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

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

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

F And SF -Journey Of Joenes by Robert Sheckley

SPHERE BOOKS - Journey Of Joenes by Robert Sheckley

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #812 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Soul Of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde

The SFFaudio Podcast #812 – The Soul Of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde – read for LibriVox by Martin Geeson. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the essay (2 hours) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Evan Lampe, Will Emmons, and Terence Blake.

Talked about on today’s show:
the individual, therefore maimed, Martin Geeson, productions up on audible.com, some public property I can privatize, hundreds of contributions to LibriVox, almost all of it is poetry, about art, how to flourish with your soul, why Jesse likes Oscar Wilde so much, amused, a student for an hour, grammar, a deck of cards, images of various objects, leaves and bowls and roses, write a story in seven minutes using six sentences, a really good story, a king, a comb, and a snake, a lot of merit, “IT WOULDN’T WORK BECAUSE…”, a blind king who needed a wife, some tasty food, a mystery, there’s beauty there, Circe, Medusa, the missing card, works in many ways, no intended audience, central to the essay, problems as an ideology, that’s what he’s like, Oscar Wilde is also a fairy tale writers, an essay by Lovecraft’s wife, Commercialism: The Curse Of Art by Sonia Greene, she has the write idea, a case for socialism, the duty of society to liberate the audience, the audience for art, what the audience for a theater’s responsibility is, if the works of Shakespeare were presented as if new, Macbeth, counterarguments, long and rambling and strange, appreciated it, lasting impact, a good intervention, historically useful, by Wilde’s own metric, whether a work of art is useful or not, stories are incredibly central to human beings, society has a huge duty to the artist, he bends the stick too far, messaging the Che Guevara wikipedia page, Bill Maher, annoys in the right way, man can subsist under moral incentives alone, the new man, typical revolutionary, work 36 hours a day, student protests, what they’re protesting about, grieving, girl claims to be stabbed in the eye, shirt that says “Jew” on it, Che Guevara wasn’t, keffiyeh, huffington post, full of slurs, start drilling down, good or not, to tell a story that supports his point of view, we’re not socialists in America, a tenant that was talking to his landlord, the messaging has gotten through, we don’t live under socialism, everything is upside down, an interesting guy to read, in the context of a rich country, imperialist value chains that make British wealth possible, make a transition to socialism, socialist state builders in the 20th century, an immediate end to poverty, if we end poverty, through new machines, the William Morris book, News From Nowhere, a much more compelling story, whether essays can be artforms, designed to convince, an attempt, a try, not be prosecuted for your art, British vs. the French, a control of language on the cellular level, News From Nowhere is not plausible at all, how we got there, a pretty nice way, women do fabric art, men make wallpaper, an essay, his only political work, story is how people adopt, asked to teach essays, only the most insufferable people, the slandering of Che Guevara, A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, undermines bad argument, functions like a story, within it are stories, best fricasseed or make a nice ragout, a series of plateaus, organized with a theme, crime and punishment, motivated by pleasure vs. pain, clusters of ideas, very Žižek in that sense, new paradigm, you can’t argue, counter-intuitive leaps, Terence spoke beautifully, agree entirely, very aspirational, quite beautiful, influenced nerdy graduate student Evan, do history, do podcasts, write it my own way, very juvenile about that attitude, the media, not just accepting the media’s interpretation about what art is, solipsistic, films and series, dumbing down, making everything consensual, why does popular art have to be bad, a democracy of individuals, ignorant schoolmaster argument, he’s in a knot, if this was the only thing we knew about Oscar Wilde, compare it to what happened to him, success and punishment, being publicly gay, physical punishment, a powerful lord, sent into prison, H.G. Wells, doesn’t get a sir, tried the wrong lady, royalty, it’s expected, previous conspiracy, a pretext for sending to prison, non-straight sex, Bill Clinton, he didn’t get punished for his art, lightfootedness, the Popes, the power of kings, a king with artistic sentiment, Voltaire, the curse of the public and their interest through journalism, successful, pandering to an audience, A Picture Of Dorian G[r]ay, a gap between, the abolition of property, the means of production, independent wealthy, a theme that’s in here, kind of, wealth and private property, Lord Byron, they’re not separate, he jumps around, you have to share your toothbrush, doesn’t really define it, the long section on how wealth is a burden to the wealthy, [Andrew] Carnegie’s gospel of wealth, that’s the legal system, entirely about private property, a warehouse is an amazing awesome technology, keep the rain out, books, pencil crayons/coloured pencils, keep your paper dry, personal property but not private, an apartment complex, no idea of transition from here to there, we got there somehow, this great possibility of free expression and individualism, he’s read [Peter] Kropotkin, crafts, automation, nobody should sweep, throw a fishnet into the water all day, quotas of fish, a serious problem with this essay, Will has intellectually warped himself through Marxism, the media does this says this, for what reason, what class do they represent?, the public’s ideas bad?, during the French Revolution, tear down the Bastille, all answered, this is not acceptable, a previous story which controls them, if that story is bad, suspicious of human nature, people progress, people change, how fucked up it was, starving peasants fighting for feudalism, The Third Revolution by Murray Bookchin, bottom up democracy, monarchy, liberals, Jacobins, sections of Paris, met in monasteries and churches, 1792/3, suppressed during The Terror, bottom up faith, Maoist epistemology, communists don’t make history, the masses make history, Wilde finds the masses to be repugnant, their condition, the rebel is good in some way, the thief, those who don’t believe the ideology, resentment is something that makes you ugly, living in squalor and full of hate, accept the squalor, more sympathy for the thief, you should be rebelling, it is right to rebel, it is right to rebel against reactionaries, Chinese factory worker be careful, the western interpretation, who one the Cultural Revolution in the end, too soon to tell, the Lost Decade, vaccination rates, two distinct periods, different factions, boring history, the developmental stuff, chaos, more chaotic than, Wilde’s views about what one’s duty to society is, volunteering to do more work, the barefoot doctors, is that so bad?, extremely useful, artists should be allowed to flourish, what the purpose of artists is, that’s why he’s wrong, all art has a class basis, to paraphrase Mao, the innermost kingdom of the bourgeoisie, who is the audience, the artist is the audience, onanistic, oppression, why this is not a great piece, art or light under socialism, giving you the feel, exactly contemporary, Christology, fun, religious group of people, what makes us so religious, is Wilde speaking to an audience that is Christian, he loves Christianity’s beauty, Catholicism for the aesthetics, Lutheran, the liturgy, aesthetically, a cultural christian, a slap in the face with a fish, Jesus, currently accepted ideology, before the socialist experiments, non-authoritarian, before Freudian type, pain and pleasure, very Nietzschean, robot slaves,

“For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through pain or in solitude. The ideals that we owe to Christ are the ideals of the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists society absolutely. But man is naturally social. Even the Thebaid became peopled at last. And though the cenobite realises his personality, it is often an impoverished personality that he so realises. Upon the other hand, the terrible truth that pain is a mode through which man may realise himself exercises a wonderful fascination over the world. Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk about the world’s worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it is rarely in the world’s history that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world. Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods – Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ.”

