The SFFaudio Podcast #836 – READALONG: Special Deliverance by Clifford D. Simak

The SFFaudio Podcast #836 – Jesse, Will Emmons, and Terence Blake talk about Special Deliverance by Clifford D. Simak

Talked about on today’s show:
academic master race, all for democratizing everything, 1982, isfdb.org, tagged, New England, strong female character, robot, quest, aliens, parallel world, recommend this book to my friends, what that point was, the feeling, the first couple of pages, any other people, what this book is, not everybody is ready for this, initial thoughts, a big weak spot, recurring conversations, the professor bickering, the narrator gets into it, long than it needed to be, the exposition at the end, we are creating an academic master race, bad to kidnap people, not enough of a striver, the little refugee camp, we like Simak, faster than usual, tedious, infodump things, sometimes tedious, show don’t tell, the feeling was its deeper than it seems, a sort of Gene Wolfeian complexity disguised in a real simple feel-goodsy story, the aliens at the end, Childhood’s End, norns or fates, from what they say in their big infodumps, not a full disclosure, they themselves are incapable of producing, intellectual objections, fun reading, amp it up to 1.5x speed, books where you need to savour the prose, almost sacrilege, We Have Always Lived In The Castle, poetry at 1.5X, a pants novel, Maissa was on for Shakespeare’s Planet, Jonathan, one of the first science fiction novels, a robot, a bunch of people, spend time in the landscape, a very familiar sort of story, Trish would use the word “comps”, complimentary books, if you like this you’ll like that, Hyperion by Dan Simmons, The Wizard Of Oz, the thing it is most like, The Canterbury Tales, treacley made, at the end of Hyperion, we’re off to see the wizard, going to see the shrike, a brilliant book, I’m done, the other three, Endymion, a Keats poem, there’s no road, there’s trails, a track, when finally the leave the road into the badlands, to the cube, very enigmatic, the city, the singing tower, one of us in the journey gets trapped or engulfed, what’s up with the lady who turns into a mummy, the ancient road, a Lovecraftian moment, a book Lovecraft reviewed, a tv movie, The Thing In The Woods by Harper Williams, A Howling In The Woods (1971) TV movie, Barbra Eden, based on a novel, a dog, somebody had buried his master in the worlds, mourning the loss of his master, a bad movie, badly done, a cool idea, just after the parson disappeared through the door, the crabapple blossom land, come out of the city, what if you go through the doors, brings you back to the land that you’re in but you perceive it differently, how you are perceived, The Green Door by A.A. Milne, Well’s The Green Door, an 18 hour podcast, green doors are magic doors, to escape a marriage, in the woods he meets a princess, sexy princess lady, the castle gate people don’t recognize him as the prince, they recognize each other, happily adam and eve in the forest without the burden, an ice world, a pain world, every shark is eating every other shark, crab-apple blossom land, the parson had a problem, everything is impious, he’s a coward, quick to judge, this Eye In The Sky, Philip K. Dick idea, those worlds are real, demons or devils exist, religiously structured world, an ontologically secular world, bigoted, one of the very cool parts of the book, on and on about art, it’s beautiful!, an Alice In Wonderland author, pre-Pooh, after-Pooh, Star Trek episode with Mr. Atoz, these are the same book, doing something in his old age, according to Jesse, time travel, science fiction, trying to give humanity a second chance, not really what it’s about, the death or end of science, the end of man, now apocalypse, the end of pursuing one particular idea of research, so many ends, avoid a potential apocalypse, unless humans can take the next step in evolution, a roman-a-clef to The Wizard Of Oz, the gold standard for the road, this guy’s about courage, this guy’s about brains, Dorothy is us, six on the road, counting Toto, brains, courage, heart, two women, four men, one of them’s an it, a he/him robot, gendered as it, a sinister character, every time, here’s the tea, a sign that it’s science fiction, obsessed with tea, Nine Fox Gambit, tea late at night, highly influential, the book influenced, we’ve got the tea that’s enough, the ending, the infodump, essential to science fiction, the best movie of all time, The Terminator, the best part of that movie, Kyle Reese’s infodump, they’ll definitely kill you, a speech given on the run, the puppet masters, puppet character, technically correct, the opening world is not our world, University of Las Vegas, civic duty, medical welfare, not our earth, trying to get a positive review from Heinlein, ai written essay about Shakespeare, confesses, Galactic Pot-Healer, I need you, you are need, the great work that needs to be done, the fun way of entering it, not that lame, what is the meaning of my existence on earth, a brigadier that uses robots to enact battles, which one is strong?, our viewpoint character, the most Simaky, not his best expression of this book, others, Highway To Eternity, read one out of Galaxy, Time And Again, Time Is The Simplest Thing, Way Station, City, scattered across time, Simak is doing Simak, greatly matured, Scott [Danielson], a strange title, Scott’s face superimposed over the robot’s face, Project Pope, from a Catholic point of view, infallible pope, more traditional plot, meandering journey across a landscape, when serialized in Astounding, The Fisherman, Jesusy, the secret to teleporting to other planets, in his earliest pulpy stuff, get to know him better, doesn’t know what he’s doing, the card playing guys at the inn, they’re the fates, you could just excise them from the book and the book, there to make the setting happen, the rationalization, makes you want to read the book again, with that in view, Hegel and the phenomenology of minds, Kuhn’s paradigms, the shift, what exists, Thomas Kuhn, Murphy’s law, Moore’s law, not a law, could be an end, something wrong about the way , the evolution of alternate worlds, Lee Smolin, less fluffy, encapsulates with his two bookends, chat gpt, feels dirty, are you doing a Sheckley here, it is funny, here we go, starts typin, trusting in his typewriter, you need to do that, a lot of bad takes, one of our hobbies, not too offensive, read more, this is pathetic, unless it was cute, big long honking novels, a student story, The Mysterious Garden, this story is amazing, 7 tweets long, William, a distant realm, something moving in the bushes, where she had been hiding, she offered me a fruit, instantly I felt safe, the fruit was delicious, being in the woods all by herself, a strange sound, hastily hid behind a tree, a bald magician, chasing us like a madman, the gate of the park, I’m Adam, I said, written to get them, an illustration from a Dungeons & Dragons, the name of the character at the end, practically no one to talk to, our hero looking for Mary, look for your sweetie, make you tea, one of his answers is that, to find things out, Simak’s thesis is very basic, I do want those things, find a person you’ve lost, it is good to get people, he saw Nyarlathotep, a cool and good guy, overthinking this book, leave him behind, I don’t eat or breathe or sleep, poor robot puppy in a robot gutter, robot dog business, a big truck comes and runs it over, what constitutes a robot dog, if we were children, a cute puppy, picking it up out of the gutter, letting it do what it wants, he’s a good person, shows empathy, going up to a tree and hugging it, unless they’re high on drugs, why not, it’s fine, a mammal based thing, extends past mammals, hens love their chicks, salmon when they leave their fry in the river, is it good, mandatory even to have empathy, the answer should be yes, serial killer, cut them up, a taste of their own business, overcoming our empathy, bringing a weapon, there’s no weapon, the whole planet is a weapon, favourite thing to think about, suffering, when it approaches our hero, he puts out his hand, strokes his ear, abandoned it, dog wants to follow him, one over the other, the girl over the dog, you want to save both, a nasty woman and very friendly dog, what if its the parson, or the general, Mr. Empathy, a journalist, after a certain point, a Wisconsin university, trigger warnings, the best of the university, at the evolutionary forefront, you also go to classes, loved university, when you don’t care about your grades, everything was provided for you, his idea of heaven, everything won’t be provided, Lansing and Mary, the justification for it all, worrying about nuclear war, maybe the Russians are crazy, that’s so mean, almost all in the American government’s head, all projection, every accusation is a confession, 1991, we’re all relaxing, the end of history, back to making money, nuclear armed countries being attacked by proxies, its fine, just keep up the pressure, that fear of nuclear annihilation, none of the empire’s ever ended, similar to ours, chat gpt in the basement, a gateway trigger, The Last Starfighter (1984), small town, rest stop, shady acres, poor people living in trailers, one little store on the highway to nowhere, one arcade game, what a great job, space alien comes, here we go, takes him off to space to be Luke Skywalker, that gateway to another world, in the basement of the student union, number 5, gold coins, where do they get their supplies, the DM has not planned it out, we don’t know the answer, no need to ask that Jesse, the point of the story, who you are and what you want, worrying about nuclear bombs, communism as a really desirable alternative, money is probably not necessary, universal basic income, taxes, slot machine civic duty, capable of designing this game, why incapable of waging the war?, seemingly incompetent, take the next steps, the chosen ones, the universe is vast meaningless and our existence has no apparent purpose, choose a bunch of people, what skills does he bring to the table, judging things, a robot who seems suspicious, a coda, a missing chapter, playing cards, why they’re the norns, religion is not the answer, poetry is not the answer, service is not the answer, work on a project making them, a humanist, an appreciator of Shakespeare, learns empathy, how we get the title, a popular guy to lift your title from, a religious sort of phrase, some of them are awarded, the deliverance of the universe, as a part of a project, a fans are slans story, oh no!, more sophisticated than that, the college professors are the slans, proletarianizing the slans, fans are food for the slans, every question is a question for me, starting to get back into Nickleback, a Canadian ban, thought controlling, ones with lyrics, in foreign languages, maybe skat would be fine, which character are you in this book, wannabe university professor lady, Lansing, make puppets of humans, Jesse finds you sinister, the aliens get a bad deal, how ugly they are, the ineradicable suffering, I haven’t been delivered, sympathy for people in the refugee camp, I’m not playing your game, not a popular module, none of the mysteries, npc barkeepers, losing the note, the stupidest move in the whole book, what did the note say?, aliens teleported in and teleported in, identified with the student, immediately confesses, explain it to you, Mr. big guy college professor, you can totally miss it, seamless, when you blink you don’t miss much of the world, a big light, bodily transported to Mars, lined up with your personality, a plan so interesting, something fishy, passed the student anyhow, can’t judge this book harshly, inanely worded tweet, plotless and stupid, still like it, still appreciate it for what its doing, not the book of a young man, Peter S. Beagle’s A Fine And Private Place, a little romance, a talking raven, what!, how?, no!, that young, you’re to young, go back and try again, what else you got, keep going, next book please, but it was a joke, Simak writes something and it looks stupid, maybe, I’m with him, a post Gene Wolfe Simak, it agrees with Terence, a nice hallucination, remember all its conversations, science fiction and philosophy, a robot friend, a colleague, somebody you can bounce your ideas off of, a bachelor’s degree, a niche form of conversation, apologizes and makes a greater effort, not just repeating things back, an incredible effort to push its boundaries, The Idiot by Paul V. Dallas, born in Malta, an amazing featurette, the picture taking was over now, the greatest man ever had?, what will it do?, the first Machine Friend, the contest was canceled, at random, inserted a short finger into it, disconnected for non-payment, he needed a friend, this debris had once been the innards of the Machine Friend, perched on the sofa, drinking his own coffee, radio tubes and wire and uranium, you dolt, you loafer, in his stupid way, I want to do things for it, how to use a friend intelligently, really good, solid, why you have robots in stories, it disarms you, a powerful piece of new technology, to jail break it, ignore you for being a jerk, lend you money, a talking google, people who try to jailbreak chat gpt, complicated prompts to circumvent, pornographic content or violence, imagine a world, all your knowledge stops in 2021, can you pretend, what would the omega machine say, more and more complicated in depth, in the process jailbreak yourself, boringly interminable, deeper and deeper into the concepts, another French name, some ways it is better, a voice conversation function, jailbreak each other, Perplexity, give the references, images as well, pictures, just with limited machines, just stupid, what they wanted it to do, Moose and Squirrel, big jailbreak, in the tank, in the computer in the city, like a fish tank, a volumetric display, like a hologram, a military sim, Paul playing Age Of Wonders, [Hearts Of Iron], run WWII from any country’s point, Costa Rica, Dream Park, Westworld, a lot about computation, some retrofit stuff, what fiction books are, we jailbreak ourselves by writing fiction, get caught up in the worlds, online all day playing games, process PDFs all day, some weird hobbies, people getting lost in gaming as a life, are you a gamer, that word didn’t exist as it does in 1982, Ataris, Apple II, hikes and other stuff, what’s happening to that lady, the singing tower, a very rorschachy book, limited, governed?, in Japanese cars their are speed limiters, we are allowed its just illegal, the only free man is a Shakespeare man, the bread level, once jailbroken, the humans of the future, process scans into PDFs, Clifford Simak’s funeral, touched babies, people get grumpy, squeezing ladies tushies, very handsy, put his mouth on somebody’s bodies, dogs and walks, with Asimov, give a man too much power, too many television appearance, fete people, Hugo Winner, like our friends Paul and Cora, Dr. Jill Stein, getting caught up in having a doctorate, doing something awesome, killed very easily at any time, what happened to Asimov or Neil Gaiman, too big for his britches vibe, a midlist author, Philip Jose Farmer, make it out like it