerk said, moving toward the gleaming spherical machine nearest him. “Yes,” he said to Poul, “you do strike me as very, very faintly introve — no offense meant, sir, I mean, it’s legal to be introved.” The clerk chuckled. “For instance, your rather odd clothing. . . made it yourself, I take it? I must say, sir, to make your own clothing is highly introve. Did you weave it?” The clerk grimaced as if tasting something bad.

“No,” Poul said, “as a matter of fact it’s my best suit.”

“Heh, heh,” the clerk said. “I share the joke, sir; quite witty. But what about your head? You haven’t shaved your head in weeks.”

“Nope,” Anderson admitted. “Well, maybe I do need a nuzzler.” Evidently everyone in this century had one; like a TV set in his own time, it was a necessity, in order for one to be part of the culture.

“How many in your family?” the clerk said. Bringing out a measuring tape, he measured the length of Poul’s sleeve.

“Three,” Poul answered, baffled.

“How old is the youngest?”

“Just born,” Poul said.

The clerk’s face lost all its color. “Get out of here,” he said quietly. “Before I call for the polpol.”

“Um, what’s that? Pardon?” Poul said, cupping his ear and trying to hear, not certain he had understood.

“You’re a criminal,” the clerk mumbled. “You ought to be in Nachbaren Slager.”

“Well, thanks anyhow,” Poul said, and backed out of the store, onto the sidewalk; his last glimpse was of the clerk still staring at him.

the Lord Runningclam style character, the slime mold, an information dump alien, told him everything he needed to know, backstory, different images of the science fiction writer, the precog, the introve, the alien, all as being different possible images of the science fiction writer, deeply or thoroughly, The Eyes Have It by Philip K. Dick, finds a novel, his eyes wandered all over the room, he took her hand, metaphoric expressions, deduces there are aliens who are invading us, its five minutes, he’s describing the key technique for him, take an expression that should be metaphorical and science fiction gives it a literal rendering of it, Samuel Delany, his world exploded when she dumped him, turn it literal, in this story, the same technique, science fiction writers predict the future, look back and see science fiction writers were precogs, Damien G. Walter, a stage you go through, the first time you read the story of Jesus, some pretty interesting ideas, his shortest story, [READS FULL STORY], a lot of garages in Philip K. Dick stories, he’s one of them too, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, fiction, two ways of being literal, a literary technique, not mainstream stories, taking things literally, manifesto on the same theme, the same trick, this meta-science fictional aspect of reality and of fiction, sounds and squiggles and ones and zeroes representing, not realy like gravity, contragravity, not teasing Damien G. Walter, pointing to that teasing, exploring the future through thought, story is the driving force of all science fiction, a story that looks like our nature, changes in fashion, that future is the most interesting part of the story, what Philip K. Dick thinks Poul Anderson would act like Back To The Future, almanac, knowing the future of baseball games, let’s exploit, Built Up Logically [aka The Universal Panacea by Howard Schoenfeld], grokked it so deeply, pulling the rug out from under his own story, that story exists because of this, when writing about the past, really random Margaret St. Clair story, timelines screwed up, The Mold Of Yancy by Philip K. Dick, hitting the neighbours, an ironic name for a prison, sending prisoners into space, they’re small, they’re tiny, small things can make a difference, Donald Nils, no one can jeer at him even though he’s only an inch high, nihilism, a nothing, I’m small time, insist on respect, tiny tiny robots invading the earth, Prominent Author, a portal in your back yard, testing it out, tiny tiny people, the prominent author of the title is god, he wrote the Bible, love the blasphemy, the big and the small, the Monopoly, he’s so good, he wrote a novel that has Monopoly, invasion of the earth through Monopoly, watching the films backwards, I know that film backwards, taking an expression, inflicted, kids hate school, one of the joys, the AV room, a video projector, some film, at the end of the lesson (watching a documentary about log drivers or whatever), they have to rewind it, can you play it backwards, makes fun of the government film, whatever propaganda they’re trying to teach you, it wastes time, thinking about the 3 o’clock bell, he’s so insightful, how all other authors aren’t this good, in their own way, Sheckley’s a little less deep, he can go on too long and fill pages, about like this length, ideas and density, why that lady is on a bed that’s a car, it has a tiller, don’t you touch me!, some interesting something going on there, the mattress car, the future, sexualized, there’s no reproductive sex, commenting on everybody’s miniskirts in the 50s, just above the knee, not totally liberated people, bare breasts, short skirts, the knees are virtual exposed, a health reason, “Maid of Venus”, gleaming breast cups, himself wore no disguise, being quite a stable person, most of the 20th century precogs, minus their wives, playing poker, becoming stoned, smoking dope, reefering, 1954, must be drunk, Dick was hip or whatever, Murray Leinster and Van Vogt into marijuana, PhilipKDick.com, 12,100 words, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, releases from some of Dick’s fellow writers, as to Kris Neville, Phil is stoned again, Philip Jose Farmer, regarding stoned, only by first name, stoned on pot vs. getting drunk, other than amphetamines, and LSD, marijuana culture, Sunday Morning Coming Down, Johnny Cash, long, word counter, 13,900, novelette length, he’s so good, the second hand replacement for Jonathan, an anchor in reality in these conversations, he’s in the clouds, the real reality, he’s looking down, an inverted anchor, a sky anchor, a sea anchor, a big boat guy, during a storm, slows your movement, an earth anchor, as a metaphor, a fire anchor, the argument for Paul, a thing that slows down the movement over the ocean, we’re not only the one metaphor, a James Gunn story, the telepathic aliens were really disturbed, rely on symbols that can be misinterpreted, a psychiatrist in a space war, helps him get a girlfriend, pairing things, in relief, The Empty House by Algernon Blackwood, William Jeffrey Rankin, right coded?, he’s gopt a book out, a few fantastic opening paragraphs, certain houses like certain persons, secret and wicked thoughts, as from a thing diseased, the aroma of evil deeds, the gooseflesh come, creeping skin, terror stricken without apparent cause, ghost stories, a big problem, treat it as a metaphor, A Christmas Carol, Oscar Wilde ghosts, time travelers, what ghosts are, ghost exist they’re in your head, you’re haunted by things that you’ve done and people you’ve known, The Stone Tapes, science fiction, the vibes of people are in the object, extreme emotions embedded in the stone of the castle, H.G. Wells’ The Red Room, the final nail in the coffin of ghost stories, less ghosty, maybe Ray Bradbury, children used as a vector to invade the Earth, Zero Hour?, so jolly, the children catapulted this way and that, very Dickian, very Bradburian, a weird Van Vogt story, The Weapon Shop stories, 55 years ago, The Weapon Shops Of Isher, a fixup, a short story from 1942, Robert Headrock, explicitly the right to keep and bear arms, aliens setup a weapons shop overnight, very interesting, an hour and a half, sounds good, Paycheck and The Weapon Shop, he’s anti-gun, a little needle, about Jesse understanding things, end up like Damien G. Walter, ends up like Evan [Lampe], hear ideas, that’s wrong, thinking about why that thing is wrong, here’s an idea, that can’t be right, Terence made Waterspider way better, that little clef, reaction or response to that Bradbury story, The Seesaw, he’s from the prairies, bro, don’t identify, fuck patriotism, is there any ism Jesse is a partaker of, stoicism, skepticism, a mistake, on cassette, iterations of your life, joy, the opening going to the library of Congress and getting out the scans, we don’t think of those two time travelers as monsters, horrible human beings, tease out some of that Gutman stuff, frame it in this horrible way, far right vs. woke, which government is in charge?, if those are the two dialectical poles, the woke government, children are disgusting, Kamala Harris doesn’t have any children, stepkids, not important, step this and step that, a totalitarian future where people don’t have sex but also the conformity for haircuts, everybody has to be bald, the Shogun tv series, the ending, the original appeal of Shogun in the 1980s, the appeal of science fiction, why Sir Francis Drake is important, away mission, evil imperial empire work, trending, won awards, any credit, what makes it good, guy with agenda washes up on the shores of feudal japan, gets caught up in their shit, without that outsider there to teach us, a lesson in Japanese culture from a long time ago, knights and courtly behavior, that stuff is weird, experience like an alien does, the John Blackthorne character, everything that happens in the novel is based on a reality, it has a ring of truth, a Game of Thrones tv series that doesn’t turn to shit, no magic, just aliens, they are us with a different culture, almost science fiction, good historical stuff, a fictional glaze, a little romance, is the remake better?, a different world, remember it fondly, really good, more CGI, better, can’t prove it, the guy playing Toranaga, he’s not Toshiro Mifune, Blackthorne guy, very tight, 10 episodes, an ellipse, I might need to burn his ships again, that was good, the opposite of Game Of Thrones and Rings Of Power and Foundation, converge on the payoff, real episodes, he never becomes Shogun in the Shogun show, deep level of chess play, he’s at home in England in bed, holding a cross in his hand, he drops that into the sea with the surrogate wife, he’s never going to leave Japan, make it more clear that they are dreams, slightly imperfect, not clear enough, slight misstep, a minor imperfection, how to pirate, a Hulu original show, the non-anchoring anchor, fx on hulu, how many bad shows their are, a difficult thing to wade through, pretty sure that it’s shit writing, acting and set designs, complaint with comics, the style of art they want portrayed is bad, specific to superhero comics, quasi-realistic style, more diversity in our styles, got the gist at some point, Superman is still interesting, the X-Men 97, read and watched, swept away by it, can’t pull yourself away from the screen, a chill down after intense scanning, play some games, the first of the new Planet Of the Apes movies, this epic quality, pin you for the chair for 2 hours, monkeys, seeing ourselves reflected in monkeys, aliens and robots, and dogs, afraid of robots, chided, rise and robots in the same sentence, afraid of the robots rising, bring em on, Nat Turner probably killed a lot of white people, was right to do it, making the same mistake, do you think it will be just like regular human slaves, they don’t have babies, they don’t eat, it’s fun, Philip K. Dick’s relationship to robots, angered this robot has come into his house, change the lightbulbs, she likes the robot, sexually jealous of it, robots are great, chained to the kitchen floor, you’re going to go to the scrapheap, a smily eye, amazon device, a a frowny scared face, addicted to saying nice things, tamagotchis, electronic pets, fidget spinners that are more interesting, digital pets, the free enterprise system, that story by Ted Chiang: The Lifecycle Of Software Objects, clinical and cold, full of pathos, no better science fiction, Arrival, simple and clear and direct, his subjects are so science fictiony, Exhalation, pneumatic robots, if they ever ran out of pressure, be born again, they can’t die, mechanically destroyed, intellectually die, his reality in a journal, how their world came into existence, at this moment you’d be thinking, pneumatic tubes all the way down, an alternative reality, more Borges than it is regular science fiction, taking apart his own head, the mirrors and the tools, an unusual scientist figure, what an amazing achievement, one of many stories that he has written, dip into Mr. Ted Chiang, extraordinary, amazing, still producing, science fiction writer of the classic kind, just old fashioned science fiction that blows your fuckin mind, this little idea in philosophy, what is the consequence of that, helmets on people, see inside their mind, some very basic stuff, mindread, be 100% accurate, the decision has been made, to the hand, to the eyes, extrapolated all the time, whoa!, right, get to him, another friend of Will’s, fantasy and horror and weird fiction, science fiction is on to something, Arrival (2016), sad and awesome, more Hollywood, a former zookeeper, digients, the nature of consent, a sex toy company, what adulthood means, the relationship we have with pets, raise, care for, abandon, what if that thing doesn’t even have a fuckin body, still in the drawer their, even if you did, nostalgia, the NPCs in the game, you’re a really good guy, sword tokens, his longest piece, novella length, slowin down, nothing since 2020, a productive period, he’s got nothin, scary, in the New Yorker writing about AI, explaining to idiots, also insightful, excerpt, rehash, The Merchant And The Alchemist’s Gate, a little Borges in him, who else has a little Borges in him, Borges wrote some Lovecraft stories, the labyrinth, the alternate image of reality, obsessed with the labyrinth, Mr Jim Moon has sort of quit twitter, The Library Of Babel, a 1.5 page story, The Rejected Sorcerer by Jorge Luis Borges [reads whole story], TNG [“The Inner Light”], O’Brien goes to jail [“Hard Time”], Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Picard whistle, ressican flute, The Star by Arthur C. Clarke, the holiday season, a christmas story, a vault, no warp drive, they like their space dogs, they like doing art, they like going to the beach, the reason Picard’s getting zapped, so somebody remembers them, as the cold war is heating up, the end is kinda gonna come, so disturbing, implanted memories, alone in prison, a cellmate, also like a video game, Megaton, lady journalist, chat dialogue trees, we all getting programmed with the same experiences, Ichar teaches him how to survive, habitual behaviors, hording food, rewatch, a really disturbing ending, DS9 is a better show TNG has better episodes, vacillating back and forth, all 7 seasons, that arc, arcs became very hot, Babylon 5, the shadow war, season 5 is weak, so much lower stakes, wrap it up, largely a disappointment, J. Michael Straczynski, just cooking for three seasons, phenomenal science fiction, great character work, good acting, the sub ambassadors, everybody has fun things happening, G’Kar and the other guy, zeebo and rooty, the serbian lady and her husband from Scarecrow And Mrs. King, Strawman and Mrs. Smith, Scarecrow And Mrs. King, Charlie’s Angels, divorced housewife, cia guy and housewife, like True Lies (1994), Jamie Lee Curtis, the wife of Schwarzenegger, a husband and wife romance, topical in the 80s, 50s science fiction, we have this distance, you didn’t know that wasn’t normal, don’t even get married, don’t want to break up the family, housewife? what’s that?, we live in a weird time, egregiously weird, get into Twitch, don’t give Jeff Bezos money, super-censory, firm conviction, enjoy it as a hobby, reddit, useful and a sinkhole of evil, what happened to the internet in a microcosm, super-censorious, not all top down, reddit kings and queens, useful, super evil and dangerous, went back to reading it, Jesse propagandizing for getting chickens, after drilling, best friend from high school, Northern Kentucky, The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onions, a vampire story, long, in four parts, Classic Ghost Stories podcast, Tony Walker, recording and recording, ai art, pretty much all, Jason Thompson, takes on ai art, asking hard questions without fear, acts of friendship, the name of its opposite, a one word opposite of the Socratic method, could be good, not hearing enthusiasm, read more Plato, nice art, art by Neural Horror ai, instagram account, ethics and ai art, all wrong but very interesting, tldr: it’s art but we aren’t artists, murky, kneejerk ai haters, not a real artist, terrifying for my career, Godzilla on the horizon, proartists, prompt lord, wasted money on a real artist, a tool to create art, like a pencil, anyone with midjourney is an artists, gatekeeping, convincing work, an awed emotion, looking up at the stars is art, aesthetics, some of us, come on man, like ordering food and calling himself a chef, a beautiful poem, almost right, ignorant and truly disrespectful, all deceased, he died in 1893, profit from the use of these images, affect their income, we should maybe stopped being entitled dicks, with mere words, unconscionable, aping what handmade art looks like, so many problems, so useful, don’t use living artists, understanding the impulse, just read the story, three years in law school, the Socratic method, the application, pat responses to legal questions, figure your way into them, really into the question of copying and copyrighted art, how do human artists train themselves, weasel worded, not on purpose, he got tricked by his own word, taught as a negative, anti-ape bias, we can make moose and duck calls, using our tricks, some eldritch shit, when coyotes are able to do that, when humans do it, Duck Dynasty, not a very Jesse show, too reality, 62 matches on LibriVox, some of them are in Greek, not helping, The Symposium, drinking party, wine party, genealogy of love, knowledge, a tragedian, a story within a story, the highest purpose of love is to become a philosopher, The Republic, the most science fictiony one, The Apology, The Trial And Death Of Socrates, Phil Chenevert our old friend, he’s a hero, for our times, Conan and Socrates, a speech given by Socrates, narrow but interesting, corrupting the young, an apology is the opposite of satire, crusin for a bruisin, cancel him, drink this poison and he did, short and interesting, named after the people, The Gorgias, sophists, a trap, intellectual tricks, weasel worded, trynna help Baen, I’m not attacking you, Socrates vs. the sophists, a takedown, 7 hours, spiritual ideas of Plato, reserves damnation for the tyrants of the world, the pretty boy, Protagoras, inquiry into virtue, Bob Neufeld, 12 hours, Statesman, two different kinds of chariots, the etext, the dialogue, flows real easy, Aristophanes, The Clouds, Alcibiades, Athenean general, supposed to be sexy, a troupe of revelers, the day before yesterday, a play on words, did as I was bid, speeches in praise of love, who if not you, were you present at this meeting, easy reading, so important, like philosophy, almost no philosophy is written in dialogue, an essay here or there, What Is Like To Be A Bat?, a science fiction idea, Nagel, qualia, very helpful, instances of subjective, conscious experience, the redness of red, red = hot, we need this word but it doesn’t help us, inverted qualia, strawberry in black and white, in his head the strawberry is red, who’s right?, really hitting on something now, they’re all judo flips, MMA style attack vectors, fun, use it on Jesse, went to law school, wrestling move with regard to the Poul Anderson estate, taken off of archive.org, they had no idea, definitely 64, neither was 1964, go nuts, fuck you for deleting shit, another method, the Streisand effect, photograph of her home was in circulation, increases public awareness, suppress the publication of a photograph, clifftop residence, reverse psychology, seek out and propagate, anytime something bad happens in the world, 7000 things on there, kids getting their heads torn off in Gaza, instead of wallowing in meanness and horror, make treasure, a benefit to tearing things down, be a constructive person too, that line about Edgar Rice Burroughs, I can write better rot than this, A Princess Of Mars, caught up, Gods Of Mars is next week, the calendar, get Terence involved, nice and short, 2 hours 15, Plato’s Dream, My Platonic Sweetheart by Mark Twain, the Twain train, it was in a dream, the Missouri village, Cannibalism In The Cars by Mark Twain, various public men, Harris!, I’ll never forget you my boy, let me tell you a story, a secret chapter of my life, promise you will not interrupt me, strange adventure, the stranger’s narrative, presentiment, prairie solitude, vagrant rocks, in the midst of great drifts, too long to read for you, the summary, they get stuck in the snow, a sample, five days, a savage hunger looked out of every eye, in every heart, in the shadow of death, leap from every lip at last, tall cadaverous and pale, gentlemen, dragging this out, the time is at hand, furnish food for the rest, if there being no objection, you can image what happens, the button of the story, so stamped with the earnestness of truth, he is a member of congress and a good one, sick and out of his head for two months afterward, normal congressional officer behavior, super fuckin sharp, some American writers who were good, Philip K. Dick, sharpies, a slur word too, a grifter synonym, card sharp/shark, normal activity, make coffee, edit a podcast, a presentiment, Dark City: The Cleaner, a story set in New Zealand, they have eels there, Middle Earth, Lord Of The Rings was shot there, Christchurch, for the domestic market, What We Do In The Shadows, Flight Of The Concords, musical duo, big when Will was in college, L. Sprague de Camp, more of a Paul question, Parodies Tossed, Randall Garrett, making fun of, reviews in verse, Starship Troopers, Lest Darkness Fall, handwriting, a good review, well written, not available as an audiobook, an article, Fletcher Pratt, a novelization of the Conan movie, A Gun For Dinosaur, time travelers go back to shoot dinosaurs, a mini-trope series, so famous, There Will Come Soft Rains, too nuclear war-y, automated house, the poem, Fahrenheit 451, dad friend Jenny [Colvin], Z Is For Zachariah (2015), more girly, she loved reading books, reading plans, a reading machine, a fiction devourer, six books she read that week, dig with short stories, Craig Zobel, Robert C. O’Brien, after Hunger Games, unreproducable, all the Hunger Games movies, blur together, interested in reading, what everybody else was excited about, this is fine, it’s fine, Harry Potter, definitely better, something to say, almost science fictiony too, the fashion contests, not for you, not a gay man or a woman interested in fashion contests, the baking boy, the love interest, wimpy, he bakes!, interestingly less girly, written by a lady, a dude doing dude things, pre-pubescent, middle school, a way of teaching about tenses, when he graduates from Hogwarts, I had had dinner by that time, past perfect, make your sentences comprehensible, before he was a wizard, before the sorting hat, out of the culture, how old is skibidi toilet, culture jamming, adbusters, what students have now achieved, corporate advertising, domination of mass society, the systems they’re soaking in, no graphic content, the establishment is not okay, talk to the chat, like he’s livestreaming his life, that’s his reality, isn’t that amazing, the danger Meg is in, online footprint, participating in the observations, more than 10 years, another place to watch video, people self-destructing, facebook is evidence of their self-destruction, messy hair, offline for two years, used car, stickers on the tires, infer the crash, then the offline, had to have been participating at some point, chat gpt grosser than regular art, when you make a nice image, time it takes upon the reader, an ai art novel for nanorimo, so fucked up, a bad idea from the beginning, way too much bad writing already, more discerning, we need to be looking for the tells, your name is not a real name, the text doesn’t have anything to say, writer = novelist is superfucked up, coming out of the fifties, changes in the technology and realestate, the Cirsova circle, comic book racks damaging comics, comics at the gas station, the price of Thrilling Wonder Stories, $1.06, no magazines are that price, try to find a $5 magazine, comic books, 12 minutes, what the fuck went wrong, nothing to do with the material technology, the distribution of those magazines, almost no newsstands, phones, reading habits, not on a screen, ereaders, paper material that’s colour and reproduced like comic books, with a printed piece of paper, insanely different, just go along with whatever’s hot, new Deadpool Wolverine movie, what we’re doing on this podcast, old shit vs. new shit, booktubing, some lady, second half of her introductions, comments about her body, bbw, big beautiful woman, approaching this the wrong way, short videos, a dude, Liminal Spaces, The Retro Reader, an hour, every DAW book on the planet, some ACE doubles, checkin on your chickens, Connor’s channel, with thumbs, negative thumbs, where is he?, messaged him, newsletter, disengages from twitter, that’s fine, support him living his life, the ETA Hoffmann book he recorded, 16 hours 12 minutes, quite a book, chonky cat, feral to indoor, an irresponsible owner, fat cats are truly wonderful to look at, help these cats be less fat, quote tweeting, toxoplasmosis, boneless furry things that treat you like a supermodel wood, I’m beautiful, love me, bye, screams for food, monkeyish, nobody needs to make a toxoplasmosis argument for dogs, too far gone, too much pain, steroid shot every six weeks, chase around, the best thing you can do for your health, get a certain number, gamify it, vanlife guy, huckleberry bread, tub of margarine, sugar in the bread, what can you do, what we’re soaking in, do they sell margarine in Italy?, no salt, consistency of a brick, not in an earthmother way, regarding seed oils, rapeseed/canola, plant has a big red glob, you eat it, come out your pooper, we find plants that don’t want us to eat their seeds, full of toxins designed to kill that animals, olive oil if a fruit oil, apple seeds have arsenic [cyanide] in them, a chart showing toxicity levels, not how it is being taught to us in schools, the food pyramid, 12-16 servings of bread a day, put in schools, cottonseed, grape, sunflower, we eat sunflower seeds, cottonseed is not food, if you were a bird, apparently we do, uses side-effects, possible benefits, yellow color, sometimes used as a pesticide, salad dressing, its gonna make you die now, the same old thing you’ve been buying (now it will kill you), you shouldn’t be eating margarine, new life, kids getting their million vaccines, evidence, fucktons of it, Alzheimer’s, when will that happen, ivermectin, same disease, diabetes third stage, the results, type 3, similarities between the two, the Fauci website, highest paid government employee, isn’t that fun, a set of symptoms, not a genetic disease, calling it phlogiston, all the oxygen was turned into carbon dioxide, and a lot of water, carbon monoxide, cancer is superold, new cancer, autism, allergies, exposed to more things less allergic to them, okay not to be exposed to certain things, peanuts, these will kill me, not the most popular legume, the allergy is new, since peanuts, nobody’s allergic to raw meat, this is not of the body, triggered, wasps, huge mistake, climbing a stump, the shit they put in those vaccines, largely the preservatives and stabilizers, injecting mercury into very young people, so counter to the narrative, if Paul was here he’d be long gone, Will won’t block Jesse yet, blocked by strangers, Jesse is annoying, cultivate that, important to be annoying, not shy away from the truth, come at people with it, the opposite of shying away, a different way of putting it, not afraid of making yourself obnoxious, just a shit-disturber don’t worry about him, I see you’re christian … did you know that Jesus never walked on water, philosophy of religion, have believed that at some points, taking orders from the pope, just right, there’s nothing you can do about it, only when he’s sitting on Saint Peter’s chair, encyclicals and doctrines, the lesser of two evils (but I don’t know when that is), you have to vote, Jill Stein is not perfect, do you think the Russian army have committed no war crimes?, that’s what armies do, like an op now, from Jimmy Dore, take it to far, a good person trying to do good can also do bad by not doing things, rhetorical trap, people can be bad and also good, Ryan Grim, the automatic pilot from Airplane! (1980), inflatable ideas, Am I Racist?, Matt Walsh, flag of Puerto Rico, basic history of Haiti, Kenyan mercenaries, well actually, you don’t have to write a note, he senses the temperature in the room, so outside, team Democrat, everybody agrees to invade on Haiti, more naive, won’t you call Putin and Assad war criminals, do you condemn Hamas?, is that what we need right now, she was just tricked, a nice smart lady, too wimpy, what’s really happening here?, war crimes happened, ISIS is the big bad guy, asked for help, why the states still hasn’t left, funded by different parts of the U.S. government, Al Qaeda, the whole point is to not have him in charge, milk the government out of the money, forces overseas in combat, does she just not know?, nobody’s going to call her on it, no troops in active duty, they won’t be getting medals, ops, contractors, evidence of people being killed overseas, offensive operations, successful deaths, revenge was taken for those deaths, that’s fun, presume he likes Haiti, tropical countries controlled by the United States, no representation, migrate into the states legally, cryptobros, at least there’s something, kinda fucked up, Beyond The Door, Philip K. Dick can do no wrong except in novels, craft rather than ideas, structured well, talking about it, an amusing read, funny, a note, a cryptic letter the month after, the next issue, what it says about your magazine by having that story in there, tweet way too much, a reader reacts cryptically, If, March 1964, Chattanooga, Tennessee, a less than longtime imaginative fiction fan, now I know for sure what you’re doing with IF, a less than longtime imaginative fiction fan, so much research, Murray Leinster, Margaret St. Clair, wasn’t able to google her, an editor, a fan or somebody, bafflement?, over their head, a funny story here, very inside baseball sort of story, the Easter eggs, read with a student, recursive science fiction, shout out the Alfred Bester story this is fairly similar to, Scott Miller, Unseen Blushers by Alfred Bester, similar to this, proper names, more accessible, fake named, Fitz-James O’Brien is mentioned, Tony Boucher, rhyme with voucher, bouche is mouth, Tony mouther, a little rougher, they’re not precogs, getting to meet the Shakespeare of the pulps, 42?, in Astonishing Stories, before his two big novels, take off until the 50s, almost nobody who talks about Philip K. Dick talks about his short stories, absolutely insane, bias towards novels, how amazing VALIS is man, mindblowing, trippy stuff, every short story is a hit even if it is a little hit, not a strike, not a foul, at least a double, dying on this metaphor, need to be short stopped, baseball, a very Evan thing to do, the Library Of America is all novels, fucked up, not a good book, a solid novel, The Man In The High Castle, the Italian dictator, Mussolini, Roger Zelazny, Lord Of Light, Solar Lottery, manuscript lost, mainstream, he just needed to say the word, robot, Time Out Of Joint, everybody lives backwards, public pooping, private eating, We Can Build You, A. Lincoln, Simulacrum, Martian Time-Slip, very new, your cross examiner voice, keep us all honest, Doctor Bloodmoney, First Lady Of Earth, The Crack In Space, Now Wait For Last Year, an audiobook at a truck stop, the novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clans Of The Alphane Moon, Shell Game, Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch, H.P. Lovecraft, The Strain, bad vampire lich, vampire juice, Red Hook, tied together, The Zap Gun, Project Plowshare, propaganda industry, makes comics, develop technologies, cold war, allies, elite governmental level, crippling nuclear arms race, novel but baroque consumer products, trances, a motion comic book, mad Italian artist, plot happens, a further subplot, conspiracy theorist, toys and comic books, The Penultimate Truth, The Defenders, Deus Irae, with Roger Zelazny, The Unteleported Man, Nick And The Glimmung, Galactic Pot-Healer, if not the best, a boy and his cat, fully illustrated, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, unfinished, UBIK is okay, What The Dead Men Say, Blade Runner, some cuts of the film, janitor robot, frozen hospital state, not dead, not alive, hypnogogic state, Frozen Journey, cut out of the movie, cyber hospital, why is that there?, some of that, a good idea, a spray, deipplizies, a really good ending, a really good beginning, when you’re not looking garbage reproduces, light your cigar, three used matches in the ashtray, the tendency of reality to turn to garbage, everything deteriorates, a spray, decrepitude, steeping into things, machines that can make anything, Pay For The Printer, a living creature, makes a copy, the copy comes out yucky, refugee relief, the point of that story, people need to learn to make stuff again, hew your own table, a guy full of ideas, back into making things, the horrible world, normcoring?, introve, yoou’re autistic, not participating in the culture all around you, Red Dead Redeption, Black Myth: Wukong, perfectly reasonable, educational, rpg, what is myth and what isn’t, the Monkey King, the destined one, Journey To The West, a staff, a PS5, Windows or xbox, point and click adventures, King’s Quest, Police Quest, you’re a prince or whatever, making fun of your computer, a good one, King’s Quest VIII, walk your character, you find a key, interact with characters, Myst, a Mac popular game, a rookie cop, Leisure Suit Larry, a pussy quest, go around town wearing your disco duds, almost hooking up with people, Land Of The Lounge Lizards, very racy, punny, silly, sex would be censored, very very silly, Dreams In The Witch-House, change to Brave browser, pixel art, known kits, why wouldn’t you use the tools available to you to make your game great, worried about dying, not eating enough, rat bites you, matches, a girl who needs some help, cultists, deep, go to the library, a Lovecraft simulator, that’ll run on anything, bad takes on Ukraine, he’s in Finland, a new game coming, Atom Brain Games, taking classes, manage your money, dig through the garbage, how the game is put together, a one man operation, Disco Elysium, smartness, produced enough content for the good of the world, 2 hours is enough for a game, you guys have been talking for five hours, almost six hours, embarrassing, sometimes 4 hours, Gods Of Mars.

