recent non-podcast reads, podcast music
(listen to the episode on Spotify)
(Chrononauts Theme)
Gretchen:
Hello everyone, welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Gretchen and I'm joined here with my co-hosts, Nate and JM. How are you both doing tonight?
Nate:
I'm doing pretty good. I'm excited to talk about some meta-podcast topics. It's been a bit of a stressful week, but we can unwind talking about some of our favorites of the year and some of the cool stuff we've been checking out.
JM:
Yeah, I'm doing okay. It's getting close to what I consider my least favorite time of the year. It's kind of like the end of December, January, I don't know. Ever since I was younger, I don't know when it started happening. At first you're in school and you look forward to the holidays and then you go to work and you look forward to the holidays if you get them. But there's always just quite a bit of stress involved, I guess. So it's kind of like, nice to have this at the end of, I think around last year we did this kind of bonus type episode at the end of the year too. And it's nice to kind of have this to unwind and try to work out a new job and financial situation and all this stuff. So it's just like, been a little tricky, but doing okay. And I have a few cool things I want to bring up. So artistic related things, books, movies, music, all that good stuff. That stuff that keeps life interesting and keeps us engaged. So yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I have one week left almost. Well, basically there's another project I have due next week. But this last week is kind of, most of my finals are wrapping up. So I just have to get through this and then I have a nice break for a little bit.
JM:
That'll be good. And you guys just had your Thanksgiving break a couple of weeks ago, right?
Gretchen:
Yes.
Nate:
Yeah, it wasn't really that much of a break for me. We had a dog here that was basically at death's door and required a lot of work.
JM:
Is that when you flew out? You flew out of town, right? Or something?
Nate:
No, I was here the whole time.
JM:
Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Nate:
It was a challenge.
JM:
Emergency measures.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Oh man. Yeah.
We're recording this now in early December. We were talking last time about recording the episode for Octavia E. Butler's "Kindred", and we are going to do that still. We haven't decided exactly when we're going to record it yet, but that'll be coming next for sure. I don't want to talk about it too much here, but I think we all read the book.
Nate:
Yep.
JM:
And yeah, I really liked it. So it's going to be interesting to talk about.
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
We made a list of our top and bottom sort of entries of the 49 stories that we read this year. And I kind of contemplated whether I wanted to include that on my list, and then I thought, well, we didn't talk about it yet, so it should probably stay off till next year. But yeah, I don't know what order you guys kind of want to do some things in. But we have a very loose knit kind of agenda about it. But why don't we start by talking about what we've all been consuming then lately?
Nate:
Yeah, sure. I've been doing a fair amount of reading outside the podcast on audiobook primarily. I just finished up with a reread of "Lord of the Rings" on audiobook. Prior to that, I had done Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend, and it's kind of interesting doing various works back to back because there's always like these weird coincidences between the two.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And there's some names that are in common between "Our Mutual Friend" and "Lord of the Rings". It just kind of makes you wonder if Tolkien had read that particular work and had it in the back of his head somewhere. Likewise, I just started the Tolkien translation of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" on audiobook, and the phrase Middle Earth is used a couple of times in "Sir Gawain". So, you know, again, it makes you wonder.
JM:
Well, I mean, I always kind of thought he got that from like Midgard or something.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
The Norse concept of the Middle Earth being the part of the nine worlds that we live on, I guess. So that's kind of where I thought he got it from. So it didn't surprise me that he used it again, but also I wouldn't be surprised to see other people kind of use that term as well. But that's really interesting. I have a life kind of history with "Lord of the Rings", but it's not something that I've reread since I was very young. Actually, my dad read me that trilogy when I was pretty small. We started with "The Hobbit", and then we kind of went straight on to "Lord of the Rings". And it took a long time. It took a long time, you know, to read through the trilogy because my dad and I probably didn't, for different reasons, didn't have the patience to read like more than a chapter a night or something like that. So it took a while, but we eventually finished it. I've never reread it, and I've thought about it a few times, especially since the first band that I joined was really inspired by Tolkien. It's kind of like a black metal, Tolkien-inspired black metal, it was kind of Norse-ish, and kind of got me interested again. But I didn't, instead of rereading it, I just listened to the 13-part BBC radio series, which is pretty cool. It's a full-blown dramatization, but they also throw in the songs that Tolkien has in there. Like, somebody, I guess, composed music for the songs, and there's some pretty good established performers in there. Like, I believe David Collings, who plays Silver in Sapphire and Steel, and is in some Doctor Who and Blake's 7, He plays Aragorn.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Aragorn? Strider?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
There's some interesting parallels with the movies, because Ian Holm plays Frodo, and he plays Bilbo in the Lord of Rings movies. I'm not sure who plays Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, but it's not him, obviously.
Nate:
No, yeah, the guy who plays Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, I forget his name, but he plays Tim on the UK Office. He's in a whole bunch of...
JM:
Oh, Martin, something?
Nate:
Yeah, I...
JM:
Isn't he in the Fargo show as well?
Nate:
He's in the Fargo show, that's right.
Gretchen:
Oh, That's Martin Freeman.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, that's it.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I never saw The Hobbit movies. The Lord of the Rings movies, I think, the Peter Jackson ones are pretty good. But, yeah, the audiobook is cool. The narrator of this one, Robert Inglis, also does the songs. I kind of feel bad for the guy, because there's like a song every chapter, so he's got to make up a melody for it.
JM:
Well, maybe somebody told him what to sing.
Nate:
Yeah, it's possible.
JM:
There's been times when, I mean, I used to read aloud to my former partner all the time, and there were certain cases, especially in like the Fritz Leiber, Fafhrd and Mouser stories, and in Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun", in different times where I had to make up a melody too, that was fun. So, yeah. But it's kind of cool when the audiobook narrators go all out like that, you know, they actually put in a little bit of extra effort there, making more of a performance. I always appreciate that. I mean, I figure why listen to an audiobook, if you're not going to appreciate something like that, you know, like, mak it a bit of acting, not just reading a book. But, yeah, the movies were cool. I mean, I enjoyed them, but every single adaptation leaves out the Scouring of the Shire part.
Nate:
It does, yeah. It takes a weird veering into Irish republicanism at the end, which I think the chapter is great, but you can definitely see for practical reasons why the Peter Jackson movies left it out, because it's basically another hour and a half movie right there at the very end of what's already an extremely long movie. So, it's unfortunate, but I can see why they did it.
JM:
I suppose so. I feel like it kind of is an important part of the story.
Nate:
It is, yeah. And I like Saruman's fate in the book a lot more than the movie. I thought that his...
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Death in the movie was...
JM:
Christopher Lee was not happy about that either.
Nate:
No, he wasn't. Apparently, he didn't talk to Peter Jackson for like a decade.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, I heard that. He made a pretty nice tribute to Christopher Lee, though, after he died, and he said that they had made up at least.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. So, I read a few books in the last few months. Sometimes, I don't read that much besides the podcast stuff, depending on how I feel about time and stuff like that, and how close to the wire we are. Because I tend to read kind of slow a lot of the time, although sometimes when I'm really into stuff, I don't. And that's how I can tell that I'm really into something, because I kind of devote all this time to reading it. But I read a few, a kind of like, I guess you could call them crime books. One is this book called "Run" by Douglas E. Winter, and I'm not sure when this book was published, but I'm guessing 90s. And it kind of feels like it must take place in the 90s as well. But it's kind of a, it takes place in Washington, D.C. And it's all about gangbangers and gun runners and stuff like that. And it's pretty violent, but I enjoyed it. It was kind of a thing where the style just kind of intrigued me enough that I kept going, and there were a couple of times where I kind of questioned, like, Oh, where is he going with this? Why am I reading it? It's just a bunch of like, guys knocking each other off and stuff like that. But then I kind of started to see that there was a greater purpose behind it. And there's kind of like, there was a lot of social commentary in there. There was like, some race issues brought up. And the fact that most of it takes place in Washington, D.C., which is the U.S.'s capital, obviously, and it's like, considered to be a pretty, I don't know, it's like, it's got a pretty notorious urban gang problem, I guess, or at least it did have. And so, you know, and it kind of felt very authentic. I was a little surprised because Douglas Winter, I thought was considered a horror writer, so I was expecting something quite different, but it had some of those, it certainly was very tense and had some real, like, suspenseful moments and stuff. And the main character knows everything possible about guns. And he works for some people that are running guns to various organizations and gangs and stuff like that. And it's very crooked. And he kind of discovers, you know, he's got this like, a bit of a suave, smart ass kind of badass narrative voice. But he kind of discovers that his life is a sham and people have been dooping him and his girlfriend is an undercover cop and all this stuff. It's bad. It's bad. But it was a fun book and it was a quick read. So, and I enjoyed that.
Then I read an older sort of kind of tied in with crime stories as well, but it wasn't quite that. It was a book written by Gerald Kersh called "The Song of the Flea". And I've been into Gerald Kersh probably since, I don't know, sometime in the 2010s, I guess I read a few short stories and I really liked them. And I read a couple of novels a few years ago, "Prelude To A Certain Midnight", and "Night and the City", which I first saw the movie "Night and the City". It's kind of a 1950s, late 40s noir type film. It's one of the rare instances of a film like that set in England, even though it was actually an American production, I think, but it had a lot of English actors in it. And the film is really good, but the book is much darker and goes to much more troubling places, but it's also a lot funnier. Gerald Kersh kind of has this, it's very English, but apparently he did most of his writing after he moved to the United States and he spent most, he spent a lot of time in Quebec as well. So "Song of the Flea" is almost a sequel to "Night and the City". It involves one of the same characters, he doesn't come in till like over halfway through the book. There's this con man, pimp type character called Harry Fabian, who's played by Richard Widmark in the Night and the City film, and he's a really nasty character. In the film, he's a little bit endearing, but in the book, there is not really that much endearing about him. He's just nasty. But Richard Widmark, he wanted to play heroes. He didn't really like playing bad guys, apparently. So I don't know how much that had to do with it. But anyway, so Song of the Flea is mostly about a struggling writer though.
So it's kind of interesting because a couple of the reviews I read of the book compared it to Charles Bukowski, who I just had my first exposure to this year as well, having read "Ham on Rye". And I would say that the Kersh book is a lot more to my taste, even though I didn't mind the Bukowski, it was kind of fun, but there's all the kind of gratuitous stuff in there and weird sex kind of hangups and whatnot. So I don't know, but the Kersh was very witty, it was very fun. He just has this really hilarious way of exposing their grotesquerie of everyday life, especially on the seedier side of the English urban landscape in the 1930s and 40s. And it's really funny at times. There are some chapters that are just super memorable because of the way he puts things. The dialogue, There's a lot of crazy, cockney talking and stuff like that. And I really had fun with it. I didn't want it to end too fast, even though it wasn't exactly a short book, but it was a lot of fun.
A couple of other things. I didn't finish this one yet, but I started reading the book "City Infernal" by Edward Lee, which is kind of a splatterpunk novel. I enjoyed the first part, it was really over the top and it had this 18-year-old goth girl main character. She was actually really well portrayed, I thought. There were some neat gothic touches, even though it's very much like splatterpunk and over-the-top gore and violence and stuff. But it kind of took this different turn halfway through and now the characters are in hell. That's kind of interesting, but it's kind of made it... He kind of does what a lot of other older authors did and turned it into this decadent urban sprawl. So hell is basically what we imagine. A cityscape gone to rot and everything is evil and twisted. But it's kind of a lot like the world we know now, it's just more satanic and evil, which is kind of interesting, but it's not as interesting to me as the first part, maybe, so I've kind of slowed down with that because I have a couple other things going too.
A friend of mine sent a couple of things for me to read and she's a writer. I might as well mention her name on here, but the stuff is not published yet. She's hoping that the first book, "Pallas", will be published in May or June. As soon as the cover's work out, I guess. Her name is Lisa Kuznak and this is pretty much science fiction stuff. The first book, "Pallas", is a shorter novel, could be considered a novella by some people, I guess, but I think it's... I don't know. It seems long enough to be called a novel. And she described me to me as The Wicker Man meets Solaris. Now, I didn't really see a lot of Solaris in there necessarily, although it was a bit. The wicker man, definitely, though. And there's quite a bit of body horror as well. It's kind of about this space trucker, kind of cargo ship guy who gets stranded and has to land on this. His ship gets damaged. He has to land on this asteroid that used to be used for mining. And nobody's heard anything from it for several decades. And he finds out that under this dome, there's this community thriving. And everything seems great and rather idyllic, but of course, there's a hidden underbelly of dark secrets and it gets pretty heavy with the body horror and weirdness. Definitely likable. And the other book she sent me is also really good, but I won't really say anything about that one, because that one will probably come quite a bit later. But it's interesting to me because this stuff definitely seems good enough. I don't know how to say this, but it seems like it definitely deserves to be published. And I've seen a lot of stuff done by professional publishing companies that is not that great. And just learning about the trouble somebody has to go through to get their work out there, and after shopping it to so many different venues and stuff like that and getting turned down in a lot of places, it's kind of interesting to me. It feels a bit like it sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole too, just sort of discovering how much literary agents and publisher, marketing executives and stuff are concerned with what's going on in the market and the trends and how much they have to appeal to certain types of audiences and what to do to get Amazon to notice your books and stuff like that, and having the right keywords and all that magical stuff that everyone has to consider nowadays. Yeah, it's interesting stuff.
But aside from that, mostly short stories as usual, because I always sometimes just have to read short stories to, I guess, keep my mind sort of fresh. Just read something small at night or something or first thing in the morning when I wake up. It's always felt kind of good to me and it's a good way to get exposed to authors that I wouldn't otherwise read, as I think we've mentioned on here before. So I've been reading a lot of Brian Lumley short stories. He's a horror writer who's well known for the Necroscope story series in the 80s. Some pretty good short stories, sometimes quite Lovecraft influenced, sometimes more influenced by like Arthur Machen and stuff, a little bit of science fiction too. Good stuff.
But yeah, that's mostly what I've been reading anyway. What about you, Gretchen?
Gretchen:
Yeah, well, for most of my reading, it has been for class and a lot of that has been theory. I'm in the middle of a gender and sexuality class, so there's been quite a bit of Judith Butler and some of the other cornerstones of like 90s queer theory that we've been reading. And I'm also taking a post-colonial literature class, and we covered some theory in that too, like Frantz Fanon, which has been interesting. As for fiction, I read a couple of interesting fiction works in post-colonial, including the one I just finished a final on, was called "Season of Migration to the North", which is by a Sudanese writer named Tayeb Salih, which was really good. It was published by one of my favorite publishing companies, which is New York Review Books. I always like their editions. They uncover a lot of untranslated or, you know, lost works,and that was one that we had to read for the class. And it was an interesting novel about this clash that a lot of post-colonial subjects feel between the colonized culture and the colonizer culture. Really cool. And we also read "Annie John" by Jamaica Kincaid, which I had read, I think it was last year, last fall, we had to read another short work by her in a history class. And reading a longer work was cool. I liked her fiction there. I know she also has a story in The Weird that I really need to check out. "Girl", I believe. So I should check that one out because I'm interested to see what something that's a little more non-literary, you know, more of a genre piece would be like from her.
Besides that, I did read a couple of works in my free time, although the work that I'm reading now, which is "The Only Good Indian" by Stephen Graham Jones. Yes.
JM:
You finally started that one, cool.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I ended up starting it. It's been going very slow. I'm only about halfway through and I started quite a while ago. Hopefully after this week, I'll finally get to finish it. But I have been enjoying it so far. It's intriguing to me. Over October, I did read "Something Wicked This Way Comes" by Ray Bradbury. Yeah, I liked that one a lot. And I also watched the film adaptation that was made of it in the 80s. And the director, I only realized after I had watched it, also did The Innocents, which is another good film that I really like.
I also read "Tender is the Flesh" by Agustina Bazterrica, which was really brutal and really good. Quite a messed up book, but I really liked it.
Most of the stuff I've been consuming has been, I've finally gotten around to some television series that I've been meaning to watch. One of them, which I had had a chance to get through during Thanksgiving break, was Our Flag Means Death, which I heard about, I think, back in like May or June of this year. And I've been meaning to watch it and kept putting it off until one of my professors actually was talking about it in class. And I thought maybe I should check it out and really enjoyed it. And after that, because it stars Taika Waititi, and I've been wanting to, I've already liked quite a few of the films I've seen by him. I also recently started watching What We Do in the Shadows, which is very funny because I'm pretty sure we mentioned that in our bonus episode last year. Finally got around to it, and it's very funny. I really enjoy it so far.