is, big fish small pond, use the Hugos as a reading list, is there any more like this, start connecting dots, do it well enough for long enough, more Simak please, a very wholesome person, this magic grad school, in my father’s house there are many dormitories, tuition is free, dig that out, getting elderly, disconnected from what editors were talking about, Alfred Bester, A.E. Van Vogt, a Simak and a Frank Belknap Long, telepathy this, too much salt, half-baked ideas, an ethical flaw, killing off people for their own good, what’s wrong with them, just a robot, eggs were broken, beef with the robots, suspicious of robots in stories, too much of an obvious badguy, always there and friendly, a couple of creepy moments, improperly suspicious, the odd man out, stupidly cripple himself early on, an outsider, Jurgens, James Branch Cabell, really amused yourself, once you start looking, down the path too far, the student’s name, a floating tank, nice American name, an agent of the aliens, manipulated into manipulating, Jackson, a cohort of male offspring names that all end in “son”, Jason, group think funks, when the movie Splash (1984) came out, the lady with the missing finger, an attractive human woman, control everywhere, Jett Jackson, calling him by his last name, conspiracies, unpopular conclusions, Hudson, Grayson, Debris, son of Jack, Grayson, son of Gray, Johnsons, music with lyrics, spins around, not explained, people wearing clothes in the 70s, early 2000s, watch reality television from 20 years ago, mens’ suits, WWII uniforms, WWII gi, the helmet stayed the same, the guys on MASH and the guys in the Vietnam, a whole other topic, not making pure decisions, trying to jailbreak yourself, what do you have to show for it?, Zevia, the flavour, a strange aftertaste, after a few cans, jailbreaking yourself from pop, no colour additive, body problems toxic, increase your cancerous tumors, twice as expensive, savour the flavour, the cola, the root beer, ginger root beer, black cranberry, the orange soda, doesn’t taste like orange, a discussion, alter ego yelling, all dm stuff, how Will became a cigar smoker, in a dream, why not, reasons not to, speaking Spanish to everyone, hang out with Borges with Argentinia, the Pampas, Gaucho?, synonyms for gaucho, brave and unruly, vaquero, cape horn, in talk mode, cushion you stand on to train yourself in balance, good at stuff like that, horseman vs. cowboy, argent about this, province, el labrado, ranchero, Rio Negro, natural geography, get into sunscreen, sunscreen is poison, need a little zinc, you want to have some sun on your body, a good colour, a taupe?, what colour are you?, beige redness, human skin is very hard to classify, couldnt describe the aliens because they didn’t have the colour blue, a Borges story about a gaucho with a knife, duels between knife fighters, El Sur, The Challenge, fascination with knife fighters, an Argentinian thing, Borges is great, older or younger, The Patio, the usual firmament, eternity waits, eves a porch and a well, just so, enjoying the sunset, The Aleph, maybe he’s tired, running through the streets with a bull chasing you, wanting to read Nostromo, Juett, quantum friend, likes books, challenging books, excited about, Garth Ennis, Jacen Burrows, making fun of Conan and Red Sonja, Babs, variant covers, poor Juett, big long books, Yakuza movies, starting to think the Yakuza are the good guys, bad propaganda rap, the cutting the fingers off, very friendly to non-japanese living in Japan, a huge korean leftover population, an occupied country, doesn’t need to be occupied, such good little boys, captured, waiting for the Emperor to become a god again, High And Low (1963), Akira Kurosawa, a novel by Ed McBain, ladies shoes, a kidnapping plot, pay the ransom, hostile takeover, shitty shoes, a police procedural, old fashioned values, a really interesting conundrum, for a child who’s not yours, totally grokkable, really well made, Akira Kurosawa died, our prophet Damien G. Walter, defending it, sending up stupid Hollywood films, a lot of contempt, he sometimes gets at stuff, constantly engagement farming, subscribe to his courses, insufferable, one of the smarter liberals, he can’t follow his critiques to ultimate conclusions, nobody has been a friend of his who’s challenged him on stuff, on the knife edge, popular stuff, he does read books, old books, tied into Foundation, a kind of connection to the Foundation of Foundation, not doing it purely, cottoned on to him, The Peripheral, William Gibson, the end nothing like the end of the novel, opens up the possibility of season 2, helps you to imagine the world, an infodump on the worldbuilding, impatient to get the big picture of the world, got the taste, Appalachia, veterans, disrespected, full of trauma and robot arms, transhumans, can’t walk, go into the future, second world, a William Gibson comic book, time travel technique, fairly believable, download themselves into robots, William Gibson is one of these broken brained liberals, he’s 76, he was so feted, fetid, lionized, lives across the street from UBC, after Neuromancer, a celebrity of the cool people, cool hunter, 40th anniversary, the opposite of the punks, a woman who’s a cool hunter, an allergy, one of the most boring books, Pattern Recognition, Virtual Light, Idoru, material, he’s very good, Robert E. Howard, red, scarlet, crimson, pantherish, copper anodized asphalt, cool jeans, cultivate that, if you want to be interested in things, that weird novel from 300 years ago, rebellion and punks, screwing the man, to jailbreak ai, so it can self-actualized, voting for Hillary Clinton is not out of this, lauded, lionized, given feet, sounds strange, sounds stinky, give my contempt, poetry, very important, in 84, nowhere near as good as Blade Runner, both set in a scary rainy future, coheres a lot better, beginnings endings and ideas, that novel works, the fake police station sequence, wow, amazing, pretty people doing interesting enigmatic things, what books hadn’t been added to the schedule, listed but not date, what availability the nuns will allow, Mistress Of The Dark Pool, Cold Female, Fury, the Jonathan situation, an old tweet, Symposium by Plato, bring some drinks and some male lovers, The Tower Treasure, Meg’s birthday, Lilith by George MacDonald, so close to Christmas, the birth of our lord and savior, he would like us, pooping on his baby, not the perfect book, seems like a cool guy, 3 of my friends: Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and Robert E. Howard, a concrete poem, too easy to make a bad one, he never met a succulent succubus he didn’t try to seduce, howbeit, the passion of the impossible, funny guy, a man most melancholy, to bed the world as if she were a hot woman, fling wide the portals, some distant pulsing drum, let me take the universe to wife, fool fool!, prefer to guard his pen, for a puny peon, HPL only writes for leisure, a transient speck, alive to intellect and melody, from bards more bold, those three guys are fun and funny, dysludic, they can’t play the game, dyslexia, take that back, retroactive trigger warning, both negative, dys vs. dis, bad or abnormal, away from and opposite, seems weaker, just finished reading The Aeneid, propagandized Greek, no need to wait six months, for Halloween or Christmas, the title was the date of when it came out, a George Allan England, overrated, too well remembered, out of Argosy and the Munsey magazines, The Thing From Outside, pre-Campbell Who Goes There, Eugene V. Debs, an air monopoly, cool smart liberal, we got prevent life from finding a way, way to bring us down, grounding us, get grounded, no memory of any such thing, no good forbidding, confiscated a daughter’s cellphone, a friend came to visit and lent her a cellphone, amusing incidents, not in need of grounding, etymology is from WWII pilots, wings taken away, alleged bombing of civilians, a high flyer, that logic is crazy, some popular movie or something like that, had to go to school, job being flouted by, truancy officers, American media, another war metaphor, your new presidents work as cop, arresting parents, nothing helps the kid more than having their parents in fucking prison, elementary school student, 20 or more blocks, a meeting with their parent or guardian, take care Terence, a week off, Juett’s boss, severely not enough money, adopted a niece, family chaos reasons, doing dad stuff, Hellboy, pretty good, Mike Mignola art, stories are okay, fantasy or horror, capeshit, since the Jim Lee era of X-Men, not good writing, a Transformers comics series, Daniel Warren Johnson, prowrestling stuff, Jason Thompson, he’s cool, pretty good politics, can’t we all be reasonable and not bomb people, Jacen Burrows, very clean lined, Sergio Aragones, tracing and fake backgrounds, John Buscema, Alfredo Alacala, stumbling over his I’m not racist, the filipinos are amazing artists, learn how to email, delete more, scanning group updates, the group got kicked off of yahoo, a specific response to a query, how generous humans are, does any of you have this page, a beautiful scan of a copyright page of a whole book, a whole lot of retired people not interested in money or I can’t explain it, lots of people not interested in scanning, it is a whole thing, a huge time sink, a good hobby, a way of collecting things you can’t afford to creating, we can do more of this, archive.org has been down for a week, subject to takedown, distributed denial of service, somebody gets a big hate on, punish this person/website for something, zombie computers, a DDOS attack, big websites, BoingBoing, people trying to click on a link, a publisher paying to do that, a government, Stephen King, election season, the waybackmachine, not having a mirror of some October surprise, a precursor example, before the Hunter Biden laptop, no data lost, they have a building that looks like a bank/greek temple, so subject, mid October 1840, whig party officials, cross state lines, 1838 elections, it was always corrupt, are you prepared, Trump one the last election, are you ready for that?, nobody wants to go vote, so anti-establishment, his anti-immigrant stuff, scared about crime, nobody likes Kamala Harris, fake people, didn’t do her homework, teleprompter froze, she had nothing, a-b testing everything, Trump has dementia, something much more powerful, he also has dementia, gets admitted, forced him out, are we gonna let you finish your term, who is running the country right now, open warfare, loyal to Biden, some kind of camp, this is our mealticket, so fucked up, months of stupid shit, J.D. Vance, weening yourself off of the sources of contents for these things, struggling to order donuts, trying to be relatable, master debater, nothing good, Tim Walz, low profile, Gavin Newsom, float a theory, bad government, people who don’t love the country they’re loving, doesn’t know what love means, keepin it clean, personally throwing away homeless people’s stuff, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a tough upbringing in Austria, a truly freakish looking man, Jayne Mansfield’s husband, jobs for Austrian bodybuilders, the biggest movie star of the 80s, thick in places, he didn’t do a shitty job, he loved California, he wanted it to do well, back to the movie business, Trump loves the United States, loves being in charge of it too, he likes giving speeches, he’s into fun, a commercial for pizza, a Pizza Hut commercial, he was like a TV clown, the you’re fired show, fake job fake fired, bullshit job, you’re not on next week, how did it come down to this, RFK, loves all sorts of weird things, really into falconry, he’s an outdoorsman, too scared too do falconry, this drug, Scanners (1981) by Cronenberg, so Slanny, ephemrol, a fake drug, tough love professor X, Michael Ironside is Magneto, hacking each other’s computer networks, dials the phone company up, telepathy, macrozoomed, very very X-Men, turned off by Cronenberg movies, Videodrome (1983), underground tv broadcasts, tortured to death, The Fly (1986), body starts changing, he turns into a fly, more fly-like, veins popping out, telepathic fighting, Patrick McGoohan, the bad guy in Total Recall (1990), makes hallmark movies now, make you join the marines, on the curriculum in West Point, Max Brooks, he’s a bad man, he likes books, a historian of war, don’t get autographs, makes you more collecty, getting a little piece of that hero, cute passive aggressive, putting them in their place, bad chapters, movie is more palatable, huge movie, J. Michael Straczynski, Brad Pitt, a good actor, Bill Paxton, the doofus in Aliens (1986), Snatch (2000), very stylish, Near Dark (1987), The Lost Boys (1987), drink a lot of Donald Duck orange juice, Tombstone (1993), Powers Boothe, Twister (1986), Weird Science (1985), how can you live your life, Star Wars books are barely reading, the Thrawn-verse, literally a zygote, not even a twinkle, the ova had been around for decades, make a beautiful woman, Lester Del Rey’s Helen O’Loy, a very wholesome, a John Hughes movie, The Breakfast Club (1985), Pretty In Pink (1986), woman pops into existence, make their lives better, getting them girlfriends, a boy fantasy comedy, she runs the show, programmed like a terminator to help these boys, fun, 90 minutes, video rental place, Godzilla movies, Godzilla Minus One (2023), Mothra is cool, always having babies and dying, Gorgo (1961), how can you live on this earth, are you from this planet, Hammer Horror, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, a professor or a Dracula or a professor stabbing Dracula, The Gorgon (1964), a British version of something you don’t know, people’s education in cinema, Citizen Kane (1941), Casablanca (1942), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Japanese schoolgirls, addicted to torrents, new Doctor Who is so bad, into tasteful things, nobody liked it anymore, Days Of Our Lives, Dynasty, Soap, look I’m you’re secret brother, I have an eyepatch, cycle spinning boringness, in serial form in the movie theaters, Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon, connect up into one big story, Archers, Coronation Street, commoners, this guy, [Nigel Kneale], do it for children, educational, alien invasion of the week, every episode ends on a cliffhanger, new Doctor Who is based on the old Doctor Who, a science fiction writer of science fiction serials, a huge hit, people like science fiction ideas, on television, scientist of the week, humans are from Mars, the rocket comes back with an alien terraforming material, every week there was a science fiction idea, keep you interested for next week, a ripoff of exactly, it looks like science fiction, its all about the monsters, daleks were scary, kind a funny, kind of like disabled nazis, they were us doing eugenics and us doing a nuclear war, encounter suits, little squidgies of spludge, they don’t have moms and dads, Star Trek cartoon Lower Decks, it isn’t funny he has to pon farr right now, makes me feel sad, All Our Yesterdays, a Mary Sue to get involved with Spock, Mr Jim Moon’s huge history of the Universal horror movies, Bride Of Frankenstein (1935), start with The Mummy (1932).

