(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: shimmery matter telephone switching)
Gretchen:
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Gretchen, joined by my co-host, J.M. and Nate. This is part of our episode, looking at works of medical experimentation from the late 1800s. This segment is about Edward Page Mitchell's "The Man Without a Body". Check the previous segments for discussion on the works, Moreau's "Under the Knife" and "The Island of Dr. Moreau", Ross's "The Vivisector Vivisected" and Morrow's "The Monster Maker".
Edward Page Mitchell has become quite a podcast regular. We've covered multiple stories from him in the past, including the stories, "The Clock That Went Backwards", "The Tachypomp", and "The Ablest Man in the World". The first mentioned story can be found way back in the sixth episode of Chrononauts. The one we'll be looking at tonight, though, is "The Man Without a Body", which appeared in The Sun on March 25th, 1877. And I think this is another hit from Mitchell.
Nate:
Absolutely, yeah. And like with everything he writes, he's astoundingly ahead of his time. Like, ridiculously. You would almost think that there was like a 1940s, 1950s story if you didn't know better. It almost feels like a parody of a genre that doesn't exist yet, which... It's always cool to read. There's obvious comparisons to other severed head stories we did, like the Carl Grunert and Belyaev stories a while back. But yeah, I really like this one, like pretty much everything else we've done by him.
Gretchen:
Yes, yeah. I think this is... he always manages to have... Like, he just knows tropes that aren't tropes yet. I don't know how he knows that.
Nate:
Yeah, if there's evidence for time travel, I think it's in the Edward Page Mitchell stories.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Really just an incredible, incredible set of science fiction stories across the board. It's not like with Mary Shelley where we have an early story that does one thing. He has like almost every modern science fiction idea crammed in these little newspaper pieces from the 1870s.
JM:
It's early on, but he's not drawing attention to it. It's so upfront and yet honest and not trying to be like, Hey, I got this new awesome thing. Don't you want to hear about it? Like, it's weird reading this guy is interesting because in the collections that you can get online nowadays, not all the stories are science fiction stories, right? Some of them are weird, supernatural. A lot of them have the journalistic feel that especially the precursor to this one had.
Nate:
"Soul Spectroscope". Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. I've had like journalistic feeling to them. He's writing for the New York Sun and I don't know, he's like a tabloid guy almost. There's at least one more story I want to do at a later time where I think that's really interesting and cool. It's been interesting reading so many Mitchell stories and kind of thinking like, where would they fit in my ranking of Mitchell stories? I think this is not as high as some because it just doesn't have the emotional feeling that some of the stories have. Like "The Clock that Went Backwards" has this kind of got wrenching emotionality to it that he's somehow able to convey. "The Senator's Daughter" is kind of like that too, and that's one that I've read that I want to talk about in the future. But then he's got the funny stories like "The Tachypomp". There's this weird professor who's doing something strange and it's very tongue-in-cheek and kind of goofy but fun. And I don't know. I mean, I guess "The Man Without a Body" is a little bit like that kind of story.
Nate:
It definitely fits into the comic mode for sure. Even though it used this grotesque horror imagery in a comic way, that again feels very ahead of its time.
Gretchen:
When we get to one part of the story, it definitely reminds me of some later works that are a little more irreverent. Even though this isn't my favorite Mitchell story that I've read, I think it speaks to how well his writing is that it's still really great. I mean, he just is consistently a really good writer.
Nate:
Yeah. And once you read a bunch of his stories, he has familiar beats and pacing. This definitely fits his comic, almost newspaper style of exposition. The way the plot unfolds, the way the reveals are and the callback to a previous story that would have appeared, I guess, in the last issue of the Sun or a couple of issues prior? where we get a description of the professor's inventions kind of as an offhand reference here, but they're described in great detail in the previous piece, which is an interesting tie-in to the recurring character.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Should I get into the story?
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. It's an interesting piece all around, I think, like with a lot of Mitchell. There's really a lot to get into with this.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I mean, even though there's like a central sort of idea, there's still a lot of other concepts that he somehow manages to explore in this really short amount of writing.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
The story begins with the narrator in the Arsenal Museum in Central Park coming across a glass display of mummified heads. One of the heads in particular has a certain draw for him. Although its nose and eyes are missing and its skin is shriveled up, revealing its teeth, he finds that it still has character. He also feels that there is something familiar about it, as though he's seen it before. While alone in the museum, a year since he first been aware of and fascinated by the head, it winks at him twice, indicating its intention to speak with him. Curious, the man walks over to the display and opens the glass that sits behind, for which the head thanks him. It has been a while since he's had fresh air.