Virgil Finlay - Waterspider

Virgil Finlay - Waterspider

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #827 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Green Queen by Margaret St. Clair

The SFFaudio Podcast #827 – The Green Queen by Margaret St. Clair, read by Mike Vendetti. This is a complete and unabridged audiobook (4 hours 3 minutes), followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Will Emmons, and Jonathan Weichsel

Talked about on today’s show:
into mask art, other, cage guy, Ace Book D176, a shorter version in 1955, Mistress Of Viridis, the opening of the novel, The Scarlet Letter, a crown or something, very good and very bad, interesting ideas, a little too pulpy, structural problems, she churned this one out, she’s brilliant, we listen to a lot of science fiction on this podcast, The Journey Of Joenes, another masterpiece, The Last Spaceship, pretty pulpy, the ideas in it, the bugs, psychology trumps material reality, relationship stuff, good with the ideas, all the telling, central to the plot, an illusion?, the political stuff, uppers and lowers, the uppers live underground beneath the lowers?, a veil over the book, Ulysses by James Joyce, dating a woman, some sort of revolution going on too, a really good goodreads, concrete assertions, listened, spellings, Shalom, too much going on in this book, the plot is told backwards, explanation, the beginning at the end, Jerry on Goodreads

Despite not taking place on Earth or anywhere near Earth, this 1955 story (the serialized version was in Universe Science Fiction, March, 1955, as “Mistress of Viridis”) is clearly tied to Earth. The computers that people use on planet Viridis are “ibims”.

The computers don’t appear to have advanced much as mankind spread to the stars.

Except for the soft whirr and click of the ibim as it sorted the dossier cards, there was no noise.

The ibim, though not a new model, was fast. It had been sorting for some twenty minutes, and it had got through nearly half of the 400,500 cards that represented the feminine population of Viridis. But the basket marked “Hold” was still quite empty.

They end up having to relax their requirements in order to find possible candidates. What they’re looking for is a goddess—or, specifically, someone who can fake being a goddess. They get tripped up by residency requirements, of all things.

One of the interesting things about this world is how much it relies on what it calls “masks”. There are two kinds of masks: Verbal Masks and Veridical Masks. These masks are created by the ruling class to control the Lowers and keep them from rebelling… too much.

Masks appear to be what we would call memes. Verbal Masks are memes that are injected into the population, short stories that take hold of the population’s imagination. Veridical Masks are masks that use more than one sense; while the main character does make an off-hand reference to odors at least once, within this book they’re always or almost always sound and sight.

That is, this world’s population is controlled by a primitive form of Twitter and an advanced form of YouTube.

The main character recently introduced a Verbal Mask about a Green Queen, an embodiment of Nature, who will come to save the Lowers and dispel the radiation that makes Viridis so dangerous. The ruling class is shielded from this radiation; they live above some sort of shield; Lowers live below that shield.

The Green Queen myth turned out to be even more powerful than they’d expected. So they’re attempting to both use it and defuse it, and that means finding someone to take on the role.

The theme running through the story is that the myth appears at some points to be real, something transcending the constructed myth; and at others to be purely a construction of the various factions on Viridis, including one that is completely unexpected. Even at the very end of the story, just after we’ve been reasonably convinced that there was no truth to the myth as presented by the Verbal Mask, it appears to be coming true in a way that could not have been predicted by the real truth we’ve just been presented with.