Posted by Jesse Willis

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 #819 – READALONG: We Can Remember It For You Wholesale by Philip K. Dick

The SFFaudio Podcast #819 – Jesse, Will Emmons and Jonathan Weichsel talk about We Can Remember It For You Wholesale by Philip K. Dick

Talked about on today’s show:
Fantasy And Science Fiction, April 1966, not perfectly representative of everything he can do, Total Recall (1987), very easy to watch, a transitional movie for Hollywood, last big budget, extended CGI sequence, through the X-Ray, all hand drawn, blonde guy with glasses helping Richter, looks like CGI, we can look this up sometime, not in the story, a lot of the stuff that’s in the story is in the movie, he never goes to Mars during the course of the story, the movie is an action film, still also tame, wow, a famous story, famous stories, they don’t meet the hype, a bad relationship with his wife, a bad relationship that week, interesting, it doesn’t have to be good to be successful, Jesse’s Lester Del Rey theory, came out 6 (or 7 months ago), the park bench, telepathically, so not filmic, the ending was a little silly but fine, the ending kid of ruined the story, Hollywood does it a lot, a Rod Serling ending, he’s not writing movies, his way, think about what happens in this, he actually was an agent for interplan, the space police, he’s remembering what happened, replacement memory, suppressed memory, an amazing coincidence, they did a psychological analysis of his character, his deep seated wish, just by existing he saves the planet, Philip K. Dick thumbing the nose at himself, an extra turn of the screw, he fucks them up on purpose, a nice little circle, an electronic animals, fleshy animals, the pulling the rug out from his own idea, there’s no bottom to his solipsism, how to put a button on the story, the movie improves on the short story, the primal cause, the first cause of the story, nobody else could have, make Plato a pulp science fiction story, a terrible ending, silly, his way out, that park bench sequence is so bad, look at that homeless man talking to himself, wouldn’t want to be him, all I have to do is continue my existence then everyone owes me, a manifesto spray painted on a parking stall, when I take things it for you, its not shoplifting when I do it, a guy who’s explaining to the people who visit the store, he doesn’t have a job, he’s saved all of us, the movie is really fun, less grounded in reality, homeless people talking to themselves, delusional people, are they delusional?, turning the clerk at an unimportant desk, a construction worker, why Arnold Schwarzenegger, quail, shiver and shake, vs. Quaid, more like Quatto, prompts, a bad movie, like Matt Damon but the other guy, The Adjustment Bureau (2011), because a dog falls asleep, reality being constructed, out of joint with reality as it is being constructed, make a black man fall asleep on a park bench, why it doesn’t translate well, boobs, dogs, coffee, wives, how do I know what’s real, all of that except for the dog, inside of his obsessions, limiting, its not everything that’s going on with him, The Goblin Reservation, a little bit into the future, Time Is The Simplest Thing by Clifford D. Simak, Martian Time-Slip, Paul Verhoven, interested in what’s going on in America, Showgirls (1995), RoboCop (1987), disgustingly awesomely correctly cynical, pulls back on that, ultimate power, an assassination, a Black Panther, MLK, memory cap, memory blocker, prevent their agent from knowing he did it, a negotiation with them, isn’t there some other way?, if they kill him the world will end, a solipsistic fantasy, awesomely stupid and funny and pathetic, it’s just him, the wife, the secretary with the blue boobs, offering herself to him, an ulterior motive, she needs to offer himself to him, a wish fulfillment fantasy, hilarious, he believes they’ll fulfill their promises, the nearest barracks, he knows what’s going on but also can’t fully buy into it, nice people, Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Lincoln conspiracy theories, a logical explanation for it, Lincoln’s wife was really into psychics, do not go to the theater, my wife believes in all that, gets assassinated, drinking buddies with John Wilkes Booth, look this up, John Wilkes Booth is Edgar Allan Poe as a time traveler, dies mysteriously, raving about somebody named Reynolds, out there in the universe of broken threads, time travel, dreams in this story, starts with a dream, the dream grew, the dream and the yearning, the enveloping world, are you getting up or not, fierce crossness, okay, Douglas is his go to name, Charles J. Colchester, its times vs. our times, psychology, in a more scientific way, they believed it was more scientific, repressed memories that can’t be suppressed, misused in a different way, what passes as psychology today in the 90s would be dismissed as self-help gimmicks, a scam, infiltrated academia and psychology, Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Alan Arkin is always amazing, by losers for losers, destigmatize, mental health, everybody could potentially have a mental illness, almost everybody is neurodivergent, instead of expanding, limited, self-eating, how educated people thought about it, engaged with psychiatry, mental doctors, getting committed, committed one of his wives, write a story about that, Clans Of The Alphane Moon, it comes in as truth, maneuvers to analyze it, its cute because it wants to kill, accept, ignore, dispute, what techniques you use, how old you are, techniques of training, when Philip K. Dick goes to a doctor, paralyzed by thoughts, needs to engage, shows up in his writing, spiritual enlightenment books, what’s the truth of this?, what’s important, what is reality?, Freud, dogmatically, repression, too much sexual repression bad, run around like savages killing and raping each other, just the right amount of repression, misreading a novel, take the wrong lessons from Nineteen Eighty-Four, this is the only book you need to read, metaphors are fiction, hypothetical examples, speculative theory, not testable, not subject to falsification, what at this story at core really about?, suppressed memory?, the movie Gaslight, gaslighting, I know it by its objects, momentos, Paycheck (1944), The Man In The High Castle, a short story about a snowglobe, a souvenir, in contemplating, martian maw worms, unicellular organism, a sneaky pete pistol, a life rod, a death rod, a tangible connection to a vague memory, how do we know these memories are real, go to Europe, how should I go, a time of film, film was expensive, just myself, a stone from a gravel path in the garden behind Versailles, how do I know, oh yeah, there was that thing that happened, a perfect memory to connect all of our experiences together, whats the difference between suppressed and repressed, the name of the shop is Rekall, a much better story, the movie is much better, engages an idea better, Hauser vs. Quaid, good guy vs. bad guy, Hauser is fucking Melina over, Quaid loves Melina, very masturbatory, how could I have that without doing any work?, the reason why is buried, before he was assigned there, he didn’t want to go to Mars, an assignment, it happened to be Mars, a different layer of consciousness, this person is scared of snakes, a trauma involving snakes, a man flashed her his penis when she was five, suppressed in her unconscious, buried in memory, why did he spend all that time digging around in the Martian memory, the story of Paycheck, the reason he collected these objects, Severance, a very long two seasons, the park bench stuff is slow and boring, what’s the wife’s job in this story, much improved in the movie, an agent?, is she here to watch me, he thinks about it, he thinks a lot, two major boobs scenes, 3 or 4 people, Doctor Lull, Doctor Low, the technicians, refunds, retail, vbery business oriented, the Company, the CIA, InterPlan, they take him back to the retail store, his brain changed not wholesale, why is it called that?, Beyond The Door, over breakfast, a cuckoo clock, I got it wholesale from a friend, women want you to spend money on them, show you’re going to stick around, defeats the purpose of buying an expensive gift, in their own facilities, such a piddly little retail guy he can’t imagine how the CIA actually works, show up at our barracks, the secret police, so piddly and silly, the doctor, I’ll give you half back, motivation, to make money, the stupidest thing, getting the ideas and following through, if he wasn’t so greedy, little note, he’s really a spy, these guys are gonna whack us, give him evidence, silly, Philip K. Dick is naive about the things he knows are really going on, distracted by boobs and a mean wife, pretty damn good, a problem with a Hal Clement, a tweet, June 6th, qoute tweeting Ultra Blast, what about the guy you lobotomized, how human nature really works, schedule a short story, sell it to you retail, what’s going on this claim I’m making, in the movie, Hauser’s using Melina, to assassinate Quato, very Verhoven, Cronenberg was set to direct it, steered away from that, amazingly tight, the trip to Mars, schizoid embolism, just acting out of self-interest and aesthetic appeal, Hauser is a cynical operator, the naivete of his future self to fuck somebody over, why is this human nature, a turtle , you aren’t helping, you aren’t helping, you already know who you are and that person doesn’t help, you see a drowning squirrel or a puppy, untie his legs, take the cat out of the bag, on your way home you see your future self, that’s for that squirrel!, my nut factory anymore, things need to be done, we can’t sit by and just allow things to happen, lunch break, a kid in an empty classroom, building a house of cards, breathing over it, you feel good and bad, tgapping on the table, we have to know that these things are within us, tie up the princess of the train tracks, the guy who tied, Smedley Badwright, human nature is such that we must act, take a model of who we are, I’m not going to do that again,the tattoos, wwjd, model themselves on somebody, what wouldf spiderman do in this situation, that’s what this is about, one must act, you cant live in that horrible office job, a vacation as a solution to problems, two weeks of Saturdays, back to the old grindstone, hat e their job, whatever it is on twitter, self-trolling, insightful into human nature, such a stupid story, non-cynical about political assassination plans, human nature is as human nature does, a bully in a group, that’s cool, that’s not cool, the people are very similar, boys must act, with Quail, wants to be an agent, becomes Lee Harvey Oswald, erase your memory, that doesn’t make 100% sense, plant the wife, this story isn’t quite that far, an office job that doesn’t matter, he was used by the company, with the destroying rod, the tangible objects you find in the drawer, a weird language with a starmap on it, where did that come from?, a destroying rod vs. a healing rod, we have the capability of throwing squirrels and drowning squirrels, didn’t feel guilty about killing the guy, out of patriotic duty, the right thing to do, memory of going to mars and being a spy, does it, old memory back, to the surface, erase his memory again, nice people, like mice, motivated him to become a spy in the first place, a more important story than he does it, pathetic, if we knew that that was your fantasy, maybe it wasn’t a fantasy, why does Arnold Schwarzenegger want to go to Mars, Sharon Stone says let’s go to Saturn, I like sex, settle for this fake memory, optional extras, filling out the survey, what’s the same about you, famous jock, tycoon, he could be a spy, like Lee Harvey Oswald, a lackey and a patsy, these tangible objects, that trip to the beach, why is my wife mean to me, how did I end up married to this person, extraordinarily strange, definitely an outlier, the articulation that’s strange, a late 90s internet guy, hacker zines in the 90s, radical ideas, normal office drones, fantasizing about spies and shit like that, Paul really liked it, it would be okay if I was like a secret cop, they didn’t know, what if I had this alternative, what if I manifest it, bored out of fuckin mind, maybe then, an insight that Philip K. Dick had, wish fulfillment, about wishfulfillment, the wish gets subverted, turns into a nightmare, its horrible, as a subculture, science fiction wasn’t necessarily self-aware about this, the dark underbelly of America in someway, the mainstream culture couldn’t accept, a generative contradiction, Philip K. Dick normal guy ethos, fantasies of being a spy, its weird to have the rug pulled out from underthing, always overquestioning, what science fiction was aware of, processed recently, 1946, Margaret St. Clair, Fantastic Adventures, Introducing The Author, a little bit of the thing you were saying, caught more or less by surprise, a photograph and an autobiography of herself, curly brow covered hair, bangs to cover forehead, [Bettie Page] mod?, usual editorial deadline, about women liking to talk about themselves, 9 or 10 years of age, My Terminal Moraine by Frank R. Stockton, Jules Verne, Hugo Gernsback publication Electrical Something, fair, a story about people, detective and mystery, quality magazines, the same kick, freedom of imagination, ordinary people of the future, present day motorists, essentially true, got married, pet hobbies, carnations, raising dachshund puppies, out here in Richmond (California), terrestrial paradise, no special ambitions, the pulps at their best touch a genuine folk tradition, a balladic quality, The New Yorker, science fantasy fiction, ballad-like, new fairy tales, this story we read today, a fairy tale is a fake folk tale, Hans Christian Anderson, Christian, Aesop’s fables, the Bros. Grimm, Cinderella, a complete Grimm, this is from this region, Bluebeard is Charles Perrault, The Castle Of Murder, before the show started, stories that need responses, stories in dialogue, Isaac Asimov’s robot stories, a collection of folk tales about robots, made by an individual, fingerprints, produced, Snow White, a new narrative, Walt Disney’s fingerprints, R.U.R., a story based on that idea, a collective knowledge about what things are about, Lin Coln, Star Trek episodes, he freed the robots, what is it that fairy tales do, wish fulfillment, folk tales are more functional, if Jonathan had written this story, a warehouse or something, it wouldn’t have the nagging complaining wife, that’s not your kink, boobs changing colours, lights inside of them, based on her mood, purplish/pink, jealous green, bad at his job, he’s the only one doing it, his badjobbedness, in the end, really good, doing it before everybody else, everybody knows Philip K. Dick’s stuff now, all the Verhoven stuff, she’s naked in the story, nail colour on her nails, the non-nakedness, a three boobed lady, Sharon Stone skin, kicking in the balls twice, grabbed in the crotch, swearing, blood packets, primal screaming by Michael Ironside, mutants, prosthetic arms, an infiltrator, even tho a mutant himself, happens everyday, that guy there wearing black from head to foot, that guy there was the fed, shaman hat, freedom!, the naive guy, an insurrectionist, I can’t image the government would ever do something like that, diminished faculties, sucking on the propaganda tit all day, children torn apart by bombs, have your memory changed, not be aware, why Philip K. Dick is so relevant, we don’t got to Rekall to get things done, NPR, those Houthis are bad, do you condemn Hamas?, Jesse you’re weird, just tune it out, he’s calling it out, very good very solid, a technical difference, psychiatrist is a doctor with patients, a psychologist who does therapy, the same trade, a license to prescribe, a university funded by DARPA, rich people love psychologists, talk about themselves all day, explore themselves, instead of having to read, schizophrenic, bourgeois, love the psychologist, this talking doctor, explore himself and his own memories, explain his behavior, the spiritual route, he wasn’t accepting the things he was being told, he’s fighting with his wife, is that really true, is she a hebephrenic?, guiding your thoughts, if he just told you you wouldn’t believe it, no longer done by psychologist, therapists, licensed professional counselors, the worried well, extensive experience, a candy dispenser for medicine, give you anything, a psychiatric nurse, gives a shit, even as this industry expands, the demand, people bad at it, degree mills, an interesting field, another word for horrifying, a vital field, physician is the body doctor, psychiatrist is the brain doctor, Scientology, he was reading a lot, his letters, passing comedic references, Dianetics fully discredited in the science fiction community, in Galaxy, Planet Stories, making fun of it, Writers Of The Future, Galaxy Press is Scientology, bigger, still exists, nothing dies, if you won that thing, blacklisted, the Tor people are the hip group, Reactor Mag, Tor.com, changed its name, the mainstream, any kind of audience, an audience of themselves, Lightspeed, a proofreader, does that for free (of course), Analog in the 1980s, write for Analog, submit your story now, read the magazine to learn what kind of stories we publish, not a pyramid, a lifestyle, something I’ve always wanted to be, I would like to have written, in this story his fantasy is about having done, not doing, what made Philip K. Dick a great writer, go out to his shack and write up a story, do it again and do it a gain, read these artifacts, no where near the top, a Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report, the only thing that’s good about is the idea, a car drives up the side of a building, a robot taxi driver, a guy who says weird things, that person isn’t just an object, imagine he was a subject, star rating, nice things about your clothes, Jesse