Nate:
Yeah, there's always some funny moments in the show, and the film too.
Gretchen:
Yes, yeah.
Nate:
They got to overlap in interesting ways.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, Matthew Berry's a great actor, and he's just fantastic in that, and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace is one of my favorite shows.
Gretchen:
Oh, Matt Berry's in that as well?
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, he is.
Gretchen:
Oh, good, because I have not seen that yet, but I've been meaning to watch it. So now that I know that Matt Berry's in it, I have more of an incentive to check that out.
Nate:
Yeah, if you've ever seen the IT Crowd, there's a bunch of other familiar actors that you'll recognize in Darkplace as well.
Gretcheen:
Cool.
Nate:
Yeah, it's really good.
JM:
Yeah, it sounds interesting. I guess you should probably watch the movie first, though, I'm guessing.
Nate:
For What We Do in the Shadows?
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
It doesn't really matter, I don't think.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I haven't gotten to the episode. I think that Taika Waititi and the other actors that are in What We Do in the Shadows, the film, like star in the series, or make an appearance.
Nate:
Yeah, they have a brief role, but it's like very small.
Gretchen:
Okay.
Nate:
Basically, like a lot of the plot scenarios that are in the film, they reuse for the show, they just localize it in Staten Island, not New Zealand.
JM:
Oh, I see.
Nate:
They do kind of tie together. I mean, there's like winks and nods to one another in the TV show, but you don't need to watch one to understand the other, I don't think.
Gretchen:
Yeah, like so far, what I've seen, it doesn't seem connected, although I did see the cameos, so I wasn't sure if it ended up converging with the film.
Nate:
Yeah, no, not really. They kind of show up briefly.
JM:
Yeah, I've heard of "Annie John"and "Tender Is the Flesh". "Annie John", I actually listened to a podcast about that, just because I was listening to their episodes, and it's called the SophoMore Lit Podcast. They just talk about stuff that people are likely to read in school, and it could be anything from early childhood to like "Ulysses". It literally could be any of those. So it's kind of an interesting sort of, you never quite know what it's going to be, but the host has a different guest for every book that they cover, so it's always a little bit different and interesting. And so I was listening to their episode on that because I'd heard of Jamaica Kincaid, and the book sounds pretty cool, I'd kind of like to read it sometimes.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I think "A Season of Migration to the North" was my favorite book that we read, but after that was, I did really like "Annie John".
JM:
And Nate, you read "The Hearing Trumpet" recently.
Nate:
Yes, I did. I really liked that one a lot. It's from 1974 by Leonora Carrington, who I think is a pretty well-known author. At least I've seen the name around before I read this.
JM:
It seems like she's one of those authors that maybe wasn't very well known in the English-speaking world till recently.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I feel like kind of like a renaissance is starting up around her. I know that the collected stories of her was published in 2016, which are also very good. I recommend that collection, but I feel like after those came out, she kind of gained quite a bit of popularity.
Nate:
Well, she certainly deserves it, and I'll definitely have to check out those short stories. Maybe if I could find a dual language edition or something like that, that'd be interesting to check out.
JM:
She's got one in "The Weird" too, that's really good.
Gretchen:
Oh yeah, "White Rabbits".
Nate:
Yeah, definitely have to check that one out, because this one was great, and I read it on both your recommendations, so I know you guys really like it as well.
JM:
Yeah, I thought it was great. I thought the ending was kind of like, okay, you know, I mean, I don't know. It's a funny thing with me and endings, sometimes I have trouble with the way things end. I think this will come up again later when we're talking about our podcast picks, but I just like the way the journey goes, but sometimes at the end I'm just kind of left feeling like, huh, okay.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting deconstruction on the hero quest itself.
JM:
Oh yeah.
Nate:
And the way she does it is she juxtaposes the main character who is an elderly woman suffering from dementia, and whose shitty family just sticks her in a nursing home because they want to get rid of her.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
But as her dementia progresses, the events of the novel get increasingly more surreal and detached from reality, and it's just a really great take on the hero quest.
JM:
My favorite part of the book though, and I think I said this to you before, Nate, but my favorite part of the book, well, is that part where she gets handed a book from this like 13th century, talking about like this 13th century nunnery.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And like, there's, you know, the bishop and the mother superior are actually like Satanists or something like that. And it totally reminded me of some really crazy nunxploitation film or something like that, but with like more weird touches, like if, if that had been made into a nunxploitation movie, it would be the most awesome one ever made, you know, like, I love that part.
Nate:
There's quite a few of those films. Some are better than others, obviously, but Alucard is certainly one of my favorites.
JM:
I really like "Flavia the Heretic".
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I don't know if you've seen that one.
Nate:
Yeah, my wife just watched a whole bunch of those and including Flavia.
JM:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some of them are ones you don't necessarily want to admit to watching, but.
Nate:
Yeah. There's a couple of Jess Franco ones that are, you know, basically just pornography.
JM:
"Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun".
Nate:
Exactly. Yeah, that's the one. Yeah. Yeah. But I don't know, "Hearing Trumpet" was great and it's certainly weird enough that I think our listeners who are interested in some of the weird fiction, odd Latin American spiritualist titles would really be into this one. She has a really excellent prose style and there's cool illustrations and just like a really neat vibe overall. In addition to the occult stuff.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I really love her style. She has that kind of like dry style where like there's all this crazy stuff going on. It feels still very like, mentioned in a very off- hand way and it's something that you see in quite a bit of her, of her fiction.
Nate:
It's often very funny too.
Gretchen:
Yeah. She's a very funny writer.
JM:
Yeah, she is.
Nate:
I read this in one sitting cover to cover.
JM:
Oh, nice.
Nate:
So it just like totally engrossed me. It went fast. I really couldn't put it down.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, I read it pretty quickly too.
Gretchen:
One of the first works that I read by her because I first discovered the Collected Stories online and I looked inside the book and read like the first story, which is only I think like eight pages or so. And it's called "The Debutant". And it's like about this young girl who doesn't want to go to like this fancy party being thrown for her. And so she has befriended this hyena that lives at the zoo and she has taught her to speak French. And she gets the hyena to come out of the zoo that she releases her so that she can go in her stead. And it's a really crazy story, but I remembered reading it and thinking I have to read more of this writer.
JM:
Oh, and she did actually write a lot of her stuff in French, didn't she?
Gretchen:
Yeah, I think she wrote French and Spanish that she kind of like switched between the two.
JM:
Okay, yeah. Interesting. Kind of like Luis Bunuel's films there.
Nate:
Certainly if you have the language skills, it's interesting to go back and forth.
I guess in regards to a different kind of hearing trumpet, we covered Florence McLandburgh's story, "The Automaton Ear".
JM:
Ah, yes.
Nate:
Back in episode seven. And that's a really cool early example of using technology to reconstruct the past in this particular case. It's being able to tune into any sound that was existent on earth at any given point in time. But it was anthologized in her 1876 collection, "The Automaton Ear and Other Stories". So I read the other stories in that book, which are mostly moody gothic sketches, but it has a one star rating on Goodreads, or at least did, and it seems like almost nobody has read these in the modern era, or at least bothered to read and review them on Goodreads. And while they're certainly not masterpieces, and I think Automaton Ear really is the best one in the collection, it's certainly way better than a one star book. I mean, if you're in the mood for some moody gothic stuff, they're all pretty quick. And if not, total masterpieces, it's fairly enjoyable for that kind of mood and vibe. But Automaton Ear has certainly made its way around anthologies a whole bunch. I think it's appeared in at least two, possibly three that we've encountered in the research for the podcast.
JM:
Yeah, I think so. It's in one of these early women science fiction anthologies, definitely. I like that story, but it's kind of funny, I guess there were sort of two parts of me reading it, you know, the part that's just like, yeah, we're not going to really get any info about this, like just feel the atmosphere, feel the athos of it and everything. And the other part of me was going, well, it's neat, she's describing this device. How the hell does it work though? Yeah, it's like the science fiction part. Like I'm not, I'm not one of those people who read sci fi to be like all critical of the science, maybe because you know, I don't know a ton about science. So I don't feel like I'm really in a position to criticize somebody for having bad physics. But there's the part of me that it's not so much the science, but I want to know how the thing works. You know, like I do want to know how it works. And she's very vague on that kind of thing, obviously, because it's just not that kind of story. So right, kind of a funny experience. Like, how does he tune on any sound? How does he find like anything?
Nate:
Yeah, the nitpicking of mechanics of things like that and stories, I think can be particularly funny. I mean, we'll talk more about "Kindred" next time, but a couple of Goodreads reviews where people are upset that she doesn't explain the time travel mechanism. It's like, you really missed the entire point of the story, didn't you?
But I guess another thing that I read, which we were going to cover for the podcast, I decided to jump ship on and pull it off the podcast agenda. And I figure we'll talk a bit about it now because I did put a fair amount of work into this one, and it would at least be worthwhile to get something out there and why we decided to abandon this one. So this one is a story by a Catalan author named Antoni Careta i Vidal. And the story is "The Accusing Eye", and it had been cited in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia entry on Catalan science fiction, which is really quite detailed and has several interesting sounding titles in it. And this one in particular stuck out as it mentions optography, which is a cool pseudoscience, we'll talk about it in a bit. But since it seemed of reasonable length and we were able to find a reprint of it in the June 1982 issue of Ciència, which is a Catalan language science publication that apparently also printed fiction from time to time, I figured it might be a good candidate for translation and covering on the podcast.
So I'd consider myself at B2 level in Spanish and I feel like with dictionary help I can work my way through some other Romance languages like Italian, which I did previously without too much effort. And I'd spent about an hour or so poking through the Catalan course on Duolingo to get an idea of how close it was to Spanish and figured it wouldn't be too much of a challenge. And oh man, was I totally wrong because this was a very, very difficult work to translate. And I'm not sure if it's Careta i Vidal's prose, that's being more prone to idioms; the fact that his Catalan is a bit different than modern Catalan; or if the Catalan language itself is just full of phrases that are difficult to render into English, but Catalan's superficial similarities to Spanish, at least in the case of this story, are just that-- superficial. It definitely lulled me into a very false sense of security here as this is by far the hardest time I had with a non-English story. And I do think it would be possible for me to get out something readable, but I just really did not like the ending of this story at all. And it made me not want to put in any more effort, which at this point where it's at would be a really significant amount. So to not waste all the work that I put in at this point and to avoid making you guys read a story that not only I didn't like, but it would be rough to read in draft form, I figured we'll just briefly cover it here.
So, Careta i Vidal was a Catalan author who was born in 1843 and died in 1924. And he was quite varied in his writing career doing drama, poetry, nonfiction, translations and so forth. But he was very much a strong proponent of the Catalan language and culture. And in particular had a strong disagreement with the orthography norms that were proposed by Pompeu Fabra i Poch. And these norms were eventually adopted in 1936. And as this story was written in 1905 and with Vidal's personal disagreements with Fabra i Poch, the Catalan used in the story uses a lot of archaic spellings that aren't consistent with modern Catalan. Likewise, uses a bunch of what the republishers call Castilianisms or phrases derived from Spanish. Vidal wrote four novels in the 1880s and this particular story is considered to be one of the first science fiction stories in Catalan, which is a label I might take some umbrage with in a bit. But I don't know, it was just very difficult to translate as the idioms and phrases resembled, I mean, I could understand what he was getting at, but trying to render them into something that resembles readable, unstilted English is just like a really steep task. For something like the Holmberg that we did, I just kind of rolled with it as it's such a weird, strange metaphysical story that the strangeness in the English prose doesn't really matter as much, and since Haywood Ferreira's translated excerpts of it weren't materially different than mine, I just kind of rolled with it. But this one is more grounded down to earth and in much more familiar scenarios, so I don't know, I think it would need to be more readable and less surrealistically strange than like this metaphysical voyage on Mars.
So let's just briefly take a look at the plot of this one, and we can see not only why I didn't like it, but why it's maybe not science fiction. But here goes. So there's murder in Barcelona! A woman is found dead in the Jardí de General, a Maria Cabanes i Armengol, and her cousin Ramon is our main character, more or less anyway, and he's quite distressed about her death. The autopsy says it's an aneurysm of the aorta, but the newspapers inflame rumors of foul play, but since no evidence for anything emerges, the case just kind of goes cold and sits there. So Ramon pays a visit to the local judge and tells him he has evidence of foul play, dramatically throwing down a series of photographs, and Ramon says that they were taken from Maria's irises. The last impression of what she saw right before she died can be translated to photographic material, revealing who the killer is. And this technique is called optography, which was a pseudoscience that was popular at the time, as it appears in several novels from authors we've read, in particular, Villiers' "Claire Lenoir", as well as "Tribulat Bonhomet", Rudyard Kipling's "At the End of the Passage," and Jules Verne's "The Brothers Kip".
JM:
I've seen it in a few films as well, even up to the 70s.
Nate:
Yeah, so that's where I recognize it from. I hadn't read any of these novels, but the Dario Argento film "Four Flies on Grey Velvet", it's not one of his best, but it does have some cool, Deep Purple type rockin' music on the soundtrack.
JM:
Yeah, I like that part. The main character was a drummer in a prog rock band.
Nate:
Yeah, exactly. But it uses this technique to figure who the killer is and all that.
But in this particular story, Ramon's photographs are pretty blurry and the judge can't make anything out of them. Ramon says he took the eyes out of Maria's corpse and performed this procedure on them, which makes the judge quite uneasy, and he has Ramon arrested. The policemen are Spanish speaking, and it's interesting to note the linguistic differences, which are pointed out a few times in text. Even though the entire story is written in Catalan, Vidal will note that the conversation of the police is happening in Spanish or that a certain tabloid newspaper wrote something in Spanish or something like that.
So we then get the backstory on Ramon. He's an eccentric med school student interested in the occult, spiritualism, that kind of thing. And he's earned the nickname Dr. Nostradamus from his peers.
JM:
Nice.
Nate:
And there's this whole subplot with a lackey of his that we'll just skip over, but while in jail, Ramon is madly scrawling stuff on the walls of his cell, trying to make himself appear insane, telling anything to anyone who will listen to him in the newspapers. And the newspapers published these really sensationalist articles about the case that garnered him a lot of sincere sympathy from the public. And this has the effect of greatly annoying the judge. And after Ramon is evaluated by a few psychiatric doctors who determine that he's not insane. So the judge wants to keep him locked up, but Ramon escapes and sends the judge a threatening letter.
So the letter fingers a Llorenç Virgili as the murderer. And as there's no trace of Ramon, he completely disappears from the authorities. So at this point, it sounds pretty cool, right?
JM:
Yeah!
Nate:
We get this wild med student on the fringe of science named Dr. Nostradamus.
JM:
It sounds pretty great.
Nate:
Persecuted by the law. There's some humor. There's some really nice descriptions of Barcelona. And now there's a criminal on the run defying all the authorities. So why did I hate this so much? So let's continue.
Virgili is summoned by the judge. And while it takes him a while to get there, he tells the judge what really happened.
In Santa Eulària, a small coastal town with a population of about 30,000 in the modern era, Virgili meets Maria, who is a poor woman working as a teacher and he falls in love with her. The two get involved in a romantic relationship. But when he moves to Barcelona, the big city, he realized that she's just a small town girl and there's much more beautiful women in the big city. So he just ghosts her and it breaks her heart. And Virgili marries somebody else and while Maria is writing impassioned letters to him asking why he abandoned her, he finally decides to come clean to her in Barcelona. And the two meet and as he does, she just dies on the spot of a broken heart. So that's what really happens with Llorenç. So what's all this deal with optography? Well, it turns out Ramon was just a dick all along and forged everything as a way to get revenge on Virgili. And the judge's suspicions were right the whole time. Ramon isn't heard from again until his lackey learns that he joined up with an Italian revolutionary band under Garibaldi. And a bullet kills him in the Battle of the Volturno, which took place on October 1st of 1860, where about 300 of Garibaldi's men were killed. The end.
JM:
Wow, allright.