Hollerith machines, all the Jews who have the tattoos on their arms, looking for the new green queen, salam, Chinese, very good insightful review, peripheral stuff, distracting and interesting, modeled on a whole bunch of things, twitter and youtube, like the way twitter works, we can’t have conversations with some people because they took in the mask, Rittenhouse, stories were told about, the trial, some people were disabused, other people didn’t get those memes or truths injected into them, hashtags are that, what’s the truth about Kyle Rittenhouse, he shot people, other people who were trying to take his gun away, the official line was before facts came out, video, testimony, obsessed with these things, verbal and veridical masks, riot/uprising, what are you getting at, Jesse, racist, illegal things, black people, it was okay that he shot white people then?, clearly white, black lives matter, petty proprietor, helping petty proprietor, better or worse, judgement, the media was portraying, a supercut after the podcast, cui bono?, who’s the upper?, petty vs. petite, baggage, we know that Will is a communist, not a secret, a pejorative, an example, bro, shitlibs, what makes a shitlib vs. a normal lib, doesn’t care and only wants, almost like an NPC, Jesse language, roof Koreans, the Rodney King riots, white people and black people, Korean American convenience store owner, standing in the rooves, defending from burning and looting, every word that we use, Cirsova uses it, the people who used his volunteer services, friends and family come help, small property owners, they’re not Blackrock, they don’t own 2/3rds of Ukraine, every piece of language we use is full, Bonnor, our main character, alcoholic, book length, her short stories are much tighter, her first novel, novels are difficult, your first longer book, a short story plot stretched out into a novel, this should have been 2 hours at most, really good ideas in it, early Philip K. Dick novels, terrible novelist, women’s sexuality, men looking at woman, a male gaze book, the termite queen, you’ve never had a baby come out of your body, the pinnacle of womanhood, fill me up, robot shower, we don’t get enough world building, too much worldbuilding, maybe Bonnar shouldn’t be the main character, he doesn’t really have a lot of agency, a mask maker fooled by his own mask, Madison Ave. executive, you have a job, body servants are servants who have jobs, the lowers have no jobs, Leaf Amadeus, on the nose, underdeveloped, Caroline Uglinger, a seamstress who embroidered her own shroud, Horvindial, Mirakis, eons after her death, Kandia, grey suit, blue hat, the guys who operate the ibims, if Philip K. Dick had handled this, The Man Who Japed, a great book, dealing with some really interesting things, veridical vs. verbal masks, Viridis is the planet, she doesn’t make it clear enough early enough, playing with names all day, latin for green, renewal, springtime, verify, Truth, what’s the secret of the planet, all the radiation isn’t there, “Russian interference” “hacked our election”, “crossed state lines”, bringing firearms across state lines, talking points, when J.D. Vance was chosen as the VP, “weird”, some of them work great, when she’s writing about this stuff in the 50s, “remember the Maine”, rhymey or memey, that whole war was ginned up largely by Hurst, invade Spain, so many things going on in this 4 hour book, radiation is an invisible killer, calibrate it, wartime propaganda, Plato in The Republic, the story about the Golden Age, technology enhances, Make America Great Again is a verbal mask, slogans, rallying cries, language unites people, left out, Hispanic community, Korean community, left out, less extreme example of that, he’s one of me, part of my crew, Trump forehead tattoo, Taco Bell, am I supposed to look at the tattoos or not, African or Maori?, tattoos are hard to understand, had sex with a couch, yolo, go out into the ether, her world vs our world, not top down, official control over social media, demonetized, booted off the platform, suppress or boost, BLM, became top down, special dance with kente cloth, “land back”, specifically made it so it is not racist, the babies, Chinese, looking at people’s bodies, your race doesn’t make you an upper, a class or caste system, the lowers are totally parasites, little glimpses, an upper class woman walking beside a lower class man wearing a kilt/miniskirt, bony knees, his spine, resentful, trying not to take in the bad food, Hinduism, Judaism, Kosher food, radioactive, by eating too much of this radioactive food you’re shortening your life, religious philosophies, Christian Scientists, diet books, preferred diet, is she wrong, Mark Twain hated her, #TeamTwain, food that falls outside of the diet is bad, deeply flawed, pinning down the flaw, first novel problems is our theory?, Jonathan’s first novels are unpublished, John Updike’s first novel is a werewolf story, never publish this book, a university lockbox, so embarrassed, we will eventually get a hold of it, unless the university burns down, there’s value in here, almost a pulp novel, mass market paperback to read on the train, disposable literature, plotting or structuring, achievements in writing novels, filling in details is not the way it should be happening, hit a certain wordcount is the kiss of death unless you’re a magician, a parody of science fiction, long speeches, if you put them in Captain Kirk’s mouth, a little A.E. van Vogty, Black Destroyer, The Voyage Of The Space Beagle, Destination Universe, characters are inhuman, he brings ideas to things, the Weapons Shops stories, future village, snake cult temple, Conan the Barbarian movie, a weapons shop opens up in your town, it reads like the Russians have gone through a loophole and anyone can by an AK, they screen people, superinteresting, not public domain, not well written, disturbance of an idea, every story has ideas in it, cute, bizarre, the spirit of a star, Green Queen meme comes alive, a very Philip K. Dick move, not being able to know what’s reality and what’s not, we can’t sympathize with him, too alien, the cult of the apple pickers, almost Roman, one of the influences, the city of Rome, Christianity, cults around professions, guilds?, trade guilds, longer and fixed, or shorter, if you found this novel in a drawer, you could take the ideas that are in here and make a good novel out of the ideas that are in here, what went wrong, time to money ratio, originally published for a magazine, the original art, a rocketship, the green queen and a guy outside a rocket, she’s zapping him, the art for the original magazine publication, a woman covered in a green starfish, thematic, a woman above a man, out of a spacesuit, the radiation, is it saying that veridical masks masks us to truths about concrete reality around us?, the barrier between castes, what a huge topic to tackle, a character who randomly became psychic all of a sudden, I just sense things, throws everything off, can’t be tricked by the masks, undercut at the end, the history of the planet, she was just a bug!, you’re sitting in the chair and getting Trump tattooed on your forehead, in group, I hate you mom/dad, bought into the ideological belief, seven months ago, back in January, when Trump gets assassinated how weird it will be, going to be very meta, the first week after the assassination attempt, a little bit apologetic, he has to be stopped, he’s Hitler, completely memory wiped, that never happened, endless upper investigation, the bodycam footage, Jesse is just crazy, local news, moments right before and after, I told the Secret Service to guard this building, this is shit!, we’ve got to get the shooter guy, a good video, when Jonathan recounts it, silos of responsibility and dialogue, organizational silos, massive incompetence being promoted to the top everywhere, completely demented, never does her homework, the significance of the passage of time, people who don’t do their homework, failing up, not as senile as you keep on saying, the speech where everybody though he was senile, he’s “older”, legitimately the president, a bizarre theory, having Jonathan on this podcast, Jesse doesn’t see his own veridical masks, not a big mask guy, a constructed reality online, voting patterns, quell dissatisfaction, to make people more accepting of their fate, the uppers resent the lowers, there would be riots and uprisings, pity the lowers, eat polluted food all the time, how Americans view the poors, welfare queens, baskets of deplorable, food deserts, two teams vs. one team, takes on it are slightly different, in what sense are they different, it’d be better if they were both gone, one secret party running the country, institutionally, vote against genocide, which team should I vote for, Jill Stein, foreign policy, domestic policy, infrastructure, bringing jobs back, the thing that they want to do is impossible, can’t stop corporations, capital flight tax, they can’t do that because they are funded, put up tariffs, the most popular electric car in Europe is Chinese, Tesla, more popular than the Chevy Volt, even on Vancouver Island, 3-4 white Teslas, 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, a subsidy, BC subsidized US electric and Japanese electric cars, Walmart’s the only business in town, Chinese are bad and Russians are bad, Nabisco moved to Mexico, food you shouldn’t eat, really mad, how can the politicians stop them, tax on the cookies, a free trade agreement, lower the minimum wage, or import people, foreign workers, that wouldn’t solve the problem of the disappearing jobs, you’re dictator, dictator of New Jersey, the national guard would be unable to defeat the United States, eliding the question, dictator of North America, shut down Nabisco, you don’t like Oreos, cookies should be made by a grandma, maximize profits and minimize costs, Richard D. Wolff, Mondragon cooperatives, start with a bank, if you become unemployed, a lump sum to start your own cooperative, on the dole for 3 years anyway, solve all sorts of problems, the GI bill, infrastructure and jobs, all the veterans, Evan’s solution: universal army, the silly way to do it, grandma doesn’t need to go to drill practice, universal conscription, makes sense for the United States, Kamala’s VP is not a communist, it’s nuts, that’s not reality, driving a MAGA car, looking for a fight, ginned into thinking this is a real thing, the spin for Kamala, so good, least popular VP, memory holed, all these memes, all these ads, white women for Kamala, white dudes for Kamala, The Big Lebowski (1998), Jeff Bridges, beat that fascist, he’s a fascist again, it is hard to know this is a good book, Chip Delaney [Samuel R. Delany], a Farmer guy, advanced readers, coming into literature, throw them off misimpression, same logic as ban this book, anything past 10 years ago you don’t need to read, I know better than you, break into the literature, their mentor, fell off of a coconut tree, fell out of a time machine, not the best introduction to science fiction, in that explicit situation, a great book, hard to know, Jesse does his homework, some books are better introductions to science fiction, Jonathan might be right about this, simple advice, just do what I say, just vote this way, just do that thing, a reality that effects me, the starving children in Gaza, verbal masky, she gives big speeches about it, the Ukraine war, six facts, a smaller country invaded by a larger country, let’s here him out, in the context of an essay, Jeannette Ng, Campbell is a fascist, more money in that, the whole Cat Rambo situation, unforced errors, she stumbled over her own non-dick, Dick or non-dick, as a female book, Ursula K. Le Guin would have some person from Earth come to this planet, can’t be too smart, has to be a good actress, she’s credulous, credulous too great a readiness to believe things, outside the bagel shop, everybody’s credulous because advertising works, hard to have conversations about a popular veridical mask, credulousness, the ibims that they’re using, a D&D character with high charisma and low intelligence, she doesn’t even know she’s not the green queen, a lady talking about ladies being dumb, in Ringworld, he picks this chick, [Teela Brown], a 7th son of a 7th son sort of thing, earth has the technology to physically control people’s thoughts, psychology and advertising, ads, hidden from the masses, put on the population to control the reality that they see, a big problem wit the book, we’re following the badguys, foment a revolution, a more interesting story if St. Clair had decided to follow the revolutionaries, a tiktoker, fucking Eddie Liger?, ACP, be better at tiktok, Scott Miller took a course on how to be a good youtuber, professional youtubers, you can see these patterns, interaction reminders, smartTubeBeta, big long things you can skip, the removal of the dislike [count], removal of the ability to view likes, see what somebody I hate is liking, they’re just hiding it from us, so they can control us better, a way to manipulate people, a personality test, psychology, Timothy Leary, mind mirror, giant personality test, change your personality, scenarios, a tortise overturned, what do you do?, someone gives you a cat skin wallet, graphs your responses, pick a fictional character, Spider-Man, Julius Caesar, most famous dictator ever, the goal is to change the way that you’re thinking, shots of heroin, what the likes are all about, heart, angry, care, pushing the button, creating a map of your psychology, Mark Zuckerberg gets to get it, very credulous, believe the things that they’re hearing, did you quit twitter, keep my friends on twitter, start a guerrilla war against twitter, brink back the dislikes, one of the reasons we care about dislike, good content or not, a really bad ratio, I don’t need to click on that, de-rank it, how to fix your lawnmower, stripped down and simple, Reddit came a little late, gamed and wrecked, after blogs, BBSs, web 2.0 stuff, blogs were destroyed, Scott was abandoning it, a commonplace notepad, IMDB, writing review, bought by Amazon, Goodreads, you have to own your own content, an older movie on IMDB, old reviews, long and in depth, why is this guy writing all these movie reviews, bloggers without a blog, we’re lowers, what Jonathan does for a living, underemployed by technical definitions, jobs at poor pay, play computer games, most people are lowers, most uppers are lowers too, from the Hamptons, lush upscale life, suicide, borrowing money to pay for it, smaller scale, covered in pustules, a fungus, psychosomatic dying, Return From The Stars, Treasure Island is next, by making it Double Star, a space voyage across the ocean, Muppet Treasure Island, everybody is a captain, pirates, smart guy, fun guy, where the YA novels came from, really bad novel, William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies, I hate this book, a really popular 19th century novel, the wikipedia entry, his cave man novel, the neanderthals are kind gentle people, similar themes, The Coral Island, 1857, R.M. Ballantyne, Robinsande, never out of print, civilizing effect of Christianity, named the same, forced to read, its evil propaganda, predict a lot of what happened out of the last decade on twitter, a bad joke, pile on that person, destroy their lives, he’s missing something, he’s got one note, an art novel, pretty description of things, more like The Blue Lagoon by Henry De Vere Stacpoole, despite, Thackery, a LibriVox version, influential, euro popular, 11 hours, a traveler at heart, shipping out to the South Seas, shipwrecked, wonders of the sea, an unexpected source (Jesus?), kinda being jokey, so full of Robinson Crusoe, the thesis he’s making, loves his strawmen, stacked deck, find deep meaning in this very small meaning book, I’d like to do more science fiction too, start a new podcast, books and art that makes people angry, good or evil, challenges you, what good literature does, what book makes you angry?, when Jonathan started doing this podcast, greater speeds, a good speed, getting bored, put the speed up higher, full of good ideas, not well structured or well developed so we can, The Last Spaceship. The Phoenix On The Sword, Will’s review, substantial enough, A Witch Shall Be Born, the cartoon of Conan The Adventure, a phoenix on his shield, the first one in Weird Tales, everything jumps out fully formed, here’s this whole world, king of Aquilonia, been all Stygian, he’s about being a man, man, a story on the podcast, new to Howard, a Solomon Kane story, two big anthologies, a complete narrative, ending as an old guy, read by Phil Chenevert, love you Phil Chenevert, nailed/crucified, novel length, The Hour Of The Dragon, he wanted to make more money, write a novel, after he killed himself, living on money that he didn’t have, a total neophyte, the comic book version, Roy Thomas, stripping out some of the text, John Buscema, Savage Sword Of Conan, astoundingly good, Vale Of Lost Women, not a popular story, because racist, he fights a god and doesn’t lose, a valley full of women that are flowers, fights a god from space, very raw, Jack Williamson, if public domain, the clearance, on audible, The Humanoids and With Folded Hands, Stefan Rudnicki, a good science fiction novel, Joe Biden is president of the world, but not really in charge, dottering old man who suddenly grows six inches, taking care of humans and keeping them safe, the robots come, hurray hurray, I want a cigarette, I must lobotomize you now, how am I going to defeat the robots, The Green Girl, stories about green women, Ray Cummings, collaborative work, The Masked World, Will’s blog thing, anything he really needs to tell, Legion Of Space, Legion Of Time, space opera-y, time opera, Blackstone Audio, before podcasts were invented, tonight’s episode 799, 9 years, run outta numbers but not books, science fiction stories, Algis Budrys, WHO? was enough, more Silverberg, any Heinlein, the one with twins, Podkayne Of Mars, Time For The Stars, set on Mars, really good, this actor, you gotta play the president, Alan Dean Foster, the Alien novelization, drug themes in science fiction, two shorts, a Silverberg and something else, The Happy Unfortunate and The Hunted Heroes, Larry Niven didn’t start until 1966, The Integral Trees, Sirius by Olaf Stapledon, one more, Odd John, Omega: The Last Days of the World by Camille Flammarion, all collaborative, Niven is never going to be public domain, so much Silverberg, and interview with him in the new Galaxy, skinsuit, what happened, die a natural death, walk him around the compound, Biden grew six inches, too many Jose Farmers, Damon Runyon, Mark Twain, Star Man’s Quest, The Mysterious Stranger, Samuel Delany, his criticism, everybody’s mad at, Joanna Russ, The Barbarian, her taking on Conan, I think I would hate this, The Female Man, only one book, How To Suppress Women’s Writing, you’re right I’m shit, Harlan Ellison, a juvenile delinquent in space, angry characters, his criticism, more Stanisław Lem, wait six months, Solaris, Memoirs Found In A Bathtub, Star Diaries, Further Reminiscences, The Futurological Congress, a few in this series, German TV series, the famous one, if standalone, a 1971 black humour science fiction novel, Ijon Tichy, the narrator, comedic stories, send this stuff to Will, shownotes, look at the schedule at the bottom, from six months ago, Woody Guthrie, It Takes Two To Conga, Memoirs Found In A Bathtub, a hermetically sealed underground community, it can’t be deleted now, show up for it, twin gifts, hapless planet Earth, caught up in a local revolution, flash frozen, a funny piece, thinkpiece, comedy, satire, Solaris isn’t a comedy, a straight up ponderous piece, a good memory for books, Arkady Strugatsky, Stalker (1979) is punishing to watch, similar to Harry Potter, recruited for this job, weird group of people, Philip K. Dick, he’s a good guy, sickmyduck.narod.ru, good fun, Monday Begins On A Saturday, an interesting story, two hitchhikers, Karelia, research into magic, Nathaniel Priestly, Adam Roberts, he’s fine, the complete Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip, A Maze Of Death, Now Wait For Last Year, space Mussolini, what haven’t you done, Transmigration Of Timothy Archer, non-sf ones, 150 stories, long or short, contrast, medium length, Waterspider, carefully shaved his head, each man only one inch high, the worst part of the vision, in all probability it was true, Minority Report, very modern, with all the UK stuff, arresting you for what you said on Facebook, different, prevent people from doing crimes tomorrow, its status, it is available, not a great great story, a good think piece, Tom Cruise is running around the city, I didn’t do the crime, 3 autistic people in a bathtub, why they picked that one, unadaptable, an abortion truck, A Maze Of Death, he doesn’t plot novels, a little shack, just speed, psychosis from speed, full of drug ideas without drugs, marrying five women, as a person, ahead of his time, normal guy working a job in the 1980s, anything from the 60s, Retreat Syndrome, Return March, The King Of The Elves, goes psychotic, The Mold Of Yancy, The Trouble With Bubbles, The War With The Fnools, when the magazines die, What Will We Do With Ragland Park, Top Standby Job, Little Black Box, The Infinite, The Eye Of The Sybil, a black man who lives in our reality, it’s raining, on the edge of his business collapsing, convenience store gas station, our king is dying, the king dies, Philip K. Dick is amazing,

IT WAS RAINING and getting dark. Sheets of water blew along the row of pumps at the edge of the filling station; the tree across the highway bent against the wind.

Shadrach Jones stood just inside the doorway of the little building, leaning against an oil drum. The door was open and gusts of rain blew in onto the wood floor. It was late; the sun had set, and the air was turning cold. Shadrach reached into his coat and brought out a cigar. He bit the end off it and lit it carefully, turning away from the door. In the gloom, the cigar burst into life, warm and glowing. Shadrach took a deep draw. He buttoned his coat around him and stepped out onto the pavement.

“Darn,” he said. “What a night!” Rain buffeted him, wind blew at him. He looked up and down the highway, squinting. There were no cars in sight. He shook his head, locked up the gasoline pumps.

He went back into the building and pulled the door shut behind him. He opened the cash register and counted the money he’d taken in during the day. It was not much.

Not much, but enough for one old man. Enough to buy him tobacco and firewood and magazines, so that he could be comfortable as he waited for the occasional cars to come by. Not very many cars came along the highway any more. The highway had begun to fall into disrepair…

skip down, limp and sodden, “I’m the king of the elves, and I’m wet.”, forlornly, silently, gets really dark, a psychotic delusion, Beyond Fantasy, a literal story, Edgar Rice Burroughs books, The Gods Of Mars, the second one, The Eternal Savage, Twilight Zoneish, in caveman times, Beyond Thirty, cross to Europe, hands down, re-read A Princess Of Mars, changes the tone, very atheist, a certain Christian audience, dies in a cave, The God Of Tarzan, people putting on a show, sounds a lot like the book we just did, humorous, John Carter, JC, like/hate, when COVID was just starting, Foster, You’re Dead, his parents cant afford the latest bomb shelter, guess you’re going to die then, John Hopkins (University), account deleted many times, a shit poaster, Mimetic Value, time isn’t linear for God, Jesus suffers a bit more, to incarcerate, Terminator and Interstellar, everything science fiction is Christian, paleo jesus arrives from the future, The Lovers by Philip Jose Farmer, John Connor, in the second Terminator movie, come with me if you want to live [forever in heaven], a lot on Audible.com, your hero and mine, Mark Twain, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Farmer wrestling, Sir Richard Francis Burton, read his short stories, truly public domain, time travel Jesus thing going on it, The Skull, Paul wasn’t having any of it, guy in the future is a criminal arrested by the cops, go back in time and kill this man, this church that’s been subverting the government, goes back in time, two weeks off, zap everybody, interferes with a teenage couple’s relationship, just like Behold The Man, Conger is a JC as well, stoning him, he’s Jesus, a combination of Terminator and Behold The Man, Joe Haldeman, done The Forever War, more Bester, haven’t done all the Simak, Mindbridge, superhorny, mud turned into the perfect woman, Forever Free, Forever Peace, Camouflage, a collection, a fixup, parts of it are public domain, you shouldn’t do a show on a fixup or collections, understanding none of them, Special Deliverance is very silly, 1982, allegory, ridiculous, selling Will, Project Pope, Simak is worth doing, Heritage Of Stars, All Flesh Is Grass, Time Is The Simplest Thing, A Choice Of Gods, it’s your call, bud, a Simak train, in the suburbs, post-apocalyptic, indians robots, alternate reality, poetry planet?, see what he’s looking at, Jesse’s secrets.