on the road to get healed somewhere, conversations with wives of Bath, a reflection of what artists are doing, a symposium of art making, by one’s self, music, one guy with a saxophone on a mountain top, pretty strong, his heart is in the right place, he himself wants his efforts to count towards social reconstruction, the overman is Caesar with the soul of Christ, one of his passions, art, science, politics, manual labour, craft and crafty, fishing, a self-help manual done right, come together in groups, very individualistic, kinda Ayn Randian, against business, against private property, against class difference, everyone a poet, as capable as him, been lucky, everyone can become creativity, more artists, better art, Roger Ebert, frustrated reviewers, easier to be a critic, snobby, Zack Snyder probably says that, why does he bloody show his movies, show to [Denis] Villeneuve and no-one else, a guy recording in his bedroom, stack of DVDs, free passes, free stuff, free audiobooks (that used to be expensive), becoming twisted and wrong, journalism feeding into bad behavior, cultivating an audience in a theater, utube is very big, hate bait, how to breed chickens properly, in that openness, feeling free to not have a popular channel, more ability to share, sharing is something he’s not fully thought through enough, so focused on oppression, the soul of man is art, whatever a soul is, why socialism is important, free us from the oppression of the property relationship, actual physical repression, the relationship is the oppressive thing, the freedom to comment, the freedom to review, if you don’t have your own printing press and your own distribution you don’t have freedom, mimeograph machine, the internet today, hard to find, the system is gamed against it, how bad google is, there but unseeable, virtually free to do that distribution, drowned out, ai art, an imperfect essay, handwaves a lot of this, the first line, we’re individualists in socialism, not making a program to get there, we’ll be freer individuals under socialism, we need other people to get us there, libertarian socialism, charity is the problem, amusing the poor, the accelerationist argument, the homelessness problem, people trying to solve, you shouldn’t do charity, the majority of people spoil their lives, he comes for the charity people pretty hard, this essay has such a humour to it, slave owners being kind to their slaves, let this outrage happen so the revolution will occur, in his back pocket, a program here, not detailed, it’s not for the masses, bourgeoisie cease charity, charity as a virtue, he’s for sympathy, for human feeling, otherwise socialism is going to be set back, it is immoral, the institution of private property, a personal program, under socialism this problem will no longer exist, places to organize, do what you can, Jesse might actually be right, Jesse is always wrong, a half sentence, the people who do the most harm, the charity degrades and demoralized, “Charity creates a multitude of sins.”, a hard argument, on French TV, presidential elections 30 years ago, equal time on TV, the marginal groups are marginalized even further, a Trotskyist, we are plundered, stealing everything from us, a star dancer at the Crazy Horse, stage name, as close to nudity as you can get, discovered by the head of the Crazy Horse, made her the star that she is today, the Marxist, I’m against charity, running for president to bring about the revolution, something sordid about this poor person elevated to stardom, patriarchal manipulation, charity vs. sympathy, property is theft, stealing $2 in the morning, Spider-Man should bite everyone to give everyone radioactive powers, with great property comes great responsibility, the logic of superheros, superheores are trying to stop the revoltionaries, Doc Oc, always some guy who wants to change things, Superman never zaps the president with his eye, judges shall not be impugned, questions in congress, happened for TikTok right now, you cant be super without lots of subs, sub-supers, The X-Men, homo superior, sympathy for Magneto, The League Of Evil Mutants, the oppressed group, the oppressed group, the oppressed individual, no one will have to seek approval, what’ll make somebody an elite under socialism, harvest more wheat?, an asian Soviet with a pipe [Semyon Nomokonov] who notched the number of nazis he killed on his pipe, 9 children and 49 grandchildren, not allowed to have open factions struggles, a war hero, a different sort of examples, Robert Sully Sullivan, played by Tom Hanks, whuffie, the congressional medal of honor gives credit to living people, Ulysses S. Grant, all the previous guys were all WWII veterans, you can’t give that status, Bush I, you’ve fucked up, can you have an elite, people’s who’s paintings you like, sweeps really good, tending to defer, a different kind of culture, this guy’s teepees are the best teepees, this collective, multiple elites, the stupid utube model, unbeleivable popularity, lowest common denomenator, flaming gold Ferrari, attract most attention for revenue, focusing on repairing fans (the things that you make you cool), Jordan U, why does he have 17th phones in his house, paintings on the wall of the warehouse, people who show off their rare book collections, Will’s greatest sin, scanners live in vain, scanner printer combo, the printer industry is superevil, Brother, Martin Geeson doing what Oscar Wilde is saying, unfortunate that Jonathan Weichsel doesn’t like Martin Geeson’s voice, the way to be popular, distracted by the whole socialism thing, a lot of people don’t get it guys, usually advertized without, its right in the first sentence, judging a book by its cover, talking about oppression, censorship on a basic level, people who can’t use words that they want to use, humanreadable, at symbols and upside down 3s, how much more could he say before he is thrown in prison, if the mood was wrong in the country, they chopped off the head of their monarch, restored the monarchy, Oliver Cromwell, if it weren’t for the Irish, Lord Protector, all cavaliers, now, a true leveller, entry points for people to grok things, start with what materials you have, making things easy for people is difficult, Martin Geeson is choosing interesting books, great voice, soul of an artist, valances with Sirius by Olaf Stapledon, the conditions of the people in England, under some social programs?, bankrupting the empire!, sold everything to win that war, the dog with no hands, the soul of dogs under socialism?, similar philosophy, an individualist quality, thinking together, working together, a particular novelist, Meredith, who that guy, Charles Kingsley, an immoral novelist, George Meredith, forgotten, didn’t have any science fiction books, just read Scalzi, The Three Body Problem [by Liu Cixin], The Dark Forest, Damien G. Walter, boycotting the book, the shows, why you have to do homework for this podcast, this podcast has homework, his sinophobia is facile and dangerous, too positive a view of the Cultural Revolution?, bad for science, the traitor to humanity girl, she meets up years later with the three women who lead the criticism and physical action of killing her father, privileged, before they joined the Red Army, able to better themselves a little during the Cultural Revolution, more complex than his propaganda, so empty, goes on and on, 2 hour things by him, you have to go to your death knowing that, did and didn’t, John Vervaeke, we need a new mythos, trying to determine what is in canon, you can’t do that unless you’ve read a lot, more of a media guy, an article, a list of all the women authors of science fiction not usually talked about, working through the canon, Mildred Klingerman, Margaret St. Clair, Judith Merrill, a great tastemaker, seems all right, writes really interesting stuff, leaning on make sure you get your diversity quotient in there, Madagascar science fiction, the same perspective, you can live in Bali, more about American literature, women writers and black writers, percentage, James Baldwin, first queer writer, Herman Melville, obviously super gay, if the stick is wonky, a qualitative judgement, compensating, black writers and asian writers and women writers, because he’s funny, being obtuse on purpose, Evan’s colleagues, eurocentric, teaching cohort, early modern history, too lazy to learn this stuff, we can tell the history of the world through European eyes, teaching world history, not just white European men, not about seeking out a quotient, not being ignorant about the world, people look for excuses not to read, because its propaganda, we all have to winnow, a bunches novel series ever written, Discworld, stuff without depth, not everything is showworthy, Tales Of The Gold Monkey, Indiana Jones pre-wwwii nazis, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century in the South Pacific, an ex-flying tiger, set in 1939, it’s impossible, no active duty until 1942, a hot lady in a hot tub talking to a nazi dressed up as a priest who wants to have sex with a native named Tiki, skin colour, sounds cool, what they called lived experience, their mom and dad were nice to each other, hung up on the wrong things, they’re all books, nobody talks about those, people need excuses not to read, Fearless Benjamin Lay, can we get more diverse than a Quaker abolition vegetarian dwarf who made his own clothes and lived in a cave, bend the stick to far against the liberals, what’s the baby, official commitments to anti-racism, why do you have a police state, the Deep State replaced Richard M. Nixon, the origin of policing after reconstruction, slave catching patrols, police hitting teachers, the philosophy professor being dragged off, sad but hilarious, I can’t breathe, she’s doing a callback, making an analogy to another situation, political correctness way of protesting, arrested and died, knee on the neck, oh you’re all right, fluids to make him calm down sir, heart massage, CPR, if somebody looks dead, we notice he looked unconscious, Evan is missing out all these amazing, give you you shittiest take, twitter is not good for Evan, talking about Reconstruction, the freedman wanted to be slaves again, quite good at governing themselves, Wilde in conversation with Mao, the greatest socialist intellectual of all time, something Damien G. Walter needs to read, Ursual K. Le Guin has a dangerous philsophy, The Dispossessed, not a lot of amazing art happening on that moon, a position of scarcity, post-scarcity, maybe Cuba has great art, musicians, health care, scarcity, internal production is not as efficient, a very small country, is Le Guin doing the same thing to criticize our man Oscar Wilde?, could be in dialogue, libertarian socialist, more liberal than anything else, attitudes towards copyright, for overthrowing the government, people don’t pay attention to what she says, near the end of her life, given an award, speaking about capitalism, a poem quoted in full on BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow had to take it down, The Master by Ursula K. Le Guin, the passing of knowledge and the mastery of tech, how to learn the slipstick, copyright in China, the argument that is always thrown against China is they steal patents/copyrights/trademarks, a serious problem, there’s a long story about the Tetris game, an ideological opposition to censorship, copyright is a form of that, Mr. Shitlib King, breaking copyright, not in favour of censorship ever, socialist/communist society, what’s the difference?, a communist society vs. a socialist state, a good place to be, philosophy of mugs, a really nice mug, spouse, a cute mug, bad shape for a mug, mugs should be functional, spoons, mug with hole in the bottom, a mug, an indigenous mug, made in an anti-imperialist country, handwashing, a mug is a device for delivering liquids to your mug, a cute mug, hence the drips, take a photo of it then get rid of it, emotional sentimental value, not broken yet, Mao would call that liberalism, use it often and carelessly, you should not be upset when it breaks, point in the direction, deception is allowed, the right shape, efficient, homeless guy who masturbated in the public square, Diogenes, u need a lamp, some onions, Louis CK, stoics, in a mugshell, one mug, thank you for everything, thanks for all the mugs, What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown, a novel, Lawrence Block had a book come out, a writer that Block appreciated, a way of getting into that relationship, a halfway important science fiction writer, a writer’s writer, Mack Reynolds, not his great novels, the fuckin system, after 1963 fuck everybody, copyright for 7 years, so it can be useful to multiple people, works in translation, a holdover from the imperial period, he’s cute, he’s funny he’s smart, a science fiction novel about science fiction, another case for the Baroque Cycle, interesting, long, as a long as a story needs to be, sometimes things need to be longer, this essay didn’t need to be 2 hours, why do we have long books, the cost of a credit, subverted, not why Stephen King writes long books, what censorship, he would never be censored, self-censorship, he’s not following the market, he’s 7 and a half feet tall, he’s not Spud Webb, most people who write long books, unnecessary sex scene, fetch quests, Evan went wild, a popular podcast, Geek’s Guide To The Galaxy, side quests, find the G.E.C.K., representing the game, defending it, The Stand, awkwardly updated the setting, the tone, this is here to sell more paper, he’s living life under socialism, he’s rich, people who are wanting to be Stephen King, writing novels, 7 sentences in 7 minutes, they’re wrong, you have to fill a certain number of pages, you have to have a cover, self-identify as a writer, not a real person, a class of people who aspire, doing a disservice by trying to make shorter or longer, when TV shows are about an hour are not confined by a hard number, when not helpful to the story it shouldn’t be followed, longer is better, big fat fantasy novel, wanted to live in that would, what Paul would say, room to breathe, he goes by instinct, develop a philosophy, make an argument, give me an example Will/Paul, favourite really long book Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh, doorstop books, a person’s whole life, a big Russian novel, wheels within wheels, Dune by Frank Herbert, a lot of plot, long for the period, every sequel by other hands, an important density in there, it isn’t room to breathe, it’s long because it has a lot in it, the Baroque Cycle, characters, packed with ideas, denser, despite being that long, the origins of capitalism, money, the scientific revolution, abolitionism, Anathem, Player Of Games, people who love Culture, don’t need Dune Messiah, bring Duncan Idaho back, that’s stuff happening, the guy has no name, the servant has no name, the lady who it is about has no name, ideas can’t exist in characterization, apple show A Man In Full by Tom Wolfe, an idea in it, military SF is more about gun polishing, ideas are central, fully explored in a short amount of space, the writing quality is less important than the idea explanation, the density, how many books I could read in the time I am reading this book, like Evan with women, build up the body count, women are the opposite of ideas, the people who like Dune too much, being immersed in the world, gets your juices excited, he isn’t heavy on ideas, The Colorado Kid, Mike suggested we do The Flitcraft Parable, a scene in The Maltese Falcon, chapter 7, like a fist when you open your hand, when processing it to consider it, Eric S. Rabkin, a really solid book, 196 pages, didn’t need to by 700 pages, Sam Spade is having sex with Archer’s wife, he’s one of the suspects, mysteries are an interesting parallel to science fiction, exploring our reality, in his rambling short book about the Flitcraft Parable, the length is appropriate to the idea, From A Buick 8, complain about his endings, life just sort of goes on, sets up characters as dominoes, eucatastrophes, shinings, the house forgot about its own boiler, not servicing fans?, intimate relationship with his fans, hurried to finish the Dark Tower, an old woman writing him, shitlibbery caused by a desire to please his audience?, Joyce Carol Oates, not normal for people to be liberals in our society, fucking suffer, can’t have a house, can’t have a wife, people are suffering, his fans are not all boomers, an Xer, Marissa likes him, it doesn’t define him, a 70s vibe, he feels the need to be relevant, comes off awkwardly, the Bachman book that was in a drawer, counter-culture vibes, hippie commune vs. the nazis, so not relevant, this old black lady, just show up, talk to the fascists, eucatastrophe happens, they’re mean and short, they have an idea and the character dies, The Running Man, Roadwork, Rage, The Long Walk, weary, just life, this oppressive thing the state is doing to them, questioning the purpose of life and why we’re here, droppin’ dead, a metaphor for life, an oppresive state, about school, the military and conscription, Carrie is nice and short, The Dead Zone, Firestarter on the backburner, in the zeitgeist, boomerness, what does Joyce Carol Oates represent in the zeitgeist, irrelevant Princeton professor, middle age guy, Killdozer, Marvin Heemeyer, Stephen King when still drinking, Thinner, gypsy curse seems silly, experimental in the 90s, the idea idea idea thing, one series, very meta, not like Hunger Games, a fast reader vs. a slow reader, you have to be in the right headspace, The Alleyman by Philip Jose Farmer, COVID doesn’t help, two boosters once, don’t accept injections unless literally dying, flu vaccine, now is the time to do Jesse’s epistemology, he’s a skeptic, have a police incident happen to you, it’s about that for everything, Sextus Empiricus, sense impressions, what’s a heap, suspend judgement, a lot of baby words, retweet a lot of far right things, show me one, nothing, heterodox, Jackson Hinkle, 1776 revolution, liberating Canada, absurdity, already captured, no need to invade, shampoo, how many of the words on the ingredients list can you pronounce, syllables, sodium lauryl sulphate, if your shampoo has more than syllables your children will have autism, putting all this shit in u, why do people do this?, a little discourteous, we know how long people have been smoking, spike it, most people who smoke don’t get lung cancer, that’s the weird part, a Philip K. Dick story, body parts you need to replace, if you can’t pronounce it why are you getting it in your body, there’s a lot of things I can’t pronounce, cancer too, NaCl (sodium chloride), end up in a whole bunch of cults you don’t know you’re in, dem vs. republican a cult, tribal thing, partisanship, demented tribal leader vs. demented cult leader, more cult like, Biden is in control, obviously he is not in control, reading the parts he’s not supposed to read, just defer to better him than Trump, against team bad, you should be against things that are bad, some sort of use for some shampoo, how an average consumer can know, a silly test, properly fund an independent agency that can check, it’s been corrupted, we’re left with the label, the Food and Drug administration is corrupt, Plato, you have feet, you don’t have the document in front of you, the documents exist, evidence all around you, assume corruption is the default, moms abuse, that doesn’t get us anywhere, there’s a mom over there, she’s doing, the shampoo supply is not safe, the stuff injected into your body, you have to buy food, flu shots, they don’t work, they’re full of chemicals, mercury, a chemical, salt is fine, know what the words mean, reading labels, margarine is not human food, lubricate objects, define mayonnaise, chlorine, basic chemistry, who put this shit together, something for sale, preservatives, calcium propionate, water that comes out of the faucet, no industry, there’s nothing, coast mountains, metal pipes (not lead), perfectly good to drink, bottled water full of plastic, advertised to, there water is terrible, the water in Taiwan, boiled water and bottled water, water dispenser, Coca Cola, drink the tap water, water are the ingredients, do what their parents do, who you probably assume are corrupt, maybe his graduate research, follow all his footnotes, bit the bullet, you could question everything, reasonable suspicion aroused, start questioning, bad puppy, cook that puppy, shot that puppy in an ethical manner, we all have to give up our inquiry, big flashing warning signs, recreate all these experiments home, this tub margarine has been sitting in my fridge since 1981, it doesn’t rot, food rots, alcohol is a poison, designed to kill things, sugar doesn’t rot, this is an industrial lubricant sold to us as a replacement for butter, seed oils and vegetable oils, a food product, you can eat industrial lubricant, your mom gave you butter and it seemed good to you, butter is really good for you, you need fat to live, asparagus fats, is this important, she makes a good point here, anything that is not super old, animals, see if they’ll eat it, when set of grandparents, switched to butter, poison that’s for sale, not human food, the coal butter, that’s what shit is, carnauba wax, employed in food grade polish, making food out of it, see you on twitter.