The narrator asks how it feels to live without a body, and the head laments that he would give anything to be able to move. That a man of science, such as himself, should be able to walk if even the birds on display around him, creatures of no ambition, have the likes to do so. Upon hearing the head's love of science, the narrator places him as Professor Dummkopf, a scientist renowned for his many achievements, including his success at bottling music, photographing smell, and freezing the aurora borealis, which are all just very quickly just there, like he just name drops those things and moves on.
JM:
Professor Dummkopf.
Nate:
Yeah, it's a great German insult. The things that he just name drops in the story are described in more detail in "The Soul Spectroscope", which is one of his, I don't even call them short stories, but we covered one in our Hollow Earth episode, where it's like a pseudo interview with either a quack or a weird scientist who goes off on these ridiculous tangents. And that's what our, Herr Dummkopf is doing in "The Soul Spectroscope", basically, is elaborating on these wacky ideas.
Gretchen:
The Professor tells the narrator, though, that these were minor compared to his final discovery, which also ruined him. He wants to tell the narrator more, but the museumkeeper returns at that point, so the narrator scrambles to shut the glass display and move away from the head. The next time he returns to the museum, Dummkopf tells his story of his invention, the telepomp. Not the tachypomp, mind you.
Nate:
No, it's quite different.
Gretchen:
Yes, very different. He starts by revealing his discovery of transmitting sound through electricity and his invention of the telephone. The narrator says that was recently accomplished by another scientist.
JM:
Yeah, what a grim oversight.
Gretchen:
Yeah. It's like, oh, well, someone else got there. So you can't take credit for that one.
Nate:
A lot of people tried, though. Bell's patent, he famously beat Elisha Gray to the office by a matter of hours on the same day. So two people were there pretty much at the same time. And after Bell got the patent, numerous people would try to challenge with nonsense saying, oh, actually, I did it first. All these claims have really no merit. But yeah, it's interesting that this patent war was like a real-life thing between two people. And the telephone had only been introduced a year prior. Bell's patent was in 1876, and this was in 1877. So only about a year.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Add Dummkopf to the list, I guess.
Nate:
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Gretchen:
Yes, the narrator says that was recently accomplished by another scientist, though he tells the professor they have not reached the level of the telepomp, which turns out to be an invention that would allow matter to be transmitted the same way sound was through the telephone, effectively, than a transporter. The narrator asks how the telepomp had worked in practice, and Dummkopf reveals it was successful. His attempts at transmitting inorganic objects and a cat going off without a hitch. He decided then to test it on a human, namely himself. He set out to transmit himself across the Atlantic, reforming in a room in London. This attempt started similarly as the others, with no problem. His body dematerialized, then began to materialize in London, starting from the top. However, as the process of materialization reached his neck, it stopped.
He explains to the narrator that he realized his error, having not replenished the cups of the battery of the telepomp. Without the sufficient electricity, the rest of his body was unable to reappear. From that point, he assumes his head was found and used for anatomical study, then ineffectively preserved, given the state of his nose. The narrator wishes to do something for the professor, to which he responds he has resigned to his fate, though when the other man begins to take his leave, Dummkopf asks if he could possibly be taken out for a walk. The narrator agrees to help and returns to the museum later, hiding himself until after closing time. He then takes the professor's head from the display, connects it to the body of one of the large birds on display, gives him the glass eyes from an exhibited lion, and dresses him in a blanket and walking stick. They emerge from the museum, walking arm in arm, and I love that image.
I love that final paragraph. It's so good. It's so whimsical.
Nate:
Yeah, it's such Edward Page Mitchell too.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah, he writes great scenes like that with these ridiculous images that...
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
He nails the comic thing really, really well, and I think the story is exceedingly good at doing that.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And I think it's a really good choice to end on this image when it comes to our text we've read tonight.
Nate:
Absolutely, yeah. Because like all the others, it's like we've had these horrible monstrosities, these horrors that were supposed to like fear or feel bad for something, but this is such a nice image, like they're just walking together outside, arm in arm. I think that's very sweet. Having a pleasant time in Central Park, you know, I'm sure the weather is lovely this time of year. I'm sure New York in 1877 was a lot cleaner and quieter than it is in 2024. So yeah, nice pleasant night out in the town.