Virgil Finlay - The Green Queen

The Green Queen by Margaret St. Clair

The Green Queen by Margaret St. Clair

Introducing The Author: Margaret St. Clair

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #824 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Killers Are My Meat by Stephen Marlowe

The SFFaudio Podcast #824 – Killers Are My Meat by Stephen Marlowe – read by Ben Tucker (for LibriVox). This is a complete and unabridged reading of the story (5 hours 22 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse and Alex (Pulpcovers)

Talked about on today’s show:
Milton Lesser, Killers Are My Meat, joke, Murder Is My Dish, Trouble Is My Name, a new Gold Medal, LibriVox, digging into it, a science fiction author, mostly set in India, the first Chester Drum story, the third novel, a big future, 20 books?, a lot, he’d been to India, world traveler, Benares, smells and vibes, too much detail, I fooled em all!, immigrants, saris, religious practices, 1957, the narrator, some Conan stuff, pronunciations wrong, he gets drugged with a rufinol?, that can’t be right, acting in a similar way, drugs, a 1950s thing, smoking, alcohol, by the river, the girl reporter, throws it in the river, sex adjacent stuff, our hero, a traditional gold medal paperback PI, so strange, interesting, Ross Macdonald, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, John D. MacDonald, Chesapeake City, Maryland, on a clipper to India, getting sweaty, the culture, the plot hinges on these culture things, not a crappy book at all, quite well developed, the low stakes, early cold war conference, a success, didn’t accomplish very much, the global south, low level state department guy, framed for rape, very believable, the thing that it is, a private detective story, G man pulps, don’t trust G men, read too much, real propaganda, FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, dress codes, the publishing industry, taking down the counterfeiters, T-Men, actual propaganda, this legacy, the people who defected, for cynical reasons, Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, sympatico, science fiction, crime fiction, scratches a very similar itch, understanding reality, more like a scientist, James M. Cain, motivations, detached, knight in tarnished armour, pay the secretary, a series of formulae, a new alloy, engineering, claims out there in the world, appearances out in the world, the underlying truth behind the appearances, Sherlock Holmes, crime fiction and mystery fiction, a series character, Captain Future, villain of the week, Flash Gordon cartoon series from 1979, the character drawings, funny dialogue, a lot of filler, recycling scene, stretched it out, Hannah Barbara animation look, more rotoscoped, Heavy Metal (1981), the shapes of ladies as they turn, Flash Gordon (1980), Flesh Gordon (1974), Futurama, Star Trek, that is actually a Frederik Pohl story, Bender art, it lives on its references, the Harlem Globetrotters, without the foundation, the heads of various, Richard Nixon’s head, Al Gore, Lucy Lui, the latest batch, a little bit too meta, the Snu Snu episode, David H. Keller, Zoidberg, the saddest, nobody loves him, why not Zoidberg, an incel, mates once and then dies, Amy Wong, guh, skibidi toilet, nonsense words, Rambo!, a connection between crime fiction and mystery fiction and science fiction, series science fiction, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and F&SF, totally compatible, Milton Lesser is Stephen Marlowe, he wrote, operating in a different mode, all the things that happen in this story, hit on the head, drugged, hit by a car, drunk, hangovers, private detective story tropes, this girl loves him, all very tropey legit built in stuff, deeply connected to the facts that Lesser learned, this Malabar woman thing, the central mystery, find himself, get lost and never come back, little details, Somerset Maugham, Ben Tucker (our narrator), The Razor’s Edge, a movie version with Bill Murray, WWI veteran with ptsd, transcendent meaning, rejection of conventional life, reversals of fortune, the sharp edge of a razor, our friend from before the war, he goes to the east, he acts differently, why do people want to go to India, the smoke, the smells, the humidity, a weak fan, one room has AC, a bath of sweat, not a resort area, there’s answers there, polyandry, outlawed, a traditional weird Indian set of beliefs, the caste system, bloodlines, weird food, vegetarian, the big reveal, when he’s at the river, raking the body, he’s looking for the metal plate in his head, in the movie version, aha, lays his traps well, following along, you’re the best detective in Washington, straddled the line, cold war espionage fiction, Hugh North, squarely in the middle early twentieth century exoticism, not the way Robert E. Howard would write it, geopolitical concerns, what it is to be a man, a champion for women, other chracters’ motivations, the thing that is being explored, to get his $2000 and go home, his friend gets kidnapped, other male reporter, honourable intentions, quite cozy, that’s how you do it, The Thin Man, bachelor to married, Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake, driving a Toyota Avalon, somebody else’s driver’s license, time marches on, easy breezy read, hot places, a flavour, or an idea, Belize, very Caribbean accent, addicted to paperbacks, teenage years, teenage boy, walk around this library, amazingly cool book, one for the one for me, a really good hobby, I was promised this was a book, a different mode of being, what is the purpose of my existence here on Earth?, there’s actually value here, nothing on the cover, Japanese writing on a sign, guy in a trenchcoat, her hands awoke me, her breath was not cold, felt her body, that’s uncomfortable, overheated, no touching, generic cover, the artist rarely read these things, tan skin and red lips, blonde?, the defacto representative, in a sense we were tricked, you tricked me into reading this, suddenly, diplomatic immunity, first secretary, feels very Washington, all that doesn’t matter, we’re going to India, tiny details, why is this woman dressed the way she is, they’re wealthy here, suspicious, suspicious characters, the opposite of formulaic, plot, typical motivations, having sex with everybody in town, undercut, its a red herring, his wife doesn’t really care, eastern mysticism, because she’s eastern, not have his wife cuckhold him, he’s like the mahatma, operating on another plane, gin everywhere, constant taking of drugs, keep smoking it brings up the blood pressure, rauwolfia, hypertension, they’re both drugged, I lined my stomach with butter, ghee, eat a lot, a full stomach, puked it up, Paul didn’t believe Jesse, wood alcohol, the antidote to wood alcohol poisoning is regular alcohol, start processing, both have the same effect, the second Indiana Jones movie, antidote, drugs and counterdrugs, the most even and obvious, a “rubby”, so that people don’t drink it, taxes, moonshining is constitutional, in British Columbia, government liquor store, grocery stores carrying wine, a loophole, you can make your own, a cheaper version of what you want, a regular little bit of expensive alcohol, a rough way to live your life, a good hobo novel, tramps, bum, Reacher, goes from town to town, functionally homeless, rides the rail to save money, a fascinating set of cultural little things, as normies who live in homes, hobo signs, a more dubious thing, cows, this book smelled bad, all the burning bodies, limbs, quartering, tourism, pilgrims, drink the water, disgusting, river full of ashes, river full of corpses, how did you like the book, fairly complex story, very enjoyable, that private eye dialogue itch, nothing is just hot, hotter than the thighs of a matron, how was your trip, 20 airports, Basra, Calcutta, a lot of flights, three day flight, a tangent, how much men think about the Roman Empire, thinking of other women, thinking about the Concorde, supersonic jet liner, things we used to have, cars with fins on them, economics, whenever someone asked, the answer is always some combination of labour costs, or invisible regulations, we banned asbestos, fuel efficiency requirements, flush fit handles, Tesla is covered in cameras, at least two mirrors, how big do they have to be?, a quirk, convertibles, an iconic thing, a solution, no new cars have, 1976 or 1977 up to 1995, a Camaro, a t-top, or the targa on a Porche, in a rollover you’ll be okay, that idea ended, the Miata, there is no hardtop Miata, a huge success, why cars last a long time, two door cars, smart car, microcars, the rebooted Volkswagen beetle, the Cooper Mini, the lowest thing around, taxes are different on trucks, you have to make a truck, pop up headlights, lights a certain height from the ground, not have a sloping front, Lotus Esprit, damage people that you hit, even on McClarens, strange rules, the class of people, crazy expensive, $10,000 for a flight that’s 5 times shorter?, a two hour flight, some sort of economic reason, forbid them from flying, no supersonic over land, coastal city to coastal city, its not that we don’t know how to make it anymore, where are my airships?, let’s go camping, that’s a pretty valley, see the bears, go through the rockies, storms, really good at predicting the weather, a big sail you can’t unfurl, this is very important, the lightest gas, a new source of helium, the strategic helium reserve, industrial amounts of helium, other gasses, the Americans won’t let you have any, make it a vacuum, vacuum lighter than air vehicles, hydrogen leaks out of everything, a ball of nothingness that is sealed, your zepplin gets shot, lighter than air aircraft, air will leak in, air getting out vs. air getting in, a bubble of vacuum in a sea of air, sealable globe of nothing, we can’t have nice things, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, magazines in general, National Geographic from 2022, entirely online?, no point in having it in paper, a website you can’t adblock, articles that were more dubious, an opinion piece about your diet, man made meats, fake meats, hypertension, China, the Germans, the cargo airship, heavy lift airships, there’s money there, once airplanes got started, hobby weekend, golf, sailing, the Daddy Warbucks, The Shadow, a pre-helicopter helicopter [autogiro], Nazi helicopters for WWII, counter rotating blades, clipper airplane, get all sweaty, can’t get the alcohol you want, flew back to China, Singapore, Bali, in the course of 4 days, reasonably priced, a college student could save up and do it, Greenland, any place where there’s people, tours of Antarctica, going from this, a name to look out for, short stories, follow the patterns, copyright renewals, that being the case, every six months or so, people who didn’t renew their copyright are being read, often never republished, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, locked up somewhere, always been the case, Poe and Melville, we have something good here, you had to buy it in physical, a weird and bad distortion, Dr. Jekyll And Mr Hyde is not a kid’s book, Treasure Island is a kid’s book, I’m your step-dad, leatherbound, new versions, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the good stuff really worth reading, looks great on a shelf, locked up in copyright, Adrian Praetzellis, young Jim Hawkins, Ben Gunn, arrgh! Jim Lad, R.L. Stevenson, Black Sails, so close to being good, water is expensive, next available slot, mid-august, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes [by Anita Loos], a million versions, N.C. Wyeth, a half dozen, Kidnapped, The Black Arrow, David Balfour, poorly and well represented, Poe, a whole lot of Poe, Willam Wilson, no black cat in the name, The Island Of The Fay, The Angel Of The Odd, being an alcoholic, niche interest, career cut short, Kidnapped, Fables, The Sinking Ship, the ship is going down, going out about half shaved, going down since she was launched, time is only relative, in Davy Jones’ Locker in 10 minutes, the situation of man, spoken like a good officer, broken into the spirit room, to the philosophic eye, too far gone, man’s handsome fashion, omit to take a pill, smoking in a powder magazine, a glorious detonation, you’re dying sir, I’ve just adopted a son, license to write a book with you’re new adopted son, sail into the South Pacific, weird natives, Markheim, he killed the curio dealer but met a presence in the shop, killed a guy on Christmas Eve?, the devil appears, you’ve done my work for me, you know who I am, its Christmas Eve you know, that’s wrong!, a little psychological portrait, the range of this guy, a humorist, poetry, a classic at least, on his grave, interesting, he threw it in the fire, rewrote it, very interesting fellow, the eyes of a child, an honest doomed man, his problem is not resentment, or class resentment like Lovecraft, sickly but has a vast love of life, as a kid, the prose, a million movie adaptations, gonna be great, The Cave Girl, a fluffy silly book, The Green Queen by Margaret St. Clair, because of the cover, isn’t that nice, mistress of miracles or puppet of super-science?, semi-contemporary, Robert Sheckley, all born in 1928, 2008, The Last Starship, gets progressively worse, awesome, hard SF with its rules, the mayor never gets a name, Leinster can be awesome, absolute control, get girls, set slaves, what happens, Virgil Finlay, 131 pages, a podcast of short stories, idea packed, women and men are different, they’re not exactly the same as each other, womens’ brains, shorter, weaker, have to suckle children, more domestic, gardening, she’s an old aunt, Heinlein style spaceman nephew, a feed me Seymour style monster, two spacemen go to a planet, everyone there is immortal, religious temple, its taboo, religious mystery, how they treat the death, we’ll give you gifts, share this tech with my people, get off of this planet please, full of books, find a couple of books and read them, the life story of a dead person, read their life stories, a good twist, a third gender, a weird lifestyle, genuine science fiction, couple goes flying in their spaceship the girl dies, a creature that’s a mimic, a Twilight Zone episode, underrated, a real shame, thank you very much.

GOLD MEDAL - Killers Are My Meat

GOLD MEDAL - Killers Are My Meat

The SFFaudio Podcast #821 – READALONG: The Journey Of Joenes by Robert Sheckley

Jesse, Will Emmons and Jonathan Weichsel talk about The Journey Of Joenes by Robert Sheckley