Nate:
So, yeah. I was really on board with this until like the last 20% where it just turns into crap. I have no idea why it took that direction that it did, but the ending left such a sour taste in my mouth that I'm just like, I don't want to spend the work cleaning up this really rough draft and try to get at the heart of these Catalan phrases.
Gretchen:
A real 180.
Nate:
Yeah, it really is.
JM:
That's too bad, really.
Nate:
Yeah, because this could have been cool. But again, science fiction, I don't know, the highest level of science involved here is like forgery. And I mean, we see that in Sherlock Holmes stories. So if this is science fiction, then.
JM:
Yeah, we did that. We did kind of that in "Atoms of Chladni" by Mr. Whelpley there.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. So that involved like higher tech.
JM:
That was way more science fiction. Yeah.
Nate:
So yeah, that was this one. The translation was an interesting process because man, it really did kick my ass trying to get through some of this texts.
JM:
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, most average speakers of any language would not really be up to doing a translation of a work. And here we are like your efforts in translating some of the Russian and Spanish stuff previously has been, you know, it's been really cool. But it's definitely a challenge.
Nate:
Oh, yeah.
JM:
And without any real familiarity with the Catalan idioms and stuff like that, I'm sure it was exceedingly difficult and probably frustrating to kind of realize that the last 20% was going to kill all our enthusiasm.
Nate:
I don't know, it was kind of a fun challenge because I mean, it does, the language bears a lot of similarities to Spanish, French and Italian just based on where it's geographically located and where native speakers live and all that. I mean, it kind of makes sense that it really does feel like those three languages kind of mixed together in a pot with its own unique identity kind of emerging out of three. Yeah, I think the fact that it's just not as widely spoken as either of those three languages leads it to kind of developing its own phraseology and idioms and unique beats that are kind of hard to bring into a different language, as opposed to something like Spanish or French that is like way more widely spoken across like a huge geographical span.
JM:
So how much general work in Catalan do you think has been translated into English at this point? I'm guessing not that much.
Nate:
No, I can't imagine so. The science fiction encyclopedia cites a lot of works. And again, some of them sound really cool. Like there's a full length novel from around this time, I think it's like 1912, 1915 or something like that, and the title is "Artificial Men". So it's like an early robotics type story. But again, not translated into English. I don't know if there has been any significant contemporary authors who write in modern Catalan that have been translated into English.
JM:
I'll have to ask my buddy from Spain if he knows anything about that.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, I'm certainly more familiar with like Catalan painters and things like that like Joan Miro is a pretty famous name. There does seem to be more of a literary body of work in Catalan than some of the other languages spoken in Spain. Like I was looking for stories from around this time in Gallego, and I came up totally short, even though we were able to find some contemporary publications in Gallego of science fiction, I really just couldn't find any titles from around this time. And the way history plays out with Spain after the Spanish Civil War, when Franco comes into power, all the languages except for Spanish are greatly suppressed until after he dies. So it's a real dark time for the language when he's in power.
JM:
Yeah, it's hard for people that younger generation doesn't learn it because.
Nate:
Right. Exactly. And we'll probably cover Spanish stories from that time period and we'll deal with those issues then. But around this time when Vidal was writing, Catalan was experiencing language resurgence. There was this vigorous debate of, well, how should we write our language? How should we standardize our language? And it's just kind of interesting. And I guess I made a little bit more difficult on myself that I happened to choose the author who was, I guess, in contrast with the norms that did eventually get adopted 30 years later, which is kind of interesting how even in the 20th century, those debates are still being played out.
JM:
That's pretty interesting, and I think that's actually a really good segue into something I was thinking about today because when we do these podcast episodes, we do sometimes look into a bit of background and do a little bit of checking up on the authors, maybe the times they lived in, maybe something to do with science, depending on the episode and its framework really. Sometimes we don't really do very much of that stuff, but sometimes there's quite a bit. I guess what I wanted to talk about now is the so-called rabbit holes that we might have gone down looking into some of this stuff and what we kind of took away from that as being the most interesting. Say if we could each come up with one or two things, maybe that would be really cool. Nate, I don't know if you want to count the whole study of Catalan as one because it sounds kind of like you do.
Nate:
Yeah, that's certainly up there for me. And I think the other big one I had was looking into Schuyler's background, you know, reading his autobiography, "Black and Conservative", as well as the really excellent book that just came out, the "Black Pulp" book, which I think is an excellent, excellent starting point for early Black authors in the genre. A lot of the traditional histories basically put the start of Black science fiction authors with Delany and Butler, but there were these tangential adjacent works that had been written for decades and decades beforehand that just seemed to be completely bypassed by...
JM:
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of reasons for why that would have happened, I guess. You know, the fact that the genre establishment certainly didn't read any of these papers, the Pittsburgh Courier and stuff like that. So they wouldn't have known about any of the stuff published there.
Nate:
Yeah, and it's just kind of crazy that scholarship is just seemingly starting to dig into this stuff in 2022. The book is very, very recent, but it covers a wide ground and I think was a really fascinating look at something that's been really painfully neglected over the years.
Gretchen:
I think with one of my rabbit holes, it kind of fits in with that and with a bit of archives and thinking about newspapers. The one that I went deep into was looking at the Minna Irving stuff with the access that I had through my college, finding all the different papers and all the different snippets of stuff that she had published and stuff written about her, which was really interesting to do. That definitely was one that I had a lot of interest in exploring.
And I think the other, for me, I had a really interesting time looking into Paul Scheerbart. I thought that... I found the... I can't remember if it was... If I had found it or if... I can't remember if you either of you had uploaded it, the Paul Scheerbart reader. But that one, looking at his background, was also very interesting to me. And this is something that will come up with different topics in my top 5, but I think sometimes the background does kind of affect my feelings on the work and can make it more interesting to read. You have more of a respect for it. And that was the case, I think, especially with Scheerbart.
Nate:
Yeah, absolutely. And he's such an interesting individual that brings a lot of weird influences to the table. And he just had such an eclectic set of interests in his mind and the way he portrayed those in his literature. I think it's just super cool.
JM:
I would say for me, I have two as well. And I like, Gretchen, what you were just saying about sometimes the background changing our view on the stories or kind of deepening them or making certain aspects more interesting, definitely applies. Definitely noticed that in quite a few cases. And well, I would say the majority of the time, I think that the fiction we do is actually really good, and I'm actually quite into it a lot of the time, sometimes the background stuff is more interesting or more compelling in a way. And an example of that that I can think of is looking into all the spy fiction stuff. And I really only did a little bit of background reading into the very early days, essentially, espionage and spy history. And there's a lot more I could have dug into. But essentially what I learned was that spy fiction is actually, in a way, older than actual spies and influenced the whole thing, in fact, to the point where it's so crazy. It's like world events getting shaped by the pages of trashy novels. It almost like it's not really a true parallel, but it kind of almost makes me think of like people talking about Ayn Rand and stuff and how she she got to be like, considered some kind of paragon of philosophy for like, ultra capitalist types, right? And you read her books and it's just like, Well, this is like just some trashy, like, power fantasy novel, like, really nothing like profound about it. And like, if you judge it on those merits, maybe you'd actually like it more. But the fact that it has all this extra baggage attached to it makes it complicated. And just kind of seeing how like, I don't know, there's something there was something about especially reading that excerpt of a letter that a guy wrote while in prison in Germany for spying on German fortifications, how he basically described himself as Peter Pan. And, you know, just kind of like, this is real fucking serious politics are supposed to be right and yet, like, it's really bizarre. And I found that just so fascinating, funnyy, kind of infuriating, kind of a little bit like, Wow, I mean, I just it's it feels like they put the cart before the horse, but there was no choice like it's just somehow fiction influenced reality in a way that that's almost unfathomable.
Gretchen:
Life imitates art.
Nate:
Yeah, exactly. And I think there's a lot of other weird cases where that happens.
JM:
True, right up until our modern times.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, it's a weird world we live in.
JM:
QAnon!.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Of course, that's why science fiction is quite important, because it allows us to imagine futures that could happen.
Nate:
Yeah. Or sometimes the science fiction author's work of science fiction becomes a religion in and of itself.
JM:
Yeah. Well, I definitely think that we're going to have to talk about L. Ron Hubbard at some point, too.
Nate:
Yeah. So I guess One fun piece of media that I was listening to a lot a month or two ago was Frank Zappa's Joe's Garage.
JM:
Oh yeah.
Nate:
And in that somewhere halfway through the the album, you meet L. Ron Hoover of the Church of Appliantology.
JM:
Yeah. Well, Frank Zappa stuff is clever. Sometimes you have to be in the mood to listen to those albums because it's so based around the humor. But yeah. Yeah.
And the other thing that I thought was really interesting: you guys probably know what I'm going to say, but was looking into the Jack Williamson autobiography and his history and background and stuff, because I just thought that was really an interesting picture of somebody who really bridged the gap between the very earliest days of the pulp era of science fiction coming into its own, or maybe I should say scientifiction, and now, basically. Contemporary stuff. And it felt like even though here's this basically cowboy, as you said, Nate, it feels like, you know, the childhood of somebody out of a Willa Cather novel.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yet he is basically transmitting into the modern era and feeling the closest to what we have now by the end of his career and his thoughts on things and actually being able to comment on both some of the old time authors that were his friends like Edmond Hamilton and also Clark Ashton Smith, whom he met and apparently wasn't very impressed with, and new guys like Samuel Delany and Harlan Ellison, I guess I mean, I'm saying new guys but not really new anymore, but 70s and 80s even, you know, talking about meeting all these younger science fiction fans and what that was like for him being a granddad by 1947 basically. And I don't know, I just thought that was really interesting. I was quite taken by his modesty and kind of like just definitely a contrast to somebody like Isaac Asimov, who he talks about a lot because I guess they were kind of friends but, you know, in his introduction to The Early Williamson, he talks about how Asimov getting his book The Early Asimov was kind of the inspiration to allow his book to get published but he kind of talks about Asimov in a positive way but also kind of a little mocks him a little bit for talking about his oh so difficult childhood and Williamson is like yeah well I think my family and I had it much worse than yours did. Asimov always kind of seems like somebody who's I mean I always liked his introductions, I liked his commentaries on everything from the science fiction genre to his own life, to like Shakespeare, I mean I used his guides to Shakespeare a lot when I was in high school that's for sure, they were very helpful. But he's always seemed like somebody who's very well aware of his own intelligence and a little bit I guess cocky in a way, I mean you know he's very proud of being a member of Mensa and stuff like that, and Williamson just seems like really down to earth and really like modest and kind of when he doesn't get something or he doesn't understand something he's very willing to admit it and he doesn't have any pretense and I thought that was really interesting to read about from his perspective and stuff and he was kind of always a question in my head when I read an autobiography which I don't do very often. What's this person going to be like, like do I trust what they say kind of thing, like are they going to puff themselves up to the point where like anytime something bad happens I can't really believe what they say, and I don't really get that impression from him, so I thought that was an interesting place to go and hopefully communicated that reasonably well in the intro segment last time.
Nate:
Yeah he had a fascinating life.
JM:
So before we run down some of the stories that we've done over the last year -- Nate, you're kind of the star of this episode so I wanted to talk about the music.
Nate:
Okay.
JM:
The intros and various music cues that we use and stuff in the podcast are created by software synths, correct?
Nate:
Yeah, most of them. So, I use a series of programs to make the music. Primarily I work in Ableton Live which has a number of functions but it has a lot of soft synths and those are really fun to play around with, but it also has a sampler. I also use a program called Cool Edit Pro which Adobe bought a while ago and calls it Audition now but I don't really like the user interface. But I use that for not only editing the podcast but doing more like wave editing stuff like that. So there's this early form of electronic music called musique concrete which came out of tape recording technology of the 1950s and it is really strange because it features real world sounds that are recorded on tape and manipulated either slowed down, sped up, looped on top of one another, put through effects, so on and so forth.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Cool Edit allows you to do that much easier than having a whole bunch of tape machines so.
JM:
Digital audio editing software generally takes the place of a million tape racks and... reverb machine and stuff like that.
Nate:
So there was this one artist I was listening to a lot, this guy Hands To, and he has like this 50 tape box set or whatever of a lot of his stuff, and that's just like a fraction of the stuff he's released, it's really an insane amount. But he does all tape manipulation stuff, there's no synth stuff in his work, it's like all tape stuff and it really breaks down a lot of the sounds to the basics, like one tape he recorded just by using sounds that he recorded out of a cactus, but you know, you wouldn't you wouldn't be able to tell what the source is because they're so distorted and manipulated and kind of...
JM:
That's one of the neat things about being able to manipulate found sound like that.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
You don't necessarily know what the source is; you can't tell.
Nate:
Yeah, so I did that a couple times for a couple of pieces, taking things like you know hitting a metal lid with a butter knife or whatever and extending it out to be 20 seconds long so it's like really echoy, otherworldly sound. Then you can do other things with various tools in Cool Edit Pro of just basic wave editing without having to use synthesizers or anything like that.
There's this pretty cool record I was listening to that was put out by Bell Labs called "The Science of Sound," and there's a couple of these other records from the 1950s and 60s that are like educational records I guess explaining to children what electronic music is how the sounds are created and things like that, so I was using some of the techniques on that to make some weird sounds, you know, just trying to break things and making melodies or things like that, but it works in either scenario.
JM:
I've heard of some of that, not necessarily educational, but I'm trying to think of a guy's name, I think it was in the 50s, I think it was actually a Canadian guy, Bruce.
Nate:
Bruce Haack.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And he did all these albums they like based on like children stories and stuff like that. And there's something based on Dracula and it's most of its it's kind of melodic like you know I don't know how much he uses actual tapes, I think I think it's early synths mostly.
Nate:
Yeah he did a lot of moog stuff.
JM:
Okay yeah.
JM:
Well there must have been some some tape manipulation then as the early Moogs were like monophonic right so...
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
You wanted to get the, yeah okay.
Nate:
And a lot of those early electronic musicians were attached to either radio or TV studios so probably the one that people know the most in popular culture is the Doctor Who theme which was...
JM:
Delia Derbyshire.
Nate:
Yeah. The Radiophonic Workshop.
JM:
Yeah I was going to mention I want to recommend something to you, Nate I probably mentioned this before; Gretchen you might enjoy this too. It's an album by a group called White Noise.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And the name of the album is The Electric Storm.
Nate:
Yeah it's a good one.
JM:
Yeah, it's got Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, along with David Vorhaus, who's an electronic music composer and a percussionist whose name I don't know. And it's basically yeah it's all done with tapes and loops and weird percussion and singing, and the first half is like kind of whimsical and lighthearted feeling. Tthere's all kinds of cool backwards like backmasking, and it's quite melodic, it's almost like weird jazzy poppy electronic music from the 60s. And then you flip it over, and the second half is this absolutely hellish landscape of like it just sounds really dark and it's like you can imagine somebody tripping on LSD or something listening to this album, and like they hear the first side and it's like, Well that's a little freaky but I'm kind of digging, it you know it's, it's almost sexy right? And then they flip it over and, and like suddenly they go to hell.
Nate:
Yeah I mean the BBC stuff is interesting because they produced a lot of TV shows. Doctor Who is obviously the most high profile one that used a lot of this kind of music composition techniques but...
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
A lot of the other national studios like RTF out of France, WDR out of Germany, and NHK out of Japan, they produced early works of electronic music, probably less so in the TV and movies, I'm not exactly sure how much those stations did with like original radio programming. It'd be an interesting angle to pursue, but that's where a lot of the major composers got their start as the only people who could really afford high tech tape equipment or early synthesizers in the 50s and 60s were going to be radio and TV studios that have budgets of however many tens of thousands of dollars.
JM:
There's a really interesting article on the Radiophonic Workshop in Sound on Sound magazine. It's really worth a read. It's quite long and detailed but it talks a lot about the people that work there; what the actual workshop was like, how they had rooms and rooms full of like random garbage basically and then you know people were free to look around there and use whatever they could. Because you know you could you could find all kinds of things that you could use to make sounds and stuff like that. And yeah like stitching together bits of tape by hand to make certain things happen and stuff.