Gretchen:
What it really reminds me of is something from like a surrealist text. Like I could see Leonora Carrington doing this. I could see this as like an "Exquisite Corpse".
Nate:
Totally.
Gretchen:
It's so, it's so good.
Nate:
Yeah. And I think Mitchell is really good at taking this grotesque horror imagery. I mean, we've seen previous stories, I guess not previous because it came decades later, but we talked about them previously on the podcast, like "Professor Dowell's Head" where he gets into like what a horrible feeling it is to be a head trapped in a jar. You know, it feels like you have an itch you can't scratch, you get anxious and nervous and all that, but here it's played up as a comic situation.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
And he's just great at this kind of writing. He does it really well. All the jokes land. It doesn't feel awkward at all. Yeah, he's a natural on this really.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. He should have been dead when it came through. There probably shouldn't have been any life. But at the same time, it could have been a lot worse. He could have been in the teleportation chamber with a fly, and the fly could have wringled with his DNA and created some kind of terrible hybrid that was mostly fly and that would be bad. I don't know. This is not maybe as bad as that, but at the same time, yeah, we don't know how his head survives. It just does.
And yeah, Professor Dummkopf. So at first I was checking to see if he was in the tachypomp story, but that wasn't him.
Gretchen:
He really likes Dummkopf. Yeah. That name is very popular for him.
Nate:
It is a very good German word. It is. But certainly there were large waves of German immigrants in the United States around that time to the Midwest in particular. And it's an amazing touch. And again, very ahead of its time with a lot of ideas here.
Gretchen:
So what we have here is our first described transporter accident.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
It's pretty incredible.
Gretchen:
Yeah. You know, the stuff that Star Trek is native.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah. I wonder if the next story we read by him is going to have a character named O'Brien in it.
Gretchen:
This feels like something sadly that would happen to O'Brien.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I mean, the teleporter thing is just kind of crazy advanced. Even if you look at Bell's telephone and the technology involved with the telephone, it's really like not that complicated if you think about how it's done. Like an electric field is parallel to a magnetic field. And...
JM:
I think that he thought it was like...
Nate:
No, yeah, for sure. But I mean, like it speaks to the nature of the technology at the time where educated literate person could understand the factors involved here. So I mean, like a sound wave and you move the magnet back and forth and it creates the electrical signal, which goes through the wire. And at the other end, that moves the magnet back and forth, which then pushes the air out in the same wave of the electricity, which is just...
JM:
Right.
Nate:
Fascinatingly simple at how it works, but how much it would have felt like magic and something like totally mind-blowing back when you heard it for the first time. And you just take that concept a little further. Well, what if you send more than just electrical pulses through the wire, but you send matter itself? You know, what would that look like? And it's a very modern science fiction concept because we're not remotely very, you know, we're like centuries away from that kind of technology. Well, of course, as I say this, hopefully it doesn't get posted by when we release it next week, but ridiculous how ahead of its time it feels in that little minor plot point. Never mind all the other major plot points of stitching creatures together and heads in a jar and all the other things he mentions offhand that he describes in detail in "The Soul Spectroscope" of spectral analysis to the mind and photographing smell and bottling music and all this other stuff, like crazy science fiction concepts.
JM:
And it's pretty amazing how much is crammed into that.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
In this funny goofy kind of story.
Nate:
Yeah. And this predates all the other ones that we've read for tonight. So, I mean, this is 20 years before "Dr. Moreau" to put it. It always astounds me when I read Edward Page Mitchell because he always comes out with these kind of surprises. And I don't know, when I first read "The Clock That Went Backwards", you feel like, all right, you know, they have one really good story. That's what a lot of authors have, you know, and when it comes down to it, you know, a lot of them really do have the one hit, and were just like kind of like mid range, you know, some positive, some negatives, but like nothing really knocking out of the park where Mitchell just really does it every time. I have to say, like, I'm just like consistently impressed by his range of thought and, yeah, prescience in genre foresight, I guess.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I really love that we've been able to cover so many on the podcast because it is crazy how little he's known. I feel like he should be such a much more renowned author than he is.