It Wouldn't Work Because by Jesse

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #780 – READALONG: Sheba by Jack Higgins

Jesse, Will Emmons, Alex (Pulpcovers), and Jonathan Weichsel talk about Sheba by Jack Higgins

Talked about on today’s show:
Seven Pillars To Hell, Sheba, 1994, 1963, all the seven pillars into the desert, we see one we hear about two, the temple had pillars, the trail into the desert, temple to Ishtar, Astarte, Venus, a play on Seven Pillars Of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, pre-show jokes, hated this book, garbage, void, fluffy, airport lit, threads would get picked up and nothing would happen, Spanish fascists, Nazis, Hitler is busy inading Poland, part of the rewrite, a great script for a movie, Cain, get better again, cartoon Nazis trying to blow up the Suez Canal, worse and worse, judging it fairly harshly, a good novelization of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, fairly similar, events, Nazi base in the desert, blow up the plane, girl gets captured, trapped in the temple, no supernatural objects, suffered because of that, no metaphysical content, Jonathan is right about that, Casablanca (1942), stock characters, Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, all explained by airport fiction, kinda forgetable, Alastair MacLean but second tier, something lacking, discontinuities, a time jump, fast forwarded through the video, new destination, scrub forward, not Harry Potter style scene based fiction, in the rewrite, every man in the world loves an airplane, show yours, choose only one airplane?, how stupid the premise is, you could blow up a gate, block ships, fucked things up, a secret city base in the desert, I can revise my book, Raiders is kind of a trick, decieved, novelty, perfect execution, tricked us into liking it by being perfect, sequels, shows us the error of our mistake, all stories like this, they have to be like this or they’re the Quentin Tarantino let’s kill Hitler movie, paid attention to the history, biblbical historical supernatural element, blame too big of government, “top men”, Warehouse 13, back to the warehouse, in The Crystal Skull, a way to solve a problem, we can’t have the power of god in the hands of the allies, all the stuff is tricks, superhero villians, so WWII can happen, Lex Luthor has to exist, doomed to fail, stated discontinuities, WWII movies/books, this is not Eye Of The Needle, The Eagle Has Landed, the opposite of tricks, no craft, [Ken Follett], zone off, Will feels that, by the time the plane exploded, ready for the book to be over, just over 6 hours, 4 hours, 2 hour movie, heard how big Raiders was, Storm Island, Donald Sutherland, hates the British, Robert Duvall, the Valkyrie historical figure, the guy with the eyepatch, Jesse’s brain doesn’t work very well, Michael Caine plays a Nazi, kidnap Churchill, whole team is dead, nice Nazis accidently killed a little girl, this kind of genre, something that could have happened, has to fail, a much worse direction, Inglourious Basterds, made a promise of genre, we know that didn’t happen, a wrecking of genre, Overlord (2018), American paratroopers, a black NCO commanding white enlisted, executive order 9981, we changed history, the officer scene, super-compelling, see Hitler machine gunned very well, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, saving a historical film actress, the day Jesus was born somebody shot him with a crossbow, post-modernism, breaking the rules, bending genres, being free of the rules, we’re beyond rules, 1900-1960, future obsessed, fuzzy science, high culture vs. pop culture, meaning is important, meaning is relative and open ended, it will say “yes”, who else would be like this?, Cronenberg, is he postmodern?, The Fly remake, Videodrome (1983), this book is not post-modern, the rules of a promise, if you put a rocketship on the cover of you book you’re a liar, those are bad people and bad books, people will buy it, they’re just liars, man on the run, Hitchcock, pretty good, semi-historical figure, attested to in history, blocks of stone from almost the period, her name, she only exists in the bible, outside of the bible, archaeological hints, scientifically, the rocks, stones and statues, we the reader, metaphor in fiction, an incomplete metaphor, why is it called Sheba?, a McGuffin, it doesn’t tie in, who doesn’t like the way it sounds?, political activities of the Kings of Sheba, Yemen, for some reason Jesse knows a little bit about Sheba, where Sheba is, dispute, two areas claim the queendom of Sheba, Somaliland the empty quarter, Jesse’s brain is really good at background work, The Nameless City by H.P. Lovecraft, Iram of the Pillars, enjoyable, unless you’re just fighting the weather, Salim, a corrupt German (or French) archaeologist, especially girls, they have the up the stakes, human trafficking, this whole genre, Clint Eastwood in a Nazi uniform, make a book out of it too, Where Eagles Dare, comes out of literature, airport style fiction, what your grandpa or dad was reading, cowboy hat, range in the title, a horse, it won’t matter, not a classic for the ages, hanging out with Hitler, going into Hitler’s office, the prologue was fun, should add to the resonance, that old poem by Shelley, Ozymandias, Hitler built a temple to himself, white sam browne belts, we can assume the MP-40s, MP-38, not enough Catalina action, the revision was badly done, a 30 year gap, died in 2022, any other historical errors, there are prototypes man, random bedouins, a hare brained scheme, Ritter had showed up in the desert, we like him too much, WWII movies, girls probably don’t like it as much, Guns Of Navarone, Force 10 From Navarone, good actors in it, murky, the plot is terrific, a great read, more like a Jonathan story, is it worth it?, two genres, A Bridge Too Far, The Longest Day, as close as we could ever come to being in Operation Market Garden, actors playing themselves, a huge cast, capture every bridge, one big push, Robert Redford in a canoe, Anthony Hopkins totally outgunned using his umbrella, actually happened, actual airplanes flying into the sky, late 60s, The Dirty Dozen, 1981, The Big Red One, the end of this era, Mark Hamill, Lee Marvin, a series of vignettes, German and Russian, Das Boot, 100 WWII movies that you’ve seen, Ilsa She Wolf Of The SS, Jesus Franco, a Will movie, Spaghetti, exploitation characters, the prologue reflects on this temple that’s gone, makes it better, this book is broken, ahistorical, this temple plot, combining the two, I hate Hitler, let’s see some Nazis, archaeology, not-competent, the Spanish ones, bored because he’s a courier, trying to carry about a plot, a comedic sense, you want them to fail, not that bright, watching this Cain fellow, an interesting story in there, gone back and forth, meet at some point, until they show up and blow up, a weirdly wasted character, learn how to fly a plane, sea-captain, he’s the Mary Sue, a bastard of a book, it doesn’t meld together, motivation, he’s gotta save the girl, simply in it for the money, $6000, the British archaeologist lived, we just get the wife, the Casablanca element, the Humphrey Bogart character, we’ve beat up on this book, a small axe to grand, no rule against cringe, only black character cannot speak, tried to write dialogue with him, a 1970s movie decision, the loyal retainer, he’s Chewbacca, like a dog, the Somali, the Arab, the Greek, the German, endlessly interesting utube channel, drills down on the history the number of SS legions, foreign legions, there’s an American one, Arabic legions, Danish, they’re trying to setup an international system, the communists, the Romans, not just for propagandic purposes, Spanish Nazis, the Greek Nazi, part of the criticism we can all have for this book, him being a very successful market, seems interested in his subject, generally gets things right, just so happens there’s a lot of men out there, do men think about the Roman Empire everyday?, WWII everyday, wish you were here Paul, building civilizations, empire building, standard sorta male mindset, in reaction to/in spite of, Spanish Civil War was the prelude, can’t do anything that matters, Harry Turtledove, getting out of the desert alive, stuff happens, fuel tank being emptied, the plane they crashed, the MP-40s being a little early, technically well done, stories in the corners, blocking the Suez Canal, drop mines, airport lit fiction plots, out of the desert for no reason, an excuse to getting into the dessert, seeing the queen on the wall, big king with a star of David, the guy’s name is Cain, mark of God cain, a killer, smuggler, pilot, ship’s captain, what isn’t he? real, the mythological archetypal American, very El Borak, Robert E. Howard constructs better, sentence by sentence, Kirby O’Donnel, The Fire Of Asshurbanipal, tsk tsk, bad Jesse, a really good audio drama [blue hours], a lot like this story, Bedouins, a forbidden city, death trap, giant jewel, Weird Tales, beautiful cover, a demon bound to the jewel, puts in the sorcery reluctantly, ancient cursed city lost in the desert, The Curse Of The Golden Skull, King Kull, millennia go by, Lemuria, some guy with a beard, a snake came out of the skull, supernaturally in the curse was upon his bones, that story didn’t sell, more of a vignette than anything else, any sorcerer can be killed with steel, a stout blade is a hardy incantation, the best WWII movies, designed to make Jesse mad, The Notebook, The Great Escape, a WWII movie with Bronson, Come And See, Germans rolling in, very biblical movie, number of tanks fielded and trucks burned, adopted by the Nazi, The Imitation Game, all 19 years old Dunkirk, Jojo Rabbit (2019), Scarlett Johansson as a Nazi, Stalingrad, Defiance, Black Book (2006), Soldier of Orange (1977), maybe it’s amazing, Empire Of The Sun, Christian Bale as a baby, The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946), America has changed so much, looks like a comedy, straight drama, William Wyler, Arrested Development, smiling, get weepy, ironic, the hardest years, Patton, Rescuers Down Under, Hardcore, The Last Run (1971), a play, directed by George C. Scott’s sons, gambling addiction, famous son, rented a huge theater, Jesse doesn’t brag enough, Jesse loves old movies, Letters From Iwo Jima, a pendant to Flags Of Our Fathers, The Dirty Dozen, very of its time, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, much better WWII movies, the scene on the beach, Burt Lancaster having sex with a nice lady on the beach, the meme movie: Downfall, Hitler in the bunker movies, Hitler finds out about x, The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick, an artsy WWII movie, the actor list, a good cast, a cast of white guys, Nick Nolte, directing the war from the boat, on an artsier scale, Life Is Beautiful, one they would show you in highschool, a good movie, Alex just doesn’t like really sad movies, funny bits, a funny looking guy, fun times in the holocaust, not a lot of laughs in Shindler’s List, Jerry Lewis’ lost clown in the holocaust movie, an offensive concept, [The Producers], Midway (2019), Pearl Harbor (2001), the other Bridge, Dennis Quaid, Randy Quaid, the handsome, Woody Harrelson plays an admiral, 3 hour youtube documentary, Woody Harrelson’s dad was involved in the assassination of JFK, Natural Born Killers, Das Boot, the reboot of Das Boot, in the gym, pretty good, adds in girls, an on shore element, girls working for the Nazis, Dutch them, Grave Of The Fireflies, hanging out with the anime Cirsova guys, older, born in 1978, one anime every 5 years, space western anime, Robotech, Casablanca, its basically a play, where do you think the French went?, technically set during WWII, not a battlefield movie, Quentin Tarantino’s top 11 movies of all time, Sunset Boulevard, dead in a Hollywood lady’s pool, Five Graves To Cairo (1943), five stops in the desert, a British tanker, crawls out of the desert, waitstaff in a hotel, based on a play, actual tanks on screen, Nazis come up with unecssarily complex schemes, it takes Americans to…, Robert Shaw plays a blonde SS panzer, The Battle Of The Bulge, The Bridge On The River Kwai, 1957 movie starring Obi Wan Kenobi, a biopic about the actor, a WWII vet, Pierre Boullet, Saving Private Ryan, a good beach scene, the rest of it is terrible, very solid, a lot of movies have plots, Tom Hanks is ok, non-threatening, Greyhound (2020), based on a C.S. Forester, really nice low stakes, a pattern, Jonathan noticed a pattern, WWII battles, wants to be a movie, shooting, hardware, aircraft, support the invasion of Poland, set before WWII, Raiders is not a WWII movie, one of the plans, keep these guys in prison, death march them, some criteria, fill in the holes somewhere, The Man Who Never Was (1956), homeless man, remade it recently, not a better movie, some up and coming officer with a limp and an eye-patch, same plot as Where Eagles Dare, a double bluff, the plans for D-Day, recapture or kill, spill the beans, if they make computer game levels out of it, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, give it away for free, just a multiplayer, The Guns of Navarone (1961) map, Where Eagles Dare, his son said, my dad is really depressed, best WWII movies, high on the list, a lot going on, best WWII movie not on the list, small stakes, not a D-Day movie, get some men off an island, just go around Crete, fixed gun emplacement on a beach, a really good film, tomb raiding book, Easy Go, missed every John Lange book, a lot like Anthony Quinn’s character in Guns Of Navarone, half-greek half-german?, his mother was a whore, before the shore, you never read them, how any of them is relevant to the book except as a title, to tie in as a metaphor, King James, 1 Kings 10, 29 sentences, punctuation, the name of the Lord, prove him with hard questions, the lovely Robert E. Howard language, went back in time, camels and bare spices, when she was come, communed with him, not anything hid from the king, where he told her not, the meat of his table, unto the house of the Lord, no more spirit in him, howbeit, behold the half was not told me, thy wisdom, hear thy wisdom, because the Lord loved Israel forever, an hundred and twenty talents of gold, the navy also of Ophir, almug trees, pillars for the house of the lord, psalteries for singers, all her desire, royal bounty, she and her servants, beside that, in the forest of Lebanon, another archaeological thing we can dig up, she’s just there to show how good Solomon is, inferences, a kingdom in Africa somewhere, Song Of Songs, the two disputes, the pretty part of the Bible, good reading, sexy reading, sexy reading is important, beautiful art, there was good writing in here, bastardized, a thirty year gap, something we’ve seen, King Solomon’s Mines, hokey romance, people shooting at each other, one of the malest books, true story, a very male writer, by and for dudes who watched the History Channel, the WWII channel, The World At War, here’s what’s happening, WWII by tweets, here’s what’s happening in the war, this is what happened, leaving tons of stuff out, Russia invades Poland, leaves out the context, if California invaded Oregon, boats and airplanes, borders that are always moving back and