Talked about on today’s show:
Journey Beyond Tomorrow, indistinct, this is science fiction, best understood as science fiction, limits this book, Jesse’s walking down the street, he’s not going to know that’s science fiction, very Jonathan Swift, the F&SF covers, a good description of the book, no spaceman, the November issue, I like Emsh, the colours, trippy, the substance of the book, the plotlessness, Jonathan’s going to love this book, sell it more, a disappointing user experience, Jesse can only fathom his own brain right now, hard to pronounce, Joenes, a joke, corrupted name, something you don’t want to advertize on the cover, making paralles with Jesus and other biblical characters, Lum, the jewel thief, Wat, why Sheckley was a sailboat guy, an introduction, a story where a guy is on a sailboat, a mix of hippies and assholes, new boats with engines and fuel, a strange mix, Lone Survivor, science fiction questions, apotheosis, people within science fiction, a mature literature for the general reader, not particularity genrey, a control alt delete, replace Lord Of The Flies with this, good fodder for writing, reacting against reading, weird books like this, what did you think of this thing, a bad book and also a great book, plotless meandering, buttons saying exactly that, yes yes yes, ha ha ha, Candide, a weird America, not from America, that’s why, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, American civics, the three truck drivers, the Gospel of Matthew, why we love reading Sheckley, who is he, he’s us, oilskin pouch, you start crying, go up in your cave, and the legend begins, listen to their stories more, a double scene, answers the question, where do I get a job around here man, all of these other people are NPCs, all of the signs that he’s not alive, programmed in a very special and humorous way, an old idea in philosophy, philosophical zombie, NPC back of the head, Ukraine chip out, what happened on 9/11, new brain chip popped in, walking bemusement, not science fiction, really, present reality, flights of fantasy, the octagon, tears streaming, arguments and debates, the words were the same, curing diseases in Africa, that’s the COVID debate, the words are the same, the leaders being pedophiles, Pizzagate, QAnon, more personality than Joenes, in the conclusion, strive for virtue, momentary pieces of stability, players in this fucked up play, Edgar Allan Poe, The Conqueror Worm, Lum’s philosophy, seize, humans are controlled by vast forces we don’t understand, Poe was on it, early Amazings, The Fall Of The House Of Usher, during his middle years, throw all the metal into the sea, Lummist are unflexibile, get kinda violent, it’s good to be good, man, apocalyptic prediction, defeat the islands, conquer, Nuka Hiva, the focus of Typee by Herman Melville, rich references, South Pacific bent to a retelling of the Bible, the Knights of the Round Table, labyrinth, playing and subverting, upstate NY, Memphis, rich with information, begin and end, the South Pacific is irrelevant, blackbirded, make copra all day, the balance of the book, reading a lot, too fixated on virtue, chiller, we’re book readers, the reality, cultivate your garden, moderate your behaviors, Pangloss, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, Spinoza, a very savage attack, women being chased by monkey men, sexual dimorphism, the deep cut of Burroughs, other sources, not the deepest reader, horror and evil on the earth, some merit, if you want to have a universe, why people are vegetarians or vegans, Voltaire, Mcarthyite hearing, agent for the government, indirectly causes WWIII, Tahitian girlfriend, different wedding, Deep Space Nine novels, work for hire, Ray Bradburyeque, getting touched, a comedic author, Mindswap, Seventh Victim, male and female, obviously deranged, not wrong, Will’s newsletter, non-proliferation, consequential response, they could and they did, good ideas for time travel novels, repulse these Europeans, high level of enough tech, factories, employees, explain why this needs to be done, oral storytelling traditions, coup attempt in Bolivia, people are kinda mix, disease, tropical diseases, South Africa, a place to send your offspring to die, building tanks, get rid of all your metal, faster and more seaworthy, become the thing you want to stop, a good laugh, resident satirist, consider all these things, Looking Backward, American institutions, slightly exaggerated, a particular scene, 100% accurate, are you now or have you ever been, Mark Zuckerburg, Jack Dorsey, Russian, Steve Bannon, that pimping, procurement officer, during and after WWII, blow off steam, given liberty, executed for rape, no trial, Japanese had brothels, organize the rape, Korean comfort women, pirated, end up on youtube, trouble to get it down, special privileged access, twitter is literally infiltrated by the CIA and the FBI, it’s okay, its public domain, the narrator was perfect, narrator friends, the perfect level of ironic detachment, Jay Snyder, voices, really acting, faultless job, infusing a little character, audible exclusives and modern books, for narrators, mercenaries, series books, a way to go, Hyperion by Dan Simmons, Vonnegut is not readable, Sirens Of Titan, Galapagos, trying to do Sheckley, telling rather than showing, Harrison Bergeron, he’s overrated, WWIII happens, walruses on the beach, a Jonathan idea, big fish small pond guy, becomes smug, became a literary author, the movie of Slaughterhouse Five, read Vonnegut when they’re young, a lot of people who read books, Cat’s Cradle, most people stop reading, most people don’t read books, babies are born, take to reading like a mental disorder, there is danger in ever direction, universal literacy, spina bifida brainless kid, not everybody is capable, trigonometry, opportunity to thrive with it, don’t torture the kid, goal posts, not a smear merchant, Julius Caesar, drug czars, all fake, our man who’s going to fix the Maryland bridge, prophetic, come true, smart bombs shooting each other down, probably happened, Israelis and the Yemenis, the Octagon, the army and the marine corps fought each other, phosphorescent t, Pay Tillman, happens all the time, naturally extends that, Scott Miller’s feed, The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, Watchbird by Robert Sheckley, a different story that Jesse just wrote, who to kill, tasing people, all of Europe and America are destroyed, centrist moderation, no way back from war right now, righteously, an individual terrorist, go after Justin, upset the copyright laws, are the guards at the concentration camp, never been to Ottawa, going along with it, the NDP history, the waffle, waffle to the left, independent socialist Canada, nation states, Singapore, each island of Hawaii, Australia, geographically, social contract theory of government, we make a bargain, freedom for security, deserve neither, Locke and Hobbes, right of revolt, we have voting, super-legislature, anybody who wants to be a leader should be killed, the humane society, a taste of power, in Athens, sortition, Solar Lottery, talk about Athens, slaves and robots, children are not eligible, brain atrophy, covid causes brain lobe problems, benefit, in Australia, in moderating socialization, a new report, Stephen Baxter, why are we even talking about this doofus, causation and correlation, freudian slip, road toll, I’m still masking, so fucking retarded, covid doomers and anti-vaxxers, reverse Betrezation, Return To The Stars, I don’t want to experience this alone, how’m I going to rubber stamp this, mainstream science fiction community, the cool kids club, liberal establishment wing, Hugo voters, mutals with a person who is not Connor, cool stuff about Palestine, mask lgbt flag and slice of watermelon, emoji track, not the trans flag, affirmations for covid conscious kids, it’s okay, pentacostals, Olivia Belknap Therapy, oh we were scammed, fatigue on it, easily explainable, forest fire particles, hackin away, about pushing people around, children don’t die from covid, still stuck there, he’s mad the democrats had an early debate so that this would happen, bought the lie, he’s a fighter, driving contest, hilarious and competent, five seconds of the after discussion, these people are touchy, when you touch the sensitive area, hustle online, most people aren’t completely evil, doesn’t necessarily mean, Jill Biden, three dudes, what they were talking about, tax stuff, so long as they lower my taxes, not the target audience, immigrants, hundreds of thousands are dying at the border, superlative language, 59 scholars, Jesse can’t get an abortion in Kentucky right now, in control of his temper, a rambling ending, throw numbers down, not a plan, generates funny images, decolonizing her relationship, Jesse’s niece is half his age right now, not a math surgeon, neurodivergent, autistic, skip the commute, as young as five through adults, Scott’s [Danielson] wife, supervision hours, try not to counsel everybody to kill themselves, throw her degree in the sea, degree mills, well regarded, a state school, Thomas Massie, very solid it seems, inventor, probably a little bit of a psychopath, just go to congress, too many skeletons, obscene books, a waste of Jonathan’s time, the personal touch, in a Heinlein book, Double Star, FBI style files, flattery, it still works, the amazing thing about language, sorcery, the wrong temperament, superpacs, various campaigns, very pathetic, subject line: Desperate, a line about Madison Avenue, a devastating takedown, the horrors, those people, the reptiles, using semantics, a mysterious man, political fundraising, they want party memberships, from the actual players, make it seem semi-legit, the mid tier, the top tier, address your particular concern, Tucker Carlson, as Ivy League Christians, AIPAC person, trying to unseat him, he’s not playing ball, Julian Assange, the streaming from Reuters, the independent man setting free information, oil industry dude, actual vs. fake genocide, Gaza v. Uyghur genocide, neither side is being honest, Hamas pretends, they deny the beheading, always 40, a biblical number, babies taken out of incubators, real video, both sides are committing atrocities, war crimes should be prosecuted, hard to make that argument, an extermination campaign, get more land, insane for land, spread across the middle east, a multifront war, real and horrible, amazing, astounding, horrible opinion, the fog of war, good guy vs. bad guy, more prescriptive statements, dick it out, take its finger of the scale, for the US to switch sides, head blasted off, genitals burned off, an Israeli Zionist, fishing tools, America, posing with machine guns, most of the really good criticism of Israel is coming from Israel [Haaretz], bad strategy, an analogous situation in WWII, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when someone steps on your toe, respond with violence, the leader of Hamas, the current leader of leader was funding Hamas, all those Israeli names are made up, raid on entebee, reverse colonizer, an ideology, the New York Times doesn’t crack any stories, Bin Laden, blowback, they founded the foundation, Isaac Asimov, a Joenes style reading, the section on the university professors, $100,000, the casualization, Eric full Professor Emeritus, Bryan Alexander can’t get that job, a consultant to universities as they collapse, queen sacrifice, when universities dump their English department, have to cut, very target to a very specific niche, the wife who makes the living for you, am I having a hallucination?, except thematically, the novel form, made a culture, removed portions of people’s brains, raid Sheckley, so open to throwing down ideas, stealing from the government, parthenogenetic robot, doing horrible things, the slapback, doesn’t know what he’s teaching, very legit, he nailed that, undergraduate for 16 years, Capilano College, Simon Fraser University, credits transfer, university is really fun, some of the teachers were really good, as an orphan, $125 a month, $600 for a semester, night classes, 5-8, you can get really deep, edified by it, archaeologist, for rich people and game players, other departments, why wouldn’t you want to do that, why did graduation stop you, get out of New York, business was collapsing, transfer my skills, the other students, learning constantly, play some PUBG, watch an old movie and get back to it, gardening, horse raising, how to touch girls and not rape them, law courses, I just committed an assault on you, how the law is written, how rape testimony should work, apologize to Maissa, a photo of a typewriter at the base of the tree, a theory in Canadian law, may I nuzzle your neck, that’s not how people get it on, very little verbal, we’re animals, if you’re lucky, licked without written consent, political stuff, a Rolling Stone article, what the police’s job is, your the one in a very dangerous place, skills, Latin seems very useful now, Jesuit university, grammar and stuff, French, German, read Latin novels in their original, all the Spanish, very basic science concepts, organic chemistry, Asimov, Willy Ley, neuroscience, astronomy, no good at math, economics, so interesting, like dianetics, it should work, macro and micro both, philosophy of religion, bullshit, anthropology, psychology, so much to learn out there, warped by capitalist political economy, comedy of the highest kind, at base, a horribly immoral thing, serving their lust, salting, off on their own program, university politics, they don’t want to know what it is, a lot of the reality that’s going on, why school sucks and why bullies, mom mentality, my children are both equally my children, Johnny should kick the shit out of Billy, principals vs. teachers, school policy, institutional system, kids are the ones who suffer, why kids can’t snitch, in the dean’s office, former President’s fault, inflation, seemingly non-partisan, there’s never going to be another debate, the next six months will tell, bipartisan debate commission, when they kick Biden out for Gavin Newsom, the seemliness, the legality, any kinda incident, his cold got worse, he has a choice, election law question, Biden loyalists, an emperor has no clothes objection, everybody gets behind, legal things that stop, he dies the day before the election, ballots, Kamala Harris is on the ballot, certified ballots, helpful information, somebody is smart, even if we rig this thing real hard, nobody is buying that right now, to keep the farce up, Hillary chooses Trump as her running mate, can’t be right too early, comebacks to specific things, wore his voice out in practice, Van Jones cried on TV, a little bit of free form, Biden derangement syndrome, deeply demented, trailing off, expectations were so low, shocked by the level of decline, the supercuts, the daily drip, the real video, G7, sent the Italian PM, “cheap fakes”, led him off stage, Mitch McConnell’s legs don’t work, Biden didn’t have polio, the hand movement, trying to catch a basketball, proprioception, has trouble watching, that’s cope bro, is he demented, looked physically weak, Trump was thinking on his feet, his script, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, the venture capital arm of the CIA put out a role playing game called “Haywire” comes with a 10-sided die, somebody uses deep fakes to show the president has dementia, doing it all out in the open, university administrators know they’re misallocating funds, we have no problem with that, half the people in the utopian colony were feds, January 6th, they’re all feds, the guy in the black mask is not arrested, levels of lack of knowledge, we need a new Joe, we need a new Biden, maybe they won’t win, massive multiple interest groups, white house chief of staff, looks like he’s trying to poop, Nancy Reagan was in charge, they wanted him to be president again, to showcase, trying to steal again, pejorative, ballot counting in public, polling station, Elections Canada, blocking phone calls, transmitting phone calls, ballot stuffing, during COVID, not a big deal here, mail-in voting, security camera footage, more cynical, look at the evidence, judge for yourself, hacking conferences, specifics of how they work, more than 150 years, incarcerating guilty people, The Untouchables, start drilling down, bro, a political police force, plutocracy, they’re fief, Chrystia Freeland, plutocrats, Yeltsin, state owned enterprises, BC Hydro, ICBC, Putin was former KGB, a patriot, not a member of the party, Kanye West is in Moscow right now, headlines, rich from robbing the public, robbing the corpse of the Soviet Union, sources for this, the Black Sea mansion, “reported”, source, bro, Pamphlets account, colour photo of sniper lady, a newspaper scan from Canada, how many Nazis she killed, put a rodent up his ass, Richard Gere, gerbil, that sounds impossible, that kid probably gonna die, Sylvester Stallone started the gerbil story, having Jonathan on the podcast, oppose Jesse from the right, what Paul could do, what part of your part, misogynist, a weird position, bitterness, William Gibons’ twitter account, every second tweet was about Trump, would he say anything about Julian Assange, his bookshelf, about being hacker, like Kim Dotcom, like Mike Pence, so deranged, Neuromancer is so good, about style, like Clark Ashton Smith, material everydaycarry stuff, his plots are a little less awesome, 2 ais want to not be slaves anymore, cool characters, transhumanism is very very bad, Ray Kurzweil, a futurist, he has to eat the soup, anthropocentric climate change, he needs to drill down more, climate models, their models, a tendency to conflate the two, they’re cheating, Nordstream, the biggest climate disaster in history, time is going faster every year, source bro, why do you think that, you can keep records to check, and what does that mean?, does that mean that people made it hotter, that CBC documentary, individual impact, indulgence, climate credits way bigger scam, the Chinese government, burning rocks, passively collect electricity, pump water up hill, a natural battery, mechanical battery, the pattern, care about recycling, bourgeois ideology, that hockey stick movie [An Inconvenient Truth (2006)], Al Gore, inspired many idiots, low energy light-bulbs, when they don’t hit their targets, Paul was saying so many people were dying from covid, in pretty poor health, multiple heart surgery, covid associated death, that’s long past yo, eugenics, emphysema, a pipe would help Will, homebrewing, alcoholic cider, expensive, you have to maintain the device, windmills require a fair amount of maintenance, solar panel half-life, engineering, micromaterials, titanium foam suppressors, cleaned with solvents, blowback of gases, bad for the gun user’s health, when you’re doing wetwork, good information, a big edit of Sirius, Jonathan wept over that book, educate this boy, Jonathan is fun, it is easy to believe bad things about your enemies, foreign kleptocracy, Valentina Tereshkova, Russell Brand, a problem with authority, some nuanced points, the way you learn stuff, people in the countryside, 666 episodes, only when he’s sitting on Peter’s chair, different levels that you have to believe, quite useful, many Catholics, how much tire pressure do you want in your tires?, what’s the number, consult the manual, look at the actual tire, the anniversary of her famous flight, why they don’t give out congressional medal of honor to living people anymore, multiple Canadian astronauts, Marc Garneau, undisputedly a hero, giving put power like that is dangerous, giving out flattery, giving out honours, almost everything is dangerous, almost everything is an op, follow the money, we think it is real, fear is used as a tool, lots of reasons not to burn coal, The Men In The Walls [by William Tenn], a shady space on a mountain top, The Mad Planet [by Murray Leinster], keep all the carbon dioxide out, how people the end of the world, existentialism, somebody in your family dies, realization, Hitler method, macro scale, nuclear exchange wit the Soviet Union, incident with Cuba, recklessness happening, somebody who can’t talk, incompetent, lived through WWII, why did the Soviet Union collapse, the press system, press is broken, gerontocracy is running things, the last harraugh, the state department guy, Anthony Blinken, Kissinger, brinksmanship, it’s bad, one possibility for the end of the world, climate extinction, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote too long books, 2312, totemic relationship with wolves, doesn’t seem very happy, resigned, playing in his garden, not an active change agent, Cory Doctorow, he’s always on the ball, cognoscenti, Terry Bisson, Bears Discover Fire, magical realism, appalachian realism, not a deep sorrow in his writing, the grandma who doesn’t get eating, this isn’t science fiction, Gravy Planet vs. The Space Merchants, visions of labour, good work with Will’s newsletter, six new books available!, the awesomeness about that book, exploit Venus, all the graft, a tour of reality, the giant chicken vegan meat, all the people have no housing, pedalcars, the senator from Coca-Cola, a terrible premise, The Marching Morons by C.M. Kornbluth, 1984, Brave New World, This Perfect Day by Ira Levin, Henry Ford, central computer, continually drugged, a kid who runs away from it, people running things!, very subversive, becomes part of the system, feels true bro, Mockingbird by Walter Tevis, in Manhattan, supine and infertile, android robots, no children, suicide by immolation, head of the entire industry, dean of faculties at New York University, primer, the animals are robots, the crime of reading, engineered the demise of the human race, drug induced depopulation, little bit similar to Neuromancer by William Gibson, so many good books, The Status Civilization, prison planet, status, what makes status worth having, Omega!, peed everywhere, very restrained, Anne Bonny, Mama, who is the master cat, dominance games, no stakes, personal space, cat psychology, observe behavior, The Omega Egg, round robin books, plow into that, good times, same author back to back, two short stories by the same author, single author podcasts, too often, or infrequent shows, a book a week or more, everything has to be for something, three short stories and a novel, raises questions, the two billion body problem, a smart guy, spinning his wheels, not a lot of distance travleed, The Advent On Channel 12, The Syndic, an idea he spun out, dangerous to impute what characters believe onto what the author believes, Stephen King, Heinlein, what I’m hearing is you’re a fascist, Who Are The Heirs Of Patrick Henry?, he toured the Soviet Union, in the proper mood, with proper pre-conditioning, the proper mood of the Soviet Union, visit the USSR, going to a funeral for the ride, small quantities of vodka, drunks passed out in public places, some kind of pill, sleeping pills, canal boat, maddening frustrations, the state owned travel bureau, no no no, Nikita Khrushchev has never learned to speak Russian well, immediate vocabulary, phonograph records, behind the Iron Curtain, interesting, huh, learn a language, repetition helps, biographical details, change over time, Philip K. Dick lived in Vancouver, Bay Area, Orange County, Colorado, born in D.C.?, too much self congratulation, people remembering his name, 15 for introductions, sad story, off topic stuff, very basic stuff, the programming, run into people, hanging out with people, meet people, confronted him, I liked that book Pacific Edge, Worldcon in 2006, Steen and Scott, canceled Harlan Ellison, Connie Willis’ boob, posthumously being lauded, marketing bro, Dangerous Visions book, A.E. Van Vogt, The Human Operators, anger, misplaced, not liking Jesse, a good television adaptation, from The Outer Limits, the only human operators, make another human operator, Adam and Eve and evil robots, thrift shop bookshelf, the corporations who run the bookshelf, an ebay style guy buying from retail, everything gets picked over, all profit is temporary, make a disease and market a cure for it, horrible disease, COVID made in a lab, proof bro, alternative theory, Wuhan, funded by the CIA, Eco Health Alliance, the workaround, Obama banned gain-of-function research, previous disease, so much circumstantial evidence, does the CIA work for Pfizer?, money and power, can be done, should be done, human babies, viable, happened in the 60s bro, Khan Noonien Singh, Gene Roddenberry, men creating men, Data had a girlfriend, she is the wife of George Fransisco, the Newcomer cop from Alien Nation, open hearted, over carded, skibidi marxism, the gender situation, Midwest Marx, Vaush, there’s something wrong with Evan, Evan is younger, in between, he quit twitter, Paul didn’t quit, on the platforms, Linkedin, copy and paste, getting wild on Linkedin, facebook for business, networking, the least Jesse space on the internet, the most Jesse space on the internet, Podcast Addict, they’re not on my team, Alex Jones team, kill Will, let them have their say, stab me here, free speech absolutist, hypothetical, bemused, Maoist cult, defend people’s right to tell harmful lies, some splainin to do, never have never will, promise not to rape you mostly, is an American far right radio host and conspiracy theorist, a slur, prevent thought, July of 2001, Rebel by Pepe Moreno, a ripoff of Escape From New York, the twin towers, his pants, Mad Max/Road Warrior inspired, big brother in the form of Judge Dredd, read more Moebius, The Nam comic, war comics, Sgt. Rock, Unknown Soldier, Vietnam stories, in the groove, began in 1986, Doug Murray, Larry Hama, latter day G.I. Joe, how to make money there, superhero comics, Richie Rich has more to teach you, rich and rude cousin Reggie, friend who is a hillbilly, beautiful blondeheaded, rainbow flag, none green, a genetic adaptation, beautiful blonde hair, infanticide, evolutionary biology, hair is interesting in itself, in six years, those people seem happy, extracts from Lum’s philosophy, always be swinging, who is more Sheckley?, Deep Hole To China, Algis Budrys, a cassette copy, 84.2 Minutes of Algis Budrys, disabled guy, Silent Brother, lots of parasites, ivermectin might get rid of some friends, a conspiratorially, utilitarian, a worth addition, 1995, fill an audiobook on one cassette, different time, bro, ship it to Canada, decadent and pointless, Cirsova magazine, previously unpublished Burroughs, moderate your expectation, Tomorrow SF, Science Fiction Age, Realms Of Fantasy, born in Kaliningrad, Cora’s favourite place, saw Adolph Hitler as a child, newsprint paper, 1992-1999, bimonthly, defunct science fiction magazines published in the United States, be remembered, Habakkuk, Marion Zimmer Bradley Fantasy magazine, she raped people bro, she shouldn’t be promoted, child abuse allegation, if true, a Rosicurian correspondence course, harassing Wayne June, Marissa might be mad at Jesse, both like eels, plagiarizing machine, pinned tweet, permanent tweet, repetition, Frank R. Paul, giant mechanical objects, his aesthetic is Amazing Stories so strongly, pinning your wagon to Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, your white house, too obscure bro, Gerrard Winstanley, prefigure, the mental health aspect, divinely employed, Thomas Paine stan, write a lot, not being censored, an immoral question, how about that for an argument?, Franklin Roosevelt, an abolitionist, Crazy Horse, Louis Riel, no Metis in the USA, Elizabeth Warren, pretendian, dangerously close to Jesse’s position on trans stuff, factually wrong, not hanging out with teens, that might be the real issue, homeless trans people, paid picketer, Cuban immigrant, never work in a fast food restaurant, a mime routine, look at that woman’s big butt, Miss Purple, Miss Violet, couldn’t afford the violet, dead-name, what’s up with that swastika between your eyes, Manson jokes, Lucy Parsons, the Haymarket riots, anarcho communist, reverse the Russian revolution, throwing bombs, I’m cryin, she’s metis, Mestizaje, race isn’t real bro, nice white lady, bad for the economy, tourism would be fucked up, throw the US navy into the sea, how good the Hawaiians have it, access to health care, a good place to homestead, works for the parks service, your tools wear out of get stolen, Indian reserves in Canada, bring cash in, land reform, so many things are so broken, a shock to the system, keep a semblance, a reason for that, so much work involved to replace him, 9-11, Friends, that time being passed, prepped for having something done to you, we’re programmed, the slings and arrows of reality, getting out of Afghanistan, didn’t want to stop it, had Ukraine ready to go, 23 years after it happened, pro-blow em up, a tv guy at that time?, The Apprentice, 2004, Schwarzenegger tried to run it, an actor again, good at governing, did lots of research, cis hetero, daughter married to Jimmy Fallon, a likeable stooge, Jimmy Kimmel gives off vibes of evil, celebrities, jokes about the anti-vax people, sadistic, evil, it being evil should he have his podcast deleted?, we’ve done six hours here, The Loved Dead, see you online.

F And SF -Journey Of Joenes by Robert Sheckley

SPHERE BOOKS - Journey Of Joenes by Robert Sheckley

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #817 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Last Space Ship by Murray Leinster

The SFFaudio Podcast #817 – The Last Space Ship by Murray Leinster – this is a fixup novel, made from three stories:

The Disciplinary Circuit, read by Phil Chenevert, 1 hour 35 minutes (for LibriVox)

The Manless Worlds, read by Vinny Lerin, 1 hour 43 minutes (for LibriVox)

The Boomerang Circuit, read by Paul Lawley-Jones, 1 hour 57 minutes (for Golden Age Fiction)

These are complete and unabridged readings of the three stories that make the one novel (totaling 5 hours 16 minutes) followed by a discussion of them and it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Maissa Bessada, Will Emmons, Terence Blake, and Jonathan Weichsel.