Nate:
Absolutely. Yeah. And the Moskowitz rediscovery, I think, was only in the 1970s when that anthology came out, something like that. And I'm not sure how many times it's been republished. I know "The Clock that Went Backwards" has been anthologized in a fair amount of places, but I think his other short stories haven't really got out there as much. But they're all definitely worth checking out. And they're certainly freely available and easily available on Gutenberg and these other public domain sites. Moskowitz has always been very, very thorough in his work. So he was able to get them all really. Yeah. And he really deserves some kind of lifetime achievement award for the amount he's put into science fiction research and biography and bibliography. And he really compared to, I don't know, him and like the Blielers seem to have really done the lion's share of science fiction scholarship, at least when it comes to American authors in the 20th century.
Gretchen:
I mean, in this episode alone, we probably wouldn't be covering two of these authors if it wasn't for him.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
The reason is basically keep your batteries charged on either terminal, right? For some reason, the batteries weren't charged. So the experiment failed and the scientists who decided to himself take part in the experimentation and be the subject of the experiment didn't fully materialize at the other terminal because the batteries weren't charged sufficiently.
Nate:
It's certainly been an early death for a lot of scientists and engineers who experiment with the unknown . You can read all about early x-ray experimenters and all that and how that ended for them.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, it's funny how that works out with Mitchell because, again, he's always presenting the aspect of reporting something that happened. "The Clock What went Backwards" doesn't really have so much of that, I guess. Compared to the story that we just did by Morrow, "The Clock that Went Backwards" is an example of a story that's a few separate things that don't necessarily feel like they should go together, actually fitting together very well. And it's so interesting Mitchell being this unsung newspaper guy who just seems to be able to come up with this kind of stuff and makes it powerful or funny or both. I don't know if there's ever been an analysis done on how much of his stuff is really done to spec because that would be interesting too. Because, yeah, like even in the 1930s sci-fi period articles, we see some of the early writers from that period that developed into something else like Kornbluth and Clifford Simak and stuff like that. And how they were writing stories just back back then. Somebody told them basically what kind of story to write and they just did it. Sometimes I feel like Mitchell is that contradiction because there might be a bit of that, but at the same time he's able to take it somewhere else and his stuff is really memorable.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
JM:
No credit, ever.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Dude, his name was nowhere.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, Moskowitz basically had to excavate them. And the newspaper in general are from what it seems like, at least from the research that we've been doing and all the stories we've been covering on the podcast are kind of an unlikely source for science fiction stories. I think the only other newspaper story we've done aside from the Edward Page Mitchell stuff in the podcast is "The Beast of Bradhurst Avenue" by Schuyler. I don't think any of the other stuff we've done has been newspaper stuff. I think it's been all magazine stuff or like fanzine stuff, which is both totally different audiences and publication markets and all that stuff. So, I mean, the fact that we get this in like newspaper is, again, another fascinating angle to all this.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, there you go. Mitchell again, being ahead of the pack in a lot of so many interesting aspects.
Gretchen:
Another Mitchell win.
Nate:
Yeah, I would say so.
JM:
We're going to be revisiting him. It's kind of interesting because I think that it's easy to say this is some guy that nobody knew about before Sam Moskowitz discovered him in, I guess, probably the 1970s or something like that. It's just really interesting the way somebody like this is unearthed, and it's like a hunting expedition. And it's weird because, yes, he's ahead of his time and he's prognosticating some really interesting things. And you can tell there's a mainstream journalistic impetus as well, pushing him to do certain things that he knows he should do to, I guess, satisfy the audience. And yet, without credit and without people knowing who he was, creating something like "The Clock that Went Backwards", or even some of the other stories, this one, like, it's a cool story. It's an interesting idea. It goes really goofy in the end that makes it like just fun kind of ridiculous. But I mean, I guess that's what he was going for. But hey, the telephone was this new thing. Who knows what you could do with it, right? Maybe if you could somehow transmute every aspect of the human body, bring it across a phone connection. That'd be really cool. That'd be a worthy experiment to make yourself a victim of, I'm sure.
Nate:
Yeah, and it bled over a lot into what, not necessarily teleportation, but other, I guess we consider science fiction or fantastical uses for telephone and wireless technology. So there were a lot of people who tried to build spirit telegraphs to contact the dead by wireless.
JM:
And I think Arthur C. Clarke, whatever, what it was published, but he has a story about, like, the phone network that we have set up around us developing intelligence. Obviously, it's a pretty common concept that you see a few times, right? But I don't know. Here, it's like, yeah, we use that to do more than just conversate. Have conversations. We can somehow reduce human physical patterns to nothing but sound waves and transmit them over the telephone. And it'll take a while. And the battery on the other side of the terminal will have to be definitely fully charged. Or to work, but yeah. So this one failed and this guy was a head without a body. He's not just a man without a body. He's a head without a body. It'd be one thing, like "The Man Without a Body" title suggests that he should be not corporeal.