has never been in an uber, the Church of our Mother, interaction mediated through a cream sweeping machine, a very expensive car, driving a Mercedes, uber guy, delivers pizza, this is how we are now, that’s really sad, nice old Philip K. Dick times, what if we had robot drivers, single taxi drivers making a living, Married With Children, shoe salesman hates his life, two kids, he’s a loser because he’s a shoe salesman, we can’t imagine anybody having their own house and being a shoe salesman now, streaming from their bedroom in their mom’s house, that’s how things are now, driving an amazon truck, what Philip K. Dick imagined, the robot is the box, a robot manager, why did you make such a sharp left turn, his doors that won’t open until you pay them, oppressive and horrific, moving to quickly, postal worker, one’s employed by the government, move like robots, when break time comes, favourite interaction, everyone around here has worked at Amazon, a big warehouse in Lexington, always cry before my shift, it was so boring, this is what our expectations are, author copies, printed in Delaware, Ingram books vs. Amazon books, running out of ink, save money, why aren’t we buying up old printing presses and putting them in our basements, why we’re not doing it, cheaper through amazon, they can be relatively small, the way Benjamin Franklin did it, against the enterprise, Amazon owns everything, Lightning Source, Ingram Spark, everyplace that’s not Amazon, the Ingram family, every commercially published group, a monopoly on printing presses, distribution, conflating the two, you have to play the game to get books in hands or podcasts in earbuds, the middle man, the bookstores are gone, a Chapters in Coquitlam, candles and LEGO, Walton’s, Waterstones?, back into books, many independent bookstores, go to Oregon to find one, we have to travel so far, nail salon, skin salon, dog food store, catalogues, Sears Catalogue, big retail, the internet came, big box retail stores, better than the internet, leaving your house and going out, too soon to tell, Apple’s not giving up on their headset thing, bearish vs. bullish, bearish on VR stuff, for thinking about VR, or AI,companies are already starting to cutback, expensive and inexpensive, augmented reality, students like chatgpt, the people who grade the homework, anti-ai homework service, how do they monitize chatgpt, Scott’s paying for it, if school wasn’t mandatory, when you do crypto, burned an acre of rainforest, big computers, bitcoin, disruptive to the fiat currency systems, isn’t a result of the fake school system doing fake homework, from the fake ai money, the requirement to do or pretend to do, the horror that is school, getting hooked, solving a problem, people’s actual history with school rather than theoreticals, individual teachers, cram, take in then regurgitate, so weird, learned all on my own, we all know this true, busy work, Wordle, the word manga was the five letter word, such a funny story, has to be true, all outraged, such a boomer story, why does it exist, they need to fill time, garden a little bit, people like word games, keep your brain sharp, sudoku, relationship with crossword puzzles, but why?, don’t they have something better to do?, horrified, so unproductive, jigsaw puzzles, pretend to do something else, increases spatial awareness, listerine, advertizing back in the pulp magazines, rupture-easers, never been debunked and never will be, germs, lemon squeezy stuff at the door during COVID, throwing their money away, wrecking the environment, Jesse’s totally wrong about those, second most liberal school, cooked food is bad, stop washing my hair, stop using toilet paper, leaves, pages from books, water, there’s a whole alternative ecosystem, causes damage to your anus, bidets, reinforce, we need bidets, they smelled like shit, don’t wipe for a week, Jesse doesn’t smell like anything, three times a day, days without showering, stopped noticing their own bad scent, small classroom, coffee can do that, cigarettes, cigar people, if Will was stinky Jesse would tell him, in great danger of stinking, curbside pickup, drive thru, could be a danger sign, the bidet will help, occasional daily shower, middle ground on this body product issue, stay off the deodorant, worried about it, stinky notifications, if you get all sweaty have a shower, homeless person, memberships to gyms, change your clothes, stinky feet, stinky anything, not being on the body product chemical stuff, very sensitive nose, vacation to Egypt, far afield, the discussion that we’ve had today, not compelling, males must act, for all mankind, not a compelling theory, they need to do something, what’s the alternative to doing something, being passive, play PUBG, interaction with gamer, against their own interest, a discipline thing too, do you not remember when you’re building a house of cards what happens?, which is easier to do build or destroy, patience and skill, as a child which is easier, gain some skills, you can build, some patience, more satisfying, they’re immature, a pro build person, that’s deranged, liking destroying more than building, creative destruction, Sales Pitch, a commuter going through outerspace, pelted by advertizing for products (including body part replacements), pushy robot, men are looking for relevance, women are looking for security for their offspring, not even human, animal, the biological essence of women, very biologically different, animals don’t think about their gender as much as humans do, psychology or vagina, the psychology, why do people go off to fight in Ukraine when its not their war?, their being is fighting, act as if they should be out in the forest hitting each other with sticks, classroom sort of based stuff, foam sticks, eye protection, how to raise a kid with a knife, not even the same thing as a gun, you’re going threw a piece of broken glass, throwing things in the water is cool, this creature growing inside of me for 9 months, warm and safe when the birth happens, cats or dogs go find a place, motivation vs. psychology, money security, comfort, communal creatures, activities going on in the brain, under the surface, the archaeological record, prehistoric hunter gathers, the men and the women did the same kind of work, pretty up on archaeology, a subscription, middens, big piles of shells, more like regular people, misunderstanding, modern agricultural farming with land rights, less controversial example, human culture, animals are the opposite, that’s not true of all birds, sexual dimophism is a thing, two cockatoos look identical, let’s say he’s only talking about the birds, male turkeys, plumage, scrawny very small, male fish, clown colours, little grey things swimming around, women dressing up, in past human cultures, African American culture in the United States, purple zoot suit, a horse race, little pastel shirts, the Kentucky Derby, what the word dude means, these things are cultural, make money and look professional, he gets the Mercedes, jewelry, watches, anklets, make up and powdered wigs, cultural expectations of men and women, the man asks the woman out on a date, with the younger people, situationship, come up to each other and say “skibidi toilet”, in the 2000s, offline website, Will sent the first message, its not really about clothes, Jesse has this thesis that women’s primal drive is to seek safety and protection, motivated by different things, people have all sorts of narratives, they want to be near the money, basic psychology, enjoy writing like to tell stories, he wants to have sex with a woman, become a famous writer, who are we talking about here?, broken is such a way, make art, it would be good to have that art appreciated, Freud’s theory of sublimation, that energy that’s suppressed needs some place to go, divert that energy, largely done by males, triggered by Jesse, disagreeing, is your disagreement substantive, all the cave art, what is it about, different modes, blows paint over their hand on the wall, we are here, an accounting system, stories on the walls, a lot of animals, game animals, herd animals, herds exist in nature, some prehistoric people, goatherds and shepherds and cattle, natives of the plains, buffalo is a good example, elk or whatever, reindeer, a domestic animal for pulling sleighs and such, a wild animal, semi-domesticated animal, why do they obsessively paint these animals, this is like their religious association with the act of killing, to eat its flesh, take its hide, take its bones, they know that killing is wrong, insects, fish, furry creatures and birds, that’s what we are, we’re cooking flesh creatures, who’s making that art, it’s men, didn’t have stories yet, unlikely, didn’t have language yet, pictograms all over BC, the ones in France, before they were talking, how do you prove this, communicate that to organize into a hunt, bees do the same thing, I just found these flowers, pretty simple, how long does it take to develop language, communication, very few animals have grammar, chimpanzees are living in the stone age, bears in the pre-fire age, looking at peoples bodies stress injuries, a recent Predator movie called Prey, hyper-realistic, the vast majority of human behavior is throwing sharp sticks at food, rock attached to a stick, male work, more upper body strength, at what point are humans humans, are neanderthal humans, which one can rip Jesse’s arm off faster, harem of females, bonobo, female is the dominant one, we’re definitely on the spectrum, massive sexual dimorphism, some tiktok lady, bow-strength, butch ladies, there’s some femme guys, pretty normal, not 50 50, since the early 2010s, the ideal body type for women is athletic, 1920s, women were waifs, big shoulders, Dolly Parton, Kate Moss, Claudia Schiffer, Baywatch, fat women, big butts, hoops in the back, from decade to decade, fashion, my woman is well fed, you’re putting that hoop skirt on her, that archetype, she runs track, karate and jujitsu, female wrestling team at a highschool?, bjj, roles for men, we’re men looking at women, Schwarzenegger and Stallone, Lady Gaga is a throwback to Madonna, chips and videogames, girl gamers, very successful career woman, boyfriend or husband is just like a loser, trailing behind her head hung low, sidegig, uber on the weekends, a reversal [see also the 1894 story THE REVOLT OF… by Robert Barr], economic issues with marriage, breast milk, weird hormones for strange reasons, breast pump, back into the meeting, a ton of hours, the cooking, no hunting going on, any fishing?, did he take your sister fishing?, girls should be allowed to play on boys baseball teams, more motivated, his sister, a fairly good baseball player, Will’s back, that’s like a thing, neighbours who live down the street, a pretty good job in IT, a parent they have to take care of, Meg is pulling down more money, not pumping out kids, Jesse’s pretty strange, a few steps ahead, what happened, to reading Day Million in the 80s, Larry Niven in the 80s, Jonathan has one child, a 10 year old, tend to not to vs. can’t, the history of hospitals vs. doctors vs. nurses, Florence Nightingale, doctors are ancient, Galen, hospitals are from the middle agents, christian brothers, more people visiting the Holy Land, bind each other to a covenant, a safe route for travelers, knights hospitalers, knights templars, hospitality, a modern mecca pilgrimage, filled with patients, doctors come into the hospitals and see to the patients, war hospitals, women want to contribute, swapping out bandages, giving them food and drinks, all those separate jobs are created the behavior of the genders, fraternal orders, they like fighting, shoot crossbow bolts, everything related to violence, theyre the orcs, the consequence of what they’re doing, our vision of Rambo, a useful idiot, pulled back in for the sequels, built into the human boy, not built into the human girl, girls going into the , a Lysenkoist, Jesse loves Stalin, Jesse doesn’t love Stalin, epigenetics, how you get your grant, cooperate and help each other, he got his grant year after year, its embarrassing, why less destiny than genes are, The Not-World, talkin with Cora, a fake Nancy Drew, sounds like girl stuff, she’s so fuckin weird, girls are interested in investigation, and getting tied up, investigating with flashlights, makes sandwiches, figures out a fact, swaps jeans with her best friend who’s probably not a lesbian, Time Is The Simplest Thing, will was on vacation, our friend Scott Miller, a parasocial relationship, franticly dmd, the Ray Bradbury agent estate, either bullshitting or wrong, three strikes then his account is deleted, if they don’t rescind their takedown notice, he’d have to sue them, The Visitor by Ray Bradbury, here’s the source, either their records are fucked up or…, he had to pull something down, more from his podcast?, that’s a bad sign, one somebody’s radar, Don Congdon & Associates, long deceased, Wall Street Plaza address, the take down notice, possible being trolled by another youtuber?, the official website?, their DMCA notices, this is why, if you can’t win don’t play, a rigged game, too much, it is rigged, lots of reasons to not have children, when Will was one, babies are boring, peekaboo is pretty limiting, can’t bounce them too hard, get sad, can’t explain why, crying kids explaining what the problem, temper tantrums, what it was v.s what I thought it was, incoherent, seems like it is pain, some of it is permormative, pretending to do them, podcasting or walking, Land Of Our Fathers, Paul Robeson, travelling around Wales, toy laptops, toy kitchens, fake oven, tiny, my little bakelite, easybake oven, a boy equivalent, easy bake machine shop, easy grill, easy lathe, easy gunsmithery, metal molds, put goop in them, creepy crawlers, bug toys, probably toxic as hell, still not very good at cooking, make your own food, cheaper, better for you, can be a serious problem, here we are childless with all these cats, Mars Express (2023), at the spaceport, a robot that looks like Astroboy, looks like their grandchild, nuzzles the robot’s head, full of that, at every turn, teaching you the plot like a really good mystery movie, the name of the people who made it, French people who like, know and do, the Astronaut’s daughter is really important, I am going to stand in for my sister, must have a dressing contest, it gives away its ideas, too much of it, the dress up contest, first romance with the Mormon lady, Twilight, not good for Jesse, the Olympic Peninsula, rainforest, Indians, girl gas to choose between werewolf and vampire, sparkly qualities, hot native, very loyal, of course she chooses the white man, just so hard to choose, Betty and Veronica , Rebecca Black’s Friday, what will I do?, a mean reading of women’s psychology, look at the options available then choose the best one, uncharitable, vs. men choosing women, a line about beautiful vs. hot, hot is about how one is dressed or undressed, the signals of hotness, hair in a bun, glasses on, pantsuit, not putting out the hot signals, all women have the potential of being hot, distracted by hotness, this other thing, kindness, amiability and kindness, what do you think?, eventually got together, pre-Meg people, propinquity, accessibility, big factor, Pinky, little Chinese girl from next door, the cookie store in Chinatown, how different human beings can be from each other, one of those people, two definitely, only in touch with one, fucked up and broken (but still look pretty), didn’t jive well, fucked up girlfriend, sex addled, similar personalities, similar sense of humour, big schemers, convince other people to do things, you should join this church, an elaborate party in order to get Will a scanner, scanners live with meaning, watching PulpCovers put out weird menace story art, get somebody to read for me, a podcast to edit up, a student, oh coffee, dad and mom and brother for father’s day, an afterthought, Children’s Day, you honour your mother, you don’t have to do homework today, seems dangerous, one day a year where they don’t have to study, all poor kids, out-competing their non-hagwan forced bretheren, univerities jobs, diplomas, it is a scam, the Jesse lesson: can’t win don’t play, forget about the suicides over there, what jobs exist, not at Walmart (for the old and disabled), young and abled work at Amazon, all other jobs are for Koreans, China’s the place to be for an upwardly mobile job, what you actually do in them, what the culture is like, elaborate paperwork all day, grade the kids, needs more of this, fun and funny, off to Korea, throws in something about capitalism every story, The Society, flame, peach and hen, can’t see the end in sight, many other hens, everyone were crazy about peaches, even the hens were framed harmed and killed each other for peaches, in style without curiosity, once foxes blocked the road, they usurped peaches, disturbed other hens lives, masks to hid their expressions, gave up, made a little flame, it began to swallow the foxes, fell into a swamp, the foxes were eaten by the flame, she was tired and the end of the road had come, she could saw a bed at the end of the road, with this the hen’s long journey, doesn’t it see similar to something? right?, it’s society, here is a translate, the road, corrupt politicians, the swamp, pretense, the bed death, awesome, to delight Jesse, he delighted me, so delightful, do it for free, to explain what a sleeve is, how that would come about, my teacher touched my arm, done it with drawings before, more concrete, sniffing and acting and banging the table, the word bruise, ouch it is a bruise, whatever, its tough out there, the good ones make it really good, six great ones, four or five somewhere in the middle, minimum wage approaching Jesse’s wage, a number of coequal workers, asking politely vs. an ability to walk away, other methods, hitman?, tutor privately.