Nate:
Oh yeah. Incredibly time consuming; incredibly tedious and I'm really thankful that I have a program like Cool Edit Pro where it's just like a mouse click or two instead of having to break out the scissors and splice stuff and all that. But a lot of that stuff I kind of channel unconsciously into the pieces that go into the podcast. I mean a lot of times I'm just kind of going with the flow and don't really have a particular thing in mind of what I want to do with something before I go into it. I mean sometimes if I know I got to write a piece for a particular story I might have like an idea in mind of what kind of instrumentation or mood I'm going for. But almost never do I have like a particular melody in my head or something like that going into in. I just kind of turn on the synthesizer and just see what happens. And so come up pretty cool I think. And it's a lot of fun to work with. I do have some actual real world instruments that I will occasionally plug in and use. I have a couple of Yamaha keyboards. I have a ThereMini, which is this really awesome beginner theremin that functions as a synthesizer as well. It has like a pitch correction and scale function, so if you're like learning the instrument to play like classical renditions or actual songs on it and you don't want to just like make a whole bunch of noise, it's really easy to get into and do that with. It has a wide range of presets and sounds.
JM:
Yeah because an actual theremin is pretty hard to completely control the pitch.
Nate:
Yeah, very very difficult. Probably one of the most difficult instruments to play well. And if you watch somebody like Clara Rockmore, who is a virtuoso of the instrument play, it's just really, really incredible to watch how she handles the instrument. Very difficult to work with but it produces some cool sounds and some of them have been used in some of the podcasts.
JM:
Yeah. So one case where you did actually have melodies in mind though were the polkas that featured on a couple of the episodes, most notably the most recent one I think.
Nate:
Yeah, so I used six different polkas that I found on Library of Congress who has a huge, huge collection of sheet music that's all in the public domain. So it's everything before 1928 or 9 whatever the year is now. It always goes up by one every year of course. But I initially encountered the idea of high tech polka if you want to call it that, a few years ago when I was researching for something else and I encountered sheet music cover for a telegraph polka and I was like, oh that's funny, I wonder what that sounds like? And it wasn't until we did the telegraph radio episode a while back that I was like huh. I wonder if I could find this and see what this sounds like? so I did, and I transcribed it and I was like, this is kind of cool, I wonder how many of these other ones are out there, and it turns out there's a polka for everything. So I looked up the sheet music collection for various astronomical bodies, you know: Saturn, Mars, the moon, Venus, so on and so forth, and you know, a lot of them refer to obvious Greek and Roman gods and things like that in the context of the music, but we could just change the context a little bit for our science fiction podcast and give the instrumentation more futuristic sounding sheen as opposed to the piano and violin scores that they were originally written for.
JM:
Polkas are usually performed by like lots of woodwinds and horns and percussion people dance to that right?
Nate:
Yeah right. So they're primarily dances. Most of them were scored for just a piano, though a couple of them also had violin parts. The Asteroid Polka, which I used for the Leigh Brackett segment was scored for banjo; I thought that was just so strange, and you're listening to it you can kind of tell, like yeah somebody wrote this for a banjo didn't they? It's really, really weird stuff.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
But it was cool to transcribe those and kind of bring them into the modern era.
JM:
Yeah there's one I really liked in particular, I can't remember which one it was now.
Nate:
I think it's the Mercury Polka.
JM:
Okay yeah. (hums a bit of melody)
Nate:
Yeah yeah some of those melodies are silly and fun and I've been primarily saving them for like lighthearted fun pulpy adventure stories, which we covered a lot of in the Amazing episode, so I thought it was a pretty good time to unload a lot of the polkas. But I kind of do try to match the mood and tone of the pieces to what we're covering, even though like I don't specifically go into a lot of the pieces saying like this one's going to be for that story; this one's going to be for that story, I'll just kind of write a whole bunch and then when we have the episode I'm just like okay this one fits better with that story, this one fits better with that, just kind of choose it that way.
JM:
Yeah definitely definitely pretty impressive sometimes. Really cool soundscapes, and sounds and sets the mood quite well I think.
Nate:
Well thank you. I sure have a lot of fun doing it.
bottom 3/top 5 of 2022 podcast titles
JM:
And we're back. Yeah we've been doing this for a year; we actually did a bonus episode last December, and we actually didn't do this at that time. I think we did two bonus episodes last year, and the only reason we didn't this year is time just got away from us I think. It didn't really seem like we'd already done that many episodes, but we've done 49 stories.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So, that's quite an impressive amount. Now granted, some of those are very short, and some of them are a little longer. So we're going to start by actually running down our three least favorite entries from Chrononauts 2022.
Speaking for myself, I would say, although I'm going to break my own rule very quickly, I'm going to say that in general it's harder for shorter works to end up on this list. And the reason for that is, to be honest, a really long bad story is much more difficult to get through than really short bad story.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And I think that the Best Of has a kind of a different criteria than this, which is kind of like, How much did it pain me to read the story, is actually something to consider, right? So I don't know how you guys feel about it, but but things didn't turn out really the way I expected this year. I mean, I think, will have to listen to the episode with this theme last year, but I feel like in general, there wasn't really as much like pretty terrible stuff this year. There were a few things though, there were a few things. And I don't know though, in general, I think even the stuff that wasn't very good was interesting to talk about. And that, you know, I don't feel like rancor against it or anything like that.
Nate:
Yeah, I think with the early podcast titles, we covered a lot more bottom of the barrel crap just because it was super, super early. And now that we're getting on in time, I feel like less obligated to do that.
Gretchen:
We get to pick and choose which ones we want to cover. Yeah. But yeah, I feel like with my list, like the two that I chose is like the the two bottom two were ones that I didn't care for the most. But past that there were other stories that either I felt like they didn't just they didn't stand out to me, but they weren't terrible or were stories that I felt almost were redeemed by the conversations that we had about them. So I have less hatred of them, I guess.
Nate:
Yeah, it's funny, doing the episodes on the stories, it's like almost reading it a second time, and you know, going through the plot summary and all that.
JM:
Because you get to hear other people's thoughts on it too.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
So that's kind of, maybe somebody has some perspective that you didn't consider or something like that. And I was I was commenting on a video that I was watching lately, kind of funny aside that I made, I made this comment in the Chrononauts server about the Heavy Metallurgy podcast did a discography run through of Blue Oyster Cult over the weekend, and it lasted for over six hours. So no more complaints about the lengths of our podcast episodes, although there is editing involved in our show that adds an extra layer of complication to things because it takes a long time for a long episode to go out for that reason. But anyway, I was commenting on their video saying, I like it when not everybody agrees on where to place the albums because it just makes things more interesting. You know, you got when people can discuss stuff without getting angry about it, but they don't agree on something. You know, they're like, yeah, I like this more than you did, here's why. And then sometimes the other person thinks about it. It's like, Yeah, I can kind of see where you're coming from, maybe I'll listen to it a few more times or something like that. And like, yeah, there's been a couple of times when when just talking about a story improves my feeling about it as we go kind of.
Nate:
Yeah, I really never understood the attitude that some people take of like having their personal media favorites like attached to their personality, and taking it really like personally when somebody doesn't like them. It's very odd. I was participating in like a music album exchange thing or whatever this last month and a couple people didn't like one of my picks and it's like, they were apologizing and it's like, why you apologize to me, I didn't write the record you know, come on like...
JM:
Wow, yeah, yeah, that's people get that way about music; people get that way about franchise movies and television shows especially.
Nate:
Yeah, the big budget stuff especially I mean, I don't ... we might have to make the conscious decision to like stay away from Star Wars stuff for that reason, because the last thing we need is like a whole bunch of pissed off Star Wars fans ...
JM:
People've had their lives threatened over this. It's crazy.
Nate:
Absolutely crazy.
JM:
All right, well, I don't know that anybody's going to be threatening us over our choices here, mostly because they're like 100 years old.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
Gretchen:
I don't think if one of us has a pick that the other to disagree with I don't think we're going to have any huge feuds on this on this show.
Nate:
We'll see. Stranger things have happened.
JM:
That's true. That's true.
Yeah. All right, I got my D6 which I have just sort of thoughtlessly called in the podcast a couple of times a 6D, showing my newbie tendencies here. But anyway, let's see. Same order as last time then: Nate, Gretchen, and then me. And we'll see what we get. (dice roll sound)
All right. Well, our first roll is a 3. So that means Gretchen you get to pick the number three, the first number three.
Gretchen:
All right. So as I said, the bottom two were the ones that I had less of a hard time choosing. So when it came to the bottom three this one was just one that didn't really stand out to me. I feel like there was also a bit of a problem with it that I will mention when I say that it was "The Sea Witch".
I just personally wasn't as interested in this one, and I also I feel like we kind of talked a bit when we were discussing this in the podcast episode. The concept of like the reincarnation, and we talked a bit about the fan fiction or whatever that was, just the gender being swapped, and that was the only difference.
JM:
Yeah, I think two of the most interesting things about that whole talk were, 1: the fan fiction, and 2: comparing it to Algernon Blackwood and how he treated this subject.
Gretchen:
Yeah, that was interesting. That was the interesting part. The story itself, again, didn't really stand out, and I feel like when we were talking about the the fan fiction, seeing how it would have been if it were the woman who was this protagonist, it does have a very strange quality to the to the reincarnation that feels a little unsettling and, yeah, I just, I didn't, I don't know I didn't care for this one as much and I don't have too much else to say about this one as my bottom three pick.
Nate:
Yeah, I was kind of lukewarm on this one as well. Certainly Dyalhis' "When the Green Star Waned" was like way better than The Sea Witch. Yeah, if this one puts you off a little bit definitely read that one because that one has I think a lot more going for it.
JM:
The super science was really cool, with that awesome harmonic sound weapon, and real ray guns and everything so yeah.
JM:
Okay, well, guess it's me then next and, well, I'm kind of sorry to do this. It was Gretchen's first lead on an episode. I gotta say, it's "Arqtiq" by Anna Adolph. Again, it was so weird that I don't necessarily want to trash it like it was just so strange and eccentric that a part of me kind of liked it, but I didn't really get a lot from it. It was hard to read. I had to reread parts and it wasn't a very long story, but it felt it felt long. It felt like after reading 10 pages I was a little bit exhausted like trying to figure out what she was saying, and what she was getting at. Yeah, I just, I don't know. It's kind of one of those things like "Senor Nic-nac", where I'm not necessarily going to think back on this one very much. I just can't really find anything to relate to in my brain I guess is the problem. And I get, I think that she had some political ideas and some philosophical things that she wanted to express and it doesn't come across with a lot of clarity. I even had trouble figuring out whether the main characters were supposed to be human or not.
Gretchen:
The bird question.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, I didn't like, here's the thing, right? I knew it was going to be something eccentric and I kind of wanted to run with it and just be like, yeah, okay, just show me what you want to show me and I don't have to make anything of it. But then, you know, in the end too, it was like, it was all kind of a dream type ending and I don't know, it didn't mean anything to me, I'm afraid. And I guess that's my sad takeaway from it. You know, it was just too obscure for me and just too unpolished, I guess. It's a very unpolished piece of writing. So, interesting but not very good, I have to say.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know, that is one I happen to like a lot.
JM:
Well, that's cool.
Gretchen:
I do have to say that that might be making an appearance later on on one of my lists.
Nate:
Yeah, I'm definitely a big "Arqtiq" fan, and I like weird psychedelic stuff, and that's got a lot of it. And the fact that it doesn't make sense is obviously true but it also doesn't really matter to my enjoyment of it.
Gretchen:
I did say, and this was something I was planning on bringing up, like I completely understand why someone wouldn't like the work because it does have a very odd quality and it is very hard to understand. But I guess, and I'll get more into it later, but I did enjoy it for that quality. Like I felt like it was weird in a way that I personally kind of enjoyed.
Nate:
It's very uniquely weird, that's for sure.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, that's cool. I've definitely read things before where other people were like, This is really weird, I don't get it and I don't like it. And I'm trying to be like, But it was awesome, and then I can't really explain. You know, I can't really change their minds and that's definitely happened to me before and I guess that's the thing with really weird surreal fictions. You have to be in the mood. It also has to connect with you somehow. I mean, last year I read "Creatures of Light and Darkness" by Roger Zelazny, and somebody else online was kind of reading it with me at the same time, and he didn't really like it. I think he kind of liked certain imagery and stuff like that and he thought it was cool that it had all this Egyptian mythology stuff in it, but the style shifting all over the place and it being very, I used the word "slippery" to describe the book, and he's like, Yeah, that's why I didn't like it. And I liked it in part for that reason. I actually thought it was really, really cool. But maybe if I hadn't been in the mood, I might have been impatient with it too. I might have not had a good time with it. I think a reality too though is that somebody like Roger Zelazny, or even, although some people might disagree, but like David Lindsay who wrote "A Voyage to Arcturus," they're a little more polished in what they do than she was writing this.
Nate:
Oh, it's total outsider. Yeah, I mean, it's not polished at all.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So again, like I don't want to be trashing it. I'm not going to trash anything in fact, but I can see why she didn't really write much else. I guess.
Nate, what about you?
Nate:
So my number three pick is one we did last time, Leslie Stone's "Out of the Void".
JM:
Ah.
Nate:
Yeah, this one has some neat things going for it, but ultimately just really, really drags in the second half. The pieces don't come together at all really in a satisfying way. It seemed like she's just making it up as she goes. And I don't know, somehow there's a sequel that's even longer.
JM:
Yeah, quite a bit longer.
Nate:
Yeah, but I don't know. I thought this one was kind of tedious to get through and not too much payoff.
JM:
That's also my number 2.
Gretchen:
I did not include this on my list, but partially because I felt bad about how much we kind of ragged on it last time that I thought I thought I would give it a break, but it's definitely down there. I still think there was maybe, again, if it had just been one of the several elements that were in the story, it would have been good.
Nate:
Right, yeah, but too much.
Gretchen:
It drags on and the pacing's off.
Nate:
The pacing's really bad.
JM:
By the way, guys, I have a runner up. I cheated. I included a runner up. I have to include this, but I'm curious to see if it'll make any of your threes. Yeah, the Stone. I mean, I compared it to "The Mummy!" a few times when we were talking about it. "The mummy!" was a lot longer, but I don't know. The mummy! kind of stuck with me in a way. "The mummy!", I kind of liked. It had a real charm to it. This one didn't have as much. It had more modern, like 20th century superscience, I guess, but it was... The world building was really strange. The way it turned into this weird romance adventure type story on the alien planet, I don't know. It was very cliched and not very well-written, again, talking about the polish, there were some parts of the story that I thought were not well written at all. They could have been done with a lot more finesse. The frustrating thing about a story like this is that I can kind of see in better hands how it could have been awesome.
Nate:
Right. What can you do?
JM:
What can you do? Exactly. Not read the sequel.
So Gretchen, what about your next one?
Gretchen:
So my next one, even though we were just talking, when we started this segment, about how if a work is longer, it usually... It's more painful when it's bad, but the second choice that I have is actually the "Case of the Dixon Torpedo". Because even though it's like what, it is like 3,000 words, it's not that long, it's not as bad as it could have been if it was longer, but despite that, I still felt like I wanted to take a break during it. I just thought it was very dry and the very dull prose style, it just felt like a slog for something that was very short.
Nate:
Yeah, this was also my number 2 and pretty much the exact same complaints. I don't know how this was a recurring character that he had like a whole bunch of stories about this guy.
Gretchen:
I don't even remember the character's name.
Nate:
No, me neither.
JM:
I have the whole book, I didn't read any of the others. I was thinking maybe I would, but I just couldn't work up the enthusiasm to do it.
Gretchen:
Couldn't work up the nerves.
JM:
Yeah, this was so weird. This is my number 1. That is my number 1. The story was a big fat lot of nothing. People say, oh, I really love 19th century detective fiction, it has such charm to it. This story has no charm whatsoever. It has nothing. It doesn't even have the Holmes/Watson relationship, which is the most obvious thing to rip off when you're ripping off a Holmes story.
Gretchen:
It is one of the best elements.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
And every other person that rips off Holmes knows that, except for Arthur Morrison, apparently.
Gretchen:
You can't even rip off something correctly.
Nate:
Maybe that's how he's rivaling Sherlock Holmes. It's just like being bad at it.
JM:
Yeah, this is just a really lame story. It wasn't that painful to read though, because it was short. So that's what I mean by kind of going against my principle here. But it just felt like it was only published because they wanted something to fill the gap, because there was no Holmes. Right. And like, you could do that and make it great. And other authors did, even August Derleth knew how to do it.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah, because I mean, even with the other works that we've read that have ended up on this bottom three and other works that we didn't discuss, but we thought weren't as good. Like there was still potential in those. We mentioned even with "Out of the Void", there was potential. But this felt, there was nothing. It felt very just empty and there was no point to it.