Nate:
Yeah, it does. Yeah.
JM:
But yeah, that's not the way it is.
Nate:
Yeah, great severed head story. There's a couple of other Mitchell possibilities for the future. To me, the Mitchell phenomenon is really interesting. It's hard to know what to make of it and we'll never have more biographical information. So it is what it is. I just have to speculate. Yeah, I recommend basically either of the seemingly well available Mitchell collections where you can find a lot of his short stories. Certainly didn't write anything very long because his stuff was all, I guess, part of the New York Sun.
Nate:
Yeah, Tachypomp was published elsewhere in Scribner's, but everything else was in the Sun.
JM:
A really interesting figure. I don't know. Moskowitz, I guess, discovered him and not much, there's not much information about what kind of person maybe Edward Page Mitchell was, but we didn't talk about it in the original episode where we discussed "The Clock that Went Backwards" way, way, way, way back. I think it was still 2020, wasn't it?
Nate:
Yeah, maybe. Well, awhile ago.
JM:
We'll come back to him and we'll come back to his forward thinkingness. Yeah, I think we should probably discuss what's happening next time on Chrononauts, and we've decided that because short stories are such a monumental part of the science fiction landscape. I think that generally applies to a lot of genre fiction. I personally would say, for example, that for horror stories, the short story is the best format that is possible. And you should be able to read it in one sitting, that makes it more effective.
However, the point being that we all love short stories. We all love reading them. We all love talking about them. And it's the perfect venue for a lot of this kind of stuff that we do on the podcast. So we've each picked two short stories, and yeah, I would like to go through everything that people picked. So I think we'll go Nate, me, then Gretchen, because I think that's the kind of chronological approach. Nate, why don't you tell us first what the stories that you picked for the next podcast episode are.
Nate:
Sure. I picked something old and something a little bit newer, both from places we've been before on the podcast, but not really that much. So for something old, I picked Kylas Chunder Dutt's, "A Journal of 48 hours in the Year 1945", which was written in 1835. And this is from India, and the first, or at least purported to be the first South Asian story written in English science fiction. Yeah, it'll be an interesting one to take a look at, very anti-British. So if that's your thing, you can get a lot of it here.
But for something newer, and from Japan, I picked Sakyo Komatsu's "The Savage Mouth" from 1979, which was translated by Judith Merrill, who we talked about last time. This is going to be a very grim and intense horror story. So if you like some of the stuff that we did tonight, that's over the top and want to listen to us talk about something that's going to be even more over the top. I think you'll have the opportunity to do that next month.
JM:
Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to reading both of those. I think honestly, the idea of doing these kind of short story episodes has been really appealing to me. I think that this is one of the greatest forms that the genre can give us. And I've really wanted to talk about some.
Now, because I'm next, I will say that because this is our first short stories host choice episode, I don't want to make it seem like I'm picking these stories because they're my favorite short stories. I really like them, but there's so many to choose from and so many favorites that there's no way that I can ever take that approach. I'm going to talk about the two stories a little bit that I picked, but I don't want to make it seem like there's going to be many more of these, basically, I hope. We're going to have a lot of ground and I'm sure I will have many stories in the future that I will be choosing.
But the two stories I've chosen, the first one is "The Brighton Monster" and the name of the author is Gerald Kersh. Gerald Kersh is a favorite author for me. I really like his stuff. Interestingly, this is one of Harlan Ellison's favorite writers and he'll be coming up in just a few minutes. But I will say Gerald Kersh wrote a lot of novels and short stories. And from what I've seen of his novels, his novels don't really fit into something that would be amenable to the stuff that we cover on Chrononauts. They're really excellent, awesome depictions of the seediness of, I guess, London life and life in, I guess, the underground clubs of England in the 1930s and 40s.
There's a lot of really cool crime stuff. The movie "Night and the City", which was a really cool, weird English noir film from 1950, was based on his book of the same name. I will say that the book is a lot darker, the book is a lot heavier and more intense. But I definitely recommend watching the movie, too, because it's really fun and intense in its way and got an interest in cast. I guess the way I first heard of him was because of that kind of crime fiction style and a book called "Prelude to a Certain Midnight", which was published in, I think, 1935, but it was one of his early books. So basically from the 1930s to the 1960s, Gerald Kersh was writing a lot of interesting stuff.