forth, in bed with Hitler, dig into this again, maybe they want to be allies, the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, hidden pacts, we’re gonna defend France, France, we got your back, start with a sketch, forget about the pejorative part of it, drill down, really crazy details, Hitler’s Bodyguard, Churchill’s Bodyguard, protagonist from a men’s fiction novel, a WWII movie, someone on twitter reviewed it, Paperback Warrior, I’ll read that, response to Dial Of Destiny, it is a fun book, explores a part of the world not a lot of books are set in, Arabia during WWII, searching for Sheba, a Lost City with sentient gorillas, a tomb full of treasure, except for that one necklace, the femme fatale shows up looking for her husband, reinforcing the WWII stereotype, Son Of Kong (1933), giant gorilla movie, not a jewel movie, hold the girl or hold the stones, she doesn’t and she dies, Reading, Short And Deep, a Bros. Grimm story, The Woman In The Wood, tap the tree twice, cup of milk, friends with the bird, hollow tree with a door in it, witch lady in there, go into the back room, a table full of rings, pushes past the witch in the little house, the curse lifted, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, this is the cup of a carpenter, lifted straight out of movies, or the Bible, antikythera mechanism, another treasure hunt movie, Donald Pleasence as a Nazi, The Treasure Of The Amazon (1985), Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (1984), Cannibal Holocaust (1980), he’s a lot of fun, topless natives all over the place, exploitation feel, the bag of jewels, just sand, trick em all, gets the jewels at the end, that was kinda messed up, you can just kill somebody, that’s kinda messed up of you, a really cool dude, sounds like a boy movie, based on actual facts that occurred in 1958, Gringo, Bradford Dillman, Marathon Man (1976), Lawrence Olivier, High Risk (1981), Triple Frontier (2019), James Brolin, Lindsay Wagner, Cleavon Little, James Coburn, Ernest Borgnine and Anthony Quinn, drug lord, go to Hawaii and film this movie, good movies that are low rated, Tubi, Midnight Pulp, Shudder, Tubi is owned by Fox, Assault On Precinct 13 (1976), drop everything your doing, Siege (1983), evil presentism, understand, when talking about silent movies, silent films are more work, people don’t like work, half lazy, you’re on an airplane, Thomas Burnett Swann, saying you love farts, Safety Last (1923), The Lost World (1925), that guy’s an athlete, Antonio Banderas, how could you expect a movie from the dawn of movies, 1920, the 1990s is the problem, charismatic, Catherine Zeta Jones, Michael Douglas’ wife, a nice digression, Jesse’s thoughts on what makes a WWII movie, some books are designed to be movies, spec for a movie, the storyboard, why didn’t he just re-release it?, Stephen King, he’s a shitlib now, he had to fix it, he’s not Richard Bachman anymore, The Hunt For Red October, Jack Ryan, TOM CLANCY, dead for 10 years, still an executive producer, Eartha Kitt, Dirk Pitt, fundamentally broken, the girl plot, the promise of blowing up the canal, The Eagle Has Landed, Kelly’s Heroes (1970), 9th novel out of 75, more successful better selling pen-name, a drawer novel, a retelling of Of Mice And Men with a kidnapping, poured shitlib sauce all over it, famously right wing?, both parties are in favour of war, what do you mean when you say right wing, Steinbeck, the distribution of wealth, the ultra wealthy are against the distribution of their wealth, old money vs. new money, JFK to 9/11: Everything Is a Rich Man’s Trick (2014), George Herbert Walker Bush, the head of the CIA, 1963, his middle names, those are the people who run the state, WWI or not, let’s invest in Hitler, Henry Ford, full size painting of Henry Ford, IBM, Hitler used IBM, the Hollerith counting machines, James Tiptree, Shakespeare’s Planet, The Night Land, a lot of wading through a lot of kissing, mostly kissing, pining for kissing, 6 hours and 12 minutes, one is very very genre, one is very very experimental, a long tradition vs. pioneering, fantasy, Heavy Metal magazine, power armour, chainsaw lance, William Hope Hodgson, The House On The Borderland, James M. Cain wrote it, a super-good read, trippin balls, fishing trip in Ireland, a crevasse going into the Earth, assaulted by pigmen, sister is sleeping, his dog turns to dust, Lovecraft before Lovecraft, skulls being boiled, the whole concept of the hero, reject the idea completely, grown, the squeecore, let’s eat food and talk about snappy dialogue, the books that win Hugos, fiction inspired by Joss Whedon, perhaps a little uncharitable here and there, they all have MFAs, go to Clarion and pay the $6000 to be in the union, pal around enough, slip up and say something racist, a real phenomenon, changing your ways, buy a Hugo on ebay, how you gonna stop someone, you could get sued, products you can’t buy on ebay, you can’t buy an oscar, a rocketship, trade her some masters of the universe in the spot where one of her broken Hugos was, Your Haploid Heart, The Werewolf Principle, Project Mastodon, The World That Couldn’t Be, Our Children’s Children, thriving tribes of genderless natives, Gavin Duncan didn’t care, the berries cured mental illness, ten rows of vua, dead friend Gregg Margarite, LibriVox, Hellhounds Of The Cosmos, conflict, internal conflict, peach pie vs. apple pie, just a place and a setting and a story, stories with no conflict, that’s not a story that’s a display, no money for pizza, no problem, The Gift Of The Magi by O. Henry, the pornographic Gift Of The Magi, three wise men show up at the door with a pizza, well after the holidays, original art, who doesn’t like Clifford Simak?, everyone should, the way Douglas Adams, since I was a teenager, the right age for it, doesn’t hold up too well as an adult, get to the fucking point, getting annoyed, flying by the seat of his pants, the concepts are pretty heady, it helps to be young and thinking everything is dull, fun and hilarious, a frictionless surface, old science fiction story, No More Friction [by David H. Keller], Portals Of Tomorrow edited by August Derleth, it feels perfect, can’t stop rubbing it, do a double, Weinbaum is Mr. Sparks, an army psychiatrist, Death By Snu Snu, Weird Tales, psychologically deep, about writing, reality changes, The Hypnoglyph by John Ciardi, how short is it?, page 3 to 15, never ever have to take a show down, the Weinbaum list, had he not died of cancer he’d have been bigger than Heinlein, John Ciardi, actual 54, A Grocery Of Limericks, procastinating projects, Justified, very Elmore Leonard, Raylan, his last book, a cash grab, set in Kentucky, Graham Yost, TV Ontario, a movie family, arcturian space crystal, a cat likes to be stroked, tropism, every surface of the body, innately happy, objects for rubbing, old Chinese medicine, curio stuff, netsuke, chairs irresistible to the buttocks, sexual potency, his last child was born when he was 84, good dreams, the natural tactile organ, it is pleasant, pleasure is absolutely irresistible, I want less than you do, a curious coincidence, poisonous cheroots, do we collect so we can tell yarns, I’ll collect you, a new audience a new opportunity, the humidor, sachets, a terrific story so far, denubian brandy, a pause before the yarn that no story teller can omit, last blast into space, killed the wanderlust, being filthy rich is hardly the worst fate imaginable, an asteroid belt just popping, just an asteroid belt, pure diamond, federation prize money, a hunting implement, a snare, there are queerer things than that in space, a culture was founded on it, you’re not ready to believe, a yarn’s a yarn, that’s what space is, the constant reoccurrance of the incredible, unless you’ve got a prehensile hand and supra-orbital arch, the hand is good for picking things up, examining them, beginning to get ideas, an ungulate couldn’t use a tool in a billion years, that’s the sort of argument that gets hot in space, sidehumans, we didn’t make a report, as if running an inventory, buried in thought, coming up from a caveshaft, over the little polished dimple, the treasure room, what a lovely target I’ve made for a blackmailer, terrans can mate, I seem to be beyond surprise at this point, such lush pickings, still stroking the thing, too sound, reasonably proximate common ancestor, convergent evolution, without a common ancestor, deep space, the polished thing in his hand, to get back to DK-8, the hair and the skin structure, perpetually misty, all tropical, a fur covering, diffuse sunrays, die of suburn, nature always has a trick of trying to deal two cards at once, a tremendously developed tactile sense, their tropisms, it simply cannot stop, down into and over, a tactile science, tool culture, tactile culture, a rigid tribal matriarchy, working up a little voodoo, tactile gratification, they grow incredibly obese, a survival characteristic, such perfect control of their skin surfaces, strangely well proportioned, such hard wood, grainless, a huge seed, something like an avocado nut, extremely hard, then men set them out in the forest, these gadgets take care of all of that, they just can’t stop, the ruling clan of women, the slaughtering compound, his politeness was unfaltering, the men used to have unmanageable spells, hypnotize them, stops thrusting, breeding the life-wish out of the males, hardly enough men left to work the traps, the tribal leaders, new vigorous males, fresh blood for the lifestream, why I came back alone, the only male ever to leave DK-8, never, really, left, it, a puff of smoke, his eyes remained fixed straight ahead, only the fingers of his right hand continued to move, a door swung open, something huge and pale, a very Jonathan story, first sold story Going Native, humans and aliens mating, your cheroot is getting to you, getting over the covid cough, human in a legal sense, no matter how much they look human, anthropologist are busy learning if they can mate, a real challenge, complicated taboos, one species committing genoicide against the other, you like autism, autism in fiction, the OCD, not internal, an external force, The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell, August Derleth, the best of 53, Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Alfred Bester, Margaret St. Clair, Henry James, Anthony Boucher, James Blish, Mildred Clingerman, Clifford D. Simak, every story is a winner, such a good year, in future episodes, Anthony Boucher, a trilogy of novellas, One In Three Hundred by J.T. McIntosh, Earth is going to be destroyed, at least the first one is public domain, the government of the world, now we all gotta go to space, all going to go to Mars, one random dude, the most worthy people, elderly folk has wisdom, Orphans Of The Sky, piloting it from Earth to Mars, they give the rich people the good ships, One Too Many, abusing the comparison, reminds me of Poe, structured like a Poe story, The Cask Of Amontillado, little jokes about it, Behind The Curtain by Francis Stevens, very Poe, very sexual, getting his alien girlfriend a man, not prudish, psycho-sexual, use this piece of wood, a fidget spinner, it saw the future, very autistic, hypnosis is a very 50s thing, reading more David H. Keller, psychological depth, Binding Deluxe, The Little Husbands, a male bookbinders club, they’re all misogynists, of all the men who were mean to me, kinda sexy, Encyclopedia Britannica, one letter of the alphabet is missing, likes to see men tied up, tattoo on his back, turned into books, a subset, always got a wife going on, set in Africa, a forgotten writer, he’s on the second tier, Nictzin Dyalhis, a Weinbaum guy, A Martian Odyssey, a sequel, Worlds Of Weird, The Sapphire Goddess, Slaughter Of the Innocents, Weird Tales stock characters, not written for print, not hearing a strong preference, Sam Moskowitz, The Lotus Eaters, all of Weinbaum’s writing, The Hidden Planet, Donald A. Wollheim, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, need short stories, enough time to discuss, The Sea-Thing, Giants In The Sky, really weird, the k is silent, The Horror Expert, The Man With A Thousand Legs, Mississippi Saucer, The Dog-Eared God, The Man From Time, The Man The Martians Made, The Ocean Leech, a sea-vampire story, The Sky Trap, The Timeless Ones, the pulp crew, the Cirsova-sphere, Asimov’s got good short stories, a boy who speaks with badgers, 1975, is this how you identify, getting into Avicenna, Canadian farm, half of Canadian children’s literature, Owls In The Family, My Side Of The Mountain by Jean Craighead George, makes friends with animals, Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, 5 hatchet sequels, very well written for a children’s book, Brian’s Winter, back to the hatchet, hatchet with a girl, live in the forest as an adult, not into pleasing people, decades, centuries into the future, he’s rubbing a clitoris, super-sexual, reflecting back on petting cats?, the surface that’s irresistible to touch, design work, look good feel good, the whole Ikea thing, as cheaply and with as few materials as possible, paper with a thin veneer of plastic, a pile of paper with a plastic coating, the opposite problem, this design school from the late 20th century, nostalgic for comfortable furnitures, 4 hours versus material, those young bladders can go all morning, Jesse will be talking in the background, solved a lot of the world’s problems, Galaxy: 30 Years Of Innovation, good magazine, a shadow of its former self, each story has an introduction by the author, the scene there, all the authors are living in New York, Alfred Bester wrote a story about that, Roman a Clef, recognized himself and was quite offended, Horace Gold is Galaxy magazine, John W. Campbell, nobody is super-mad at Horace Gold, homophobic fascist!, far right wing, too conservative, he’s a fuckin nutter, The Cold Equations, a reactionary old man, people get hung up, Frederik Pohl’s a communist, when you read C.M. Kornbluth, only 7 pages, she’s never going to be public domain, killed her husband and had no kids, murder suicide, suicide pact, probably definitely a lesbian, we’re both CIA, my husband says its okay, hangs up the phone, holding hands and a gun, Cost Of Living, the first one slid by, that boy of his, would he mature and take his place in society?, always kidding, he’d committed suicide, it would have been great to be a rocket pilot, a different ending, that pisses off author, that doesn’t piss off squeecore readers, the later one is probably Sheckley’s, bow out, the introduction, Jesse loves Sheckley, he’s my fave, this guy was an important science fiction writer, Scott Miller, narrator, Watchbird, autonomous drones that will zap people who are thinking about murder, a pre-crime thing, I’m not going to commit a crime, that’s why you’re dead, I don’t understand why we need civil liberties at all, the public domain version, not today, Philip K. Dick stories, a father a son in a house, future gadgets, some of his novels are meandering, highly influential to Douglas Adams, Mindswap, one damned thing after another, Candide by Voltaire, it came up, the etymology of Candide’s girlfriend, pussyhinge, giant aliens, Micromegas, novella, a long time, low on the battery.