Nate:
And the potential that came from this came in the description of it that I found in like the early spy detective fiction literature I was looking through, because I really wanted to find something that had some, like, strange gadgets, like some weird device or whatever, and this self-guided super torpedo or whatever just sounded like such a cool idea, but it turns out to be a MacGuffin that has nothing to do with the plot whatsoever.
JM:
Yeah, it's like the classic example of the MacGuffin that I was reading, you know, in a story the other day. The thing that the characters care about, but the audience doesn't. Right. That's what the MacGuffin is. Yeah. So it's like, does it work? Well, maybe like in "Lord of the Rings", it works pretty damn well. But not here. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.
Nate:
There's arguments to be made that the Ring is not a MacGuffin, but you know, we can interpret it.
JM:
No, it's more than that. You're right.
Nate:
Yeah. This one sounded cooler in a one sentence description in a book that was not written by Arthur Morrison than it did actually reading it.
JM:
Interesting. Yeah, that's what happens.
Nate:
Yeah. So I guess that cycles back to you Gretchen. So what's your number one?
Gretchen:
Oh, JM, did you have, you had that as your number one? So you have it number two to go through?
JM:
That's that was my three that but I could give my runner up now, I guess, instead of after. So my runner up, it didn't make the three. And the reason is, I really was intrigued and I really enjoyed reading it for the most part. I was really wondering where he was going and I really was captivated by it in a way, but reading it made me worry about the mental state of the author and not in a good way. And I'm talking about "Medusa" by Visiak.
Nate:
Yeah, okay.
JM:
It was cool in a lot of ways. It wasn't that badly written, although it did feel a little bit unpolished at times too, but I kind of wondered sometimes if it was, you know, a modern reprinting, screwing a couple of things up here and there or whether in general, though, I thought it was like, interesting with its themes. I really liked the almost Dickensian opening chapters with this like poor orphan struggling to, and accidentally killing somebody and stuff like that. And like, there were a lot of things that I thought he was trying to say about like childhood innocence and and about like exile from the Garden of Eden and like all these Paradise Lost themes and stuff like that. And it was all expressed in a very weird way and like the sea adventure aspect was kind of cool. You know, it was we read some better sea adventures though this year. Yeah, and just the way that it and it was kind of subtle. It was not something you pick up all the time right away, but there was this subtle current of prudishness to it, I thought.
Gretchen:
Oh, yeah.
JM:
That was kind of like a little bit. Again, it makes me worry about the author like, you know, he's kind of seems to have some problems and real hangups. So I don't know, like it was an interesting read that I wouldn't necessarily not recommend to anyone, but I would certainly say there are caveats if you would want to read it. And I didn't particularly enjoy some of the places that it went, I guess. So yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, that is actually a story that for me like, it serves as such an interesting work to dissect. And like this discussion of that work kind of redeemed it for me so it did not show up on my bottom list because I just found like, kind of discussing it was interesting enough that I didn't have as much of a problem with it.
Nate:
In addition to the discussion and bringing up the themes a little more I thought that climax was absolutely fantastic.
Gretchen:
Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, that like second to last chapter is really cool.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, that made it all worthwhile for me.
JM:
And it just came out it seemed to kind of come out of nowhere almost. Yeah, but it was like it. Again, you know, there are there are things about it like it's a book that I would consider rereading actually at some point in my life maybe just because now that I know what to look for, you know, kind of like, there are all these things that I was wondering, okay, what's he trying to say with that? What is what is this with the sea devil people, you know, what is with the professor who's like, not lost his mind but he's turned into this almost like, innocent childish kind of figure, like what happened to him and why is that important, like, why does he, he's almost like the, he kind of helps them come through at the end, and then even though the captain dies and everything so I don't know it was it was it was an interesting journey and I was the one who really wanted to read it. I think at the outset, but I have to say yeah it was it was a little bit not really disappointed but kind of like, you know, I mean I don't know if I really like it all that much. But it was interesting. So yeah.
Gretchen:
Yes. So well my number 1, well my bottom one, it is "An Unfinished Communication".
JM:
Oh.
Gretchen:
And I first have to say, hypocrite that I am, some of the work's faults are also things that can be levied against some of the stuff I put in my top five, like "Arqtiq", which will be coming up, like the plot and the prose can be very difficult to follow. And it also, this is going to spoil another thing on my top five, but it is also has some troubling creative origins, like, like serious. However, I think, you know, the other works still offer things that make up for those faults. Like, it doesn't, it also doesn't combine to make an experience like "Unfinished Communication". And like, I think also with this work, it's, we've talked a bit about how the potential of the other works we were mentioning in these lists, kind of like it redeems them in a way, sometimes, but for me, because there was this potential, there is like this kind of like commentary or metanarrative about like storytelling, and like what stories mean. But it's like it all falls through because of that second half. And that kind of makes me angry at it because the whole reason that it falls through and there's that second half, is because this is a justification for a man cheating on his wife.
Nate:
It's like, he's such a misogynistic asshole and it comes off like so much in the last half.
Gretchen:
And yeah, and it's so self-aggrandizing.
Nate:
It really is.
JM:
Yeah, I think we said we said it was petty.
Gretchen:
Yes, yes. I feel like, like, it was one of those works. This is where the discussion actually made me dislike it more because I realized the background behind it and it made sense but not a way I wanted it to. But yeah, that was my final choice here.
JM:
You know, I did I did consider putting that on my list and I'm not really sure why I didn't necessarily, I guess it could have at least made a runner up to I mean I actually have two runner ups for the top five as well so I could have had two for this one and that would have been it I guess, but I don't know maybe maybe, it's because I enjoyed the first half quite a bit. But then yeah the second half is actually quite annoying and frustrating at times. So I don't know it's it's it definitely could have made my list yeah I had it in my head a little bit, and then I kind of thought I don't know, I guess it didn't really bother me enough to put it on there, but then, you know I did, I said "Medusa" was the runner up, maybe that could have been my runner up too, because in the end I kind of spoke positively about Medusa still, so I don't know. Yeah, you're right though, everything you say is definitely true it. It was disappointing in a way that I guess Medusa was not disappointing. It was disappointing because, That's where you want to go with it? After all that, and the cool intro, and the parts that actually made me laugh a little bit in the start like then you want to go there? This misogynistic, petty stuff?
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know where I would rank this one, probably in the bottom third somewhere, but I feel like this is one of those stories where you could just like change a couple minor details and it would come out to be like really good but the fact that those minor details come from just like such a nasty crappy place it just kind of makes it hard to overlook.
Gretchen:
Yeah, like I said like it's just like a combination of everything, like if it were just one failing it wouldn't be as bad, but it's that it all adds up to like just this really horrible picture of, like you know, it's misogynistic, it's the writer but like the background behind it makes it unlikable, the story itself doesn't make sense, everything adds up to a failure, in my opinion.
JM:
Yeah and unlike some of the other stuff that we've highlighted, mainly "Arqtiq" I guess, but it is quite polished, which makes it more frustrating in a way because you know it's not like that you know you kind of feel like he could have done better and I guess he released a shortened version of it?
Nate:
No, that was a abridged by like some modern person who posted online.
JM:
Oh, okay.
Nate:
But no, they they abridged out basically everything except for like the last half where it's like that weird dimension time traveling...
JM:
Oh, so all the cool stuff.
Nate:
Yeah right. Yeah, so whatever.
JM:
Yeah okay yeah yeah that's definitely a fair, a fair pick and I and I again, I could have chosen that. It was something that I considered, and I don't know why I backed away from it in the end, but I guess maybe I just didn't have a strong enough recollection of how I felt reading that second half.
Nate:
Well I got my number one, which might be a surprising pick, because it's from our old friend William Hope Hodgson, and it is "The House Among the Laurels", and while I liked a lot of the Carnacki stories, I just did not get along with this one at all. I thought it was needlessly cruel and mean-spirited; I did not like the resolution of the story at all. There's some good imagery here and there, but I think overall the negative bad vibes that the story kind of puts off with the animal cruelty, it just kind of killed it for me and...
Gretchen:
There's some really classist stuff about homeless people.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
It's a little off-putting.
Nate:
Yeah, there's the bungled like police caper. I don't know, the cops are like Herschel Gordon Lewis level stupid and, I don't know, it didn't work for me the way that like some of the other other Carnacki stories came off. I thought this was easily the weakest of the Carnacki stories, and when I was thinking about stories for this segment that like really left a negative taste in my mouth, I think this one was the most bitter tasting upon reflection.
JM:
Yeah, that's fair, I think this was pretty early in the collection, so between this yeah was number two okay so between this...
Nate:
Yeah, it was number 2.
JM:
Between this and "The Gateway of the Monster" it's like, wow, he's killed three dogs and a cat already. Is this going to be a real ... what kind of book is this going to be? But it didn't end up there, there wasn't really more after that, but it was just kind of, Whoa, okay. I was kind of keeping score there.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Hooking your audience with animal death, I guess.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Yeah, yeah all right cool, well more on Carnacki in a little bit, but let's roll for the, let's see who gets to start the, the positive run- down then.
(Flubbed dice roll)
JM:
Okay, let me do that again, that didn't even sound right, we gotta have the right sound effect.
Nate:
Yeah right.
(Better sounding one)
JM:
That's better! Okay, all right, 5, so that means I get to start, actually, and I am indeed going to start with my number 5, and I cheated here, I told you guys about this in the server, so I don't know if you noticed, but I wanted to do it this way, and forgive me, but I included all the Carnacki stories in one big group, and I think that's fair...
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Just because they are pretty formulaic and that's kind of what I like about them. There's something to be said for a good formula, and I think Hodgson really hit on a really good formula here. Now granted, after nine stories you're kind of thinking it'd be nice if the formula changed up a little bit, and maybe there were signs that he was going to do that, but it just never really happened; different things getting in the way, and war happening perhaps and stuff like that, getting blown to pieces by a shell and all that. But with "The Hog" and "The Haunted Jarvee" there were indications that things were starting to turn in a slightly different direction, and not maybe a different direction in terms of the way the stories play out, but the actual, you know, the structure of things, and it's like, Okay we're taking Carnacki on a ship now. Okay, here's Carnacki doing all kinds of stuff with his super-science and whatnot and that we only got a little hints at before, and I think the formula works really really well, and I just think that I can totally understand why even now in the 2010s, there are authors writing Carnacki stories. I think the bulk of them have been written by William Meikle, but there are other authors that we talked about in that podcast including, Andrew Cartmel, who created their own Carnacki stories and played with the formula in their own ways, and it really works, and Hodgson just did a really cool thing with that, I think, and I love that like, you know, I even wanted to write my own Carnacki story, which I'm still kind of working on, but as usual with fiction writing projects, they hardly ever get finished. but you know, I had this really cool idea to do a Carnacki story, and I still might finish it someday so. And like that's just I guess, a big criterion for me when we do these stories is: how much am I going to think about them afterwards? And here it's not so much that I thought about an individual story, but just the atmosphere of the Carnacki stories, and the feeling of what Carnacki himself was like, and the interesting contrast that not everybody seems to pick up on, where somebody says he's like rude and stuff, but we're like No he wasn't rude at all; he actually seems like a nice guy, maybe animal cruelty notwithstanding, but I don't know that... But yeah, you know, it was really cool to me, and really interesting to get into that world and kind of start seeing Carnacki stories all around me a little bit, and that's kind of how it felt, so...
Nate:
Certainly when I was editing the episode I had the outlines of two Carnacki stories flash in my mind, so maybe Chrononauts Zine number 1 will be a Carnacki sequel.
JM:
You heard it here first, folks: Chrononauts Zine number 1! we're going to talk at the end of the episode about some of our future things; I don't know if that'll come up again, but it's just a cool thought, you know.
Gretchen:
Maybe if we set up a Patreon that'll be one of the tiers.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
Gretchen:
If people want Chrononauts Zine.
Nate:
For sure. I do want to do something like that at some point; I'm not exactly sure how we can swing it, be it republications of some of the public domain stories with our graphic design and art or something like that.
JM:
Yeah, and our own little things.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, there's stuff to be done in that realm, so more to come later I guess.
Gretchen:
You know I was thinking, with the Carnacki stories, it really is like they are more than the sum of their parts, I think, like the stories themselves, some of them are kind of weak, and some of them are great, but I think that having them all together which is, why I think it works to put them all together, it's like they equal something that, because of like their formula and because of Carnacki himself, it like transcends all of the stories' individual value as a work.
Nate:
And I think the way that they just happen to be structured, chronologically, with the weird ones coming at the very end after Hodgson died, it just kind of like feels like such a refreshing break after you go through the formula six times and it's like, Alright are we gonna have to do this three more times? But no, you get something different in those last three.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And I think it's a really welcome change. Not to say that the first six were bad; I enjoyed a lot of the first six a lot, "The Gateway of the Monster" was awesome
Gretchen:
And "The Whistling Room".
Nate:
Yeah that was really good.
JM:
"The Whistling Room" was great.
Nate:
The Thing Invisible I really enjoyed a lot.
JM:
Yeah. Then there was the silly one with the horse.
Nate:
Yeah, but I mean it does feel like he's going through the motions almost for like numbers five and six, and he just even with the "Haunted Jarvee", like, while it still resembles the first six the most out of those last three, it just feels like a really needed break where the scenery changes, the methods change, the vibe changes, like and he does it really well.
JM:
Yyeah.
Nate:
"The Hog" is, you know, different and it's arguably not Hodgson, but it ties into it in a really good way.
JM:
Yeah. It's at least based on an idea by him, so, and yeah, taking it to the sea made a lot of sense to me. I think Hodgson writes that stuff really well.
Gretchen:
Oh, yeah.
JM:
I don't necessarily think we needed to see another English landlord's, Irish landlord's castle or something like that, like you know, I mean it's a cool setting for a few stories, but it doesn't have to be all the time, you know, like these massive sprawling manor houses. I don't know, it's cool, but taking it to the ocean just brought in an extra touch of authenticity that I think it's just Hodgson's own experience, you know, and he always writes like people like sea captains and stuff really well so. the, there aren't that many memorable supporting characters in the Carnacki stories, but the captain of the Jarvee is definitely one of the few that you kind of remember besides Carnacki himself.
So, what's your number 5 pick?
Gretchen:
so, for my fifth pick, I did choose "Arqtiq". It is here not not only for the work itself, but also because the background behind it I think. It's Anna Adolph; learning how personal this was to her did endear me quite a bit to it. And also, it has the sentimental value of being the first work I led on for the podcast.
JM:
Yeah!
Gretchen:
So I have an affection for it because of that as well. Is it hard to follow? Yes. Would I blame anyone for finding it a bad read? No. Do I find myself still thinking about it quite a bit? Yes. It's so weird and surreal in style and plot that I have a lot of respect for it. And I was recently watching some videos on outsider art and music, you know, stuff like The Shaggs and Henry Darger who's like this guy who wrote this bizarre...
Nate:
Vivian Girls.
Gretchen:
Yes, yeah, yeah this 10 thousand page epic...
Nate:
Yeah, something like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and I think that it all fits in with that.
Nate:
Absolutely, it does.
Gretchen:
There's, like, this there's that authenticity and a genuine spirit to it, and I think it makes it worth reading. So, it just really sticks out to me.
Nate:
Yeah, it's such a unique piece of art, and I think the only thing that we've covered like remotely comparable on the podcast is the Cavendish, just because it's so out there, and they're coming from like totally different backgrounds, and the plots and the moods are different, but like they both feel like so incredibly strange in that outsider way, that it's just a completely unique vibe that you just don't really get from a lot of these authors at all, and I really like how those feel and play out in the surrealistic imagery and just how weird everything is, but with the authorial intent to be like not to make it intentionally weird, like it's not like somebody saying, Oh I'm going to make this like psychedelic trippy masterpiece or whatever and like try to set out to make this weird as possible, it's just kind of what comes naturally to somebody like Anna Adolph when she tries to write this story, and it's just fascinating.