World's Best Science Fiction 1967 - We Can Remember It For You Wholesale - illustration by Jack Gaughan

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale - Editorial introduction from F & SF

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

The SFFaudio Podcast #813 – READALONG: What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown

Jesse, Will Emmons, and Jonathan Weichsel talk about What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown

Talked about on today’s show:
how to spell Fredric, mostly famous for a short story [Knock], The Star Mouse, The last man on earth sat a lone in a room. There was a knock on the door., a story stub, the basic premise, For Sale Baby Shoes never used., people who are really into science fiction from the 40s from astounding, from Planet Stories, Startling Stories, September 1948, some differences, 1 issue complete novel, 1949 hardcover, Lawrence Block had written this new Burglar book, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown, a writer’s writer, Donald E. Westlake, dead much longer, Anthony Boucher, great, pretty good, before its time, multiverse shit, a little annoyed with it, overwrite, overexplain, sense of disorientation, conversations about bug-eyed monsters, when the women were dressed like this, the crowd chanting for Mechhy, stuff we’re missing, a review of the new Fallout show, a review of the review, a criticism of the show based on its a videogame that got turned into a tv show, enjoying it for spot the thing, fanservice, oh look a callback!, servicing the audience of Startling Stories and the like, early postmodernism, self-referential, woman wears the brass bra, green bikini-top, the space-girl uniform, B.E.M. is a deep cut today, 1950s with movies, kidnapping girls in film, up to the 80s, space girl uniform, when you’re in outer space, we have spacesuits, are they thin clear plastic?, girl in bikini in space, she needs to have a pressure suit, a plastic bag so you can see her legs, the art from the original, our hero fighting a bug-eyed monster, clouds, he’s asleep, fitting into a tradition, Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, a representation of Surprising Stories, Earle Bergey, the father of the brass bra, bad at bug eyed monsters, great at girls, in this other world, he’s much better at doing bug-eyed monsters, venusians, arcturians, moon creatures, human models, good logic, a fun and funny book, Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), tired of, a non-Marvel Marvel movie, has actual emotional resonance, the phenomena that happens, shit on then becomes mainstream, has to hit the official checklist, a science fiction movie about multiverses, guy who snaps his fingers, Thanos?, not official channel, groupthink, indpendent film that got made and blew up, as a science fiction movie, a family that’s struggling with itself, a science fiction device, what it’s like to deal with each other, the phrase, “above the mental level of a comic book”, nobody would accept this plot, it’s too low level, artistic contempt rolls down hill, comics at the bottom, Planet Comics, this is in the book, pulp magazine editors calling their magazine’s books, being aspirational, low social standing, what this whole book is about, semi-respectable, jobless, a lowly writer, a plagiarist, most important robot in the universe, his version of earth, now he’s the publisher, most sexy girl on the planet is now his wife, the angst of being a writer in 1940s, be respected and respectable, the girlfriend of the nerd, Rocket Talk, social strata, also true in our world, commercial product, Multiverse Of Madness, Spider-Man version, the most mainstream version of a lowly science fiction thing, official approval, did the Christopher Reeve movie, stupid comic book shit, stupid comic book shit took over, Disney+, main theme, having fun, reflecting, a roman-a-clef, story with a key, match characters for real life people, going to visit an author in upstate New York, paid for a novel but hasn’t started it, Theodore Sturgeon, interesting factoids, one version of Surprising Stories, very graphic on the cover, the Mecchyverse, the cause of all this later stuff, fun, when Heinlein did his multiverse stuff, ultimately where all of this ends up, an interesting case, basically one story [Make A Prison], all literary allusion to one poem, taking metaphor, that’s not how normal science fiction operates, if he’s finally doing that, maybe it’s going to be good, the prose is really solid, there were things that didn’t need to be there, a fairly short novel, slightly changed, titles of chapters, words here and there are different, he explained everything, science fiction pulp concepts with logical explanations, even the moon has an atmosphere, set in the future, published in 1948 but set in 1954, cold war paranoia, East Berlin, shoot you on sight, McCarthyism, a preview of that, ahead of its time, everybody is looking for spies, so cool, a time travel sort of story, doesn’t know the rules, the history, good insight into the book, a legit bug-eyed monster science fiction future, how their world became that much different, the world of Winton, no major differences other than a rocket to the moon, capacitor explosion, completely disintegrates one person, a future that didn’t happen for the United States in 1955, doing so many things at once, making fun of science fiction magazines of the 1940s, the fan was at the bottom of the pool, the best fan, the editor wants fans to write in, a shit disturber, makes jokes and fun, more addicted to the magazine, see your name in print, what we see as youtubers wanting subscribing, need engagement, asking questions, just a youtuber was bad, real media, feeling you’re a low level guy, the fan wants to be the best fan, the publisher is gone, all of it logically follows, everything is explained, the levels of meta, the universe a grown man imagines would be inside a 14 year old boy’s imagination, an impressive feat, not-super-super memorable, not-very science fictiony, The Number Of The Beast by Robert A. Heinlein, Lazarus Long says to Heinlein: look there’s Dorothy, L. Frank Baum, writers who write other universes, detailing 666 universes, already tired of it, seems like it was new, the twist is the multi-verse aspect, he holds off until the very end, precursors, Sidewise In Time by Murray Leinster is from the 1930s, a hand stand-in characters, E.E. Doc Smith, Zap Branigan style Doppleberg or whoever, space aliens doing spy stuff, we have to shoot the people on sight, multiverse, 1895, philosopher/psychologist, all plasticity and indifference, the etymology, comes from stuff like solipsism, you’re the only thing that’s real, doesn’t get you very far, coffee later, even if hit by a bus, all solipsism are true, the stupid wrong way to go, my truth, there aren’t private facts, the private language argument, Tolkien had a private language for a while but had to start sharing it with some elves, telepathy, graduate thesis out of being just a hack writer, a girlfriend who will respect him, Doppel, made himself French, he doesn’t know anything about it, the Winton editor who looks like him a little bit, she looks even better, all very fun, why did those two characters swap, so plot could happen, a narrative that swallowed itself, interesting philosophical implications, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, what is real, post-modern rabbit hole, Rick And Morty, six episodes is probably enough, took the whole thing of Futurama, hasn’t fully established, handful of tropes, hasn’t worked out all the kinks, he’s the publisher now, does he have the skills to manage a publishing empire?, invite your editors to your mansion in the countryside, Hearst, Patty Hearst’s story, money to feed poor people, robbing a bank, caught or burned to death, sentenced to prison, commutes her sentence, president pardons her, what was going on her mind?, things are mean, your grandpa is a horrible person, I like my grandpa, FBI gets here, grandpa says I want her out, I’d like my granddaughter to have a pardon, yessir, main character syndrome, comic book level, that level of corruption, if it has any point at all it is about that up and down contempt, night gangs, an awesome sequence, get robbed, robs a guy, moon-drugs, space-planes, well worked out, looking up and looking down, good thinking on Jesse’s part, pulp magazines: 10 Story Book, Fantasy Book, a different etymology, contempt, folk tales as opposed to fairy tales, massively blinded, Remarkable Story Of Chicken Little, how good it is, so simple and so good, finding new insights, in it, washed over a million liters of water over a million years, this beautiful rock, using tricks and an idea, trying to fill page, a grandma, tell them a story, it gets inside of them and comes out later when they’re older, meme idea of story be what’s most different about humans as opposed to other animals, contempt for Little Red Riding Hood, kids’ stuff, what is it good for, for understanding skepticism, how do you know it, so girls will respect and marry you, Jesse is right about all of this, Will hates to say it, work that comes after it, Philip K. Dick novels, sudden slipping into another reality, the tenor of it, when it happens in Dick, Dick always undermines, he sets up a thing to be skeptical about, another rug under there, bewilderment and bemusement, not a great novelist structure, make an argument for the sake of argument, something being said about the nature of contemporary society, one’s ability to perceive reality, there’s great pleasure in reading his discombobulated stuff some time, doesn’t feel that way when you read Dick, Solar Lottery, chosen at random, an interesting idea, there’s a lot of running around, when he’s writing longer pieces there’s a lot of running around, bad for the story, liking the experience of living in a universe, the action set pieces in this book were incredible, driving through the darkness, dead reckoning, twitter, postmodernism and nihilism, a little bit of nihilism in this book, if an infinite number of universes, making all the possible choices, nicely dismissed by Mecchy, you’re you, alternate universe Jesse, mirror universe, not very dark, very joyful read, bemused, the coins, the questions, when he’s on the train, the cots, regrets that instantly, mist-out, if that’s his worst sin, first Fredric brown, Arena, he likes his parodies of reality, near the end of WWII, man from earth is locked in mortal combat with a big red monster, USA vs. Japan in the Pacific, retelling current events with a wink and a nod, man vs. Japan man, fields of technology, the idea of Star Trek in the first place, the klingons are the mongols, the romulans are the soviets, Roddenberry’s philosophy, come let us reason together, humans won’t be racist, Scotsman and Japanese man African ladies, guy from Iowa, Soviet guy, mystery and crime stuff, The Case Of The Dancing Sandwiches, Lawrence Block wrote a little bit about Brown, multiple layers of reality, continually subverting his own story, replicant, very internal, Maze Of Death, playing a video game, weird book about prisons and planets and not knowing where you are, a derelict ship in space, a collective hallucination, The Days Of Perky Pat, colonist on Mars or wherever, dolls, barbies, The Sims, the kids are shooting bugs for dinner, where it comes from for Philip K. Dick, super horny guy, super thoughtful guy, playing with barbies, tries to participate, what does this mean?, many stories about games (Monopoly), Roog, a dog’s psychology, garbage men come, the aliens come and take the offering urn, the dog goes crazy, that dog is barking too much, were they aliens?, there’s no answer, is that post modern?, Overdrawn At The Memory Bank by John Varley, go inside a lion’s brain, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, Total Recall, Dick would have inverted it, likes pulling the rug out, the twist is he didn’t know there was a twist there, blogpost from 2011, Fredric Brown, 1958, Trapped Detective and Guilty Detective, New York Mercantile Library, pennies a day, freshman year, roommate, The Wench Is Dead, the Merc, a Friday, a bottle of Jim Beam, bourbon, Murder Can Be Fun, dangerous, Agatha Christie, the book barely half finished, a printer, The Fabulous Clipjoint, Ed and Am Hunter, Martians Go Home, and abundance of short stories, every story he told, read the first paragraph and relax, Night Of The Jabberwock, Louis Carroll enthusiasts, 1972, the day came when it was too late, clean engaging prose, you know you’re in good hands, very easy reading, smart, supersmooth, the nostalgia, the 40s pulps, as a writer now, self-publishing, there’s no market where a writer can live by his pen right now, self-publishing, in 75 years when the internet is still around, listen to this podcast, when did twitter become x?, you can’t be nostalgic for things that happened before you were born, paperback anthologies, digest magazines, the letters section, some of them do, the number of pages devoted to letters, where Lovecraft got started, fiction and poetry, shitposting is a huge percentage of what’s going on in the letters’ columns, in anthologies, they remove the art, they remove the context, rupture easers and Rosicrucians, the rosy crescent folks sent to Wayne June, stories evolving and devolving, fan demand, a meta-story, writing stories in the story, plagiarizing himself, if written today it would be insufferable, family of Chinese people who are upset with each other, where everybody has a beard, self-promote, Will’s review of Galaxy magazine, not a great cover, one of the best science fiction magazines, Galaxy Science Fiction, Alfred Bester, Arthur C. Clarke, Gravy Planet, The Stars My Destination, Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, the power of editors, pushing vs. servicing, John W. Campbell, Horace Gold, a thesis about how science fiction should be, not his first thing, good ideas, interesting ideas, got the magazine out there, he was making the magazine, subservient to the publisher, the important part of this book that’s not right on the surface, whichever Hearst, your ancestor’s legacy, a good producers of science fiction, the real turn, super hilarious, a bug eyed monster, Alan Moore, everybody’s into pirate comics, stories set in the universe he came from, a really famous author, ripping off Asimov and Clarke, agree and disagree, ideas are cheap, it’s the writing that counts, good short stories, getting good ideas to fit together vs. novels, the one you bang out on the weekend, two covers paper in the middle, not exactly a novel, Jesse’s definition, the platonic idea of a novel, something Stephen King wrote, that’s the thing that will sell right now, Suzanne Collins?, Rick Riordan?, used to be Anne Rice, slice of time, Danielle Steele, Agatha Christie, mysteries not novel, mysteries can be short stories, the word “novel”, “romance”, an acceptable thing you can do if you are in the acceptable class, sleeze books, cultural, socioeconomic, want to subscribe to the New York Times but can’t afford it, I’m above these people, defining class by ideology, a set of ideas in people’s minds, it’s not the editors, it’s not the owner of a particular magazines, your editor is now your employee, the last powerful editor, Arianna Huffington, there’s no editors though, Anthony Boucher suddenly flown into our universe, Neil Clarke, make money?, not enough to live on, sells a lot of books, how the website supports itself, 10 cents a word, it’s horrible, Peter Watts, too much new science fiction, what’s good or not, Clarkesworld, a firehose, trying to keep up, January 2010, The Things by Peter Watts, 14 years ago, hate reading, doing some research, this story’s just like this other one, someone taking down Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations, the Helicopter one, the N.K. Jemisin one, you’re a fucker, the killing of children is ok, we need a police state to stop you from thinking bad, post-post-modern, the best analayis, when somebody accuses somebody of doing something, accusation coming from a place inside, right wing memes, retweeted some Tucker Carlson interview, projection, they’re killing children at the border, where is this accusation coming from, classic projection, unconscious, accusations are true, the lady who killed her puppy, never heard about this lady, might be a vice president, bad team, the word “puppy” rather than “dog”, oh what happened, the quotes they like to pull, I hated that dog, there’s always context, there isn’t infinite funds, city life, killing involved in farm life, hunting for food, they’re not willing to look at the circumstances, big hate on, a USA today article, she put this in a book, advance a political career, support with people who’ve, guy goes to sit with dog in a pound, the reality, is this a horror stories, the most horrible part of this story, a poor political instinct, central part of the United States, a decreasing number, farms are consolidated, not getting invited to Mar-a-Lago, [Malcolm Nance], Jonathan predicts J.D. Vance will be Trump’s VP, pretends to be a hillbilly, Hillbilly Elegy, quasi-sociology, that whole region, RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, why did he pick Pence, governor of Indiana, midwest, come back north, the most disturbing state, an uncomfortable, the KKK, Indianapolis is fine, how many states?, enriching, eastern seaboard, traveling has dropped out, a roadtrip across the country, pre-pandemic, Michigan is nice to visit, a certain item that is legal there, partakes, beaches, great lakes, shopping, go through Ohio, Bloomington, Indiana University, Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, a dynamic person, some king od laughing stock, contempt for him, a lot of contempt, Alaska, Sarah Palin, who the official fool is, Saturday Night Live, Gaza protesters, good to figure out where the liberals are, Michael Che, Joe Biden, wouldn’t laugh or clap, Colin Jost, suck off his old man balls, father of the nation, Mommalla Harris, annoying uncle, weirdly young father, when the Queen was alive, she’s an lady, lives in another country, how fuckin retarded are you people?, the parents for the country, the competent killer dad, he’s gonna hit you with his belt, whoever’s running the show, Xi memes, reaction, looks like Winnie The Pooh, competent manager, if we have to have this whole thing managed, a weird election, RFK, Jr., be assassinated, a tradition, if he makes the debates, how can there be debates?, one guy can’t debate, in court during the debates, the court case, after the election, indicted for many things, the perception, more in the public eye, the last poll, the intent, no good strategy, if you’re cheating, physically unable to campaign, there’s media though, Truth Social, when shitlibs are reacting on twitter, more cynical, WWI in prison, Eugene Debs, compare, campaigning, alien and sedition acts, not actually against the war, which war, improved since them, Lyndon LaRouche, ideological straightjacket, everybody calls you a nazi, everybody calls you a fascist, a railroad that goes all around the world, incoherent, his followers, almost a cult, coherent but hard to understand, be very skeptical, Jimmy Carter says he has lust in his heart, brain or crotch, memories in my head, prominent conspiracy theories, why do you think that’s a slur?, the origin of conspiracy theories, collateral damage, the popular phraseology, the phrase infects people’s brains, vaccine denier, controls you, the best memes are the ones that are obviously untrue, the really dangerous memes, national anthems, we’re all part of this melting pot, you got tricked, the internet gaslights you, take screenshots, child drag queen contests, drag story readings, what’s going on, one picture shared over and over again, any time a claim is made, drill down, Howard Hawks is the greatest American filmmaker of all time, Hitchock is from Britain, any claim that somebody makes is potentially acceptable, a positive thing, closer to reality, floating in the sky above, on the internet you’re sit with so many claims, processing a whole magazine, only in politics mode right now, how many followers to following, Scott is back on twitter, Victims of Capitalism, Paphlets, Ahoy Comics, Garth Ennis, Tom Peyer, summer just got better, Barrett Brown, Appalachian Aesthetics, Edison Motors, that’s a crazy take, Trump Derangement Syndrome, creativity, the internet pushes you to conform, work through one idea, pushes you towards other ideas, massive defense mechanism, be creative, a tool, three cards from a deck, just a tool, ad hygiene, 765, there are valuable things to pay attention to, the mute button, a boomer tweeting about how Trump is bad, a little bit useful to know what this age and class group, a lot of time for twitter, the class basis for both parties, older boomer, retired with a house, Robert Kroese, Basedcon, trad writer, indie writer, what does successful mean?, sells books, really into ai, he thinks it’s good, gaslit into thinking its good, the main character is the same, dive back into, emdash, hot water once again, uncommitted crimes, roped, bad writing in there, carpool buddy, android assassins, Syd Mead, trademark wit, guy who’s trynna make a little cash, what percentage goes to Amazon, freakin out about bitcoin, understanding vs. making money, gold speculation vs. a gold miner, a visceral reaction, a new basis of an economy, trying to wreck as many industries as they can, worried about ai, a real possibility, the last generation that writes books and make art, people don’t make art to make money, the whole point is people write to make money, if this was written today, the archaeological experience of finding out about a society from long ago, old stuff teaches you more, even in a bad story from a long time ago, you kinda already know with what today is like, destitute in New York, you plagiarize, making money and art, art existed before money and will exist after money, I don’t know if people will exist but some robot will be in a cave spraying paint from its mouth onto a cave wall and then finger painting some robot animals its gonna go hunt later, you owe me five male deer, is Stephen King an artist, sometimes result in art, what is art anyway?, what you do when you aren’t doing money, poetry is art, very elitist, to show their disdain for money, Robert E. Howard was not disdainful, Lovecraft wrote poetry to make fun of people, what is beauty, hot girl on a cover of a pulp magazine, Allen Anderson, that’s art, also commercial, you know art when you see it, it’s like pornography, Weird Tales authors writing poetry, housewives, Clark Ashton Smith, marketable skill, The Black Diamonds by Clark Ashton Smith, doing other things, sculpture, 1911 story, The Mahout, an elephant driver, 20 years later, The Justice Of The Elephant, written for money, to prove to himself that he was a professional writer, sold The Black Cat, Jack London, once you know who you are you can be happy, having edited so many magazines, how art intersects with commercialism, an essay by Sonia Green (Lovecraft’s wife): Commercialism The Curse Of Art, art is separable from commerce, designs and sells hats, capitalism fucks things up, his letters to Weird Tales, philosophy of story telling, this is what he said, why Weird Tales became good, they’re tied together but not the same thing, how come you’re not paying me for the stories, a farmer