(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: J.S. Johnston - "Electric polka" on buzzing synth)
Philip K. Dick biography, general discussion, "Last of the Masters" non-spoiler discussion
Gretchen:
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. This episode we are covering several apocalyptic stories, in this segment, we are covering Philip K. Dick's "The Last of the Masters". You can check the previous segments for "The Last War" by Amado Nervo, "Under the Comet" by S. Belsky, "The Comet" by WEB DuBois, and "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov.
The legacy of Philip K. Dick is a strange one. He is most noted for his novels, which frequently deal in the theme of altered perceptions of reality and the part of his life which also saw P.K.D. himself getting lost between facts and fictions.
His drug-fueled period in the 60s, followed by the unorthodox beliefs he accrued after a revelation or a psychotic break depending on how you want to read it in the early 70s shaped the works that are most recognized by popular culture. However, the story we'll be covering tonight is from before this period, during the 50s which is considered one of the most stable periods of his life. I remember in a video I watched someone refer to it as like the time he's pretending to be normal.
Therefore I will be recounting P.K.D.'s life up to this point, the rest we will return to at a future time when we look at a later text where it's more relevant.
On December 16th, 1928, Dorothy Kindred Dick gave birth to twins. The children, Philip and Jane Charlotte, arrived six weeks prematurely. Dorothy, as was common during this time, was not aware she was carrying twins. Having birth in her home in the dead of a Chicago winter and not equipped with the knowledge of the full extent of the care the twins needed, Dorothy did not realize how sick they were until a nurse checking on the twins for a life insurance policy noticed their malnourished state. When Philip and Jane Charlotte were brought to the hospital, the latter died on the way there. Her death would haunt Philip for the rest of his life as well as the relationship he had with his mother.
Philip often, during his life, blamed Dorothy for the death of Jane. He would also accuse her at some points of wanting to kill him as well as believing that the wrong twin had died. Soon after Philip's recovery in the hospital, Dorothy and Edgar Dick, Philip's father, left Chicago for a vacation to Colorado, then permanently moved to California as Edgar took up a new job opening for a new service for the Department of Agriculture, settling soon in Berkeley.
In 1931, Philip attended an experimental preschool, one of the first in the country, the Bruce Tatlock School. During the next few years, the relationship between Dorothy and Edgar grew strained, eventually leading to a divorce in 1933 when Edgar wanted to move to Nevada for a new job position. Dorothy consulted a psychiatrist and assured that the decision would not negatively impact Philip. She went through with a divorce.
Unfortunately, Philip would feel as though his father had abandoned him.
A year later, when he threatened to gain full custody of his son, Edgar wrote that, failing that, he'd forget Philip and want nothing to do with either of them. Dorothy had regrets over the divorce, especially the financial insecurity it caused. During the height of the depression, she was struggling to make ends meet with her new secretarial job. Having moved in with her mother, Meemaw, as she was known to Philip, it was her rather than Dorothy who took care of Philip while his mother worked. Around this time, he started to exhibit some anxiety and insecurity, particularly having issues swallowing. These problems with swallowing and with eating, especially among other people, would come and go during other periods of Philip's life.
Driven by the threats made by Edgar, Dorothy moved to Washington, D.C. in 1935, taking on an editorial job with the Federal Children's Bureau. First enrolled in the countryside school, a new private school, Philip was transferred to the public John Eaton School, attending from 1936 to 1938. Though he was often absent, he received good grades and it was commented on in one of his report cards that he shows interest and ability in storytelling.
In 1938, the two returned to Berkeley. At the age of nine, Philip tried to sell magazine subscriptions, then created his own periodical, The Daily Dick, which cost one cent, carried both writings and drawings by PKD. Around this time, it was art rather than literature that Philip showed enthusiasm in pursuing. Later, he claimed that December 16, 1940, the age he turned 12, was the start of his writing career. At that age, he taught himself to type and read his first sci-fi magazine, Stirring Science Stories.
His interest in the SF pulps blossomed rapidly, and by the time he entered Garfield, Jr. High in 1941, he owned stacks of magazines, including ones from Astounding and Amazing. Philip, along with a friend, Pat Flannery, published another periodical called The Truth for two cents this time, which contained a sci-fi story and comic strip, PKD's first full-fledged science fiction creations.
He wrote his first novel at 14, inspired by Gulliver's Travels, which was called "Return to Lilliput". He also published regularly in the Berkeley Gazette's Young Authors Club column between 1942 and 1944. One story published, "The Slave Race", was sci-fi.
PKD entered Berkeley High School in February of 1944, after a miserable experience in a boarding school which left him suspicious and dissatisfied with academic structure. However, between May and September of that year, he suffered recurring attacks of vertigo, which set back his date for graduation.
One of his friends, George Kohler, was diagnosed with polio that summer, which, along with the vertigo and his experiences with asthma and tachycardia during his childhood and adolescence, influenced his lifelong concern with health. By his senior year, 1947, Philip was also dealing with agoraphobia. He withdrew from Berkeley High in February of the latter year and graduated in June through working at home with a tutor.