Seven Pillars To Hell by Hugh Marlow

Sheba by Jack Higgins

Sheba By Jack Higgins

Sheba by Jack Higgins

Sheba by Jack Higgins

The Hypnoglph by John Ciardi

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The SFFaudio Podcast #699 – READALONG: The Doomed City by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #699 – Jesse, Paul Weimer, Marissa VU, and Bryan Alexander talk about The Doomed City by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky.

Talked about on today’s show:
Strugatsky, 1989 kind of, 1972, late 1960s, how to classify this book’s publication story, who had read this before, Roadside Picnic, weird late publication, Stalker (1979), 2017 audiobook, the afterword, the introduction, Soviet science fiction, literature in the Soviet Union, Red Plenty, if a book doesn’t have a manuscript, if it doesn’t get read by readers it doesn’t exist, the carbon copy, a book that can frustrate people, not really a science fiction novel as much as it is an existential novel, a role playing game made out of this setting, a worker in a big office building, possessed vending machines, Control, freak your shit out, single player video game, garbage worker, baboons show up, wander off into the North, jump off the precipice, Disco Elysium, strange philosophical conversations, skill tree, intrusive thoughts, weird psychology, hilarious, playing it straight, completely deranged, develop different relationships with people, a meta, did this book remind you of any books?, Dark City (1998), an undefined place and time, 1950s Leningrad, Driftwood by Marie Brennan, fantasy kingdom, squeezed towards the center, City At the End Of Time by Greg Bear, dream-like reality, the Red Building, Cinnabar [by Edward Bryant], M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series, resonance, Plato’s The Republic, The Just City by Jo Walton, The Investigation by Stanisław Lem, the Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer, To Our Scattered Bodies Go, chess board, internal stuff, John Brunner’s The Squares Of The City, moving people around, Charles Stross’ Missile Gap, an Alderson disc, ICBMs no longer work, the Siege Of Leniningrad, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard, The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman, Last Exit by Max Gladstone, the pyramid, A Maze Of Death, Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick, Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer, The City And The Stars by Arthur C. Clarke, amalgamated and reconstituted, a book about art, The Wall Of Darkness by Arthur C. Clarke, Super Science Stories, July 1949, Hannes Bok, Virgil Finlay, distinctive styles, contemplating a stairway and holding a Möbius strip, an Elon Musk style character funds a stairway to see over a wall, awesome story, an Omni story, The Infinite Plane by Paul J. Nahin, Travel By Wire by Arthur C. Clarke, the food becomes poison, the clock of the Long Now [Foundation], left handed food, no comparative thoughts, The Truman Show (1998), artificial worlds, the Soviet context, the heroic stage, friendly with a Nazi, the end, art and culture being the greatest good, the Temple, powerful writing, the Siege of Leningrad, I was in Cambodia, I was in Waco with Koresh, the most lethal, a rival source of power, the Soviet center, the great strategist, playing chess with human bodies, another Omni story, imaginary numbers, math fiction, a Soviet peasant makes a set of chessmen, capitalists vs. workers, enchantment, how chess can be played, it doesn’t matter if your king is taken, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the truth is whatever I tell you it is, angel/alien, a deeply flawed main character, he wants to leave the library, an emblem, not answering that stuff, this is us on Earth here, randomocracy, it’s just happening, the ethnography, Swedes, Germans, Koreans, an American with a cowboy hat, that open time, so global, the existential element, everybody is here, we’re told it is voluntary, you died there, bud, a camouflaged criticism, everybody will become communist, continue the program, lacking geographic specificity, NATO, good branding, if you have faith, there are no kids in this city, a garbage collector to a policeman to the mayor to the president to the leader of an expedition, doctors too?, a lawyer, bricklayer, somewhat failing experiment, it can only be failed, out of control, German efficiency, a classic utopian thing, The Lottery In Babylon by Jorge Luis Borges, a gardener, a response to a reality, you can not fall any further, a stoic philosophy, choosing not to be upset, willing to suffer the swamps, pleasant swamps, 1950s gulag, city/country divide, the farmers, the Truckers this week, coming into the city in a convoy, one of these farmers has a machine gun, we need that machinegun to get rid of the baboons, policies made in extremis, German POWs lodged with farmers, trapped on the continent, we called that slavery, 3rd amendment to the U.S. constitution, the baboon invasion, a metaphor for something, Dan Simmons’ The Terror, leaded meat, going insane, the crystal palace, endless plain, monsters, a premonition, the giant statue, an obvious super-metaphor, Stalin and Lenin statues, William Hope Hodgson, the heat death of the Solar System, The Night Land, geothermal energy, an anti-city, wireless transmission, a horseless knight with a circular saw, a geological force, a 17th century gentleman, existential and talky, a classical romance in an insane setting, there is meaning in images and events, we are not privy, the stuff that is not there, the guy who issues the toilet paper, important notes, committee meeting minutes, a curious puppy, playing the game in his way, giggling at everything, anti-semitism, he gets the last word, he’s the brains of the operation, physically jewish, an engagement with judaism, what the temple is about, producing culture, respecting the intellect, the people of the book, Jerusalem and Moscow, crazy reviews, misogyny, skank (not slattern), a Soviet style phrase, whiny sluts, wankrags for the guys, udders, in the police station, I don’t have that file, we don’t know everybody’s backstory, how could you?, no woman’s perspective, the basic pass on this is they are in Hell, Earth is Hell, capable of receiving pain, if you want to stay alive you have to kill, what are we to do, the experiment is the experiment, the devil god, hunger isn’t the problem we just don’t have enough food, our swedish friend, the military skank, they pickup somehow, everything that’s elided, previous iterations of the city, left incomplete, going downstairs to sleep with her, corrupted, WWII into the 1970s, a story of disillusionment, very Colonel Kurtz, Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (1972), the book begins with shit, the book ends with shit, reflected things, her beautiful white pristine legs, scabs bruises and abscesses, physically degenerating, their will is breaking, a blank landscape allows for deep reflection, Lena on Goodreads:

Depressing surreal social criticism that pretends to be a sci-fi. The parody on communism and soviet propaganda is quite obvious, but the story also takes deeper study of human society and nature. One star for misogyny, disgusting realism and unnecessary cruelty. Moreover authors didn’t give any explanation to the world-building nor uncover any plot’s mysteries.

where the reader has gone wrong, a funhouse mirror, through a mirror darkly, satire makes it sound like its fun, showing us truths, a misogynistic, its already in the world, when the revolution happens, sees the results, the emphasis on diarrhea and dysentery, things start in the gutter, a shit job, simple, available for you to see, the opening was terrific, The tanks were rusty, dented, and their lids were lose, potato husks, the mouth of an unkempt indiscriminate food pelican, a competent cop, it’s going to be gone when they get there, Andre is pretty incompetent, he doesn’t want to understand, haunted by the end, the temple speech, humanities, an astronomer, a sky that has one star and doesn’t move, Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God, the neoterrics, Sandkings by George R.R. Martin, just neglect, the humanities vs. the sciences, the mute mentor, circles, the emphasis on fecal matter, the afterlife, blast away at somebody, there’s no art in this city, all these shitty pulp magazines, no great writers, no great poets, a complaint, they’re not here, in the outer world, always in development, a very meta-book, its hard to write good art, are we writing good art?, a book review inside of a book, showing television in Robocop (1987), a condemnation of society, abundance riots, Nazi art, I don’t understand anything, reveal the truth about their world, the truth of the Red building, all will be revealed, nope, the authors know what they’re doing, Roadside Picnic [Stalker (1979)], Swiftian misanthropy, American conservative literature, apes and monkeys as a critique of Darwin, that realistic, that bestial, casually fucking in the streets, monkeys, an incredibly dark view, aren’t we?, a fishtank, to quote Marlowe, a decisive ending, raising our science fiction and fantasy hope, a meta-science fiction book, not a fantasy, following the rules, fantastic, Exhalation by Ted Chiang, Plato’s The Republic, H.G. Wells’ The War Of The Worlds, crappy adventure stories, later you became obsessed with it, the strivings of a story like The War Of The Worlds are to put us in our place, this is what you really are, have yourself humbled, we are humbled, a mimetic sense, what would we do if we were placed in this very strange RPG, more shit is around the next corner, worship at the temple in the crystal palace, William G. Shepherd, Omni, Discovery, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, is that the best we can hope for?, a minority adds to and maintains the temple, the temple persists, participate in keeping the temple going is a great way of life, six months of a magazine, nobody’s going to look at them, a friend in Australia, the little builder, somebody else’s job, its not Jesse’s job to put Jesse’s statue up in the temple, his job is to polish the temple steps, and point people in the right direction to find the right book inside the temple if they come by, maybe call them in from the street, no donation needed, they walk by and spit on Jesse, coral reef, all of our art, if you’re not creating, hiding hoping the squid doesn’t eat him, Jesse the clownfish, Hemingway, drunk, pedophile, Dostoevsky was an extreme right-winger, the temple creators are flawed, the canon contains shit but it has beauty within the shit, horrible creators, whatever politics is now, cancel culture, the pederast Tchaikovsky, thief and gallows-bird, O. Henry was an embezzler, Ezra Pound, open fascist, defender of the Soviet Union, defending human rights abuses, the temple that endures, whatever flag people are waving, holding up the flag, wearing a flag is an act that is very different, planting a flag on your house, when the flags come out, in division, this doomed city, it’s important, nationalities are incidental, all united as doomed, yesterday’s enemy, when you strip them of the flag, this kind of work is important, a suggestive sketch, points it’s making, high poetry, as an aesthetic way to be, endings are disappointing (usually), where it takes you to emotionally, did he shoot himself?, he met himself and he shot himself, it’s left open, capable of killing the best person we know, capable of self destruction, capable of destroying other human beings, he pulled a pistol out of the holster, tall tattered exhausted with a dirty beard, a return shot, he doesn’t check his cap, not being able to recognize this other, a mirror, he’s shooting himself, sitting in his tent, all the possible things he can do to avoid what needs doing, how you maintain discipline, these are animals, the traditional way of doing it, The One Black Stain by Robert E. Howard, Solomon Kane, Sir Francis Drake, Magellan, returns to England, you can now murder people because you are a chief of an expedition, the maritime tradition, they are the law, they can marry people, the dominant navy on the planet, unless you’re a pirate and have signed the articles, a precedent, you’re a bad person, you’re a coward, the Golden Hind, head in hands, wracked with doubt, the misery of having killed a friend for a wrong reason, we put ourselves in these Hells, regretting or doubling down, I didn’t choose to be here, nobody explains how the , no authorial infodump for us, the anti-Neal Stephenson, the thermodynamics of the big wall, deal with it, what does it mean that the sun is off, is it a coincidence?, is it a sign?, about to become a dictator, the Russian kitchen drinking scene, here it is, they’re all completely disagreeing with each other but not actually coming to blows over anything, it’s just talk, pretty deep, not something we see in American literature that often, written about drinking, F. Scott Fitzgerald, a manly thing to do, a classy thing to do, very realistic, all the russian drinking, before the blackout, the snacks, all the stages of inebriation, a positive, a bright spot, the party, Raymond Chandler, a rich guy drinking himself to death, set in Los Angeles, blendy, Dashiell Hammett, hiding the truth of reality by drinking, Mike Hammer, American detective stories are about uncovering reality, that guy was beating his wife, somebody died, his daughter killed herself, hiding the truth through alcohol vs. a communal defiance against the reality they already acknowledge, the vomiting, more thoughts, Herodotus on the persian court, Peter the Great, the drunken synod of fools, Stalin plying with vodka, in vino veritas is legit, WWII, Churchill couldn’t go 2 weeks without his prescription alcohol, Nixon drunk, Yeltsin, russians thought he drank too much, Voltaire’s conclusion Candide, a dark russian take on Candide, zoom out a bit, one last russian thing, awkward conversations, the extreme opposite of Frank Herbert’s conversations, it’s painful to read, I don’t understand what you’re saying, the dialogue is very fun, pulling out 10,000 quotes, a commonplace book, self-journal, write down your dreams, a diary is very narcissistic, what twitter is for Jesse (a commonplace book), Paul’s Miscellany, whoever exercises power, man has to have a goal, hence the expedition, hence the experiment, we’ve got to do something, general outrage, goals and enemies, very easy to be uncharitable, words on a page, you don’t need to be outraged about everything, a set of beliefs is dangerous, a blob of ideas I’m currently carrying around, squish some of them, taking a model of what someone else is saying, how other people’s mannerisms work, ongoing public conversation, these vast swaths of people who comment, a massive list of comments, they’re talking to themselves, this is what you do because , when you see Jesse on twitter it’s because he has to wait 15 seconds, in the before times (pre-covid), monitoring mentions, believing in the conversation, great for connecting with people, a really interesting bookshelf, detecting outrage, plugins, moderate your anger, road rage is like twitter isolation, indistinct, a look of concentration and fear (or don’t), this person is the worst human being in the entire world, essentially bad drivers, perfectly nice people, an excuse for it, it’s hard not to be a hypocrite, how good is that narration?, he had a voice for everybody, good show, good take, by special request of Chowbacca, a random twitter guy, exactly, a fan of the show, looking forward to everyone’s thoughts, thank you so much @chowbacca415. make the temple as pretty and nice as possible, the temple is a library, trucks being impounded, ready when you are, Mentor, Mentor is actually Athena (in The Odyssey), how to deal with Circe, some of the characters are on hands experimenters, Touched By An Angel, like Quantum Leap but for christians, make things right, a science fiction explanation, mentoring, pedagogy, the last words of the book in russian, stacks of firewood, there’s a lot of burning to come, a demon or a devil, Athena’s hobby horse for Odysseus, he’s the wise and wily one, Heracles gets a special interest from Zeus, as a psychological story, Nietzsche, no psychological depth, Get Smart, cone of silence room, a black room, an anti-room somewhere in the house, there’s a metaphor there for you.

The Doomed City

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The SFFaudio Podcast #688 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Niels Klim’s Journey Under The Ground by Ludvig Holberg

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #688 – Niels Klim’s Journey Under The Ground by Ludvig Holberg; read by Alan Winterrowd

This unabridged reading of the story (3 hours 45 minutes) is followed by a discussion of it.

Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Evan Lampe, Will Emmons, and Connor Kaye.

Talked about on today’s show:
1741, Latin, 1845, underground journey, great Latin accent, difficult, funny stuff, interesting physics, satire, the midway point, old books, Edgar Allan Poe didn’t have electricity, nobody had a typewriter, a whole century before that, the farther back in time, upfront heavy lifting, explaining Elvis, a k-pop star from the Southern United States, girls go wild, in the tree society, not discussing the nature of God, he becomes a baron, Catholicism, anti-Catholic remarks, Denmark, the Holy Trinity, intellectual Catholics, upperclass twits and fashion, a criticism of Danish society, sick of religious debates in general, the book with the book, a book review of the book you’re reading in the book, a satire of travel literature, wild places, the unknown, to the center of the earth, The Goddess Of Atvatabar, how old this inner world concept, different physics, City Of Endless Night, in orbit around a sun at the center of the earth, another planet (a ball), he was treated like a comet, blown back through the same hole, the firmament, the opposite crust, a meta-argument, we see them as the heavens, balls all the way up, 2021 North America, and Australia, and Taiwan, causes eclipses on the world of the Firmament, their planet turns away from the sun, two hollow Earths, a donut within a donut, in 1740…, what Galileo and what Newton is doin, we haven’t seen out planet from a larger perspective, he big dumb object that is the planet earth, dumb in the sense of stupid, tigermen, monkeymen, treemen, the trees take his blood, they put branches on him to help him fit in, the Enlightenment, Cesare Beccaria, the prison reformer, capital punishment, criminal justice, people having different humours in their blood, making fun of it, utopian aspect, Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, they star the same way, Mardi by Herman Melville, The Fall Of The House Of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, a Poe poem, the sentience of all vegetable things, colocation of stones, fungi, reduplication, they got up their own asses in terms of rationalism, travel narratives, duplicated, our books, the mental existence of the invalid,

Our books — the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid — were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D’Indaginé, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favorite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorium [[Inquisitorum]], by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and œgipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic — the manual of a forgotten church — the Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae.

a prequel to an underground world story, The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket, these are bullshit books, alchemy is bullshit, what we do at the FDA now, peer review, a council of elders, Benjamin Franklin, the Royal Society, secret locked cages vs. done publicly, methinks thou do protest to much, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, sniffing out bullshit is hard for most people, why Poe has Usher so fucked up, he doesn’t leave his estate, through books, out the window, only testing books against other books, Sir John Manderville, Marco Polo, outlandish [bullshit], people with their face on their chest, Antonio Pigafetta, talking about Maoris, you’re a peasant, weird consulting, why is there so much in Science Fiction, exogamy, incest is what you do when you’re up your own ass, keeping money in the family, trying to breed traits, Roderick Usher once went to school, the Poe figure, dude, you went to seed quick, he doesn’t have the light of the sun, we need the stars to tell us where we are and what we are, other kinds of underground books, a really big thread in science fiction, the inner psychedelic journey, a nation of sensible tigers, the musical instrument people, the subtitle:

“being a
narrative of his wonderful descent to the subterranean
lands; together with an account of the
sensible animals and trees inhabiting the
PLANET NAZAR AND THE FIRMAMENT.”

you get what you paid for and the people who are like viola, play a viola at them, they play themselves, types of people you hang out with, musicians, the priests, special areas where menfolk were sent and grew fat and smooth, monasteries, cannibals,

“I have a kind of suspicion that the Europeans are cannibals; for they shut large flocks of healthful and strong persons in certain inclosures, called cloisters, for the purpose of making them fat and smooth. This object seldom fails, as these prisoners, free from all labor and care, have nothing to do but to enjoy themselves in these gardens of pleasure.

big protestant comment, not exactly Ents, don’t be hasty, let’s think this through, they have Entwives, we can go one further, a guy with a heart in his leg, a recurring theme, rape comedy, put on trial for rape, a Dutch hotel, Italy, sleep with the innkeeper’s wife, a comment on Italian hospitality, the Spanish sleep all day, he’s attacking everybody in Europe, fragment missing [Denmark], the crown scepter, he’s burning everybody, he criticized the German language, the main verb goes to the end, Mark Twain, good for jokes, Norwegian, The Bridge, why Pete Buttigieg can speak six languages, an empty title, the language of this land, the whole land is called holy, the continental augmenter of his country, invincible notwithstanding he is sometimes slain, worth reading the whole book just for this section, the famous Voltaire quote, a running joke, Charlemagne, one Mark Twain quote, people will quote stuff change all the worlds and attribute it to Ambrose Bierce, why wouldn’t it be Twain?, don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story, the monkeys with the wigs, the Australian and Canadian judicial system still does wigs, they gave him a fake tail in their descriptions of him, the book follows a pattern, he gets run out of town, a series of episodes, Candide by Voltaire, a monkey sequence, picaresques are for lower class heroes, Huckleberry Finn, rough and dishonest and appealing hero, a deacon who used to be an emperor, Jack Vance, low class, low brow characters, incidents, comedic, not a novel though novel lengthy, active vs. passive protagonists, it is active but doesn’t seem to be, just surviving, he changes the world, when a little kid writes copyright on a story for their mom, why would a little kid care about that, there is no international copyright, the printers are the ones who make money, a pension for life, he takes wives later, he draws the line at lioness wives, the men own the women but by social custom the women are run by the men, the woman runs the house so the man has to go the club, co-equal slaves to capitalism and there is no domestic sphere, the house sits empty all day long, so far before electricity, they’ve got gun, telescopes, printing, if you want to see something printed you have to go to a printer who writes it backwards on a piece of metal, why printed up in volumes, where the word “subscribe” comes from, comparing Donald E. Westlake to Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, you go to Bath, by the author of…, you put your name under, “preorders are love”, “likes are love”, write me a hate thing, tell me how I suck, the true measure of success, angry comments, you’re boring, bitcoin and supermodel asses, flashy mics and spinning gifs, the upload takes a long time, 500 episodes, if its easy do it, what Baron Ludvig Whatsiname, he would have been happy to have been abolished, meritocracy, distinct from Europe, earned the pension, Ben Shapiro talking to Joe Rogan, The Rise Of Meritocracy by Michael Dunlop Young, what Hillary Clinton thinks they’re in, we earned what we got, 1958, Obama looked down his nose at Biden, you’re not one of us, an aristocracy, parents wanting to get their kids into an ivy league school, it effects our reality, a student bragging about being a billionaire, Hannah Arendt, not technically a meritocracy, a youtuber, the different societies and cultures we’re seeing, plays, essays, poems, history, exploring how societies could work, the tree society, the women have too much equality, maybe we could improve the life of women, is he named after a real person?, in the fiction of the story he’s a real person, just graduated from seminary (college), the ending, the Wandering Jew , his crazy king getup, Jerusalem, Prester John, like a time traveler, the Flying Dutchman, wanting position, I’m a king here, John Smith with Pocahontas, how you got rich, people are interested in you, you are a weird celebrity, a nobody, given honors, revolutionize cultures, rise to power, feeds the fantasy, when you go to a foreign land and you eat a food, worried about Canadian culture (in opposition to the United States), food is a technology, a bowl of fruit, cheese is a technology, all technologies are copying, Newcomen’s steam engine, incest vs. exogamy, take you lumber to Scotland and they give you kilts, Pasta is not that interesting but getting silk out!, why India happens, movin that product, how people work with knowledge, you heard the news?, its built into us, its bullshit, not everything that you hear is real, reinforcing the bullshit detector, Star Trek, mad at the guy with the opposite tan, The Wheel Of Time, the travel genre, episodes, no overall massive goal, The Canterbury Tales, Jason And The Argonauts, Medea, an old genre, The Epic Of Gilgamesh, waiting for the complete volume, very interesting, some really funny bits, he acts the same way, Twain would have read a lot, what version did Poe read?, Poe in Scotland and England, why isn’t there a really good Edgar Allan Poe biography?, an alcoholic or not, he was a drinker, the Army of Northern Virginia, 3.5 hours, immensely more enjoyed, too airy fairy, above The Goddess of Atvatabar, The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer Lytton, flying armies, the illustrations in both, The Mound by Zealia Bishop and H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Shaver, 1943, as true as Scientology, I Remember Lemuria, Amazing Stories, Ray Palmer, in the guise of fiction, “rock books”, like Joseph Smith, a branch of SF, like prions, mystical, good SF should challenge you, bad SF converts you into some whackjob who’s breathing though his nose to get more Vril power, fans are Slans, I have access to secret reality, these were popular because they had a quasi-true story thing about it, the letters column, the UFOs are Real, now that Space Force is a thing, ball lightning has been around long before space force, UFO means spaceship for most people, what an alien would say, I’m a lizard man from beneath the earth in Los Angeles, why are these guys arguing so much, rationalists are nice people but I wouldn’t let one marry my daughter, like a part of a cult, you’re either in a cult or you’ve just broken through the cult you’re in, what Michio Kaku purports to do, more elegant but still untestable, prayer, which would you rather have as a worshiper: a guy who follows all the edicts of your divinity and almost never asks you for favours or a guy who is always breaking your edicts but is constantly asking for favours?, understanding prayer, praying in my presence, god is apparently telepathic, praying in a language you don’t understand, prayer wheels, we know what we’re doing, why Robert E. Howard’s response to the Tibetan monks is The Black Seers Of Yimsha, unless its there to remind you of something, community, why is prayer intoned if God is telepathic?, your community can go insane, the First World War, go in the meatgrinder, don’t hang out with those ladies, go live into a cave, the sex strike in ancient Greece, the chicken feathers, we wont bang you if you don’t go into the meatgrinder, Lysistrata, war is a community activity, go to the trenches, you can make community with dead people Voltaire is my guy, he’s saying things that are in your head, “A friend is a second self” -Mark Twain, you want to hang out with Socrates, he’ll get you into trouble, have a symposium with, Alcibiades is hot, have a cat, The Midwich Cuckoos, Paul is going to Worldcon, triple vaccination, a super-spreader event, what screed has been nominated?, two dumb tweets in a row will get you unfollowed, down on the tweetcount, getting canceled, the secret is to only tweet about things that are universally appealing (cats), tweets about a slave to the COVID gods, masks are redundant in Taiwan, foreigners tend to be bootlickers, a nice hot take, Cold War on both sides, pro-China, a decent job and a hot date, they’re Neils Klim, there’s no Kentucky Colonels around here at all, Nebraska has a navy, so many chicken jokes, knighting people, giving them away like candy, the Congressional Medal Of Honor, as soon as you have a president putting a decoration around someone who isn’t one of the elite he now has power, having a beer with Obama, you’ve just given a sergeant power, real honorifics, Sergeant York, Audie Murphy, if they’re not on board….

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The SFFaudio Podcast #652 – READALONG: Farmer In The Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #622 – Jesse, Paul Weimer, Maissa Bessada, Evan Lampe, and Trish E. Matson talk about Farmer In The Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

Talked about on today’s show:
1950!, serialized in Boys’ Life, August – November 1950, its about farming, Ganymede, there’s no bad guys, there’s no conflict, no villians, boy against nature, father son conflict, annoyed at the annoying people, takers and bureaucrats, less bureaucracy hate than usual, a little lecture, the senator got him in, ultimately they will fail in life, the evolution in action argument, who is financing all of this, self-financing, the meta-economic stuff, Tunnel In The Sky, a Star Trek episode, boy and girl scouts, girls do something, Patty was a hard ass bitch vs. Patty was competent, Mrs. Schultz, in the domestic sphere, a big surprise, he chooses not to go to school, subversive, very unHeinlein, so scouty, we’re improving, were becoming disciplined, were footsoldiers for empire, a number of surprises, the twins are going to go to Earth to go to school, the Turner thesis, the frontier, why school is not necessary, so much about scouting, when the frontier was already closed, middle class, progressive, urban America, the Baden Powell scouts, the Boer War, you get to shoot at people, what little boys want to do, go out in the woods and hit things, a special two finger salute, listen to the older boys, Brownies leveled up to Girl Scouts, that Euro American tension, the Malthusian logic, pressures back on Earth, building colonies, like America up to the end of the 19th century, the progressive era, Jeffersonians, the Louisiana Purchase, Lions Clubs, Kiwanis, Elks, civic organizations, Paul was born and raised in New York City, I get to wear a belt with a pouch on it!, you have to buy your own uniform, you buy those badges?, you have to earn them and then you have to buy them, I need comics, swear allegiance to the queen, the motto or slogan, god and country, scout rallies, jamborees, an organization what was quasi-paramilitary, get involved in the community, the cadets, air cadets, sea cadets, ROTC, being a grunt digging ditches and burning latrine shit, a career resume, how to become elites, gliding in gliders, pushing people into a system of rank and authority, this is a scam, how did Evan get out of this cult?, I’m going to get my merit badges, coincidence, making our hero a hero, when the meteorite hits the spaceship, alien artifacts on Ganymede, a pro-Scout perspective, he’s lost so much, Peggy has been lost, he’s gonna get Gretchen, bothered by poor Peggy, poor Poddy, killing off the girls, somebody needs to be refrigerated, Paul, replaced with twin boys, they literally do Scouting, field patrols, some doofus on a tractor, they help old ladies across the road, can-do, he wore his uniform against his skin, his bones are in the scouts, appendicitis, be interactive in the world, pull out your whistle, what those merit badges are for, start fires when your plane crashes in the middle of the woods, exemplifying the Boy Scout mentality, go back to the meetings, very American foreigners, the Japanese Scout, Douglas MacArthur Okajima, a Russian kid, the German family next door, the triumph of the American future, a super-dystopia on Earth, this apartment didn’t have any windows, burning the dinner plates, a bad PKD future, Evan was triggered by Malthusian Earth, the Population Bomb, that horrible Star Trek episode, worked for China, too many people, 55 million Californians vs. 39.5 million, the stores have food, wrong about all sorts of stuff, the only version of birth control humanity will ever have is wars, Heinleinian old men characters, one of them is growing a beard, you did your calculations all off screen bud, what drives Jesse up the wall about Heinlein, how often an alignment of Jupiter’s moons, just because it was cool?, a Ganymede quake, Mars and Venus in alignment, earthquakes and tidal waves, astrological implications, what’s missing from this colony is religion, no churches, for a frontier society it is a giant lack, the good salt of the earth colonists, deliberate, they bring it into the war, if the colonists did it on purpose…, nobody else is talking about it, a deliberate oversight (choice), respecting silly traditions, that’s just how people are, they’re all scouts together, that’s their religion, Golgotha, he gets the tractor and smashes Golgotha, Armageddon, the only tree on the planet is an apple tree, and they chop it down and burn it, The Most Beautiful Tree On Ganymede, we did not bring weeds, a lot of things to like, ecology, we know what we’re doing, rabbits, dumb it down, weeds are anything don’t want, marijuana on Ganymede, impressively self confident, got rid of lockjaw, how agriculture is these days, GMO seeds, a broader issue, if you don’t know why you need clover, the scene on Ganymede vs. the scene on Earth, an immigrant lens, the space border, the boys dorm, endless food, food porn, a couple of hints, another very boy scouts sort of scene, captain’s mast, Star Trek Voyager, Tuvok gets promoted, Paris gets demoted, 30 days in solitary confinement, the federation is a nightmare, all of the food was not treebourne, ground food, strawberries, hand pollinate, their bees cant fly,

Listen to this: For breakfast we had corn cakes with syrup and real butter, little sausages, real ham, strawberries with cream so thick I didn’t know what it was, tea, all the milk you could drink, tomato juice, honey-dew melon, eggs—as many eggs as you wanted.