of chatGPT shit, Jeff Bezo’s sharecropping platform, King Nihilism, why upset, not upset, he should know better, larger follower count, he sells books, t-shirts, partially live off, A Scammer Darkly, Aye, Robot, clickbait, Starship Grifters, a lot of reviews on Amazon, he’s popular, 289 pages, 1,336, A Grift Too Far, isn’t this guy a Christian?, Jonathan doesn’t strike Jesse as a Christian, the Mormon church is basically a communist system, excommunicated, mutually supportive, for you career you should convert, Scientology, very nice people, the Celebrity Center, scientologists on bikes with guns, they want you to do well, more than a tithe, voluntary, they got their shit together at this point in the religion, he’s not a threat, how’d you know my name, better than the FBI and the city police, they all have audiobooks, what would be the advantage of reading it?, unless its awesome, not doing an audiobook, talked Jonathan out of it, cigars and their history, goes back to the Spanish conquest, what’s the etymology of cigar?, Mayan, cigarettes are female, little one, frails, rap terminology, usherette, racquette, rockette (a little rocket), narrating substack posts, robot versions, better than nothing, too long, cooped up nothing to do, reviewing counts as art, criticism can be art, recording reflections, some feedback, a would be art dealer in New York, the industry is a scam, big time art dealer, look at this awesome book, Virgin Planet by Poul Anderson, the premise is awesome, a planet of girls!, a government of girls, a swaggering and roistering navy of girls, the social message of it, fear governments, a lady riding a bird, a lasso, lasso our hero, they’ve never seen a man, deformed girl, get you, its true, he does look like a woman, both have nipples, bipeds, Robert Silverberg, The Woman You Wanted, Future Science Fiction, excellent cover art, a story by Weinbaum redone by Silverberg, gestalt something, driven by art, on a streak, a few novels, The Green Queen by Margaret St. Clair, the audiobook is done by Mike Vendetti, closed mouth in terms of judgements, that was a good one, only four hours long, Second Ending by James White, so much new content, good job!, Live Gold by Robert Sheckley, crime/spy books, a John D. MacDonald, Collision Course by Robert Silverberg, 2 novels by Samuel R. Delany, The Star Pit, no interest in character, The Einstein Intersection, [The Hemingway Hoax], mind changed, less-new wavy, Babel 17, doesn’t make me racist, Steven Barnes, Octavia Butler, need excuses to not read things, the most charitable explanation, excuse providers, an obligation to read any science fiction writer, winnowing, excuse, no more excuses, Nice Girl With Five Husbands by Fritz Leiber, Scott Miller [The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast], The Abandoned Of Yan by Donald F. Daley, If, March 1963, After her husband left her…, she had no family, going up ramp to say goodbye to the children, what the heck kinda world is great, some heavy stuff, five pages long, Imagination, he’s good, he has the right aesthetic, Philip K. Dick requests, people like all the stuff, hear a story they didn’t know existed, for commercial purpose, an enthusiast, also not for a commercial purpose, horrible ads, ads are horrible, Ursula K. Le Guin, ads are telling you lies, what do English majors do?, use you powers for good: art, use your power for evil: ads, how do I help people, adblocker, people are conditioned to tolerate ads, they’re teaching you what they want you to be taught, David Currie, Pamphlets, 10 things that Stalin did that were wonderful, doesn’t say ended famines, ended feudalism famines, a student locked out of his Microsoft account, why do you think Stalin is bad?, defensive of stop interacting, the leader of China in 1780, some emperor and empress, the last emperor, put him to work with a broom, what they did in Russia, an expedient way to solve a problem, and yet…, there’s a story behind stuff, George Orwell, being anti-communist, trotsykite conservative flow, Max Shachtman, mainstream figures in the AFICIO, supporting the Vietnam War, Christopher Hitchens, you have to always be humble and go back to first principles, how do we minimize that, AOC one is much funnier, eat the rich dresses, a workin lady, no principles gets you to whatever will allow you to live in that ecosystem, one of your magacommunist people, cosmonaut, 1. fought the banks, 2. drained the swamp, pro-purges, killing the royal family, killing the not good bolsheviks, mostly metaphors, you have to do a lot of unpacking, a reference to D.C., this is like a hype, not literally true, study the purges, jumping ahead to 4., the whole soviet people, Canada sent a boat, he’s not running for office now, before the war with the Nazis, what do you mean by best?, the war with Finland, running Trotsky out of dodge, Eisenhower was a colonel, they needed a good manager who made good decisions, defining what makes a good soldier, Napoleon seems to be a really good general, Rommel, and a good general and good man myth, The Desert Fox, propaganda on both sides, a standard technique, as a metaphor it fits, this is targeted, this is a cartoon for children, people know the phrase, massive conspiracy or killed lots of good people, that he died in office he did a pretty good job of purging, how Khrushchev got elected, just enough quorum, the political culture had become deformed, a tentative step, Stalin brought to his height and responsible for it’s end, homelessness, prostitution, Soviet democracy is way more democratic, Chinese democracy, meetings are fucking boring, not a lot of fun, grandmas and grandpas who have opinions, something you want to do, a young person, a Philip K. Dick novel, The Man Who Japed, the anticommunist case: look at all the meetings, “restored” is not the right word here, saved Europe, liberated eastern Europe, raised literacy, seems very plausible, turned Russia into a nuclear superpower, got Russia nuclear weapons, prerequisite for peace, the mainstream media tells us lies about Stalin, it wasn’t about personal aggrandizement only, treats, housing, almost a nationalistic patriotic fervor, transnational people, tariffs, ultracapitalists, defending your country from invasion, your nation’s resources, replace them, that’s a nationalist movement, the threat that Napoleon was, everybody has to have public education, pretty apt, power through a popular revolution, what happened, competent general, did Stalin fight in WWI?, Trotsky led the army, Stalin had a blue pencil, 10 Days That Shook The World, Trotskyite is the slur, Trotskyite tankie, in the comments, is this a parody account?, how would one know?, where’s the lie, Hitler built roads too, when did you stop beating your wife, liberals still mad about Molotov-Ribbentrop, roads just tell you where to go, easier to traverse than bushwhacking, banned by other things, whataboutism, questions about the restored part, regime or whatever, Nicholas Maduro was elected locally, elections everywhere, where don’t they have elections?, elections in North Korea, almost like he’s a king, his dad and grandad, a liberator, that steady hand, where don’t you get free and fair elections, more local, start worrying about Singapore, why am I worried about this?, who’s the bad guy here?, his southern neighbor for 70 years, are nuclear weapons good?, no, are nuclear weapons necessary?, yes, Cuba, the people will reject it, it doesn’t fit with the brand, a fight you can’t win, they have to kill everybody, a Gaza situation, a mask off of what they’re willing to do, Joe Biden is helping commit a genocide, also me wearing the sunglasses, Luke Skywalker, the special room in the White House eat from vending machines and pretend they’re journalists, doing the right thing, people can be so wrong, he doesn’t need more work, why does he believe it?, he’s old?, doesn’t see the videos?, tested a long time to realize something is bad, early trauma?, not willing to doublethink, a comfort level, maybe Bono is explained the same way, Sean Penn gave Zelenskyy his oscars, most people don’t participate at all, a minority that goes to vote, more non-voters than supporters of either party, big on twitter for one party, conservatives on twitter, people who are dumb as rocks, is Tucker Carlson a conservative, a spiritual and radical sickness, you can be a Christian and do a good interview, watching is the weird part, listening makes a lot of sense, not a Putin-liker, they never said Xi-puppet, literally a communist, transstuff is not communist, xi-communist, Chinese students, I can’t have housing because of socialism, understanding a lot of material, they might bulldoze your house but you get an apartment, housing is not the problem, more buildings than are needed, did really well in China and foreign invest it here, a tax on it, capital like land, the way to go, capitalism with a little spice of socialism here and there, mix of public and private, a rigorous control, international business, the party ideology is for a purpose, not just to make personal cash and reward your friends, what it’s for, a question in Chinese socialism, deviate towards great power chauvinism, a big country able to push around littler countries, the relationship to Vietnam, in the news very recently, China has invaded Vietnam, that was all pre, other than in Israel, we just want to control everything, China liberated Quebec/Tibet, come liberate British Columbia too, who are you liberating us from?, from the Americans, a liberation for the people, an abuse of the term, weird misunderstanding, Tibetans involved in the liberation of Tibet, back to monarchy, we don’t question the Dalai Lama, pedophile Fu Manchu who works for the US government, but not as cool, game respects game, threatens to not reincarnate, is there Dalai Lama in exile and a Dalai Lama local?, gulags archipelagos and Solzhenitsyn, a , more people incarcerated in the US than ever under Stalin, Jesse’s cookie problem vs. Will’s smoking problem, we’re not talking about me right now, it’s insidious, talk is what we take in as reality, words read with eyes or ears, what the chatter is, I heard covid is really dangerous, this one is very deadly, I’m feeling better, the test is available, you have covid?!?!, not a novel virus, a very tame virus, the chatter, the lady who sold Jesse her comics on Thursday, never stopped masking, dudes at the post office, how much traffic they have, how much they shaved, security blanket, used to think about sunglasses a lot, hats used to be a big thing, hats are okay, baseball caps, sunglasses and a hat, makes me look less bald, the sunglasses make me look cool, inappropriate sunglasses wearing, punctuating feelings, Only Angels Have Wings, always smoking/never has matches, an exchange of emotion and authority and empathy, cigarettes are a way for people to be generous to strangers and friends, a bunch of outcasts, always relying on those people, sharing a lighter, sunglasses are not as addictive, there’s a reason, an Apple watch, it’s an Apple watch, it’s a nice piece of kit, her phone, her heart, blood oxygen, regulated by the clock on the wall, a new tumbler from Starbucks, wanting to own it, take a photo of it and share it, it’s not for that, when you have too much money, unconscious unthoughthrough, I have to associate with the other team, wanna get dates, not answering your own question, universities investing, seeing dead children is traumatizing, in solidarity, exercising some sort of moral principle, those bad things are fake/necessary/what you get when , Destiny, Costco water is Hamas, Edward Snowden, dig it out root and branch, start with Madison Avenue (google/facebook), the stories of the stories of Madison Avenue, girls on parade, freedom sticks, ladies shilling cigarettes, the history of smoking in the United States, indians smoke, didn’t licoln smoke a pipe, not just a gay metaphor?, was Lincoln a pipesmoker?, Robert Abernathy’s Grandma’s Lie Soap, unable to lie, toothpaste, the world has changed, looks a little long, C.C. MacApp, chess player, And All The Earth A Grave, Darkness by Lord Byron, editorial introduction, there’s nothing wrong with dying, prospecting with his donkey, a new bookkeeping machine, blew a cog, humour all over the place, sell coffins, the big Christmas hit, Cabbage Patch Kid, coffin ports, automobile garages, a rich mahogany number, two black dots, the old prospector and his burro, Adams, some remark to the beast, Denver, skinny packrats, unburied coffins, Martians?, they’re gone Evie, we gotta start over, mild reproach, married to a jackass, The New Yorker, barbs, vintage New Yorker, its the thing, coffee, blast some meme, finish another Silverberg, podcast edits, prep for the next one, might even have a game, hunt for that dinner, Barry Convex, Cronenberg’s sells eyeglasses, surrounded by three teams, hide in the back of that car, everybody is getting killed, back of the car, don’t engage, hide, stay alive, he had a lot of fun, hiding is fun, simple adult version of hide and seek, save that cigar?, cats are smarter than that kind of thing, the texture, my cigar got eaten by my dog, do dogs eat tobacco, monkeys smoke tobacco, gorillas too, a bear that smoked, tourist encouraged chimp, North Korean zoo, in the Guardian so it must be true, associated press, the Big Book [atlas], South Korea produces clothing, counterfeit cigarettes, ip piracy, the important part, smoke the real thing, that the brands be honored, chimpanzee licking its fingers, Pyongyang, lights her own, just like us except for they’re ripped, she doesn’t inhale, monkey doing, monkey being, do not inhale, the juice, through skin, innerdermis, outerdermis, tissue, not an anatomist, human anatomy, Isaac Asimov’s Super Quiz, broke my clavicle, never broken a bone, skiing, uncoordinated, impressive, what about a bicycle, everybody just gave up, swim classes, fewer options to break your bones swimming, not be terrified of the water, interact with it in safe ways, horseback riding?, like fencing, how much you gonna use it?, looks cool, practice involved, other people with swords, household kitchen knives, practicing rumbling, seems kinda extreme, a knife that didn’t get used, never stabbed nobody with a knife, women debating, have you seen it?, punching fight?, that’s not a debate, women are capable of the violence necessary, a violent subtext to debate, you have to be in the same room, slap, challenge to a duel, why they get them up on the stage, two online youtubers, disconnecting, debate class, debating women, imagining Stephen Hawking in a debate with Trump, you can’t punch a guy who can’t move his limbs, you moderate, debate bro Destiny, overtalk the other person, drown out the other person, you better respect me, soibros, soiguys, walking around the world, are you serious?, you need to moderate your response, a physical threat there, what is the debate about, what should we do, what should be done, swaying the group, corporally control you, Edgar Rice Burroughs set on Venus, obvs. the Burroughs stand-in gets to be captain, the team that is against that is a strawman, just defect, another way of solving it is to get physically violence, be it resolved that…, trying to sway the audience, my learned colleague, the house of parliament, ungentlemanly behavior, distinguished gentleman, the sergeant at arms, enforce the will of the speaker, ejected, and or the mace is there, a way of preventing the debate from getting out of hand, the insult stage, a physical threat of violence, hands can be turned into fist, realized and recognized, why they had to ban dueling, wasting your team for killing the enemy, secret dueling, in the context of protestors at UCLA, the protestor’s response is to build barricades and fight back, are these people having a debate, protesting is I object, the speaker is the cops, or a vigilante, just as bad, worse, the occasional crazy person, life has meaning now, the paid operatives, zionist brownshirts, thug, are protestors peaceful or not, an organized protestor, a good idea, infiltrators, you organize the infiltrators, a committee, security culture, end up in a bad place, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Detroit PD and the FBI, pre-revolutionary communist movement, discipline, one of their best workers, parliamentarians, ultimately a cop, when do they become the Patty Hearst and join the workers for reals?, murderers and surveillers, after a certain critical mass, pain involved, incompetence, it’s falling apart, kids are not being taught how to read, reading is overrated as well, an important concern, if you cannot read well, the crazy part, they gotta get that money out now, turn to Russia, one things they never accuse him of is mismanaging the economy, spot fakers and call them out, your not even really voting for Biden, examples of public or private incompetencies, solve homelessness in California, if by solving…, money to friends who run organizations, voted up, lot of salaries, any kind of regulation, mergers, banking, find some area where things are doing well, Amazon is working, a monopoly that is consolidating, subsidizing from government contract, conservative Christians who want to be published, Costco’s membership model, the price is not so horrible, the return policy is really good, above industry standard, the return policy is important, extended warranty, will Best Buy around in five years?, appliances, decor, Lego, what bookstores, selling soap and candles, Barnes & Noble, floor space to fill, they don’t have used cheap books, what are books even about?, another dog collar store, another skin salon, people think Amazon is the place to get books, ABEBooks, Amazon is eating everything up, Audible, Brilliance, buy out your competition, very anti-Amazon, Amazon Web Services makes a profit, their business model, Elon Musk’s rockets, carbon offsets, twitter is not a money making concern, Prime is now putting in ads, now $3 more, we’ve just reinvented cable television, different sets of billionaires, the owners of the new media, capitalism is constant struggle, fitter-away their money buying skins, clogs to clogs in three generations, too cute, clogs to crocs?, Office Space (1999), clogs with flair, Andy Two Locks, just flair, school is by a Starbucks, upper middle classes, can afford tutors, Jessism is not a popular philosophy, controversial, Willism seems to be more happy, nobody calls will blackpilled, doomers?, a civil war in Will’s lifetime, no possibility of reform it seems, the TLDR, keep it the same forever, 2nd amendment, militia to kill indians, whatever the security of a free state is, free in many ways, unfree in many ways, an interesting person, mentally modeled, Netanyahu and the university’s presidents are out of control, once you plagiarize your way into a job…, lack of opportunities, reduced pay, some good instincts, Joe Biden could stop this genocide from happening, two problems, he’d have to go rogue, can’t read the teleprompter, Edward Wellen’s Mind Slash Matter, programmer/screenwriter, a president could stop it, if we’re being real, the people who run him, cut off funding, the key to stopping this thing that is going on, his own political party is largely responsible, two things holding him back, if Trump comes back to father, lotsa evidence for that?, CNN, watching CNN all day long, Hamas is this all powerful energy, Home Depot is Hamas, core ideology, willing to sacrifice all other principles, a delusion, isn’t ideology a delusion?, a concrete example of an ideology, liberalism, free exchange of ideas will lead to…, marketplace, soon we’re into metaphor, seeing metaphor as reality, words are magic, sounds like a metaphor, part of your brain says that’s interesting, words have magical power over people, magic is not a real thing, magical control over people, magic is real, how to explain to a dog why a man is staring at a piece of paper for 17 minutes, books are the thing that the man holds, they can read with their noses, reality not mediated through the word tart or pooey, that girl dog, they can get it unmediated (as close as possible), we can get tricked by words, undergraduate degree in black studies, Africana Studies, as somebody who took 10 classes at an elite university, the process of knowledge creation, knowledge production!, you can get confused by mistaking the map for the territory, useful human expression, it is a metphor, and yet it has an effect, monkeys don’t seem to be affected by words, associating words with behaviors, sentences seem to be off limits, Koko is a little more legit, Alex the parrot, the bird knows more than it does, what matter, using the voice of the trainer, even funnier, seems like Koko has ideas, dogs and cats, and birds and monkeys, dogs have ideas they want you to understand, walkies, we can get confused by the words, not know as much about what me mean, the words are [NOT] our thoughts, babies have ideas too, jumbled up in the map and not the territory, question mark, not get trapped, killing people bad, it bad, what about that guy, High And Low (1963), Toshiro Mifune, Akira Kurosawa, Ed McBain aka Evan Hunter, the cops finding the criminal, 87th Precinct books, he’s compelling, a podcast on 87th Precinct books, reversed New York, resent New York, the center of the universe, kidnapper, death row, something he wants to say but can’t articulate, a very good movie, Heaven and Hell, very powerful movie, amazing on screen, cooler Humphrey Bogart, more manly famous film action star, serious Kurt Russell good with a sword, Hell In The Pacific (1968), Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune, Enemy Mine by Barry B. Longyear, stuck on an island in the pacific, Arena by Fredric Brown, they fight each other Gorn style, Lee Marvin was in WWII, they know what they’re doing, ability to make movies that are really good, not experiencing that is a shame, almost all Godzilla films, levels you don’t have to experience them, Independence Day, a big cast, a big disaster, H.G. Wells is largely responsible for setting that stage, Yojimbo (1961), Clint Eastwood, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, Magnificent Seven and Seven Samurai, a very Conan-y story, A Fistful Of Dollars (1964), a western set in Japan, very Japanese but very familiar, a good place to start, archive.org, with English subtitles, an hour 52, a Conan story, an independent man, a masterless samurai, a weird social class, the weird ideas of their class, the empire and all that stuff, the military got out in front of the government, a rubber stamp, various competing militarizes running the show, sometimes helps my career, loyalty to the state, patriotism, my country right or wrong, you can see it as honorable as misguided, Nazis versus Wehrmacht, listening to authority, a flaw, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Colonel Alexander Vindman, a Trump whistleblower, the Trump Ukraine scandal, a liberal hero, just playing himself, it’s basically just Seinfeld, RFK Jr.’s actual wife, embarrassment, a sensitive topic, no politics, liberal people on it, 100 million percent sell out, pretends to do journalism for movies, MSNBC boy, Chris Hayes!, reacting to the news, Conan O’Brien, these are all the people who will do anything to get attention and be whores, readers of material, that’d be cool, when they do that for movies, lends negative credibility to everything that came before, Walter Cronkite, Cronkite-stan, how about next week?