Gretchen:
It's genuine, like really from the heart.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
I do really like, I did like the way she publicized her own work, you know, and she wrote those things into the newspapers, like, Behold my great masterpiece! It had a lot of guts to it I guess, at least, so yeah. I don't know, I'm glad that it made your list honestly. I don't really have anything more to say about it though, besides what I said earlier sorry.
Nate:
Right, I guess my number 5 is Jean Ray, and "The Mainz Psalter".
Gretchen:
Yeah, that was my number 4.
Nate:
Cool, yeah, this is a...
JM:
That one's on my list too, so we'll talk about it all together I guess.
Nate:
Yeah, absolutely. It's a great piece of weird fiction; awesome imagery, a really cool plot, I mean the Mainz Psalter itself is a minor component of it, but it really sucks you in, has incredible atmosphere, and a lot going for it. And it feels much quicker than the wordcount. I mean we were talking about the Dixon Torpedo, you know, needing a break for what's a much shorter story than this one, whereas this one just kind of pulls you in and it...
JM:
Yeah, I definitely read this one in one sitting.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah I didn't want to stop. The atmosphere really was great, and just, like, the implications of the story were just really cool, like he didn't really spell a lot of it out but I could kind of feel it there, and in the end it kind of comes through when like there's this really vivid scene of this weird wizard character kind of like hovering on the water, and, like, screaming at the guy, like, Don't smash the crystal! You're destroying knowledge and power! And, like, I'll give you everything! Damn you! curse you! and like you know it was just so, it was so cool, it was just so cool, and the fact that it was another sea adventure, just when I wanted sea adventures, too, was great. The characters, even though they're not exactly, like, three dimensionally sketched in the modern sense, they're really well-drawn, and you feel, you feel bad when they all start to die.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I was going to bring up, I really like the characters, like they feel very fun and eccentric, and it does, yeah, it does hurt when they die, you feel really bad about it.
Nate:
I think it does add emotional weight when those characters are fleshed out, they're not just like mannequins there to be killed
Gretchen:
Yeah, not just bodies.
JM:
Unlike the one thing that is the mannequin.
Gretchen:
yeah.
Nate:
Right, yeah.
JM:
And on the reason, this was actually, I'm gonna like, rather than just talking about the stories again, I'll say that this was my number 2 pick, and it's there because after reading this, I'm like, you know, I developed a bit of a thing about Jean Ra, and I just wanted to read everything that I could, and so I read every short story I could find, as well as the novel, "Malpertuis", and I loved it. I love his style, I love his weird morbid sense of humor, I love the darkness that comes through sometimes and, but yeah there's there's a real humor to it, and a real pathos as well. He has this, he has this weird ability to very, very suddenly make you identify with somebody, like in this really startling and quick way, and it's like there for a second and then it's gone, and you're like, well okay you know, like I suddenly understand something about this person now.
an arbitrary imposed break/top 5 cont./2023 plans
JM:
SO, "Malpertuis" had all these mythological resonances to it, and all these connections to the Gods of Olympos and stuff, and I thought the way he worked that in there was really, really clever. If I may talk about "Malpertuis" for a little bit more, but it was like, he set up this crazy, incredible gothic melodrama of, like, this classic situation where this patriarch of a family's about to die, and all these people are fighting over his resources, and, is he going to make a will? When are we going to get his stuff? And, from that it just expands into this super-weird, morbid, strange story that brings `in, yeah, all these elements from Greek mythology and stuff like that, and it turns really fantastical in a way that you don't expect, and it's super-clever. It reminded me of The Hearing Trumpet a little bit, in just the unexpected places it went, from where it started, and I just... so far that's all the Jean Ray I've been able to find: maybe fourteen short stories and Malpertuis, but, I've enjoyed them all. I really like Jean Ray; I'm glad we did him on teh podcast, it was a perfect way to get introduced to this author. If you read "The Mainz Psalter" in "The Weird" anthology, it's followed up immediately by "The Shadowy Street", which is also by him, and I think there's only one other instance where they have the same author show up twice back to back. Shadowy Street is, maybe, an even more incredible story than "The mainz Psalter", so, yeah. Jean Ray is great, and if I've learned anything about new authors to check out this year, it's probably him, and that's why he was my number 2.
Gretchen:
I definitely want to read more of his stuff.
Nate:
Likewise.
Gretchen:
I also wanted to say, since you mentioned connecting it with The Hearing Trumpet, I was going to say, I feel like he and Carrington have a very similar humour.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
They kind of have a very dry, very kind of dark humour.
JM:
It's morbid, but very amusing.
Gretchen:
yeah.
JM:
I feel like those two might have gotten along okay.
Nate:
I guess they could talk to each other in French.
JM:
Yeah, they could. She could have said, I don't understand your stupid Belgian French!
Nate:
Yeah!
JM:
Yeah so let me see, who's turn is it now?
Nate:
I think it's yours, Gretchen.
Gretchen:
Yeah, for number 4 I had "Mainz Psalter" for number 4 as well.
Nate:
Did you give your number 5?
Gretchen:
JM, you started off right?
JM:
Okay, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah yeah, I'm also a little ... the fire alarm broke my stride; I was not sure where I was for a second.
Nate:
Yeah okay so yeah, JM, I guess you're on your number 4 pick then, right?
JM:
Okay, my number 4 is "No Man's Land in Space", by Leigh Brackett.
Gretchen:
That's my number 3.
Nate:
That's my number two.
JM:
Oh cool. All right, so we all, we all have this on our list. that's really cool. I put this on here because even though I think this was kind of, you know, this is, this was a pretty short story; it's a quick read, and it's not necessarily one of the deepest things that we've done on the podcast, but it's certainly one of the most resonant in terms of, like, yeah, this feels, it feels like so much science fiction that I know. It feels like the essence of this really action-packed, hot and fiery pulp story, you know, where like everything just hits the ground and just goes, and doesn't stop. And all the world-building is done naturally within the story. It goes into this weird horror territory towards the end with the remote controlled zombies, and it was just a really, really cool story. It just feels like if you didn't know Leigh Brackett and you read this story, you would probably want to read more; you'd probably want to be going there more often and seeing what she does, and I think this in combination with the letter that she wrote to Amazing, you know, just kind of, it makes you want to know what she's about and what she can do. And, this wasn't her first story, but it's pretty early on for her, so it was a really good story for us to do, I think, on the podcast, for the Amazing episode, because she didn't really end up sticking with Amazing very much after this. She kind of sounded very hopeful in her letter, but I think she just found a better, a better, more suitable home for her stories. And it was just, yeah it's just sort of the start of a real legacy in sci-fi writing. And there's a lot of action; there were a lot of shades-of-gray kind of characterizations; it was violent, and dark,and it was a really good story.
Nate:
Yeah, the darkness and the grim ending really contrast with her letter, which is bright and whimsical and cheery and funny, and it really showcases, kind of, both sides of her, and yeah, it makes you want to read more. And yeah, I love this one absolutely.
Gretchen:
Yes.
Nate:
I just love a good pulp story like this; it really checks all the boxes for me.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I was very recently, like a couple of days ago, I had a conversation with someone in my post-colonial theory class about westerns, because they were a big fan of westerns, and we were kind of talking a bit about, like, the western is sort of this, there's an apocalyptic feeling to westerns where it's, like it's the end of an era. It's the end of this idea of manifest destiny and western expansion, and I feel like this story at the very end, the hopelessness of it has that same apocalyptic feel. It's very nihilistic in a way, but in a way that I really enjoy. And before that of course, the pace, the action is done really well. It's executed in a really, it really grabs you.
Nate:
It's interesting that you're talking about the kind of apocalyptic themes of the western, because a lot of them literally take place in the desert, and I guess I kind of didn't really tie that to this story when I did my summary of it, but the asteroid functions just as a desert. It's this desolate, brutal harsh environment that really kind of...
JM:
Yeah, and there's this little town sort of stuck in the middle of it that's completely lawless.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
that has all these like...
Gretchen:
The middle of nowhere. It is a no man's land in space.
Nate:
Exactly, yeah. Have you guys watched any of the easterns from the Soviet Union?
JM:
No.
Nate:
So it's their version of the western. It's the eastern. So a lot of these stories take place during the Russian Civil War around the time of the Revolution basically, where the Red Army is fighting the White Army.
JM:
Pretty much the atmosphere that Mikhail Bulgakov grew up in, where that, yeah that's the total vibe of it I'm sure.
Nate:
Right. But the stories take place in Central Asia, which is their desert hostile remote territory. there's a lot of these movies. "White Sun of the Desert" is awesome; if you haven't seen it I would highly recommend it. It's a really, really good movie.
JM:
So when was that made?
Nate:
In the 1960s.
JM:
Okay.
Nate:
A lot of them were made around that time.
JM:
With the boom of the American Western.
Nate:
Yeah I mean the American Western had been pretty much a thing for 100 years at that point, I mean we...
JM:
I mean on film, though.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I guess the 50s, the 50s are considered the original western boom, right? On film.
Nate:
They had a lot of entries before that; in the 30s and the 40s I think the genre was pretty big.
JM:
Okay.
Nate:
But certainly a lot in the 50s and 60s as well. It starts to decline in the 70s. but yeah 60s is kind of the tail end for the US stuff.
JM:
Okay, yeah, I guess that makes sense, I just kind of thought, like, the 50s, you know, John Wayne and all that.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
Gretchen:
I mean you do get a couple of things a little earlier with like "Stagecoach" and stuff, that's like the 30s as well.
Nate:
Right, yeah. I think John Wayne's career even starts in, was it the 30s that he starts off doing those kind of westerns?
Gretchen:
I think so.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, I guess I don't really know a lot about the western. For some reason I just never, like, besides the spaghetti ones I just never really...
Nate:
Right. Those ones are the best too because I mean they're, they're close to the gritty genre stuff that I think we all really like, and for me anyway the American Westerns are too sanitized, too, I guess, patriotic in a way that just doesn't sit right with me: the whole white Christian guy conquering the native west by divine right or whatever, it's just like, I don't need to hear this kind of story. Whereas the spaghetti westerns I think really focus more on the darker underbelly of human nature. They don't really give a shit about American imperialism, that's just kind of the scenario it takes place in and the audience they want to exploit. I think a lot of those stories they tell are just kind of different by nature, and likewise the Brackett story isn't really about expansionism or manifest destiny or anything like that, in fact it's kind of critical of that in text of, you know, this guy who owns this chemical refinery blowing up the... (laughs)
JM:
Yeah, the chemical refinery just exploding at the end of the story to add some extra tention to everything. (laughs)
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It's like, Oh by the way you've been living on this powder keg the entire time.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And now it's time for it to blow up! Yeah, and then in the end of course one of our Danas, what is it, what is the situation he's in? I think his atmosphere is about to run out basically.
Nate:
He has a lot of major problems.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it doesn't look good for him. He's about to face his demise, and he did so, he sacrificed himself for a man already dead.
JM:
Yeah. That's my number 4 and you guys have all that ... I'm losing track of our numbers now but I think that's okay.
Nate:
Yeah, I'm also losing track.
Gretchen:
So it would be you Nate because mine was "Mainz Psalter", so I already did mine.
Nate:
Oh okay, so mine is "The Omega Force" by Lugones.
Gretchen:
Nice!
JM:
Interesting.
Nate:
So possibly a big part of the reason why I enjoyed this one is the translation process, and just kind of diving into the language. And I mentioned earlier that the Catalan story was incredibly difficult for me to translate, and this one was also difficult for me to translate; I would say probably the most difficult of the Spanish stories I've done, but it was in a very rewarding way, because this one has such Edgar Allan Poe vibes to it, and I love Edgar Allan Poe. (all laugh) And even somebody who is heavily influenced by him and kind of capturing that mood, I think it just plays out really well for me.
So, great horror story, and it has a lot of cool discussion of acoustics and resonance and that kind of thing and, you know, as evidenced by our early discussion on how I write some of the music for the podcast, I'm really interested in the mathematical side of how sounds piece together, and a sound that's loud enough to blow your brains out is just awesome. (laughs) Yeah, I really like this one a lot.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I had not thought about this one for the top five, but it is a good story, and I, yeah the concept of it is really interesting. And it does have that Poe vibe.
Nate:
Yeah, totally.
Gretchen:
Is that a foreshadowing for what might be next in your list?
Nate:
I think so.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, I liked it a lot too. I definitely think that it was, I mean Lugones is probably, among all the things that we've translated from Spanish, I think that he's probably for me the most interesting anyway. I mean I like Nervo, but there's, there's some content there that spiritual obsession and stuff that I don't, I didn't quite connect with I guess.
Nate:
Yeah. So I guess it'll be interesting when you guys read "The Last War". Because Lugones, for me, I really like, but he's like the Carnacki stories, where he follows a formula. Like the three Lugones stories, like, they follow the same beats, okay, you know, I get it but it's a good formula. Nervo, "The Soul Giver" and "The Last War" couldn't be any more different and you know we're going to hit that future plans next year and I think we're going to cover that sometime in 2023, but I'm really excited for you guys to read that one because I really like it a lot and it couldn't be any more different than "Soul Giver".
JM:
Interesting.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I did enjoy "Soul Giver", but I do think that the Lugones story was better, but I'm interested in reading "The Last War".
Nate:
Yeah, I think you guys will really like that, and there's going to be some very, very obvious parallels to a popular modern science fiction franchise that you should pretty much pick up upon on the bat. I'm kind of surprised that this one hasn't been cited as a precursor for that one.
JM:
I think I know what you mean, actually, from what I've read about "Last War" so far.
Nate:
Yeah, we'll we'll definitely get to it when we get there.
JM:
Okay we can save it for then. (Nate and JM laugh)
Yeah. Yeah interesting, that's a good point. But yeah we're talking about Lugones. But yeah, I like the Poe-esque formula; I like the weird science, and yeah the acoustical stuff is really interesting.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
I kind of like the kind of stories where you get a whole bunch of information and then there's a gap, and like, you kind of go forward in time and you're like, Hey we haven't heard from this guy for a while, let's see what's happening with him! And then they show up and he's like, he's dead! (all laugh) Because his experiment's gone wrong, and you're like, Oh, what happened? Remember the vivid scene that he described where his brains flew all over the wall and everything, and the doctor was, like, tasting it and going, Hmm tastes like brains! (all laugh) No, it is a really good story. Interesting pick I guess I liked it but it maybe one of those things where I think maybe I would have liked it more if it was a little longer, actually. Then it could have made my list, but I guess for whatever reason it didn't really quite register with me enough to make the list, but it is a really good story, so I'm glad that you picked it.
Nate:
Yeah, and I mean I guess translating this, I probably read this five or six times all the way through in both English and Spanish, so I mean I spent a lot of time with this one. You spent yeah you spent a good amount of time with it that's also a good point. I don't think I did read it twice, but unlike with The Soul Giver, I didn't really feel that there was a lot to comment on with the translation. It seemed like it was a bit more straightforward, to me anyway.
Nate:
Lugones was tough for me. I mean, he uses a lot of idioms and phrases that it's like, okay, I get what you're saying in Spanish, but how do I phrase this in English where it doesn't sound totally awkward and unnatural, and I think that was what I had the most problems with.
JM:
All right. My turn then?
Gretchen:
Yes.
JM:
Okay, so my number 3 pick, is "Sirius", Olaf Stapledon.
Gretchen:
That's my number 2.
JM:
Oh okay.
Nate:
Well he's not on my list, so.
JM:
No. I mean that's interesting. You know, I mean I know we had some discussions about it, and it was a book that actually engendered a lot of talk, and I think that's one of the reasons why I wanted to include this. I think we all kind of agree that the last quarter of the book maybe is not really as strong as the rest of it. It takes a couple of turns that are a little bit unfortunate, I think like everything after Francis dies maybe is a little bit, like, just sad, and kind of upsetting, but I think that the rest of it was just so good, and the concept was so cool, and I don't know, sometimes I feel like maybe I'm the most immature person on this podcast, but this whole, I guess, way that Stapledon described Sirius's adolescence, and his kind of trying to come to terms with a world that was not designed for somebody like him. It resonated a lot with me, and I really felt like, not to sound cheesy or corny or anything like that but, I really felt like it was speaking to a part of me a little bit, where I could really relate to it and I kind of...