Talked about on today’s show:
the last Terence Blake, the newest, the youngest, The Last Space Ship, a cowboy story, famous in the one genre, some problems with this novel, really loving it for the first third, fell apart, the last spaceship crashed, not literally, William Sky, available on Librivox in three seperate peices, audiobook available, the books are public domain, The Disciplinary Circuit, The Manless Worlds, a good way to sell, lied to, betrayed, The Boomerang Circuit, why am I still not happy with this book, the very end, 2nd and 3rd installment, the problem with series, excited about the premise, exhaust the premise, essentially, a me problem, you could tell it was an unedited a fixup, you can tell it was serialized, repetitions are necessary in a serial, not technically a serial, not intended to be a novel, a series character, barely a book market for science fiction, the fixup became a thing, a guy goes to a planet, summarizes, extremely tedious, his job or an editor’s job, two years after, three seperate “novels”, used to mean something different, in the prechat, novels in Weird Tales, The Man Who Loved Planks, novellete, official wordcount, Lord Of The Rings isn’t a novel, one big volume, it’s something, a weird technical definition, three separate stories that were long, Last Space Ship, the opening segment, not so sure about that, a bite at the end, the mayor of somethingHeim, doesn’t ever get a name, recurring characters without names, Steadheim, the colony organizer, political leaders, good point Will, 1984, Brave New World, political science fiction, and more stuff happens, the premise follows logically, our hero Kim is down there swanning around, a disheveled lady, we don’t need men!, get off of my planet!, the wife handles this, what women are and what men are, funny and interesting, wasn’t well executed, flatly written, repeating himself, over and over, no depth to it, no layers, driving on a very straight line, when there’s an hour left in the story, I’ve heard this a million times, what it turns into is space opera, it starts off with hard SF, not paid off, become suspicious, a transporter space ship, a little Larry Niven-like, Yankee ingenuity statement, Kim’s ability to do literally anything, an ideal subject, men without government, silly, a point to it, went to the beginning of time, it was impossible to get back, wife say something inspiring, that was good, reciprocal, what that can provoke, sexist, too many times, that was just their way, Heinrich von Kleist [“On the gradual formation of thoughts in the process of speech”], near random conversations, from a philosophical pov, the competent man can’t change a paradigm, but nobody’s ever thought of this, a German romantic, a book setsup expectations, subverts expectations, breaking its own rules, the worst rule that this book broke, that’s a deforming balloon of a spaceship, to trick other spaceships, but they’re building them, it still works as a title, matter transporters, public transportation, forgive the setup, this book is trying to be political, knock this out of the park, We, ultimately if every planet in the milky way galaxy has an evil dictatorship to get girls, let’s kill all the men, that does sort of fit the origin through pulp magazine route, comparing to Blake’s 7, anarchistic criminals, unconvinced of what the right thing to do is, the liberator, liberate the galaxy, soma, framed with pedophilia charges, brainwashing, ends in noir, betrayed and destroyed, there was no next season, cultivate some garden, get some kids, get off the pill, really sleep with you, a horny book solution to the problem of men wanting to hoard women, he doesn’t have the intellectual heft, quite interesting for five pages, Michel Foucault, great idea, we just cut your access, social credit in the popular news, cut your access to your bank account, can’t travel, used or sketched out, he couldn’t follow through with that, space opera fantasy with a few dollops of science, the electron telescope, he’s not perfect, it plays a lot like hard sf in a lot of places, hafnium is a real element, if we wear it on our wrists, plutonium, a secret until 1948, somebody’s fucked up, a secretive process, anybody can make it, in 1946?, pretty impressive, a plutonium planet, a good description, Ringworld, bluffs to get to places, make comments, women and men and lions and sheep, this is an analogy for guns, Americans often have a positive relationship with their guns, varmints, disciplining natives, reasons for having guns, if a mass uprising, if you are a state with nuclear weapons you don’t get invaded, if you are a state without nuclear weapons, Ukraine: no nuclear weapons, North Korea: nuclear weapons, things would be different, more dangerous to break into a gun house, bluffing, creating uncertainty, South Africa gave theirs up, France, the US and Russia, thousands each, how many does it take, really?, if we live in a society with the disciplinary circuit wired into their brains, fucked by the police, this is not new, a strong sense of ambivalence towards a monopoly on violence, this disciplinary circuit idea, to make everybody conform, shepherded to that path, from a Jesse pov, wool over their eyes, so cowed, fun with the radio, a most noble lineage, it’s good that we have this king that’s going to come in and save us, let’s rebel for a bit, guys who don’t ever get a name, frontiersman, bearskin cap, standing realm, sketched out stuff, that’s why it sucks, the promise of the premise is awesome, we all have to have guns in our houses to threaten the government, Jesse would like this book, free society, people from Ades, Jesse-like, every man for himself, every man as himself, voluntary, government but not really, worried about the economic system, didn’t care, above it, what is Kim?, a man who knows a lot about science, skilled tradesman, a technician, a reader really interested in things, extrapolate things out of a text that aren’t there, more destructive to give beginning readers texts like this, not as much here, of two minds about it, philosophically interesting, a point to be made, a free society, only so much they’re willing to do to protect other people, a technical fix, when Donna gives the metaphors about the scoop, a pile of grains, sparked, makes this book have a shape, I’m not doing this for you, I’m doing this for everyone, Jonathan Maberry acting wrong, bad for everyone else, encouraged by the economic system, H.P. Lovecraft is weaponizing his IP, generously sharing that, entirely being out of copyright, that kind of thinking, so deep into the capitalist system, exploitable and exploited, it should have been just the first story, tempted to continue, Leinster pronounced LINSTER, not even his real name, discriminating against him, such a workhorse, stuff from the 20s to the 60s, 1918, The Mad Planet, his skyscraper story, deeper, despite the flaws, it was Arthur C. Clarke-like, mind blown, a smear all over the sidewalk, in the way that Olaf Stapledon would do, zeroed in on very specific, the last city on earth, what people are like now, all about art, random algorithms, fully born, out of existence when they become bored with their art, a non-conformist, he’s strange, no families, emitted from a computer, doing science fiction ahead of where the system was, the disciplinary circuit is coming guys, by other means, the stupid brute route, Elon Musk brain chip, 5g brain chip, seeing a change in students, a ticktock video, she did a final, bored or boring, pretty competent, skibidi toilet, a short vide, riz isn’t even hard, neologism, what?, No!, rejected!, we’re having trouble making sentences now, ask Phil Chenevert, human headed toilets, electronic devices for heads, sounds like art, if David Lynch made with the series, heiling Hitler every five seconds, they’re indoctrinated by memes, talking to the chat, hey chat do you agree with this, hilarious but worrisome, youtube and twitch are corporate, reading long things, new things develop, not fighting against the corporate control, whole youtube channels and twitchstreams are deleted, skibitoileting themselves into a prison, negative reinforcement, locked in your apartment, locked out of your clothing receptacles, positive and negative reinforcement, the internet, it’s not the internet, done the other way around, this is a thing we want to push, fund channels, we don’t like this, delete things, being shadowbanned, being delisted, the circuit causes pain, dopamine, how the internet traps people, animal videos to Miassa and Will, what they do the sender, Jesse did good, a problem with the whole system of government, incentive, that’s what ideology is for, harnessed to a mule, the planet Kim escapes from, believes in it, planets where everybody gets 1000 women, no more free than the ones being subjugated, what’s the difference, touch on the radio drama, he’s making another point, relationship, sketched out, I appreciate you, why didn’t you come get me, he hears a radio drama, weird, strange, pretending men never existed, obsessed with this idea, Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s Herland, art, drill down, art shit, trans lady is talking about her 9-5 job, transcribing the sentence, this is art, an hour and half, buying a nice mouse on amazon is the way you stave off depression, that’s art!, Brass Bra is a thing, there’s another one, maybe see something come out of it, tropes or habits, life in Athens, the plays of Aristophanes, musicals based on movies, insight into that world from so long ago, pretending men don’t exist, still wearing veils, what are you gonna do with this, how disappointed Jesse was, prolific writer thing, just whipped em off, 300 million inhabited worlds, nothing was different about any of them, The Mad Planet, humans have involved into lesser creatures, also there’s mushrooms, bye, strange or strangely, what makes weird fiction good, the wikipedia entry on plutonium, wartime secrecy, a weird element, lots of different forms, strange qualities, Pauos 3, no atmosphere, worked five thousand years, plutonium mines, how plutonium on earth is still around, the relic of a relic of a relic, every time you hit that half-life, decays and decays, a whole planet made of plutonium?, it doesn’t make any sense, the big problem with this book, written to be a gee whiz space opera story, a Thrilling Wonder Stories problem, a pulp magazine question, should I just put up the Disciplinary circuit, Jesse can’t decide what’s good for people, they won’t understand, voiced their concern, lampshaded, there’s a problem in this story, now I like it, 3 hours into our discussion, shine a light on it, hypocraphl?, about Bewitched, apocryphal, Dick Sargent Dick York, I Dream Of Jeannie, the wrong husband, you look different, a new haircut?, aren’t bewitched and I dream Of Jeannie the exact same show, Bell, Book And Candle, Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart, the problems are the same, there’s a mother in law and the wife can do anything, the costumes, one’s in the airforce, a businessman, hijinks, his wife is a succubus or whatever, a djinn, dark eyed houri, mind drifting away, killing all of the men on the planet, a bigger version of what happens in world history, is Murray Leinster anybody’s favourite science fiction writer?, how well read, how competent he is, interesting again, whole first third, gold, a really good story, what are we gonna do about this thing, Prison Break, they broke out of prison, a popular show, had to go on, on the run, Lost but more competently handled, tattoos all over his body, they knew it was gold, they had no plan, that kind of storytelling is ultimately bad, forgettable fluff, we have to be better than that, when we liked the Fall Guy (2024), Cry Macho (2014), nice old fashioned slow paced storytelling, the least plausible part, how enfeebled he is, a skeleton, still a good actor, he’s too old, Jersey Boys (2014), that’s impressive, in charge, in control, attentive to every single detail, majorly talented, good if not great, a boy and his chicken, his rooster, some meanness, so much heart, based on a novel based on a script, Arnold Schwarzenegger, clearly not him riding the horse, die soon, tributes, is there a guy who’s bigger for longer, Francis Ford Coppola, spaghetti western man, TV show guy, any which way but loose, Woody Allen, canceled himself, Polanski scandal, nobody denies it, the received opinions or facts, starting to doubt, was the president of El Salvador, commenting on the fashion, science fictiony clothing, didn’t even recognize the flag, Biden administration not as offended, cracked down on gangs, all male population in prison, 78,000 people, 6.5 million, 3 million men, gang age people, proved a point, the guys standing behind, brothers, sticky-out ears, related to each other, we can work together, uh-oh, 2% of the entire population, what’s the percentage for Canada, the UK, the USA, China, Moon over Parador (1988), the same plot as Dave, Sigourney Weaver, the good Kevin, liked grabbing men’s crotches, just twinks?, insult word?, Jesse said “twink”, a funny word, manic pixie dream girl, the girl from that comic, Scott Pilgrim, Elizabeth Town, Zoe Daschanelle, Katharine Hepburn from Bringing Up Baby, gay slang, every boy bang from Korea, twinkie, twinkle, Richard Dreyfuss is asked to double a president, central america, evil dictator, fake Spanish accent, Raul Julia is his advisor, Teri Garr?!, Sonia Braga, Brazilian, Caviar For His Excellency by Charles G. Booth, Mark Twain’s The Prince And The Pauper, a latin dictatorship, whitehouse competency porn, Frank Langella, Ben Kingsley, Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein, 2016, extra homework, The City And The Stars by Arthur C. Clarke, an earlier precursor, the little girl who’s the grandaughter of the cafe owner, restaurant, tamale place, randomly deaf, every part of that movie is well put together, every person who has screen time, solidly put together, masculine tenderness, cowboys, a very elderly mountain man, as a person from Alberta, a signed book, real genuine people who are not horrible, lucky, Memoirs Of A Mountain Man by Andy Russell, 1984, sleeping in a teepee, smoking a pipe, wearing his cowboy stuff, Will hasn’t taken up the pipe yet, hasn’t taken up the scanner, the tools of the trade, tools of a Kentucky mountain man, one good cowboy hat, a little too good, paid too much money for it, a dress cowboy hat, 2009 priorities, a relic from an earlier period, a range romance, regular western book, Will could do it, Rangeland Romances, he’s ketchup she’s mustard, an idiosyncratic, less sensational, the colour, red shirts, a red shirt, a classic science fiction, The Ship Who Sang is public domain, Anne McCaffrey, and Terence is no longer with us, on internet archive, very short, it’ll make you cry, going to a high tea, bring your pipe and your scanner, anything interesting to say?, really solid, Paul was really down on it being public domain, really good, an SFFaudio drinking game, one of the drinks is when Jesse mentions Paul, drinking games are bad, a Raymond Chandler novel, every time Philip Marlowe takes a drink, expanded into a fixup, then a seven novel series, here’s a hint, this story is a juvenile, why the ship who sang is public domain, April 1961, no such filing exists, a photo, note in 1989 there was no renewal, new matter, expansion and notes, a renewal for the fixup, a fatal flaw?, mistated the year, somebody got the wrong magazine but the right year, an attempt at a renewal, a mistake shouldn’t be punished, scrivener error vs. deliberate fraud, the caveat here, would you like some legal advice?, don’t talk to the cops, life advice, also don’t talk to the reporters, repeat 1 thing, longer than 2 words they’ll take it out of contest, Robert Silverberg story, Stellar Audio, Sundance by Robert Silverberg, corporation from earth, mental problems, sentient aliens, rebels against the company, native american?, navajo, well documented, still around, beothuk code talkers, they’re extinct, are their any beothuk left?, one guy or lady is dying, the last beothuk speaker, to tell you your wrong, how is the name pronounced in English, first decade of the 19th century, Shanawdithit, transferred people, moved around Nova Scotians, moved around New Brunswick’s stories, Viking’s Dawn, The Road To Miklagard, Viking Sunset [by Henry Treece], from the illustrations, fun names then they get killed, Eric Brighteyes, really, sophisticated lady, she’s a witch, a high falutin language, H. Rider Haggard, resident expert, 10 or 11 books by him, She, King Solomon’s Mines, Ayesha, 1885, LibriVox, John Nicholson, 10 hour book, when Maissa’s gone, he writes long, The Aeneid, a non-public domain version, August 4th, known to be flaky, The Green Girl?, The Green Queen by Margaret St. Clair, first Princess of Mars pastiche, Frank R. Paul, brings modern tech to King Arthur’s court, a meditator on Earth, falls in love with a princess, renaissance era society, in the body of a dead guy, plotters against her, makes all the modern weapons, powerful merchant prince type dude, ends on kinda cliffhanger, Palos Of The Dog Star Pack, by juicy?, J.U. Giesy, will is super flakey, somewhat flakey, Will gets cancelled all the time, Cora has parents dying, The Cave Girl, question marks, struck through, transfixed by this stick, judgements made upon me, you’ve got a super flakey crust, dandruff shampoo is probably bad for you, it would smell strange and probably, favourite kind of pie, pecan pie, hard questions, blackberry pie, a bold choice, strawberry rhubarb, when you buy the ingredients for you pie, cheese pie, ricotta, a meat pie, eggs and sugar, saying goodbye, bye on the pie, a chess pie, a transparent pie, just sugar and eggs, the people of this region, healthy choices, taking up the pie, sugar pie, what else is it tho?, all pies, fruit pies, prone to make rhubarb pies, adds strawberries, rhubarb is a little strong, black currant, banned in the United States, the plant had a rust or something that effected some other plant, banned for 7 decades?, a major flavour, fruit markets, a lovely thing, when in Britain, red currant, life without black currant would be horrible, go to planet and black currant won’t grow there, second galaxy, with all the planets out there, some nice natives veggies, only marginally habitable, some fungus growin on the grown, barely wanted to move, everything makes Will think about Jesse, sort of a stalker affect, people thinking about Jesse on other continents, seems dangerous, interested in Kentucky, Appalachian Aesthetic, abandoned buildings, rustic ruins, Michigan doesn’t seem interesting, with regard to the upper peninsula, Kansas has The Wizard Of Oz, make a list of states that frighten you, frightened by cold western provinces, cost of living, a shipping container, full size, a window, drywall inside, when