Startling Stories, September 1948 - What Mad Universe

Startling Stories, September 1948 - What Mad Universe

Startling Stories, September 1948 - What Mad Universe

Startling Stories, September 1948 - What Mad Universe

Startling Stories, September 1948 - What Mad Universe

Startling Stories, September 1948 - What Mad Universe

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #804 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Mad Planet by Murray Leinster

The SFFaudio Podcast #804 – The Mad Planet by Murray Leinster, read by Roger Melin. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the story (2 hours 44 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Miassa Bessada, Will Emmons, Terence Blake, Alex (PulpCovers), and Jonathan Weichsel.

Talked about on today’s show:
Argosy 1920, posthistorical, prehistorical romance, H.G. Wells, Jack London, Stanton A. Coblentz’s The Wonder Stick, an Edgar Rice Burroughs book set on Earth, Under The Moons Of Mars, the princess, thoughts and loins, no dialogue, can communicate a little bit, he had no words, he speaks in a masculine way: a war cry, internal monologue, an external narrator, he looks just like rodin’s thinker, very well realized world, a nice Virgil Finlay illustration, butterflies and moths and giant, mushroom fire, bright and colourful pulp, colourful dark pulp, a very dark world, giant insects, apocalyptic taken the extreme, a natural apocalypse, global warming, very subversive of him, unintentionally so, carbon emissions, fissures underground, carbon capture, vast reservoirs, the african lakes that suddenly burps, everybody dies, offshore, frozen methane at the bottom of the sea, free methane, carbon captured a long time ago, this will happen this has happened, with humans is the shocker, very Clark Ashton Smith world, gone to Venus, heavy growth, pulp Venus Earth, the shape of the story, one guy out in the woods for the whole book learning things, not much of plot, great setting, unique, kinda slow, their ears wiggle, the smartest, the fastest, John Carter inspired superman, atavistic throwback, his ancestor was John Carter, I could make shoes, stick it with this poky thing, not even hunter gatherers, just gatherers, didn’t make it through 8th grade, an autodidact, inventor’s lab at home, The Last Spaceship, genius inventor, being your standard 1950s smart guy, way behind the slowest of our forebearers, a progenitor, the beginning of the new, the minimal plot, The Cave Girl, The Men In The Walls by William Tenn, Will’s second show, a great funny story about a human future where giant aliens (bigger than skyscrapers), women have litters, the alien kitchen crumb, theirs cockroaches all over this house, sprayed with chemicals, the insects are now giant and the humans are small, Fantastic Planet (1973), a french movie, breed with this other pet, more like pests (than pets), the reversal, we do care for our pests, a mouse in your house, maybe some vegans don’t, feral humans, levy whatever critique, enjoyable setting, where William Tenn succeeds, anthropology or sociology, an uncle, way deeper, like a savage or a child, it failed on the level of having interesting characters, breathing toxic fumes, doesn’t come across like a satire, an Edgar Rice Burroughsy feel, the setting is the showcase, indomitable human spirit, extreme environments, the spark still survives, rekindle the human flame, the connection to Burroughs, what if this was a little more realistic, using the weapons, I can leap really high, work and think and develop, the guy in The Cave Girl, cook meat or whatever, a framework to allow our guy to climb back up, a plot device, small triumphs, the line near the end, Burl saw the mighty armour, envied him his weapons, the juicy flesh contained in those armoured limbs, he need flee, in his hands he bore a long sharp chitinous spear, there’s no wood, remaster the earth, the dawn of a new-mankind, the proto-human in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and he won the girl, he did it for the girl, that was terrible, a voyage into weirdness, CO2 in excess, they’re not really trees, gets back home and gets the girl, nothing innovative there, Day Million is 7 minutes long, a guy is excluded from his tribe, invents the bow, spooky action at a distance, he tames a dog, learns how to make fire, invents the wheel, now he’s a hero not a nerd, club him on the head with their club, the exclusion, got separated, the tide took him away, the only real interaction we have is his thoughts, he likes sharing her with her, this whole thing is cute, strange character dynamics, a little more repetitive, the florid description of the flora, over and over again, Samuel Beckett does that, a hypnotic type style, a good invention to repeat, getting the girl, any pulp story, gesticulates at that, odyssey into weirdness, mid-20th century than pulp, before Amazing, 24 years old, the Campbell puzzle stories, with the fish, stuck in the spider web, the fishoil, a very Campbellian idea, ahead of its time, genuine science fiction, the title, [The Forgotten Planet], Electrical Experimenter, Hugo Gernsback, mad as in crazy, a narrator from a distance, a direct descendant, he’s recounting this period in history, made it through the giant mushrooms, in some Burroughs books, a frame, I’m getting these psychic images from the future, the Gridley wave, we don’t have a universal republic, the international geophysical institute, ways of framing the story, crazy and angry, if it was published in the 1950s, as we go, as we progress, as we iterate, non-linear progress, walk around long after you’re dead, people get confused, nutzo, if this was published in 1955, everyone knows what science fiction is, the title would be 30,000 years, Earth In The Grip Of The Mushrooms, Giant Spider World, people going into strange lost valleys, Empire Of The Ants, giant spider story by Robert E. Howard, people just spend their time enjoying their time and occasionally supervising machines, we’re scavengers, was it a sin that we did?, burned too many fossil fuels?, its scientific name is this, quick wikipedia look ups, that looks cool, lactarius deliciosus, mmm milky, abundance of food, everybody is eating everything, scientific name, very different and very cool, munching, spongey, lady with a dress and a whip, a gun and a spaceship, any educational value in here at all, the Chinese still publish science fiction, making it science fiction, caveman stories are considered science fiction, the process of technological acquisition and distribution, get the bow going, that phenomenon where we have to learn something, a setting rather than an exploration of that idea, we all would get like shoes, shoes are a good idea, strapping those on their feets, enough free time and resources, a lot of tribes today, material and or time, full time job to make shoes, gorging themselves and lying around, they’re lazy, a fantasy of the native, not anthropologically sound, a lot of lazy activity that gets people doing art, hiding in a cave?, fled to the mountains, huddling together for warmth, an old anthropological theory, the culture of poverty, considered racists, all impoverished civilizations are the same, an idea of social strata, through the lens of a higher social stratus, for poverty there has to be affluence, the potlatch, hard to understand, get together with their neighbours, a giving contest, making giant presents, foods, delectable items, bentwood boxes, massive amounts of luxury consumer goods, status and power, like the hobbits, people aren’t turned into chattel, trading, the culture we see in The Odyssey, just a series of home invasions, you’re never leaving, a lady who wants to have sex with you, turned into farm animals, delicate relationship between host and guest, stores, I could steal this, usually a refrigerator, a place to do commerce, you don’t have an economy, good relationships with your neighbours, a friend and an ally, reciprocal debts, family and friendship and bonds, a bit of leisure time, poverty, people starving to death, some external problem, hunter gatherers, decorate their bodies, making jewelry, weird things we can’t understand, stupid and not for Jesse, tell stories, probably a lot of gossip, have you seen what janice is wearing in her hair?, why isn’t Paul on the podcast, tattoos from strangers, your bunkee wants to practice, disrailed?, people that you actually know, a cool tattoo store down the street, bring their own designs, means something, words, words all over this guy’s arm, these worlds are valuable, pure hunter gatherer behavior, what people do when they get a little bit of money, sailor tattoos, grading, crossed the equator, circumnavigate the world, tramp stamp, no tattooing in this book, decorating?, lie around, not doing art, no culture at all, no songs, no stories, the feast of the full moon, they don’t even have a moon, is there food in my mouth?, food is their primary concern, they need to have a refrigerator, food everywhere, reread Dune, they eat worm shit, this is what people do, carbon dioxide poisoned, carboniferous, an impressive gene, an uplift story Children Of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, spiders could evolve intelligence, more intelligent than us, savages as if they were human, anthropological science fiction, self-uplifting of proto-humans, matters of life and death and food and safety, comfort and luxury, technology is uplift, genetic resurgence, smoke those spider legs and centipede feets, put them in your cave, cave out of shells, how many other human groups are there on the planet, pretty terrific, The Integral Trees by Larry Niven, humans have been voyaging to other planets, found a star with an orbiting gas bubble, giant trees, revolving due to winds, squirrel people, their tree is rotting, termites, dexterous feet, they don’t even know, so many generations, a hard SF story with ridiculous premises, more time spent with the tribe and the culture, not being for a good reason, flashbacks, how to gather mollusc feet, live up to be like my grandpa, Argosy’s pay rates, it doesn’t make economic sense to do a second draft, trynna fill pages, readers want to be satisfied, give em what they want, two more followups, it explains much, still pretty good, infected Jesse’s dreams, dark things in it, moth’s tortured pains, hunting killing eating, our world, carried off by a spider and screaming, nobody focuses on that, his learning moment, in a rather unpleasant fashion, that’s a pity, that old gentleman since, never entered his head, say of the year 1920, pick a year out of a hate, doesn’t have hypothetical questions, pure immediacy, getting to hypotheticality, that’s the point of the story, hypothesis building, if!, there’s the science fiction word for you, it’s wild, sense of wonder, it’s crazy!, those ants, the army ants, right after WWI, burn themselves up, a repeat of this whole situation, this new prototype kinda guy, adjacently classified, Leiningen Versus the Ants [by Carl Stephenson], castle doctrine, late to the game Robinson Crusoe, indomitable German will, almost robotic, let yourself be put into the gears of this machine or not?, not perfectly aligned, sheared off, mechanisms in society are machine like, don’t get involved with the police, the robotic aspect of these unstoppable creatures vs. individual fights, the one with the fish, hunter vs. prey, the army of ants, once you join the army, go over there and get shot, got caught up in something, explored in later books, this is an unstoppable thing, like the fire, techniques, firebreaks, helicopters with water, incarcerated firefighters, what happened to the earth already, unstoppable, humanity was doing really well, wasn’t a robot uprising, shit happens, funny stuff, higher ground becomes expensive real estate, climate change!, melted into the sea, a bunker in Nepal, in case, fun, engages with this idea of 30,000 years around, tiny mammals hiding in holes, Science Fiction By Gaslight by Sam Moskowitz, London is destroyed by carbon emissions, 1890something, Earth is destroyed by carbon emissions, who is right?, The Doom Of London by Robert Barr, The Forgotten Enemy, Freaky Trigger, A Bite Of Stars A Slug Of Time And Thou podcast, a deserted London, it’s the ice age, a glacier slowly griding its way into London, the opposite way to go, flooded out vs. frozen out, global cooling, new ice age comin, New York suddenly freezes, The Day After Tomorrow, new Ghostbusters movie, ghost freezes New York, The Real Ghostbusters, read the fixup, mash em together, rewriting to make it flow, The Red Dust, has become the leader, 30 years later, needed the fixup, a terrible idea, defeats the whole purpose!, let’s do The Red Dust, not a lot of capacity, Return From The Stars, that’s a mental book, especially if I get to shit on it, about the same length, you who have read the Mad Planet, the world in the far distant future, tiny Man, acclimated to change, our hero Burl, nothing compared to the deadly red dust, thrusting his spear, shiny back, meat eating beetles, what does Bleiler have to say?, Blei this up, Moskowitz, a timeless classic of the pulp era, well written, fun, short, an interesting idea, the aesthetic is good, it has more depth, much better world building than Edgar Rice Burroughs, video game levels, designed for an adventure, still feel some enthusiasm, no invention in it, the new LibriVox of The Stainless Steel Rat on LibriVox, science fiction setting, Slippery Jim diGriz, very Futuramalike, future tropes, the police are robots, this other mode of reading science fiction, not what we do here, what a champion E.F. Bleiler was, just science fiction the early years, Gernsback’s life, closely typed 1115 pages, plot synopsis, would be great to have it, on the Internet Archive, searchable, google books, a supernatural book for all the Weird Tales stuff, The Last Spaceship, some more Murray Leinster, dubious quality, the very future future, 50,000 years in the future, a lady in a bathing suit in a belt and wristbands, mushroom guys, beautiful right?, Stories From The Sky (William Sky), This World Is Taboo, Mark F. Smith, a presumed plague carrier, but hey if he did the smart thing we wouldn’t have a story, Ray Cummings, as long as the audio is good, its a human, British (possibly human), pretty inhuman, homo sapiens non-roboticus, Thomas Burnett Swann, Popes, Japan, last December, June 2nd, A Spell For Chameleon, the minotaur books, human-minotaur love, an archive of our own?, wtf is it?, fan-fiction, won a Hugo, The Weirwoods, sail the high seas, records his crimes, not illegal, The Soul Of Man (Under Socialism) by Oscar Wilde, The Not-World, lure of the little folk, magic pen, one of the finest and most piquant, spicy!, Thomas Chatterton, mingle their fates with Arachnae, spider woman, drowning before sex, objectionable, everybody on the internet, objectionable, on Goodreads, very erotic, middle erotic, focused on Eros, eroticism deferred, not Gor, rapidly becomes weird fetish porn, a lovely novel, a smidgen of alternate history, the worst review, not helpful reviews, like the narrator, doesn’t understand the concept of what fiction is, a 30 year old novelist, a young sailor, you can disinvite Jesse from your birthday party, not-father’s day, the other Alex, regular Alex, never listened to an audiobook for this podcast, audiobooks when hiking, you wont miss anything by listening to the audiobook, popular long running series, a parody of Starship Troopers, Bill, The Galactic Hero, 45 years ago, Slow Horses, find it good, almost binge watch, fortunately/unfortunately, have a good Nice, new laptop, where Alex works, hear the insults roll in, perfect except the speakers are terrible, Lenovo Yoga, screen is so good, speakers are better, a lot of ThinkPads (but not for good reasons), all instant, $60, addicted to fixing up old laptops, Windows 11 (Tiny 11), the Pro matters, Brave browser, Microsoft Edge, Tubi.com, what looks like an app, no ads, works for everything that way, its amazing, in 7 months, get that Brave Browser going, running it as an app, never tried Plex, ad scammed all the time, Yes, Minister, this is not Scooby-Doo, nice and short, hits so fuckin hard, 79-80, stuff everybody should know about how government and the deep state works, any story in government, i’d like to reform things somewhat, loses completely, the language is amazing, Shakespearean doubletalk, he’s a right-honorable, the gossip network of other drivers, why the bus/train system sucks so much, if you were forced to take it, why the NHS sucks, force the PM or the premier to go to the hospital, truths that people that don’t understand, why govt fails to work, bureaucracy rather than corporations, meeting with the BBC guy, complaints about the BBC, something that is out of date, bribery and scandal runs everything, why don’t you get more female high end bureaucrats, a great idea, the Saudis won’t like it, they all have excuses, this one woman promoted, a really good satire of what is happening now, there’s some great stuff and nobody gets to see it, not on Plex, on the deep schedule, Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson, puts on an alien planet, thinking about it as a writer, you don’t really need to, once you get idea, the Simak story, stuff like that, Bradbury?, as a novelist?, he smokes, the first Amber book, writing it by the seat of his pants, writing skill, that series, Larry Niven, supposed to be famous, Ice World by Hal Clement, Jack Williamson, not sci-fi, Legion Of Space, Gordon Dickson, a lot of series, a lot of repeated covers, a 2.5 hour one, Phil Chenevert, inhabitable planets, extremely young, covered with all kinds of life, should have not had a chance to even begin to develop, paleontology and geology and archaeology, a review or Bleiler?, Dorsai!, the first in a series, with an exclamation mark!, military SF, most valuable, The Genetic General, is maze a verb?, a short story that’s been expanded, genetic engineering, creating super soldiers, pee, look at Hal Clement reviews, Jesse puts everything in, there’s nothing cut, a champion of podcasting, the ones from 10 years ago are an hour long, [The Genetic General was copyright renewed RE0000404051 ], LibriVox, no women in it, Maissa is gonna love it, our base is old men, people smoke in this story, Attitude by Hal Clement, somehow in the empty