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Felt like, yeah I'm not like Sirius, maybe not as smart as Sirius and I'm not a dog, (all laugh) but like, you know, it just kind of felt like, yeah I get this! I get why he's frustrated. And I get why everybody's like around him's like, yeah we want to help, we want, his, I guess you could say his father Francis is just basically like, Well I don't really, I don't really understand why you're so upset, you know, like here I got you this nice place in university and everything, and I know it's weird being the only intelligent dog around but surely we can make this work! And there's kind of this communication gap in between them, where it's like, he really cares for his creation and all that, it's kind of like the opposite of "Frankenstein" where "Frankenstein" couldn't give a shit about the monster, you know, like he doesn't, he doesn't even want to have anything to do with him.
Nate:
No.
JM:
This guy does but at the same time, he doesn't really get it. He doesn't get why he has all the problems that he does and, You know, I really felt for Sirius and I really, I felt his moments of triumph and I felt his moments of frustration. And there were parts of the book that really got inside me a lot, and so you know it's, yeah all that other stuff towards the end, it's kind of unfortunate and there's one specific decision that he made that I wish Stapledon hadn't really gone there, but besides that this is a really cool story. It really did the thing that I think science fiction can do so well, where it puts you in the head of a creature that thinks like, as Campbell said ... John W. Campbell that is, said: show me a creature that is not a man, but thinks as well as a man, and I think that Stapledon really really hit on something here and made a really awesome creation in the form of Sirius. I really enjoyed his, even his like, you know, solitary wanderings among the Welsh, the Welsh fields, being a sheepdog, like even that stuff was really really cool, and I really liked it, so that's why it's my number 3.
Gretchen:
Yes, I agree that, you know, the last quarter of the novel maybe does take some questionable turns. But I mentioned with "Medusa", one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much was the discussion, and I really think that our discussion of "Sirius" was a great one that we had. And maybe I'm a bit of a hypocrite for having this book so high when I was kind of ragging on "Unfinished Communication" because there is that aspect of, maybe this is partially a justification on Stapledon's part for an affair that he had, but I still feel like the rest of the novel is just so well-constructed and well-written. I love the prose, and the musings of Sirius, and it's very intimate. You know, we talked a bit about how it also has a distance, but there is also an intimacy to it that I really enjoy, and there's this kind of balance between the two that, yeah I just, I think it's very well done.
Nate:
And Sirius is a much more sympathetic character than Frankenstein's monster in that while he has his moods of wild instinct and kills random animals and stuff like, that he's not like, a child murderer for no reason like Frankenstein's monster is.
JM:
Yeah. it's not just for vengeance.
Nate:
Right, exactly. He kind of reverts back to what he perceives to be his natural state of like the natural food chain order or, whatever and he's like living out this lifestyle that he thinks is supposed to be natural, but it just doesn't come natural to him, it's like this, like you were saying, he's living in a world that is not meant for him, and he kind of captures that a lot better in some ways than Frankenstein's monster does, because Frankenstein's monster is, ultimately while, we feel bad for him that he's shunned from humanity and that he is an outcast and his creator abandons him and all this, he is at the end of the day a brutal murder. (laugh) And Shelley makes no bones about that. Whereas I think in general SIrius is a much more three dimensional character, even though the monster character of Frankenstein is very interesting and compelling on its own, Sirius is more, I guess, sympathetic and more relatable as a realistic character.
JM:
Yeah and there are there are elements that I mean, you know there were definitely elements of triumph that I really felt. I mentioned there was one scene in particular where Sirius went to a church and he was like, listening to the sermon and they tried to kick him out of the church and it was, it was kind of mocking, and it was just so well done. You know I wanted to cheer him on, and then after that he kind of became friends with the rector of a church and joined in with the congregation and stuff and they didn't know what to make of it. And it was just like this really cool thing that that I think Stapledon did where it's just like, showing the alienation but also so much humanity as well and, I don't know, it was just really good, I even thought the relationship between Sirius and Plaxy, although it definitely was a little bit discomfiting I guess in a way, I liked the way that it was challenging; I like the way that he was trying to kind of push at these especially 1940s British sensibilities of what you were supposed to be able to portray and stuff like that. Even now, like even obviously, it's just weird. But these are the kind of things that when we talk about sci-fi romances, and when we talk about inter species things and what's going to happen.
Nate:
Well that one movie just one best picture.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
What was it called, "The Shape of Water" or something?
Gretchen:
Oh yeah, "Shape of Water".
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Right. It's not necessarily supposed to make us not squirm right? I like that he went there even though, I do think it's weird too, you know, I just, I like that he actually was willing to take it that far. So, I like Sirius a lot, and that's my number 3.
Yeah. Nate?
Nate:
So my number 3, as alluded to previously, is Edgar Allan Poe. "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym".
JM:
So that's one of my runners up.
Nate:
Okay.
Gretchen:
Yes.
Nate:
Yeah. I read this before we did the podcast and absolutely loved it, and again loved it when I read it for the podcast. It is a bit disjointed and it feels like four different short stories kind of pasted together, but they all work, and it's not like a Leslie Stone where the elements don't come together in a satisfying way. I think all the elements, while they don't necessarily mix, can be easily taken on their own and separated from one another and seen as a more cohesive entity than something like Out of the Void. The tension that you feel, that Poe conveys during the shipwreck segments of trying to survive off of no food, and the cannibalism angle. The way it shifts into the weird Antarctic voyage. It's just such a roller coaster of a ride and absolutely awesome at the end, that one final scene of the strange entity. (laughs) You know, just encompassing the whole field of vision and world, it's just so overpowering, it's completely unforgettable for me.
JM:
It's definitely a story where I don't mind at all that it's very episodic. I actually appreciate that in a way, like it's not a complaint that sometimes, like sometimes I feel like people nowadays maybe have this crazy expectation that everything should hang together perfectly, and there should be like, exact lines drawn between every point of the story so that everything just lines up just so, right, and I don't necessarily, I don't necessarily expect that or always want it, and I kind of feel like Poe did a really cool job here in not only telling a story, but telling the life of this young Arthur Gordon Pym, in a way, like you know we get to see him in his earliest sea voyage and it is this kind of crazy drunken excapade. And it feels almost lighthearted I guess in comparison to what's to come.
Nate:
Oh it's very lighthearted. I mean that first incident can easily be read as comedy.
Gretchen:
Oh yeah. Yeah, there's some very funny moments in it, like the part when he meets with, or rather he's walking by his father?
JM:
His grandfather.
Gretchen:
His grandfather. And he's just barely able to make sure that he doesn't recognize him and, that part I remember laughing quite a bit at that, you know, it was afunny moment, and you get that quite a bit in that beginning section.
JM:
Oh, sure.
Gretchen:
And then, yeah, it just goes into a much darker territory.
JM:
Yeah. I love how when he goes on the boat with his buddy, right, Augustus, and he's like, Augustus just seems perfectly normal and Arthur's too inexperienced to realize how drunk he is and he's like, Yeah everything's fine; we're just going along, we're going to have a ride and it's going to be fun, and then all of a sudden he's like, Uh-oh, actually he's smashed. Oh no he's passed out! What am I going to do? (laughs) It was so good. And then the book went to some pretty dark places in the following episodes. And it was during the height of that January- March period where all I wanted to read was sea stories. (laughs). It was awesome.
Nate:
And this is early for the genre, too. We covered Symzonia, and that was from 1820, and when we did that episode we remarked that that was kind of early for nautical seafaring fiction.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And you know, this one's 1838 and I had revisited "Moby Dick" during the summer.
JM:
Yeah, I read that one this year too.
Nate:
So it was three or four months after we covered this or so, maybe a little later, but I was again struck by the similarities between the two in places because it might be totally coincidental but it might be intentional reference, but there's a very small scene at the beginning of "Moby Dick" where they meet the crew of the Grampus.
Gretchen:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Mind you, that is the name of a whale, right?
Nate:
Yeah. I mean it's possible that Melville wasn't referencing it at all, but again, it's one of those interesting things like the Tolkien and Dickens thing that I mentioned earlier, that it's just kind of neat putting the two side by side when you read them so close together. You pick up on those little things.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
"Moby Dick" is obviously the superior novel, but I think Poe was influential enough and certainly had his name around a fair amount that "Pym" was probably quite influential in its own right for the whole seafaring nautical voyage fiction, which again I think when we covered "Symzonia" we talked about how we thought that it was earlier dated than that, but there really wasn't a lot of major nautical seafaring fiction before ... again, I don't think that many people read "Symzonia", and there were a fair number of minor things like that.
JM:
Yeah, definitely. And with "Symzonia" I think there was just the one thing that we came up with, a nonfictional sort of account, what was that guy's name, Daniel ... some kind of non-fictional sea account; we read some excerpts from it and it looked pretty exciting, right?
Nate:
Oh, Nathaniel Ames.
JM:
Yeah. And it was an early example of a non-fictional sea story I guess; we wondered if it influenced "Symzonia" and whether, even, like there was some speculating whether that was the same author.
Nate:
Yeah, right. That was a whole authorship question piece that we talked about in New Yorker, yeah.
JM:
I mean we think it's Symmes just because it seems dogmatic and a little bit like, not written by somebody who has the greatest grasp of storytelling perhaps. It's a bad book.
Nate:
(Laughs) Yeah. "Symzonia" sucks.
JM:
Yeah, "Pym" is definitely awesome and Jules Verne thought so too, but neither of those stories actually made my top five, although I did consider "Pym" and it was one of my runners up.
Gretchen:
Yeah I was considering "Pym" as well.
JM:
Cool. Yeah, I'll mention my other runner up at the end, unless somebody else mentions it in this, but I don't think that'll happen at this point.
Nate:
Yeah, I guess it looks like nobody considered Jules Verne for either of our list, which, you know, I'd rank that one, probably somewhere in the middle-ish.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I thought there was some interesting concepts and some interesting things in Verne, but I didn't consider it as a top pick.
Nate:
Yeah, nor bottom, I mean.
Gretchen:
No, it wasn't bad at all, but not a favorite.
JM:
Yeah, it definitely doesn't deserve negativity but I didn't really, it wasn't as good as "Pym".
Nate:
No.
JM:
Put it that way. So, and the fact that "Pym" didn't make my list, you know, it's like, yeah I don't really, I think it's a little bit difficult for Verne to make a top list at this point just because his formula although I guess he does deviate from it a few times during his career, it's a little bit, sometimes just the lack of character conflict and stuff like that does I think take him down a little bit for me, occasionally. When Verne is good, he's really, really good, but I do think sometimes it's easy for him to just get into this mode where there's just a bunch of people looking at stuff, and there's not a lot of tension; there's not a lot of drama. So in his book, his sequel to "Pym", it's cool that he decided he needed to write a sequel to "Pym", but at the same time, he wanted to demystify a lot of the weird stuff in "Pym" and I don't really think that was necessary.
Nate:
No.
JM:
A lot of fanfiction is not necessary. (laughs)
Gretchen:
Just let the mystery be.
Nate:
Yeah I mean that's the best part of Poe is the mystery.
JM:
I think it's you now Gretchen?
Gretchen:
Well, I have already kind of had my favorites covered except number 1, which I feel like might come up, but I've already had numbers 3 and 2, so.
Nate:
Yeah, likewise. I think we might have all picked the same number 1.
JM:
Oh, wow, okay. yeah I have one more too: who wants to say it?
Nate:
(laughs) Well, I guess I will say that the number 1 of my bottom list and the number 1 of my top list are the same so, is that an accurate description of you guys' number 1?
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah I should say that while making this top five I did cheat by having a certain rule where I would only have one work per author as well, as I tried to do one work per topic, but I did this because I knew it would mostly be Hodgson, if I didn't, and of course the one that I chose for number 1 is "House on the Borderland".
Nate:
That's the one.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah I thought to, should I have, should I make that rule too? But in the end I decided not to, so my number 5 and my number 1 are by the same author, and "House on the Borderland" is it. And and I also felt a little bit bad because it's a reread for me. I've read this book like four times now. So, you know, it is the fact that I have reread it so many times probably says, yeah I like this book a lot. The atmosphere is incredible. Again it's a lot of what you see in weird fiction like this, like the Jean Ray is another good example. There's so much stuff that's implied, but it's really cool to think about. Maybe not everybody would feel the same implications, but I think particularly if you read a lot of this kind of fiction you kind of feel it, you know. You kind of feel like, you're reading a story and it's really eerie and atmospheric on its own, but there's something greater than the story going on, where it's like there's more that you're not seeing, and it's that extra thing that adds this feeling of cosmicism to it I guess. It's a very strange book but there's a certain logic underpinning everything and there's a certain like, once you kind of read into what's happening and you go Okay so you know, first he's under siege from these beings that are Kind of from this dark plane dimension, but they also kind of might be from the future. And there's the weird time journey, which is this awesome cosmic vista of seeing the end of the universe.
Nate:
Yeah. Just utterly fantastic.
Nate:
Yeah, and like it's pretty early on for this kind of thing. It's like he took elements from Wells's "The Time Machine", where he goes past the Eloi and past the Morlocks to the end, where he sees a couple of really, really strange things. It's like he took that and expanded upon it, manifold. It's just. Yeah, the whole first half with the swine things holding the house under siege is really tense, and then when he gets back from the cosmic journey, the tone kind of changes and it becomes really sad.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
It's just like you kind of get the feeling even though he doesn't really spell it out too much, you kind of get the feeling of this old bitter kind of, not- friendly man, like, reconsidering his life and being like, Man, I really screwed up. I don't have any friends, I haven't been very nice to my sister, and I miss my dog. And it's just like, damn man. It's just, you know, all of a sudden the things that he's gone through just suddenly feel like it means something.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
A part of you is like, I wish he could come through this okay because I'd like him to learn from this and be better, but actually I know from what kind of story this is that he's not going to be okay and you just know the doom is coming, and you can feel it approaching, and like, you know, the way he spells it out it's, you know the doom is coming but it doesn't mean when it comes it's any less effective.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean that last half of the novel, it's really just such a, it goes from being that, like you said, the siege narrative, to this meditative epic that deals with loss on the cosmic scale, and it explores loneliness and mourning in these really grand terms. It's just really incredible that especially the first part is just a really great suspenseful work, but then that second half is when it just becomes incredible.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely the tackling of grief on a cosmic scale I think is really impressive and the way he is able to pull it off. He does a great job with it. And it's very mournful, like mourning the whole universe as it passes.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Pretty incredible.
JM:
Yeah, I'd say. Yeah, and of course he's got to work in his body horror, fungus thing in there somewhere too.
Nate:
Oh yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I went into "House on the Borderland" with pretty high expectations because it was a work I had been wanting to read for several years. And it was one of the first like weird fiction works that I had ever heard of. So it was one that I had been kind of building, up and it was quite delightful to have my expectations not met but also to have it excel those expectations.
Nate:
Yeah, absolutely. This is a masterpiece to say the least.
JM:
I'm glad that you guys liked it that much because I know this is a first read for both of you.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It's kind of like one of those books like Voyage to Arcturus that's been with me for 15, almost 20 years now I guess, 15 years at least, where it know it just kind of, yeah these books are always going to stay with me now, like I'm never going to put them aside completely, you know, I'll probably come back to them again.
I don't know I mean to me this is like, last year Voyage to Arcturus was that book. These two books are, I mean they're not necessarily that similar but they have a similar weight I guess in my consciousness. So, yeah, those two. And they're both very good examples of very, very weird early 20th century fiction from Britain. So, yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, I would like to find a good audiobook version of this one. I found one of "Voyage to Arcturus" which, the narrator is American and I don't know if it really fits what I want to listen to. I kind of picture somebody with like a thick Scottish accent.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. Starkness Observatory! (laughs)
Nate:
Yeah. I've been really into the audiobooks lately and a good narrator really makes a story excel that much more.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I listened to the Rudyard Kipling "ABC" stories today...
JM:
Oh, cool.
Nate:
And yesterday doing various, running around, and the narrator on those is just awesome. He gets into it.
JM:
He did a really, really good job.
Nate:
He did,
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. Especially the way he brought the characters to life in the ABC story.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, and the version of Tolkien's "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" I'm listening to now is narrated by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame.
JM:
Oh!
Nate:
He does a great job with it.
JM:
Cool. Have you seen his weird history documentaries?
Nate:
No I haven't but I've watched a couple of the Michael Palin travel documentaries. So it's kind of interesting how some of the Python guys got into the documentary scene after the comedy.