So the story that we want to talk about is "The Bright Monster", which was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1948. And it's a pretty mainstream publication. I think that Kersch is one of those writers who maybe had a chance in his time to become popular, but nowadays not that many people remember him. And there's a bunch of anthologies of his stuff that you can get, though, and this story was published 10 years after its publication in the Saturday Evening Post. It was published in Kersch's collection "On an Odd Note" in 1958, and it's been published a few times since, including in the collection "Nightshade and Damnations", which I think is one of the newer ones and is probably the easiest place to find this story right now. And yeah, it's a really cool story and I'm looking forward to everybody reading it.
My second story, and I have to apologize in advance for picking this. The story is "We Purchased People" by Frederik Pohl, and we've been talking about Frederik Pohl and his name keeps coming up, so it's time we include some of his fiction. And now this story can be found in the "Foundations of Fear" anthology, which is a follow-up to "The Dark Descent", one of the greatest horror anthologies of all time. And the reason I'm apologizing is this story is skin-crawlingly dark and, I don't know, content warnings all over the place. It's, yeah, Frederik Pohl is normally a really funny guy. He has a quality of sense of humor. Satire is a big part of his fiction, and Nate was talking about reading "Gateway" earlier, and it's supposed to be one of his more, like, new wave.
Nate:
It definitely feels very new wave in its approach, yeah. I wouldn't say it's a comic work, but there are definitely comic elements to it. But I would definitely be curious as to how he writes horror, because there are definitely a couple opportunities for "Gateway" to take a horror direction, and it never really does. So yeah, we'll see how this one goes.
JM:
Yeah. The story is short, and I will say to you guys, you will be happy that it's short. I don't know, I read this just a bit ago because I knew it was coming up, and I remembered, like, feeling it was a really powerful story, and we've been talking so much about Pohl, and I'm like, yeah, let's put one of his stories in there. Yeah, if you're sensitive, be careful with this story. It's dark, and we've covered stories before with, like, ribald sexual humor and weird, like, whatever. It's fine, but in terms of dark subject matter that will make your skin crawl, this story is kind of, I don't know, more forward than some of the things that we've covered so far in the podcast. So if you want to read this, it can be found in "Foundations of Fear" and other sources. It was actually originally published in an anthology called The Final Stage, edited by Edward L. Ferman and Barry N. Malzberg, and that was published in 1974. It looks like that was the first publication of this story. Yeah, it's the 70s, everything is supposed to be mean and ugly, and I think Gretchen will be talking about a little bit of that shortly, but content warning, everything bad. But if you're willing to deal with that, it's really, really powerful, so we're going to talk about it next time on Chrononauts. Gretchen, what have you got?
Gretchen:
Yes, continuing in the quite disturbing category here. My first work that I'm choosing is "I Have No Mouth" and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison, which is a work that I read quite a while ago. It's been several years since I first read it, and it's been on my mind since a friend of mine recently read it, and I've been thinking about it a lot, so I thought I'd choose it. And also I thought it'd be interesting to talk about some of the adaptations that have come out, specifically the video game and also the radio broadcast of it.
So that's the first story, and the second story I decided on is one I just recently read for the first time, and that is "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" by James Tiptree Jr. Which I just thought was really an interesting work when I was reading it, and I thought it would kind of be interesting to look at both that and the background of Tiptree.
Nate:
Cool, yeah, so I'm glad we all picked one really unsettling story to read. So yeah, will be a fun episode next time.
JM:
Really, really looking forward to it.
One thing I do know, though, is that the beast folk are there demanding to be let in, demanding that I provide them with alcohol, else they'll tear me limb from limb. So I better exceed to their requests, so everything should be fine, I hope. But meanwhile, my friends, you better do whatever it takes to avoid being under the knife, because it's a terrible fate, after all, as it's succumbing to the bestiality that lurks so close to our human experience. Now, though, it is time for us to put away the knives, the tools of the trade, forceps and blades, so skillfully lathed, we're so pleased to maim. Yes, I was going to insert some more carcass lyrics in here, but I forgot to get them, so that's okay, just listen to carcass, and tune in next time. We have been, as always, Chrononauts.
No comments:
Post a Comment