There was an open sugar bowl, too, but the salt shaker had a little sign on it; DON’T WASTE THE SALT.

There wasn’t any coffee, which I wouldn’t have noticed if George had not asked for it. There were other things missing, too, although I certainly didn’t notice it at the time. No tree fruits, for example—no apples, no pears, no oranges. But who cares when you can get strawberries and watermelon and pineapples and such? There were no tree nuts, too, but there were peanuts to burn.

Anything made out of wheat flour was a luxury, but you don’t miss it at first.

Lunch was choice of corn chowder or jellied consomme, cheese souffle, fried chicken, corned beef and cabbage, hominy grits with syrup, egg plant au gratin, little pearl onions scalloped with cucumbers, baked stuffed tomatoes, sweet potato surprise, German-fried Irish potatoes, tossed endive, coleslaw with sour cream, pineapple and cottage cheese with lettuce. Then there was peppermint ice cream, angel berry pie, frozen egg nog, raspberry ice, and three kinds of pudding—but I didn’t do too well on the desserts. I had tried to try everything, taking a little of this and a dab of that, and by the time desserts came along I was short on space. I guess I ate too much.

so good at it,

The first supper was mushroom soup, baked ham, roast turkey, hot corn bread with butter, jellied cold meats, creamed asparagus, mashed potatoes and giblet gravy, spinach with hard boiled egg and grated cheese, corn pudding, creamed peas and carrots, smothered lettuce and three kinds of salad. Then there was frozen custard and raisin pudding with hard sauce and Malaga and Thompson grapes and more strawberries with powdered sugar.

Besides that you could drop around to the kitchen and get a snack any time you felt like it.

lumberjack food, tilling the fields, planetary disaster, on a scale that’s hard to replicate, rain and snow, sublimation, Fritz Leiber’s A Pail Of Air, the bowels of a skyscraper, endless layers of blankets, an amazing story, if you’re Pluto, Titan’s atmosphere, liquid methane or nitrogen lakes, from its semi-terraformed state to its original state, -70 fahrenheit to -20 fahrenheit, this is an awesome book, the tacked on ending (was good!), the whole sister killing thing, the father – son conflict, Anne and George, call me Bill, a modern civilization thing?, he calls him Dad to us, he addresses him as George, a formal relationship, never?, you knew her name but you never used it, if you want to make a point, just mom and dad, almost never, running a business, focuses the relationship with the customer, its about power, you get a name before your parents get name, if certain circumstances apply, maturity and growing up, being a caregiver to your parents, asserting power, he’s right a lot, his dad is an incompetent cook, wasting rations, he lapses, growing up with depression era parents or grandparents, the household books, little Billy’s bike got a puncture, everything gets recycled, you scrape that bowl to the bottom, money doesn’t grow on trees, I just want to have an allowance like all my friends, that Golgotha rock, the same thing happens to his uniform, the rubber pillow, it was all rags, he cut off all the badges but he threw away the uniform, a home-made patch, imagining a sash, symbolically interesting, his merit badge exams, a maturing metaphor, the Soviet WWII veterans for VE day, so many badges they have to put it on both sides of their chests, grade inflation, give em another badge, I’m subverting the boy scouts, man, you can just be a farmer, Evan Lampe needs to do a Heinlein readthrough as a podcast, themes and hobby horses, like Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft, Between Planets, who your audience is, older and later?, Blue Book Magazine, not the onlt thing he wrote for Boys’ Life, Tramp Space Ship, the literal inspiration for Tribbles, Flat Cats, Space Family Stone, The Rolling Stones, a space opera radio drama, a used space ship, industrious children, Europa is next, Pigs Is Pigs by Ellis Parker Butler [not O. Henry], an unlimited amount of guinea pigs, hence the tribbles, Tenderfoot In Space is set on Venus, Tenderfoot -> Eagle Scout, you can wield a hatchet without killing anyone, the new scout handbook, all girls troops in the BSA, not a merger, trans scouts of America, atheist scouts, a list of things scouts need to be, you cant be reverent if you’re irreverent, a vocal atheist, tiger cubs (kindergarten), early indoctrination, Red Dawn (1984) is a very Heinleiny movie, strong women still subservient to the men, no line marriages, the Mongols, Cubans parachuting in to Colorado, the Nicaraguans and the Cubans take over the United States, they can camp all weekend, you’re never gonna catch my sons, out there in the woods and they are Eagle Scouts, a weird analogy for Afghanistan, the North Koreans invaded the United States, for movieland reasons, an Australian remake of Red Dawn [Tomorrow, When The War Began (2010)], we people of the hardscrabble lands know how to take are of ourselves, obedience to authority, love of country and love of the countryside, faking the homeless experience, the war experience, a lot of marching, a line of guys walking into the forest, WWII was a lot like being homeless, but with hot food, without the political an historical context, looking through the catalogue, there was something wrong about it from the beginning, there’s no boy scout tax, pre-pandemic, cadets standing in uniform outside of grocery stores, food banking, bottle drives, trying to sell oil change certificates, child labour sucks, rich families buy all the girl scout, cookies, a troop of boy scouts in the girl scouts, its not fair, when she’s selling cookies, book points, government bureaucracy, pioneers need good neighbours vs. absolute self-reliance, specialization is for insects, no good waiting for the government to provide soil, his straw man, Noisy, he never gets his revenge, kids today don’t understand violence [says old man Jesse], getting over it vs. turning the other cheek, Hank was the bad guy, go over the speed limit and lie about it, he eventually is the ally, go and hang out with the captain, Heinlein is so good, the same kid, they do the same things, tons of pets, i can’t give you my fish, the horse in Between Planets, the girls are irrational, our hero Billy or William is oblivious to girls, more oblivious, put them in a bag, is he wrong?, girls and boys should be put in a bag, the German household next door, the family stuff, George drops it, Bill pouts until he gets his way, George drops it again, Bill pouts again, leave his son behind, people are not one thing no matter what you are, bad at communication, Ann and George, Have Space Suit—Will Travel, no cupboards, our kind of food, processed food, the bounty planet, living formally, good characterization, so neat with some of his straw men, the dad was so intent on Bill going to school, get everything he could out of Earth, be a professor like his dad, the step-relationship, so many separations, until she is refrigerated, how much happens, how good the writing is, skillfully done, entertaining and interesting, for novels Jesse likes Heinlein best, somebody online said it was a bad book [correction: Joachim Boaz said it was a “blah” book], really good philosophy stuff, the crystals, he can’t see what’s in the cave, it seems to have legs, 38 legs, tractor?, spaceship hangar, the world is open, really really good, top notch, atmosphere plant, our slow space program, the Voyager probes, the ruined planet is the asteroid belt, a petty hobby horse, regular intervals of planets and then this missing one, its a mystery, one more point of science, back to back to back, 40 novels tons of short stories, in Requiem, Tenderfoot In Space, is there a more American author than Heinlein?, Hemingway is international, Mark Twain, Hemingway is cosmopolitanism, the soil of Missouri, a fetish for Joan of Arc, James Fennimore Cooper, the modern stuff, a fetish for the new, H.P. Podcraft’s episodes on Voltaire’s Candide, hilarious all the way through, not a commercial product in the same way as a lot of stuff, Evan’s restrictions, a leading candidate, mainstream writers, Steinbeck, Heinlein’s speaking to a lot of issues those guys don’t do, the power plants, atomic power, an atmosphere shield, fusion? the radiation level on Ganymede is too high for humans, a little handwavy, Rocket Ship Galileo, there’s Nazis on the Moon!, sub-Antarctic French islands, Space Nazis!, fight the Nazis on the fucking moon!, the frontier and the sea, following where the text take him, libertarianism, in some respects it is gross, Reason TV, a mock libertarian PBS, approx 70%, Fraggles: “you have right to put anything in your body”, SOCIALISM!, free speech, associating with neighbours, hospitalizations, there’s no mention of pay, the community pays, the barn raising, a cooperative nature, cooperative clans, I was promised X, Y, and Z, I refuse to do work, we will feed your family, you can go eat rocks, he’s an adult he can fend for himself, personal responsibility to stop the drug war in Central and South America, straw men characters, given we have to deal with people, reason with them, the alternative is violence or shunning or deporting or locking them up, excessive, he broke the prime directive, this water planet was being ruined by their own environmental policies, solitary for 30 days!, Pen Pals, the Prime Directive loophole, lots of people on Voyager who have no rank, she takes orders from Harry Kim, the Doctor doesn’t have a rank, Neelix doesn’t have a rank, Kes didn’t have a rank, not passengers, Maquis badges, helpful for us as viewers, who are you new actor of the week?, Chakotay’s side, we’ve transitioned out of this episode, some good episodes of Enterprise, stupid decisions, a country and western theme instead of some horns?, a whole bunch of mistakes, savoring Voyager, Red Letter Media on Star Trek The Next Generation, The Naked Now, Darmok, The Inner Light, ideas, they’d have to make it way stupider, the value of boy scouts, commanding voice, be prepared, punch that little kid in the face several times, the environmental disaster, a novel structure, how the gravity works, gravity plates, the gravity plates never turn off, TV is not smart enough to handle what Heinlein’s putting down, Red Planet, a case for a kissing book, Take Back Your Government, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Tunnel In The Sky, Star Beast, Job: A Comedy Of Justice, Sixth Column, Anarchaos by Donald E. Westlake, The Puppet Masters, Beyond This Horizon, The King Of The Mazy May by Jack London, Nothing Ever Happens On The Moon, The Rolling Stones, Roadwork by Richard Bachman, Gullivar Of Mars.

Boys' Life August to November 1950 - Satellite Scout by Robert A. Heinlein

Boys' Life August to November 1950 - Satellite Scout by Robert A. Heinlein

Boys' Life August to November 1950 - Satellite Scout by Robert A. Heinlein

Boys' Life August to November 1950 - Satellite Scout by Robert A. Heinlein

Boys' Life August to November 1950 - Satellite Scout by Robert A. Heinlein

Boys' Life August to November 1950 - Satellite Scout by Robert A. Heinlein

Boys' Life August to November 1950 - Satellite Scout by Robert A. Heinlein

Boys' Life August to November 1950 - Satellite Scout by Robert A. Heinlein

Boys' Life August to November 1950 - Satellite Scout by Robert A. Heinlein

Boys' Life August to November 1950 - Satellite Scout by Robert A. Heinlein

Farmer In The Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

FARMER IN THE SKY by Robert A. Heinlein

Danny Flynn cover art for FARMER IN THE SKY by Robert A. Heinlein

PAN - Farmer In The Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

Dawn On Ganymede by Anonymous - from SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON / LOST IN SPACE, issue 15, January 1966

DELL - Farmer In The Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

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