JM:
Yeah. My friend Ionas, who created the actual theme piece for Chrononauts...
Nate:
Yeah, right...
JM:
Showed me the Terry Jones history documentaries. There's lots of medieval history stuff, and they're done in a very weird way. Definitely got a personality to it, not just a documentary; it feels kind of different and there's a lot of weird enactments and stuff like that. They're pretty fun and strange. And I can totally picture him doing that kind of ... Elvish talk, and the hiogh speech, and you were talking about the contrast between the Hobbit characters who kind of spoeak Irish-like.
Nate:
Yeah right. It's interesting how Tolkien does it, because he translated "Sir Gawain" from...
JM:
Yeah, and "Beowulf".
Nate:
Yeah, so I mean I guess they're different languages pretty much entirely, but Chaucer's Middle English I think is much easier to understand without a translator than the Gawain author's English is. Chaucer was around London and his Middle English is more, I guess, much more of a precursor to modern English than the Gawain author's English was. So it incorporates a lot of older words that didn't make it into the English spoken today as opposed to Chaucer. But the alliterative nature of the Gawain poem really comes across in the Tolkien translation. Like he's really good at keeping the, I guess, rhyme scheme and meter is the wrong way to put it, because Tolkien even says in his introduction that that's not what the Gawain poem was concerned with, he's more concerned with the alliterative nature of the words. So basically every word of the same sentence starts with the same letter and there's this one awesome, awesome chapter of James Joyce's "Ulysses" where he does his version of (laughs) Gawain- era English alliterative poetry that's just breathtaking goosebumps level of parody. I mean like it's the amount of talent he puts into the prose and the evocative imagery it brings to verses like what's actually happening in the real world, which is, these guys getting black out drunk and pissing off all the staff at a maternity ward is an incredible juxtaposition. (laughs) I mean I know "Ulysses" has this reputation of being this incomprehensible, impenetrable block of deep philosophical text, but it's just really not that way at all.
Gretchen:
That's "Finnegan's Wake".
Nate:
It's a lot of humor. Yeah exactly.
JM:
Yeah. I still have to take a crack at that one myself. I'd like to, but one of the things that people always say is, it will seem that way if you don't, like, there's so many references in it, you know, like there's so many references to things that you will know if you've spent a lot of time studying in the English curriculum, even basic school stuff maybe, but like if you haven't been brought up that way it probably will seem kind of incomprehensible.
Nate:
Yeah, but in a way it's like when we did the Jarry novel, where the introduction says like he's making fun of these French authors and if you know them, cool, and if you don't know them it's like, OK that's what he's doing here.
JM:
Yeah, but you wouldn't know that if you didn't know them, or you didn't have introductory material to tell you.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And so that's why I think it's important, probably, to read a good annotated edition.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. If I don't understand what he's saying I can at least read some commentary that'll kind of clarify it to me.
Nate:
Yeah. And it's one of those works that have been dissected to death, so I mean the commentaries out there; the audiobook version of "Ulysses" really does melt away a lot of the difficulty which kind of arises from Joyce just being, like, not a fan of punctuation or format. (laughs) Some of the paragraphs are just like straight blocks of text. Aand again the audiobook version just makes it melt away.
JM:
That's cool. Yeah.
Gretchen:
I do feel like I really missed out. There was that class I think I mentioned in one episode, I can't remember which one, about that one course where they were teaching both "Ulysses" and "Middlemarch".
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Unfortunately it's not going to be available next year, but man I really would have liked to have taken that. But yeah, I have only read a couple of stories from "Dubliners" by Joyce so far, so I would definitely like to give Ulysses a try.
Nate:
Yeah. "Ulysses" is I think his masterwork. I haven't read "Finnegan's Wake" yet; I'm going to get to at some point, but it's definitely, in my opinion, better than "Dubliners" or "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man".
"Middlemarch" is definitely an interesting work to pair it with. Middlemarch kind of is a part of that English pseudo-historical novel tradition that kind of gained popularity with "Tom Jones". And "Middlemarch" references "Tom Jones" a fair amount in text. And it's an interesting lineage, because "Tom Jones" is a very, very long picaresque, but it's a breezy long read, you know what I mean?
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Like it's not like a "Middlemarch" or a Dickensian novel where there is like, a billion characters you got to keep track of. It's just the same two guys just going on adventures for 900 pages, but he makes it work.
JM:
Yeah, I've always liked the picaresque novels. That's probably why I like stuff like the "Dying Earth" stuff from Vance so much because it reads a lot like that.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, I'm thinking, I'm thinking for a future episode we may just have to do the "Dying Earth" stories.
Nate:
Yeah, well, I guess that segues nicely into what we're going to do for the future in 2023 right?
JM:
Yeah. I did want to mention my runner-up though, which was the "Moonstone Mass" by Harriet Spofford.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Very atmospheric work.
Nate:
Yeah, absolutely.
JM:
Yeah. I wanted to include that somehow, just because I thought it was such an awesomely atmospheric piece of writing. It was really strange and eerie. The story-wise it was pretty simple. You know, when you try to summarize it, there's not a lot that happens. I actually think that that excerpt from the story that we put in the beginning of the podcast was more, telling you kind of what the story was like, than my plot summary was. And that's just because, you know, it's just so weirdly stark and cold and picturesque. I liked her other story that we read; It was really gothic and cool, but this one was really, it culminated some of that Arctic adventure, and sea adventure stuff that we've been reading, but it was also, the way she described the landscapes and stuff like that. You know, I mean it made me kind of think of Lovecraft and his Cyclopean cities and all that, and like it was very hallucinatory. She kind of had, like, the main character felt that he was seeing godlike beings, who may or may not have been there. It was really potent. I read it twice just because the first time I was like I don't really know what I just read but that was really cool. Let me read it again because I can't summarize that. (laughs)
So I read it again, and it kind of felt very much like a dream. That is in its own way a little bit of a cliche, but to say that it felt like a dream, in this case, was a good thing. It felt kind of nightmarish, kind of like, again, like this guy learned nothing. But the thing is, it's so perfect, because the way she starts the story is she's describing that he's under a curse. At first I'm thinking, What's the curse? What's the curse? And it turns out the curse is just, like, some kind of weird perversity that makes, you know, is this kind of weird family thing where they're very acquisitive and they don't need to be. There's no reason for this guy to be looking for this super-fantastical diamond, he just feels compelled to do it. And he's got this fiance waiting for him back home, and all she wants to do is, you know, settle down and have a good relationship and a nice house. And he's just like, Uuuhh I'm going off to the Arctic. (laughs) Yeah. I don't know. It was a really cool story and it just not in the top five, so I made it a runner-up.
Nate:
Yeah, I like this one a lot, and I was looking for a good anthology of her fiction and there's just not one out there. So somebody needs to put one out there, because this one and the "Ray of Displacement" I think have both been anthologized a fair amount, but I would assume that an author as prolific as her, that had been writing for like decades by the time "Ray of Displacement" came out. I think this one was fairly early in her career, but her career spans a good, like what, 40 or 50 years or something like that?
JM:
Yeah, at least 40 years, yeah.
nate:
Yeah. So publishers, come on. Harriet Prescott Spofford! Put out a good anthology.
JM:
Give us a really good Spofford anthology. Yeah we deserve one. There is one available at Project Gutenberg, but it's a fraction of her supposed output.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Of dozens and dozens of stories. I think there's like six stories in there or something like that, and I think it, this one, I think it may be a book actually published in her lifetime. We need a modern reprint of a lot of her stories, taken from different points in her career. Maybe with a little bit of commentary.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, a nice Collected Stories publication.
JM:
Yeah.
All right. Let's talk about the future then. So our next book is "Kindred". We've all read it. We all thought it was really interesting. It's going to be a heavy discussion. So I think I'm glad that we are only doing the one book for our next episode, because I'm sure there'll be plenty to talk about, even if it's not five hours long. It doesn't matter, because it's going to be hard to kind of segue from doing something like that. Definitely anybody who's listening and wants to read something that's, I guess, powerful and pertinent in its way. It's not an easy read, but it is a quick read, in the sense that I didn't really want to put it down. I wanted to know how she was going to manage it.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And you also had mentioned, I believe, that this it would have been on your list if we included it.
Nate:
It would have been on mine for sure. I would have ranked it at number 2 if we had included it.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Well I should say, because I do really love this work, I do think I would have put it at number 1.
JM:
Yeah. I mean we'll talk about it next year but it'll be in the running for sure.
Nate:
Oh yeah.
JM:
Yeah. It just didn't seem like, since we haven't discussed it yet, you know, I just, I didn't really want to just be, Well we'll discuss it next time on Chrononauts! (laughs) But there's this one book that we haven't talked about yet!
Nate:
Yeah. It's going to be a very lengthy discussion, I think there's going to be a lot to talk about and it's going to be a very seriously important subjects that still has resonance to the modern day. And it plays with genre a lot and, it does a whole lot of things that I think are going to be very interesting to talk about, and when we do the best of 2023 I think we can all agree that it's probably going to be high in the running of our list even though, you know, it's the only title you've covered that's going to be eligible so far.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Off to a good start.
Nate:
Exactly.
JM:
Yeah. So after reading "Kindred", though, I kind of just started thinking, well, I mean we are Chrononauts, but we're not necessarily the chronological Chrononauts, and we are kind of getting to this time travel story that's very obviously influenced by older time travel stories, the likes of which we haven't really covered yet, so I do think that sometime before next spring, or around next spring, we'll be covering Mark Twain's "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" and Sprague de Camp's "Lest Darkness Fall", will be an episode that's coming up very soon, and I also want to do some other kind of historical time travel type stories, and I want to talk about that particular tradition. So I think that's going to be, I think just doing "Kindred" has kind of put that more forward in my mind.
Nate:
And I think we're all Doctor Who fans here so we can appreciate that angle of the genre. But we do have a lot of other cool stuff coming up and I think we're going to do more traditional Chrononauts type style episodes if you want to call them that, where we do the origins of certain kinds of tropes that are prevalent in modern science fiction. So you might see a little more things that are recognizable in the modern genre rather than these 19th century oddities and obscurities we've covered on the podcast. I think we're going to be doing a little bit in robots next year as well as apocalyptic fiction, and maybe digging into some of the other pulp magazines like we did with the Amazing. We'll have to see where it takes us. I don't think we have a hard plan set in stone of exactly what we're doing for the next five episodes but we have a kind of good idea of where we want to take it afterwards. But certainly everything we do is subject to change pretty much up to the last minute I think we've found. But it all works out in the end and I think the product has kind of come together in a pretty nice way. And I'm certainly looking forward to some of the titles that we're going to be covering next year.
JM:
So without getting into specific titles, I think some of the things that we've discussed, I mean yes, the themes of robots and artificial intelligence, I think, are going to get quite a few entries. Also, medical experiments, body modifications, mental modifications. I also think that in a general sense I would like to do more of these kind of host choice type episodes, the way we've done for Kindred, and I think, I don't know necessarily that we're going to stick to our host choices that we decided on last time. I mean we'll see when we get to the next one, what we decide to do. I actually have a feeling that given the reading that's coming up on Chrononauts, I might actually want to change mine. But I do actually want to get Vance on there at some point, and I also want us to do some short story episodes, where we just kind of each pick two or three short stories and we select our stories, everybody else reads them, and we talk about them. I don't think we want to necessarily do 10 per episode like we did last year. (laughs) It's a little bit much, but we stick to two stories each, I think that would probably be about perfect.
And so in between all the themes and the host choices and doing those, I think next year will go by very fast.
Nate:
And I guess maybe on the translation front, I got my ass kicked by Catalan this year, but I think I'm going to dig into some of the Russian magazines and see if we can't pull anything out of the Soviet Union for you all, because I think there's some interesting stuff probably going on there that hasn't been translated for English-speaking readers yet. Certainly the gaps in the ISFDB website would indicate that there's, not quite everything has been catalogued and mined in the way that some of the other areas of science fiction have.
JM:
Yeah, and when you consider it's really taken a long time to mine all the American science fiction pulps. Everybody knew about certain key authors, forever, but we're still kind of discovering the Minna Irvings and we're still discovering some of these authors that maybe didn't get printed that much and so haven't really had an opportunity to be covered, and are maybe still pretty interesting.
As well as that, I definitely would like to focus on one or two of the other pulp magazines and kind of do what we did with the Amazing episode. The two American magazines that I would like to focus on are Astounding and Galaxy magazine. So Astounding got its start in the late 1930s and had a bunch of issues for a couple years before John W. Campbell took over the editorship and kind of became one of the forerunning luminaries of American SF, and shaped the way for many authors for better and worse, and it'll be interesting to talk about him and his influence on the genre, and how many people see that as a positive thing, but some don't. And we'll talk about what he brought to the table not in terms of a writer so much but in terms of an editor, and how that actually shaped a lot of what was to come in the United States, and not just there, because in his cadre of writers he had a couple of well-known British writers and one or two Canadian writers even. And Galaxy kind of being the forerunner of the "we are not a Western style space opera magazine!" kind of science fiction you, know, like getting its start in 1950 or there abouts, so it's kind of later to the game next generation kind of like, "hey we're sophisticated; we're satire we're..." I mean I love a lot of stories published in that magazine, but it was definitely a reaction in a way, you know, kind of pushing against some of the tropes, and that could be a good and a bad thing. And we're going to talk about that too, because I think we all have a little bit complicated feelings about that, when it's a good thing to push against the tropes, or when it might be a little bit too much, you know, you know maybe like a Michael Morkock and protesting a little bit too much when you're still telling the same kind of stories, but you're kind of insisting that you're not. (laughs)
Nate:
Yeah. And I think we've reached the poitn now, especially going into next year, where the genre has definitely become the genre. And of course we're still going to be covering the 19th century stories here and there, when we can fit them into the podcast, but I think we're going to be covering a lot of stories from the 1930s and the 1940s from the American side of things that fit into that marketing audience; they do fit into that Gernsback idea of the hard sci-fi; and they do fit into these kind of narrative tropes that the audience expects from the authors, and I think the authors in turn play to what the audience is expecting in a way that just feels different from the 19th century people where it's kind of a more open playing field.
JM:
So, we are open to any feedback that anybody might have, we're not necessarily going to take on board completely ideas that somebody might have for us to do, but we will definitely consider anything, so if anybody has any suggestions or possible directions that they think it might be interesting for us to explore, you can email us at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com and let us know.
I don't really have anything else to add; I think unless anybody has any other thoughts about the future of Chrononauts?
Nate:
No, I don't really, I mean this has been a great year in 2022; I think we've covered a lot of awesome stories, we've had some great discussions and I think we're going to cover some really cool stuff in the future, and cover some classics of the genre as well as bring some unknown stories to light and hopefully bring some stuff into the English language that hasn't been there before, so that's kind of my goal for 2023.
JM:
Nice.
Gretchen:
Of course this is my first year doing this podcast, and I remember first starting, I almost didn't do it. I was very anxious before the first episode we ever did, but once I got past that, ever since I confronted that, I've had a wonderful time discussing these works with both of you and I look forward to the next year of doing that.
JM:
And we're absolutely happy that you're on board.
Nate:
Yeah I mean it's been great doing the podcast with you, and you've provided a lot of really excellent insight on these stories as well as done some good story selection, and yeah, looking forward to another year of cool science and weird fiction stories.
JM:
Yeah. I'm really happy that you joined us too, and I think that obviously, there's going to be, early on, some anxiety about doing this kind of thing, and I think we all had it, I know I certainly did, it takes time to get into the groove of these things, and I think you pretty much nailed it right away. It's just like, you know, we had to kind of sit there and talk about the other stories first, you know, the Poe and the Verne and stuff, and once we got through that and you could sleep on it and stuff, it was good, it was perfect. Though I did include "Arqtiq" in my bottom three (laughs), but you know, it was still a great start. I was happy that you were able to make some sense of it, because I had a hard time. (laughs) so yeah, it's been really great; I feel really good that we're a troika now and we're able to kind of come at things from three different angles, so, I like that a lot. yeah, so 2023 is coming; we hope that you all have an awesome holiday, whatever you are all doing. We will be back in probably early January, talking about Octavia E Butler and her novel "Kindred", and it's going to be a great and heavy discussion, for certain.
But with all that said, again, happy holidays everyone. See you in 2023.
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