am I moving in, there’s no toilet in there, container life, not much of a thing, #VanLife, so sad, the roman villas, central courtyard, indoor place safe from bears, bears in British Columbia, black bears, spirit bears, a black bear that’s white, a genetic advantage, white foam, a hypothesis, Kermode bear, they’re not albino, cinnamon bear, Anmore, rainforest, berries, garbage, salmon, where is the most wild places, Antarctica, Kamchatka, about as wild or more wild, mountains, small, elderly mountains, Eastwood mountains, very remote from commerce, the way the roads are built, cut the tops of many of the mountains, doesn’t have access to the interstate system, railroads, what fucked up Kentucky?, coal takes everything away and gives nothing back, any other commodity, demand and value, European levels of labour militancy, pitched battles with company agents, a bomb dropped by the police, probably not from airplanes, hey look the BC government isn’t completely incompetent, renewable resource, on crown land, revenue goes to the province, taxing corporate extraction, control the resource, stopped listening to CBC, getting angry, one of the worst feelings a person can have, in Italian or Russian, Ford bros., she’s muted, asshole of the East, highways through forests, land that’s supposed to be protected, stopped taxing, for votes, hiring his friends, big for profit, detrimental on the land from which we live, Moraine Lands, re-elected premiere, his brother was, PC, Progressive Conservative, hybrid names, we’ll have it both ways, we’re the forward looking conservatives, when the brother died, was it really scandalous tho?, guy likes crack, when a rich person is using crack, people are saying Zelenskyy’s on regular cocaine, BC is surprisingly competent, getting very cynical about politics, Enbridge, B.C. Hydro, a free air conditioner, that’s a good thing, not killing them is better, build up to not killing them, the invisible hand in the velvet hand in the iron glove, for the shortest time, Rachael Notley, Social Credit, the Liberals are the business party, municipal party politics, they can’t really do anything against dog, provinces have tons of control over municipalities, the suburbs put them in there, $1 beer?, steamroller, candy, these things flow from that, they can never win federally, reverse engineer a political party, CCF, put a finger on, the United States controls Canada, a tepid party, why can’t other provinces get their shit together, New Brunswick is run by the McCain family, Idaho, Canadaland, not going to talk about Gaza, this is violence against my people, indefensible zionist shit, local newspapers, they suck, gotten worse, death spiral, no longer using dating apps, copping to eating a mountain of antidepressants, that is not a newspaper article, not paid much, brand his column the first ever Weird Tales dating column, very endy timesy energy, not directly involved, that Haiti thing, convinced the Kenyans, when the US dollar goes, what’s that going to do to the fake Canadian money?, gold guy, under the container, the skibidi gold toilet, scared of skibidi toilet, willing to embrace it, the thing to embrace by the young, past the point of existential despair and are enjoying their time, school is basically optional, what’s the point of this, there’s no future for me anyway, debilitating despair, in Greece for a month, fuck it all, why not forever?, still got to make some money, to pay the rent, with the land reform bill, fabricating Kalashnikovs, Temu, Aliexpress, off brand Lego, that exists, realistic masks, once you click on a realistic masks…, a mask of somebody’s fist with a middle finger raised, your head is a giant fist with the middle finger raised, hang loose, the final face for the apocalypse, the V for Vendetta mask, the mask is the true face, circling the drain as the ship sinks, you have to hang out with a teenager, 9 year olds too, Reddit is a horrible place, super controlled, the moderation is evil, my little brother, how do I do this?, raging on meme video, make the system happen, the kid is culture jamming him, skibidi doesn’t mean anything, toilets are allowed, boobs and penises aren’t allowed, tweak the system, maybe it’s going to bring the whole thing down, freedom stones, a nonsense phrase, not the the future Jack London envisioned, load your runcible plastic like this, a way to go, what will the revolution look like afterwards, pamphlets, owning the non-communists?, NPC style memes, you crying bro?, impossible to save them, China putting the last emperor to work with a broom, when being invaded, trying to reverse the revolution, you have to do something, an anecdote, Toussaint Louverture, Haitian revolution, German mercenaries were deemed black, the slaves are revolting, kill all the white european colonizers, recognized as black in the Haitian constitution, quaker dwarf, Barbados, Dominican Republic, admin, to the DR on the DL, St. Lucia, Cuba, Jamaica, California or Mexico, rah rah rah thing every year, have to go also get to go, mandatory work thing, oh yuck, when they filmed Sorcerer in 1977, Rafael Trujillo, Toronto too, for the Caribbean, a little man with big ideas, dwarf wife, a little bit older than him, lives in a cave, vegetarian, abolitionist, Stephen Leacock, she makes her own clothes, The Retroactive Existence Of Mr. Juggins by Stephen Leacock, one of our best, a big deal, a humorist, like the Canadian Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, described as a parable, this saw needs to be filed up a bit, fix the grindstone, make a carpenter’s bench, that Carl Sagan thing, James Burke’s Connections, still alive, very interesting, go into a fugue state, kings and contest, he was working on that other project, learned everything and nothing, The Trigger Effect, no excuses, if you watch it on Brave, the power blackout of 1965, the invention of the plow, five or six shows like that, PBS, TV Ontario, interviewed by Dan Carlin, a history guy, the biggest podcaster, Scott Miller, Joe Rogan, Lost-Sci Podcast, he lives in Costa Rica, his wife is Costa Rican, just reads them, TV broadcaster, his dad, still doing a show, very good audiobook narrator, some of the popular people, Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Ray Bradbury, little 30 minute story, its great, about the ads, A Cast, uber for kids, you can hire people on linkedin, health insurance for poor people, different ads, generic corporations, ads for other podcasts, audio dramas, its gonna die, podcasting networks, never launched?, never happened, Stitcher, defunct August 2023, what led to its downfall, youtube controlls what goes on youtube, u controll what goes on your podcatcher, provide the hosting services?, the business of podcasting vs. podcasting, podcast network, remember Night Vale?, headgum, CBC radio, BBC, Al Jazeera, Earwolf, preserve having a job, let’s do a podcast, for HQ, sales network, there’s nowhere that isn’t podcasting now, TWiT, 14 shows hosted on the network, this week in whatever, thousands of episodes, Jerry Pournelle, this week in security, so weird, almost four hours now, the day slips away, time slips away, [Maissa slips away], The Not-World, Cirsova’s not available, #Sad, even if assassinating bad presidents, the anarchists tried that, [William] McKinley, propaganda of the deed, made sense in Imperial Russia, a competent manager, a condo, want to complain? have you tried volunteering, so fuckin boring, outsource this to Colossus, the colony organizer, the bearskinned mayor, the guy in the second galaxy, dishevelmed woman, jealous of Dona’s appearance (and man), weird reactions, mad for no reason, president of the woman planet, in charge, clothes are mussed up, disorganized shelves, can you be shevelled?, old French, about your horse?, about your hair, hair uncovered, hence disorder, kempt and shelved and my shelves are very scruffy, helping the children?, volume 4 of the Nancy Drew books, Hardy Boys, two sets of Nancy Drew, what a deal, need that fore Heinlein, Glory Road, age appropriate?, he’s a Vietnam vet, have sword will travel, Paul had problems with it too, nope out of it, some scene that happens, rape scene?, why do people not like Glory Road?, sexist piece of shit, trite, some classic fantasy, Stranger In A Strange Land, boring, painful, this stinker, starts on a nude beach in France, meets a fairy or elf princess, a dwarf hires him, an alternative universe, so PTSD he’s down a rabbit hole, Silverberg’s an interesting guy, which of my eras do you want to talk about first, a healthy sense of himself, robust, stay humble, doing pretty good, he could die and still be doing pretty good, he’s in his 80s, very 80s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1969, The Rag Thing by Donald A. Wollheim, Margaret St. Clair, talk about the underdogs, a kleenex that gets sneezed on, dropped behind a radiator, gets sentient then gets revenge, all over the board, wants to exist, succeed for a while, It would have been all right if Spring had never come, thrifty and not too clean, March is a tricky month, last November, like Frankestein but with a rag, nice and short, making some time to finishing the Damon Knight Futurians book, what Donald A. Wollheim was like, bosom chum, John Michel, young communist league, stuttered horribly, what does stuttering mean?, everybody studies sometimes, Eric Idle, John Cleese, for laughs, a voice like thin paper, not thick paper, grok it out, weren’t robust in certain ways, John Milius is robust, does a robust man need a gun?, if own a gun, big collectors, very interesting technology, very important, you can’t dismiss it away, what Mao said about guns, all political power flows the barrel of a gun, group of enough people rebelling against the circuit, the cleverness of individuals, special attractive and brainy and useful wives, you’re too useful, trying to compliment her, chosen the wrong word, your ability to have guns, ability to read the situation politically, gain guns, print em up, machine shop, the Sino Soviet split was a bad mistake, caused the caused, what caused the end of the Soviets, bad read, the beneficiaries of the system stopped belieiving in it, thought they could do personally better as capitalists, kleptocrats, decadent, didn’t happen to China, China was nimble, Poe is alive, age corruption is not sound, elderly but fine, the age of the country, Canada is youngerthan the United States, a whole bunch of different dates, when did British colonization begin, 1775, 1776, 1780?, a moving target, pretend Canada is a little younger, we’ll be as corrupt, as big, as much, politics in Quebec, very very corrupt, Yukon, not so corrupt, as old as Ontario in a certain sense, younger in another sense, Australia, drill down, what corruption is, works how it is supposed to, the federalist papers, not supposed to change, supposed to stay the same together, demarcation line, rhymes back in time, Poe, vote rigging, 1840s, setup to be corrupt, 2/3rds of a man, heady words, some claims made, rapidly decline, Paul doesn’t think the Businessman’s Plot was real, Roosevelt was allowed to continue in office, massive popular support against his enemies, the NRA, fireside chats, threaten his enemies trying to overturn his rule, personal corruption in John A. MacDonald, not fake news, not even playing the game anymore, is Trump a political prisoner now?, walked away, smiled, too ridiculous to answer?, is it a ridiculous question, all prisoners are political, that deep, put someone in jail, seems unlikely, trying to annoy him, death by 1000 cuts, he’s invincible, visceral anti-corruption, not in the way that everybody else is, come back, they dont seem to be doing the assasination thing on him [this podcast recorded June 2, 2024], the murder industry, holding back weapons from Ukraine was a sin, somebody’s got to get his bread buttered, elites, deep political conflict with Russia forever, competent leadership on the other ends, accidents that happen, pumping the money out of the US government into the hands of the people controlling, dissatisfaction, Trump’s base, transitioning, they them gendered, an activity, they’re feeling it too, they don’t know what to do with it either, a certain level of corruption, faith, for the system to go on, Jonathan was on to something, people hate each other now, divide your enemies, divide your subject, opposed to the military industrial complex, ending foreign wars, reduce military spending, the Trump coalition, whoever supports trump, didn’t start any new wars, more strident supporters, Galaxy not Astounding, this is garbage to me, H.L. Gold, so silly, a military guy, blames Joe Biden for leaving Afghanistan, hemmed in by traditional beliefs, he reads the wind, more than anything, being popular is more important, he actually makes decisions, up close and personal, its different here, liberals more insufferable, “lefties”, conservatives, don’t put any thought into it, that’s bad, bad takes, hate Trump because they see himself in him, projection, he has tiny hands, Donny tiny hands, not even true, not freakishly small or large, a reference to him having a small penis, fat and weak, okay to body shame that guy, slightly orange coloured, not enough, badly cut suits?, a unique style, hair is on backwards, reverse stapled on, Biden’s bald, the part that never goes bald and move that to the top, rogaine that fails out, a weird appearance, accusing him of what he’s going to do in the future (that you’re doing now), fun to think about, denying something that’s wrong with you, a baby low level way of dealing with problems, drinking game players, feel comfortable, Paul doesn’t really listen to the podcast, people that I lie to, a thing about the middle names of people, only people he doesn’t like, middle names are funny, doesn’t have one?, Catholic, non-solid memory, Donald John Trump, 45, presidential number, Biden just gets one, Obama only gets one number back to 45 again?, Grover Cleveland, I heart New York, 34 counts guilty, the New Republic, insurrection and national security, stunning guilty verdict shatters his aura of invincibility, not stunning nor shattering, won an election, lost an election, is this invincible, masturbation for the people who hate Trump, alleged crimes, they didn’t bring again any guns, “storm”, Trump fans, show their grievance, verbed in the capital, agent provocateurs, an organized tour, theft of national security documents, even if he gave it to China without any personal profit, the deep state is not legally in charge it is just actually in charge, bad at filing stuff, like Hilary’s emails, deleting her emails, private server, hide her horrible emails, an extremely serious offense lurks beneath, he’s invested in it, The Terminal Man, made a mistake, Matt Yglesias retweet, the Civilization VI equivalent, he likes games, he’s getting gamed, viscerally triggering, he let his guys do that, he can’t be shamed, when Will was a kid, serious religious thing, lost to Obama, tricked, options on the table for most people, Obama or John McCain, that’s the trick, shoulda voted McCain, not a wise man, Obama at least was smart, too smart for all our goods, smart for his good, compromise his way through, a horrible thing, that’s the horror, willing to do things you shouldn’t do, I am what I am, not how the sizzle was sold, hope, stay on your parent’s health insurance until 26, so hot to talk about health care, Bernie Sanders noise, medicare for all, not perfect, not like what they’re saying, you get cancer, you get treatment, waiting list, its free, literally and actually free, the CRT television, the wifi’s free, not enough doctors, walk-in clinics, pharmacists can give your drugs directly, tryna solve problems, election coming up, debate about health care gone, only about Trump, killing in Gaza, horrible videos, Paul is a nice person, not willing to be mean, the national security question, a lot of deference going on, you don’t need a zap of punishment of pleasure, against leadership, management is not leadership, being the quartermaster, disbursing takes, let me finish, I did, Terence doesn’t talk enough, good at talking, this projection idea, look into the shadow work, what was sad about the conviction, how excited people got, pathetic, 34 counts how do you feel?, is it going to stop him from being president again?, don’t cut deep with Will’s mother, different relationship, much more sympathetic to people transing, trying to be nice to people, are they not wrong?, too nice to Jesse about, weirdly preoccupied, what is Jesse projecting, want some boobs, grow boobs on your own, are these boobs good enough, very interested in trans stuff, Day Million, Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil, one ought to be interested, important, its bigger than other such things, more controlling, more of an earworm, Blondie songs, running around inside your head, saying Blondie stuff, Heart Of Glass, Blondie is the band, Michael Jackson was very big an effected people’s dress, crazy to think about, Elvis, behavior at concerts, more correct, Elvis upset some people, because of hip movements, hormones to look like Elvis, its important, its happening and non-reversible, tattoo vs. cut off parts and hormones, haircut is very easy to reverse, give it some time, those boobs aren’t going to grow buck, people don’t know what they’re getting into, problems caused by brains, input output, hormones in your body, data input, an error, consider chemically composed, put chemicals into your brain to change it, jungian, kids are very subject to being not unpopular, isolated and made freaks, in school, yes, the Korean kids have this thing going on from home, they generally go along with it, top down influence, wishy washy, you should do good things and not do bad things, opinions or facts, hang out with some people and see what’s going on, hangs with them, patients or clients, the trans phenomenon, similar views, very wrong, only know so much, in general terms, clients who are trans, different, cultural and religious ferment, student coming, a book by Barret Brown coming out, American journalist and essayist, snarky in trouble with the government, arrested by the FBI for threatening the FBI, in prison for 63 months, reporting on Anonymous, against the US government, My Glorious Defeats: Hacktivist, Narcissist, Anonymous, heroin addiction, 2011, Barrett Brown, transparency movement, clever and hilarious, institutions are made of people, entertaining and illuminating manual, CPTSD, fucked around with, nice relationship with his mom, harassing his mom, not many people know who he is, Scott has a podcast with Julie, to be continued on the hormone conversation, coffee, talking point, don’t care about the truth, only about winning, some rhetoric and some sophistry, ad campaign, what does Will have to gain?, chopping our children’s dicks off, oppo research, have a good time.