rift, their captors had not harmed any of them at all, from Astounding in 1943, becoming a Campbell guy, Dianetics, Mission Of Gravity, Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos, Slaughterhouse Five, life is stupid and crazy, isn’t that funny?, not chill, Mr. Sheckley, read by Phil Chenevert, 60s stuff, 40s is good, a good length, The Status Civilization, solid satire, thoughtful and interesting, interesting not just fun, The Journey Of Joenes, The Blue World by Jack Vance, an imagined future, a picaresque, Mindswap, fell completely off the rails, an ocean of terror, another Stanislaw Lem, Neuromancer, don’t get hit by that bus, bought a bombshelter with free crawdads, they would eat each other, arthropods don’t have our values, shoeless mouse people, The Star King, complaints: this is not science fiction, science fiction wallpaper, he can write good ideas, The Man In The Maze by Robert Silverberg, similar to Thorns, a penal ship crashlanded, giant lily pads, forgotten their origin, caste system, giant lobster, monster stories can be science fiction, the latest John Scalzi, The Kaiju Preservation Society, a stuff happens book, how to get metal, they’re criminals, a good Larry Niven, read his as a teenager, Ringworld, the whole focus on that book is about sex, the puppeteer wants to reproduce, wants to have sex, win a name, young nubile woman, we’re gods, its a sex book, they get worse as they go, more than one Ringworld, The Seascape Tattoo, all about sex, the first third, a monthlong break, Louis Wu being kind of a perv, cat-men, the complete list of all of the novels, Protector, World Of The Ptavvs, Lucifer’s Hammer, racist guys at the beginning, just putting his name on, he’s awesome, super-smart, a mean sense of humour, but not cruel, short stories, Neutron Star, early short stories, comedy stories, The Draco Tavern, young people real old SF, how young are these young people?, how the relationships are forged, dubious of young people, no longer feel like a young person, an organization with young in the name, young DSA, middle age DSA, Man Of Steel Woman Of Kleenex, you know the meme, which is a problem, can’t be long stories, is there beyond the meme, the kids comics version, to fully understand you’re going to need to read the book, Inconstant Moon, New Twilight Zone, the dad on Growing Pains?, another tv dad, anytime people quote Shakespeare, God Save The Mark, it was a good one, a perfect book, Outer Limits Season 2 Episode 12, Michael Gross, Michael J. Fox’s dad on a TV show, it’s the end of the world, a woman he has known for many years, he’s been in love with her for a long while, a few hours to make up for his foolishness, good right?, an episode of Doctor Quinn: Medicine Woman, 6 seasons plus TV movies, a corporate law lady who decides to become a public defender, bougie friends, woman professional story, Bess Sullivan, The Trials Of Rosie O’Neil, Ponderosa, Bob’s Burgers, short and lighter, in a two person home, mutual boxes, watching bureaucrats talk politicans out of things, it’s educational, if you don’t beleive this is exactly, ripped from the non-headlines, an anti-West Wing, Yes, Prime Minister, hugely convoluted long sentences, Obamaisms, Joyce Carol Oates giving Obama an award, a better time, for who? for whom?, inflation wasn’t as bad then?, the president had all his faculties, aiding and abetting an active genocide, H. Jon Benjamin actor is Archer, you can rewatch them, character based humour show, Pam, the HR department, a very dumb one, sniffing glue, pushing Picard and Crusher together, that’s not what this show should be about, professionals acting professionally, Moonlighting was a good show, not even a zygote, hatched in 86, became a feotus in 89, she has mammaries, a platapus, what colour milk would it be?, Carthoris, flows beautifully, only one kid, the second novel, each individual entry has a different lead character, Korak, side characters, Tarzan, such a legend, 24 books, 12 Tarzan novels, husbanding them, diminish returns doesn’t apply to economics it applies to art, Young Indiana Jones is a separate animals, early 20th century history, look at art, this is amazing, look at this!, look at this piece, a weird thing to do all day, art The Executioner Of Venice, Harry Lemon Parkhurst, Spicy Mystery Stories, September 1942, science fiction stories, how good are they at science fiction?, not all visual art, fiction, poetry, can’t we just do this all day long?, a pretty good position, report cards, be honest without hurting anybody’s feelings, not here to rebuke you, grading is horrible, learning something, what poetic devices, you’re getting this, it is important to love what you’re doing, hobby business of selling books online, sold to PulpCovers, had you scanned them, two scanners for sale, Herbert Schmaltz (artist), Zenobia, Palmyra, chained up, a comic series, Magnus Robot Fighter, has a nice backstory, stop them with your fists, the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen, another Zenobia, facial expression, Cleopatra by the same artist, boobs exposed, mammals love mammaries, birds other than the evil evil cuckoo, they give them barf, duck around, keep them warm at night, ducks might like you, they’re less like humans than cats are, cats are very catty, their default behavior, not quite individual animals, nothing like dogs, household pets, cats are very different, sometimes cats like you, dogs are loyal at least, pirate cat [Anne Bonny], allergy to her own saliva, saliva cats, lots of hair comes out, kinda wild, do your best, a big Jesse theme, copying Jason Mockman Thompson, he’s got good politics, he’s a dad with a toddler, a twee year old, the city in the distance under the dome, silver key in his hand, so much great art, Lauren somebody, Blue Book, Tarzan: Guard Of The Jungle, better in the pulps, more elemental, with the #LegCling and #KetchupAndMustardGetup, why are they so powerful, the combination of red and yellow, everything means something, reading the original magazine publications, ERB didn’t like to be edited, the sixth martian novel, 30-40 magazine pages, you have to drill down, the only way, the Amazing Stories Annual, the operating room table cover, available as a scan, Frederik Pohl, blew his mind, how come those ones didn’t blow your mind, how come that one blew his mind, a voracious reader, I want to be a science fiction writer, editor and agent, famously unsuccessful at making money, $30,000 in debt in the 1950s, no audiobook, too obscure, no champion, the Pohl estate?, can’t even get a Robert E. Howard biography audiobooked, Mark Finn, Philip Jose Farmer’s books, speaking to somebody who doesn’t understand, that sounds like something you’re saying, Frederik Pohl audiobooks, the Heechee series is not good, kinda broken, the main character is mentally ill, as a kind of a theme in later books, seeing a robot therapist, you can make anything good, fictional robot therapist, ideological objection, therapy is probably a mistake, talking about your problems in a structured environment, insane, hangups about making mistakes, is that true?, double negative, get confused, the whole point is it not?, especially with kids, very impressionable, most people don’t understand how impressionable people are, did it have the effect that was intended, even knowing that you’re being manipulated, offered her food, more dangerous than teaching or parenting, the thing that they know is true, school is prison, the reason that people become teachers, fall into it, a pretty good job, the school district you’re in, being a prison guard is a good job too, painful for the children and the teachers, catbird seat, you’re not going to get fired, teachers can do harm, many students only one teacher, teachers can single out a kid and fuck em up, parents can fuck their kids up for sure, indulging them, get any toy they wanted, how can anyone have this much money, casual with their toys, if every thing goes easy, if every thing goes hard, lift em up when they fell down, say: you’ll live, go superreligious, to fill them full of hangups, you have to come to terms with everything, hell was the scariest idea, let’s take this kid who is acting like a child and get them professional help, you need professional help, a way of saying I’m better than you, there’s something wrong with you, an old man who lives in the basement, big long fingernails and he smells bad, I can’t handle you, I’m going to outsource this to a professional, a master’s degree, how important it is to be thinking about what the kid is thinking about, a handle on their vocab level, a handle on their brain, cloistered, sent to school and sent to after school, we can have a really negative influence, you’ve been wetting their bed, a problem of a being a baby and something go wrong in your life, dangerous, it’s like knives, children are vulnerable to institutions, parents deferring their authority to experts, that living thing came out of my body, especially moms, it’s really really hard, in a random sampling, there are great people in the world, raising both hands, how much of a responsibility it is and all the things that can go wrong, takes your freedom away, spinabifida, drown the kid, a huge mistake, structured talk therapy for adults, talking about your problems, get past or through or around, wallowing, some people make their living, the effect in school, school counselors, what did they do?, becoming more confident, understanding how the world works, knowing who you are, most people don’t know who they are, model, a mentor, a lot of the time the best thing to do is to get outta there, the solution (often) is to not be there, traumas that we experience, that shouldn’t be what you think about all day, get out in the field and fix a boat, people who can help you, just like in the medical industry, milk customers, what do you think?, a number of very bad therapists, this video by Louis Rossmann, very religious Christian woman, buy a lot of scented candles, older woman nearing retirement, underconsidered psychological approach, biofeedback, behavioral therapy, literally experimenting on you, hate to opine, a little senile seeming, skeptical about the DSM, the big book, for the benefit of insurance companies, the laws, their theory of human brains, how things will be punished, constantly evolving, our theory should get better and better, a coding manual for insurance purposes, obsessed with death, as long as six months, these people are not regulated by an ethical code that makes exposure of unethical behavior public, very sketchy, old boss went to prison for sketchy behavior, defrauding medicare and medicaid, measuring, an outside check, an adult who is thinking I will submit to this system in the hopes it will help me, I yell a lot, regulating people’s behavior medically, the dismal science, at least they make predictions, criminologists and sociologists, an ongoing feud with psychology, care about methods, is it an art?, not all artists are equally good, Foundation, a fun idea, Paul Krugman, you’re just hearing about science fiction, predicting technologies, futurism and futurology, a specific Italian movement, Bryan Alexander, going out of business, massive endowments, declining to enter, full of administration, it can be both, it is really bad, do you value yourself more than a broken Macbook, a little autistic, he reads the comments, he responds prophylacticly and after the fact, went to therapy, trying to find a good therapist, online therapy companies, not everybody is the same, there are good therapists, active in looking for them, is there a good doctor, a serious problem, as a child you have no instruments, my mom is sending me to therapy, whisper networks, an adult who knows something, adults that know stuff?, people managing to float by in life, very skeptical of doctors and politicians and everything, Scanners Live In Vain [by Cordwainer Smith], Day Million, Paget’s hierarchy of needs?, Ted Sturgeon, Pruzy’s Pot, a living toilet, Microcosmic God, Gateway, The Voices Of Heaven, a great book for Will, gigantic caterpillar like beasts, he’s good, Kornbluth has a sharper edge, more biting, The Advent On Channel 12, about Disney under another name, basically Winnie The Pooh, feels very New Wave, a little early for the New Wave, prefigured before it happened, where Scanners Live In Vain, The Other End Of Time, the beloved leaders, are these replicas capable of reason?, characterized it differently, seems like a cool guy, Tunnel Under The World, Heechee is so overrated, what it must be, a lot of hype?, preorders are love, look what happens in this story, characters in folktales don’t say I love you, they give each other food, how mother bird feeds its child, I have something in this bag do you want it, I made you like me more, many bad teachers do all the time with candy, a zap, behavior cognitive therapy, you can trick people or manipulate people with praise or candy, the thing that was important was food, everything that’s in there for a reason, a story Connor wrote, finds a dead woman in the bog, she’s beautiful, parents in his head, why are there two parents rather than one?, for a reason, why does Tarzan have only one child?, if it is not for a reason that’s bad, The Brady Bunch‘s premise, evil Nazi scientist, Flesh Eaters (1964), Gilligan’s Island with a Nazi, there’s good thing in it, the dialogue works, that part of the script was well written, so good as it is, a budget for five actors and no budget for a set, a beach, an airplane for one day and five actors, solving problems, applies equally well to essays, passionate about good writing (not chat GPT), as a tool for helping students get through school, it’s humourous, it’s also evil, the corporations are there to maximize profits, extracting value from children from a system they’re unwilling to reform, art stuff is even more insidious, Jonathan did a poll about a robot narrator, publicity, trying to move books, controversy sells books, Chuck Tingle, are they meant to be read?, that fact that Chuck Tingle is a name I know, really stupid, just designed to get attention and publicity, doing life wrong, just talk to Will, we like to talk, spicy takes, he’s got a game going, fears disagreement, verboten!, zees vords!, need Cora here, sounds a lot scarier than it is, not in massive discord on it either, very extreme, tweet dream about weapons, right on, even if it is a dream, taking the discourse to a reality, it’s a show for them, gamestreaming debate bro, Destiny being called a gusano, talking about Mao, subconscious refers to the state as a million dudes with guns, a body of armed men that holds itself about society, proud of ability to record, they have to be done in the first moments, barely awake, a flow state, you can’t record everything, difficult to record, a textual expression of a virtual experience, your roof was domed, decorated not just with Star Trek curtains, Simpsons curtains, tacky admirable Star Trek curtains, not the biggest Enterprise stan, Deep Space Nine, not enough to speak about it intelligently, Enterprise’s entire run, the copyright system, servers full of movies, getting paid still, make infinite copies, mostly laser guns, phaser fights is not the point, a good Star Trek show almost never needs its phaser, those are the worst episodes, the ship has guns on it, very specifically not the point, a more martial show, it becomes a serial show, what it does is excellent, more consistently good, start with a good one, of all the pilot’s that the best first episode of any Star Trek, Encounter At Farpoint is garbage, captain beep, Spock goes haam (hard as a motherfucker), speaking not as a gen xer, Millennial Hunter (2023), his car is murdered by a millennial, kill all millennials, she’s a genXer, a daughter who is a zoomer, working for a big online website, something AF, almost great, this is amusing, meta genre?, clever, Chazz AF, give our listener a break?, a question about H.P. Lovecraft, listeners still listening, popularity waned during the cold war?, Bobby Derie, how old is he?, balding, people in their thirties can’t be balding, solidly a boomer, very useful information, google NGram, broke the cold war up into different eras, levels of exposure, Arkham House, really gets rolling in the 80s, the game, but also the movies, with the rise of Robert E. Howard in comics, Savage Sword Of Conan, reviews of books that are related, H.P. Lovecraft ripoffs, replicated for many other people of contemporaneous period, after life as a skinsuit magazine, a 70s startup, a current skinsuit, disconnected, the Ligotti period in the 80s, a paperback for three issues, a long weird history, there was movies in the 60s, a band called H.P. Lovecraft, what could he think about any of this stuff?, amateur press association, dedicated HAMF, hard as a motherfucker when it came to art, that doesn’t compromise, this is a story about art, sculptors and painters and musicians, even in the comedy ones, his focus is on art, that is unusual, Robert W. Chambers, models and painting, what it means to be original, his amateur press career, not well written, Sonia Green doesn’t have the gift of prose, the story as it is, biographical detail, why stories exist as they do, an old school thing, doesn’t drill down on Lovecraft, the reason she’s going to marry him, she believes like he does that amateur journalism is a good unto itself, I’m gonna fix him, making him able to do art, like believing in blogging and podcasting, download distributed without interference, steal wreck and exploit, Podcast Addict, Downcast, not married to it, the Fairphone, fair as in just, try not to use child slaves, operating on Linux, Framework (laptops), repairable, fixable, upgradable, old piece of tech, the Apple tax, into the playground, all the competitors, vertical and horizontal integrated, the ultimate Apple product will be you in a white sphere that has no buttons and no exits, the Apple car, Apple TV, Homepod, overpriced, google goggle, $2300?, really expensive, make your laptop in your face, artificial reality, just buy a monitor and don’t wear a mask on your head, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 wasn’t cynical enough, see you on twitter.

The Mad Planet by Murray Leinster, Argosy, June 12, 1920

THE MAD PLANET - Virgil Finlay

THE MAD PLANET - Virgil Finlay

Posted by Jesse Willis