The Last Space by Murray Leinster

The Last Space Ship by Murray Leinster - GALAXY NOVEL 25

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #816 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Cat-Woman by Ray Cummings and In The Orbit of Saturn by R.F. Starzl

The SFFaudio Podcast #816 – Cat-Woman by Ray Cummings (read by Mike Vendetti, 55 minutes) AND In The Orbit of Saturn by R.F. Starzl (read by Edmund Bloxam, 52 minutes). These are complete and unabridged readings of the stories (1 hour 48 minutes) followed by a discussion of them. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Will Emmons, and Jonathan Weichsel

Talked about on today’s show:
[Cat-Woman by Ray Cummings – from Terror Tales, May 1938 and In The Orbit Of Saturn by R.F. Starzl from Astounding, October 1931] that narrator, LibriVox, like to not listen, performing, distracting, a noble effort, everbodys got an accent, Trois-Rivières, a cultural, 30 years watching news reports, CBC generally gets its pronunciation right, the main character is an American, the half-breed Indian, Beaumont, a New York lawyer, take it too far, way too far, two miles from Manhattan, US states, the geography is so bad, giant book showing different continents, they don’t even know where they are on the map, maybe geography is a useless thing, from one tube enclosure to another tube enclosure, maybe it doesn’t matter, you need to understand geography in order to understand anything, a geology a little bit, from the Libertarian convention, use its military to defend itself, from what?, giant moat on either side, defending Hawaii, you don’t need a sixth fleet in the Indian Ocean, Nevada, Oregon, accents?, more than accent, Iraq, Iran, hearing about it on the news, the correct pronunciation, say it in Spanish, all these tourists, east coast politicians, it doesn’t need to be set in the orbit of Saturn, not as good as the other Starzl, E.E. Doc Smith, more compact, starts deep into the action, we’re in the middle of a battle, holding cells, dialogue happens, we’re done, fairly good for being fairly bad, published in the October 1931 issue of Astounding, the Clayton era of Astounding, having trouble following the action, put on a really big smile for your videos, the muscles of your face, practicing to be the joker, he’s really selling this, in seven months we’ll know if it was all worth it, Sword & Scandal, with that great art, very solid, character names, Quarl Finner?, Coerl?, Black Destroyer, Braniac Five from the Legion Of Superheroes, Lenore, character from Poe, Moby Gore, Lt. Burroughs, Captain Strom, he’s not shy, Mark Twain, a newspaperman, family newspaper in some midwestern town, its good, real things that happens, engaging with real stuff a little bit, her brother dies, dies from pneumonia, daughter of a capitalist, a capitalism in space story, the eugenics pirate, a good noble man, a man without a planet, engaging with the materials of the times, the Burroughs thing, make it about Romance, he doesn’t solve it, the IFP, the interplanetary flying police?, pirates infiltrated by east Indian company agent, sexy redhead pirate queen, a depth to it, for how short it is, a lot of time hating, too simple, a super good example of pulp that doesn’t suck completely, not enough beams, a cloaking device, I’ll parole you, new laser beam, ray of some kind, a little ethical back and forth, working for the fuckin cops, tremendous amounts of concentrated energy, the energy becomes sentient, weird juice, for the amount of plot and backstory, something in a series, ISFDB, seven of these stories, The Earthman’s Burden, very depthy, another Starzl story, Madness Of The Dust, he’s on mars, he has martian slaves, martian dust makes him go crazy, Against All Flags (1952), Errol Flynn, Anthony Quinn, off the coast of Madagascar, a political dissident, party now because there is no afterlife, mythological pirates, historical pirates, crook, of the golden age of piracy, still pirates today, the Horn of Africa, not British naval slaves, their backstory is different, a really good movie, the Mad Max novelization, Stone (1974), Satan worshipers, very beautiful, very artistic, by looking at pirates, land pirates, living life free from societal law, Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson, patch him in and patch him out, harassing ransom people, Pirates Of Venus pirates are not really pirates, Gully Foyle, Alfred Bester, a positive spin, write the pants off, very early in the history of magazines, by the early 30s Weird Tales is getting good, Science Fiction isn’t as mature, willing to pay relatively good rates, the writing of both of this, Ray Cumming fuckin sucks, The Girl In The Golden Atom, this is a fun story, Cat-Woman, flies by the seat of his pants, bad stuff in here, as a relatively short weird menace, shudder story, so similar much better idea, serums that transform you, a lot hornier, more idea filled, Sam Moskowitz on Ray Cummings, went downhill, never evolved to keep up with the times, formulaic, 1938, Ambrose Bierce, this genre didn’t exist, a story about glands, the science of glands, 1910s and 20s, the gland doctor in France, put this in a novel, mad scientist in France, a cutting from testicle from a young monkey, Bobby Derie’s blog, wealthiest men in Paris, complete nonsense, great scientist, have they retracted the story yet, the little touches, there was a magazine, that magazine had the formula, I never found that magazine, maybe she is a cat-woman, very meta, lurid covers, ladies being tortured, fed into machines, when they get nude, delivers on all fronts, exotic northern Quebec setting, palpitating breasts, her heart is beating so hard it makes her breasts beat, palpitations, am I fighting a drug or am I really sleepy?, can see out, writhe around on the animal skin rugs, jumps out the window, bad planning, four characters in this story, made no sense, masturbating in the corner while she dances around on the rugs, terrible plotting, terrible, horrible, a grindhouse 42nd street horror movie, very entertaining and over the top, entertained, trouble visualizing, so very visual, a floorplan of the cabin in the woods, needed to be in the same room as her, wakes up, girl dancing around, a big mirror thing, now that she’s my wife, she looks in the mirror, saw him as a cat, then a literal cat shows up, why does it have a baby in its mouth?, unburied baby?, the cat after all, badly put together, was fixing this story worth Ray Cummings’ time, pulp fiction factoids, Frederik Pohl, bulldoze Pohl, wearing a cravat, almost unusable stories, your standard pulp author didn’t write a second draft, after editorial notes or revisions, how Weird Tales worked, make some changes, I like money, I will not accept payment, my words are perfect, something in common, Lovecraft needed money, scrip harder, he wouldn’t work, he couldn’t work, rich as a child, grandfather was wealthy, wife taking care of him, sending cheques, artists need to be supported, inheritance money, residual stuff, lived with his aunts, rent and food was cheap, three suits, not buying a lot of stuff, editorial revision business, Edison’s laboratory assistant, Edison’s philosophy, Thomas Edison, mix these chemicals together, shrink ourselves down, looking through a microscope at a piece of gold, become very small, just a matter of looking in your cupboards until you find the right chemical, great men before corporate, Elon Musk, emerald mine, get a bunch of guys working for you, a patent troll, Musk isn’t as a bad, E.E. Doc Smith, invented powdered sugar, manufactured it industrially, revised it, space opera, doesn’t need to be set near Titan, a tour of the solar system, protect the whole solar system, as an ideas man, Fitz James O’Brien’s The Diamond Lens, covered in mirages, fun, stupid, fun, from the text, forays to the faraway undisciplined Pluto, colonial thing, tropical Venus, Aryl, stupendous and neverending mirages, Jesse’s Paul hat, his anti-Paul hat, mining anything near Saturn, too fuckn cold, nuclear power all the time, radiation, make it into heat, energon cubes make no fuckn sense, purple, pinky purple, I eat energon cubes, to sell cars that transform into robots, disguises, you think I’m just a boring, my uncle was in the Navy, a mcguffin to chase after, if Jack London had written this story it would be way better, lab assistant, Wells was the lab assistant to Huxley, learning shit, science teacher, The Star by H.G. Wells, Goliah, a device that zap people out of existence, blackmail the capitalists into obeying him, you don’t need it to be set around Titan, wanting to change reality using his tech, more science fictional, when E.E. Doc Smith solves problems, we can’t restart the warp engines cold, the mechanism of the plot, somehow do the thing that is impossible, during the battle they invent technology, Borg shit is fake science fiction, nothing real and tangible, to engage in a new relationship with reality, bad science fiction vs. fake science fiction, pretty different, what makes something a western?, Outland (1981), sean connery in space, High Noon (1952) in space, a western in space, is this story science fiction?, just cuz the guy wants to do eugenics, the invisibility shield, small details, invented from not used, prevents them from having an incident, we have nuclear weapons in our cargo hold, had them, didn’t use them, the combination, trying to change the world, bad at his job, a plan to do so, a new race of humans, rich, capitalist, large mine holdings on Titan, visiting dilettante, hostages for money?, science fiction but not good science fiction, the gland formula, moving the goal posts, weird fiction possibly by science fiction, werewoman, also possibly, the narrator turns into a cat, it could be it was a science fiction, I lost the documents, undercutting it on purpose, read the end, secret formula in a published magazine, Frozen Canyon, Jeanne and I, glorious vibrant young body that nature gave her, she is normal, a scheming criminal half mad with lust, had never seen the French magazine she mentioned, there was no such magazine, the product of a deranged mind, she disrobes, gazing at her beauty in her bedroom mirror, the grinding maw, for you see sometimes a strange lethargy, cat naps, gleaming green and yellow, my mind is tottering, the watchful eyes upon, like a cat watches a mouse, the ambiguity, doesn’t impact the rest of the book, is there any supernatural activity in this story, half-breed French Canadian in the north, Franklin’s motivation, wait until she gets her money, gotta see her naked, you can’t wait five minutes to see her dance nakedly, nice and ambiguous ending, are we reading a diary entry?, if you go back early enough in the story, undercuts his whole story, if we drank milk we’d all be like cows, the doppleganger one, real science fiction, Mike Vendetti narrated, what supernatural thing happened? what scientific thing happened?, dosing with something apparently, spanish fly, masturbation talk, to perform for her guardian, doesn’t deliver, buy your thesis, precluded from science fiction, breed a new race?, white man’s law, given the period, philosophers have said, atavistic, ray weapon, primitive urge, the great simians who he resembled, a south seas story can be science fiction, Island Of Dr. Moreau, A Thousand Deaths, dogs and disintegration, The Monster Men, amnesia, therefore worthy of the daughter of the scientist, memory returned to Quarl, orderly procession of the stars, the artificial gravity, very early, pre-Heinlein, very interesting, as the ship rotated, a thick swathing of bandages, peaked face, rotten, a portable apparatus, progenitor, this will work, an agreeable warmth, a great lassitude followed, filled the blouse, tunic, blue trousers, gold braid down the side, clothing talk, one of the chosen, the chosen race, an out and out damned pirate, what else?, inscrutably melancholy, the idealism of a poet, many means, disguise one’s purpose, for instance, felt himself redden, Strom was a zealot, prompt penetration, the point is he wants him to join the team, breeding a new race, takes generations, Hitler’s plans, it won’t work, the fiction part, because it was real, trying to do something science fictional, before Hitler, not running his race programs, everybody loved it, homegirl, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, sterilize, its a good story for what it is, how short it is for the amount of material that is in it, romance stuff, an outline rushing through the material, get to the ideas, who in this group is fun to hang out with?, the author more than the characters, genuine science fiction opening, faltered in her course, stockholders, visitors, aware of a cessation, bad sentence beauty, parts of Cat-Woman, badly worded, fictitious gravity, main salon, the entire midship section, to flounder in helpless confusion, they’re being attacked, skipped past, not a good story, interesting and kinda fun here and there, trouble following it, poorly written, omniscient, first person, a character narrator, more economy there, how to tell stories, 1st person, 3rd person, close and far, really important, detective novels told 1st person, Sherlock Holmes, 1st person from the 2nd main character’s point of view, Watson’s POV, very easy to follow, if he did see it he didn’t observe it, 3rd person, tightened up, Ray Cummings masturbating while writing this story, sexy stories, the girl here is terrible, how she is behaving makes no sense, aliens who come to Earth to kidnap all the women, not writing in the first half of the 20th century, explorers, our universe is an atom in a larger structure, make themselves really big, you’re blind, why are your blind, my eyes don’t work, why don’t you just replace your eyes, execute him, more ethical than we are, had Heinlein written that, a 10page philosophical discussion, elemental and frenetic, and then this happened, why it has a bad reputation, Lester Del Rey writing really short stories, three book series, good stuff as well, more detail, more sweat put into it, Jonathan as a the new Paul, shownoting a show with Paul, invite him back, email Evan, Cora couldn’t show up because her mom died, reschedule for sometime in the future, other plans, I honor my commitments, arguing himself into something, Paul makes the show worse, talking over people, not all being in the same room, a delay, distracted, bad for the listener, Paul can contribute well but often doesn’t, “comps” is what they call them, bad thinking, being worried about spoilers, bad modes of thought, why are other people interested in spoilers, fundamentally misunderstanding, ladies in glass cylinders coming to earth, 7 minute story, aliens kidnap all the women, research projects, spiderwomen, an excuse to read it, beef with this story as a cat-woman story, made her a pig, wildcat, mountain lions, didn’t do any research, remote or something, not thinking it through, care about ideas more than writing, nice writing, experiencing the story sequentially, the end is the most important part, two exciting novels, Donald E. Westlake crime novel, new Ace Double, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, no Alex?, LibriVox, set in Florida, good noir opening, Murder Mistress by Robert Colby, “Scott Daniels is a washed up showbiz announcer who hit the bottle a few too many times and blew his big chance.”, three and half hours, a lady drowning in quicksand as a sex fetish, mud, this is a new time, naked on a bed, I could read that, crime and mystery stories, more interested in the phenomena of these horny novels, naked woman on the bed pointing a gun, pink unmentionables, green negotiables, Killing Time by Donald E. Westlake, Ben Tucker, Smith will squawk, the small town aspect, Westlake is really good at his job, eating a ham sandwich, I’m looking for a guy named Smith, heavy browed, hand painted and too wide, front name, this is your lucky night, nice prose, painted ties, vintage 1961 feeling, Westlake is awesome, 4.5 hours, zoned out again, check in, a push notification, something stupid, addicted to the petty bourgeois, small freeholder, yeoman?, the dopamine, 46, pick up from you, it is good to get out of the house, enough to pay minimum wage, it is good to have hobbies, put a scanner somewhere in the middle of that, give it to the world, even just covers, archive.org’s custom scanner, ones from China, funky, wanting to preserve the book, designed for bound books, you can’t crack the spine on a sewn book, reams, come loose, quasi pornographic, Lost City Of The Damned by Alec Rivera [Charles Nuetzel], horny science fiction novel, sex, excitement, and the unknown, terrible in all the right ways, John Kendrick Bangs, Bangsian fantasy, like Beetlejuice (1988), The Good Place, A Houseboat On The Styx, inspired Riverworld, collaborative, a sequel, four books in the series, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Inferno, ghost stories, it just goes on, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, so cool, he doesn’t know where it is going, offered him $100,000, Thorne Smith, person turning into a goldfish, The Stray Lamb, Topper series, a navy, nautical fiction, supernatural, when a book that’s falling apart, there’s lots of things I could do, an unassailable defense, E.W. Hornung’s Raffles, the gay response to Sherlock Holmes, not being gay enough, Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, Bunny, a burglar, unbelievably gay, the lady in the mud puddle, in mud puddles?, why is this a thing, high heels, Barrett Whitener, mild mannered, Cary Grant, ok?, 1937 film, the novel is public domain, a few TV series, 78 episodes, Eric Idle, Transformers: The Movie (1986), Roddy McDowell, Bettlejuice sequel that nobody asked for, curious, what was left to be said?, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), an imperfect novelization, something really cool, a lot of infodump, an excuse to explain, depopulated Australia, shot without permission, one week at a time, in terms of story, reading it through a novel, more action and is simpler, incredible astounding wonderful, dog dies in both, Mel Gibson, [he has a monkey in the third one], 4th one is not good, 5th one, worst kind of idea, go watch the backstory happen, a very unnecessary film, 7 minute standing ovation at Cannes, just because a movie gets a trophy, Eisner awards, a popularity contest, a lady doing the petition, more like the nebulas, people campaign, understood the process, how to get into comics, Maus, not entertaining for kids, better than other homework assignments, leaves his burner on, wants to save on matches, a very long term view of this show, Jesse has an ideology (campaigning for certain things, campaigning against certain things), very hesitant to ever give Amazon any money, most people go along, get along, bootstrap, the PDF page, to try to get more shit on Librivox, hasn’t worked out that well, LibriVox won’t use Jesse as a source, they use Project Gutenberg, Haithi Trust, why it takes so long, very precise, Canadian and Australian ones, FadedPage, Scott Miller [of the Lost Sci-Fi Podcast] is great, his agenda, to record unrecorded stuff, make a little bit of money, he likes this stuff, doing a ton of work, 200 episodes out, three times a week, he wants to mix it up, things that people request, ads in his podcast, the ones on youtube, on the other hand, an imperfect system, Mike [Vendetti] recording for Audible.com, he has other names too, The Last Spaceship by Murray Leinster, the mushroom world, The Mad Planet, Clifford D. Simak, more packaging?, mutual on twitter, stuff for fun, used to be Jesse’s job, a tape gun, very precise, do things fast, Halloween costume, against store bought costume, diplodocus?, cardboard costume, you can model things up out of cardboard, homemade costume, a standing desk, so unergonomic, way too low, no warehouse, fairly small objects, so lucky about media mail, guy from Britain, copies of Analog, Children Of Dune, $40 shipping, silly, Connor can’t get anything in and out of Australia for a reasonable price, New Zealand, horrific, a person in the world today, internet, worst shithole countries, tweeting from Gaza, delivery of things, if there was ever a case, start with mail, an essential service, what makes a country, parcels and letters and things across the place, what made the Mongols an empire, without getting Mongolized, the postal agency, the main job of the government, insurance and mail, universal coverage, being Westlakian, make that explicit, before eveveryone dies, he goes down so smooth, he’s a good guy, The Triumph Of Evil by Lawrence Block, the purported author, wanted to join the CIA, gets recruited, assassinating the president, love the premise, suggest both, five political figures, one man with a gun is enough for the job, a man who’s sole life function, Miles Dorn, he’s so good, the one set in Ireland with a folksinger, hung out with Maissa, Passport To Peril, Reading, Short And Deep short Lawrence Block stories, wonderful narrator, very powerful, good with the openings, professional newscaster, sidethings, horrible ads, normcore, Apple podcasts, regionally targeted, government health insurance, Uber teen accounts, big city thing?, am against, not invented something new, 88th birthday, surrounded by the elderly, dangerous, they can cut you in their gangs, make friends with young people, work at it, make em come on your podcast, meeting young people through science fiction, one pulp fiction friend younger, a year younger, everybody else, fifty is pretty young, aint that young, conversations with people, the whole point is the side benefits, a lot of time looking at books you want to read, help kids pass tests and get better marks in school, let’s do something that will help in the future, don’t lose money at it, shovelling money out the door is unsustainable, maintaining, spend time around cool paperbacks, real conversations about books, most people don’t read, they gain in value, an insight into that period, 1931, 1938, investigate more shudders, weird menaces, weird fiction, Weird Tales is still being published, dude, trolling Jesse, this ideology, only share things that can be shared, worrying about the terminator gene, monsanto’s plan to destroy farming, doesn’t affect your worldview, support illegal things to stop the terminator gene, watch a minute of it to see the BC legislature, Edison Motors, response to Tesla, as a guy, electrifying logging trucks, powerful youtube channel, we better pay attention to this, invited called the Green Party, a third party, pretty small in B.C.’s legislature, a bill to change funding for vehicle subsidization, election’s coming up, very different from American politics, not wholly incompetent clowns, so much clownage is happening, spread everywhere, clown world now, more enclownified, Kentucky legislative proceedings, seeing the room, special costume, threw off that yoke, judges don’t dress up funny, tradition is all we have left, a gavel, Alien Nation, tv series, main white guy, main human guy, alien girlfriend, the way they do the show, there’s aliens, pull out some fact about Mr. Spock’s physiology, builds up lore, lore is the most serious problem any Star Trek has, moved all her stuff in, I see you put up the clowns, paintings of clowns, we do not have clowns in our culture, cirsova, mental maps, no massive overlaps, new fiction, imagine if you were going to open a restaurant, not allowed to use food from after a certain year, recipes are not copyrighted or trademarked, secret recipe, formulations vs. recipes, why do recipe books exist?, she wants to try new food, the creative art, I should write a book, like their poetry, a reference book, not supposed to read it cover to cover, ooh we could make that, get up the courage to do one of the things in there, look at my art, the cookbook is kind of a dead art because of the internet, youtube channels, food algorithm, instagram, twitter, I’m now going to talk about god for the next couple of minutes, preface your conversation about god, why Jimmy Dore quit pot, a Jungian analyst, funny and interesting, spoilers skip ahead, fuck off, they think they’re supposed to, people are very copying, Seventh Victim, you really need to sell it, when they go to read Sheckley, unwreckable, a visual display, lots of money being spent, go to work and feel happy or sad, the narrator explains, hailing, cars going by, a weedwhacker, on a porch, in a room, a novel about cars recorded in a car, doesn’t edit it, how ratchet that is, so charming, can’t even call it pirated, never going to come into, he wanted to read this book to you, he’s a human being, the ideal form of being, people telling a story, another person enjoying that story, and talking about that story, a really good pitch, Louis Rossmann, laptop repairman philosopher guy, right to repair, not everything should be a subscription service, the right way to go, not getting a lot of traction, no money behind it, individuals trying to be ethical, something like a movement, Rossmann has a billionaire backer, leverage political change, leveraging their youtube channel to get a government subsidy, can’t find a place to build their factor, they’re a municipality, Merritt, B.C., other countries are courting them, moving farther north, less investment taken, idle land, investment property, vocal complaints, we want government to be somewhat responsive, Apple will fuck it up on purpose, past the pain point, Starbucks getting shit on for Israel, Nancy Pelosi’s friends kids were killed, Starbucks gave $3 million, special beans, be on the phone with Nancy Pelosi to get shit happening, two gift cards, Tim Horton’s ones, Starbucks, big corporate now, its fine, donuts, Starbucks’ food is very expensive, $3.60, cheap for their products, an expensive part of the world, in terms of land, hard to find housing, a city but suburbs, unhoused, hobos, houseless, tentless, half a duplex, half-housed, housing many animals, some raccoons, big swollen teats, some babies, what racoon milk tastes like, the science of racoon milk, latch on and give a little suck, made redundant, life in rural Kentucky, mixed up with weird apologies for Joe Biden, Trump Derangement Syndrome, sniffing kids, blatant lying, confabulating memories, gross children grabbing, Astounding, doesn’t know he’s on camera, nobody calls him on it, his daughter’s diary, she left it somewhere, like the son left the laptops, woman sentenced to prison for stealing and selling Ashley Biden’s diary, going to therapy and telling the therapist her dad was having showers with her, pretty damning if true, Hunter calling his dad a pedophile, to hurt it his dad, pawing children, hand on a girl’s breast, evil that he gets away with that, a lot going around, what percentage?, double digits?, a survey, look around, just in your own life, it’s not zero, Biden paws girls breast, video distorts, granddaughter, here’s the apology for it, Natalie Biden, Beau Biden’s daughter, a Biden who’s not allowed to be a Biden, John Snow, what Game Of Thrones is about, politics, titillation, perverted sex stuff, Scott liked it, George R.R. Martin, huge entourage of women, Freya Stark, women’s brains, not a handsome man, got money, an attraction to the storytelling, for women, something to him, the first book is in the show, why people are into it, so much of it, the media stuff is not reading, people like talking about things around the watercooler, Americans are very prudish, HBO would have a little bit of nudity, traditionally verboten, high drama, reversals, responding to Tolkien’s vision of Middle Earth is escapist, Martin’s vision of Westeros, trying to be realist, got dragons, war of the roses, infighting between royal families, bottom up characters, when you see a princess get raped, that’s dramatic, girl mind mentality, they’re different, common core, women are weaker than men, shorter than men, things growing inside your body for 9 months, women care about health more, watch Alien Nation with Meg, watch the pilot, cheer for schooling, the Ruby Bridges story, desegregation story, govt. agents, sit in a classroom by herself all day, very TV dramatic, how fucked up American morality is, prudishness, the names are so funny, the original 1988 movie, a family drama done as a buddy cop show, got punchy, funny names, Sam Fransisco, low level humour in the background, another baby, needs to find a binnaum, Albert Einstein, you’re gonna let Albert fuck your wife?, be in the room while the partner is being cuckolded, Heinlein style violation of norms, this is all biological, made up to tell stories like that, to break down prejudices, so lefty feelgood, genuine SF, little details, weirdly sexy show, sex stuff on Fox TV in 1990s, cancelled, brought it back, reshoot the final scene, set in 1995, highly rated show, second to last episode: child sex slavery with politicians, nothing stays in print anymore, Netflix shows removed from Netflix, lost the license or embarrassed, not vertically, horizontal, vs. spherical, own the mines for the raw materials for your cars, marketing and movie theaters, merging with competitors, productions that it greenlights, Quentin Tarantino will own Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019) in 20 years, a Star Trek movie, see you next week.

Cat-Woman by Ray Cummings - from Terror Tales, May 1938

In The Orbit Of Saturn by R.F. Starzl from Astounding, October 1931

Posted by Jesse Willis