He received psychotherapy at San Francisco's Langley Porter Clinic, where he was diagnosed as agoraphobic. He would later claim that he was diagnosed as schizophrenic to his third wife Anne, though whether this was by the same psychiatrist or whether this claim is actually true is unsure.
His handling of these attacks and phobias and their eventual ebbing was due in part to his work at University Radio and later Art Music, owned by a man named Herb Hollis. Philip worked as a sales clerk and also wrote DJ patter for local radio station KMSO, which was supplied records by Hollis. The financial and emotional support from this job, the only job Philip would hold besides writer, allowed him to move out of his mother's house.
His first place away from Dorothy was a warehouse for multiple young gay artists of the Berkeley scene also lived. The literary tastes of this group exerted an influence on Philip, whose sci-fi interest at this time waned in favor of more mainstream literary works. Although Philip had befriended the gay residents of the warehouse and didn't express homophobia towards them, he himself had a fear of being gay, which led to his first marriage at the age of 19.
Jeanette Marlin was a regular customer at University Radio and it was while showing her some records there that Philip met her. Wedded in 1948, the couple were together for only a few months. Jeanette told Philip less than two months into their marriage that she wanted to see other men, but the final straw was her complaints about Philip's records, which she threatened to have her brother break. This was the reason he cited at their divorce hearing, which the judge found as one of the most ridiculous grounds for divorce, but granted it anyways.
Despite his hatred of academia, Philip decided to pursue her degree at UCal Berkeley. His major was in philosophy and he took classes in history and zoology, as well as enrolled in mandatory ROTC training. The latter were a point of disgust for Philip, who, like Dorothy, held to pacifism and objected to the U.S.'s current military involvement in Korea. He refused to march with a rifle, instead joining parades holding a broom.
He attended the university from September to November of 1949, though he later claimed he was expelled due to his shows of resistance in the ROTC training. It is more likely, though, he voluntarily withdrew. Also attending UCal was Philip's second wife, Kleo Apostolides, whom he married in June of 1950. During the same period, Philip came into contact with William Anthony Parker White or, as he was known in sci-fi circles, Anthony Boucher. These two were significant to Philip's emergence as a writer. Kleo's support and income and Boucher's encouragement and position as an editor and publisher led to Philip publishing his first story and numerous others to follow over a span of several highly prolific years.
The first story, published in the October 1951 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which Boucher had co-founded, was "Roog". And what followed were four stories in 1952, 30 in 1953, and 28 in 1954. One of those 28 is one we'll be discussing tonight.
Before we do, though, it should be noted that Philip at this time viewed his sci-fi work as less significant than the mainstream novels he was working on at the same time. One of Philip's acquaintances, Iskander Guy, said,
"I got the impression at that time that he was writing science fiction because that's what was happening, but he just hoped to Christ he could get some serious work published. Science fiction was what he did. It was a format in which a few ideas were presentable, but he didn't think of it as the format for serious intellectual inquiry. No way. Who the fuck ever paid attention to paperbacks?"
In 1954, P.K.D. would begin focusing more on his novels, both sci-fi and mainstream, though he would during 1956 and 57, give up the former to place all of his energy into the latter. It is this year that The "Last of the Masters", the subject of this discussion, was published in Orbit Science Fiction.
It's very interesting that we'll be covering this work right after an Asimov story for the hard science fiction approach of Asimov was one which Philip didn't subscribe to, focused as he was more on the plot and its probabilities than the science and its probabilities.
JM:
Yeah, and you can definitely tell that that's the case.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
This story doesn't really, I don't think it gives him the opportunity to do much super weird stuff, but there are weird things about it which I'm sure will take great pleasure in getting to. Whatever serves his vision, I guess, it doesn't matter how the science is or how accurate it is.
Nate:
It definitely plays into a lot of themes that he would use a lot later on as far as mechanical intelligence and what that means for humanity and what happens when machines essentially govern society and when they're kind of led to their own devices.
The political commentary in this one is definitely, I don't know, a little silly, I guess. You can definitely tell he's trying to say something, but I'm not sure if he knows what he's trying to say. It does come across a little clunky, but yeah, this one is just so much fun.
I love all those Italian knockoffs of the Road Warrior, like "1990: Bronx Warriors" and "Warriors of the Wasteland" and "2019: After the Fall of New York".
JM:
And it definitely has a bit of that vibe.
Nate:
Oh yeah, 100%. Like, this is such a precursor to all those kind of stories and it's really awesome and a lot of fun, I thought.
JM:
Before we specifically get into that, since this is our first time doing PKD on the podcast, I wondered if we could talk about that legacy as a whole and I'm sure we've all had a little bit at least of experience reading PKD before.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
We just go around and talk about our feelings and all that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, so my experience with PKD is actually very limited. I only had read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" before this story, so he's always a writer I've wanted to try more from, especially something like "A Scanner Darkly" or "The Man in the High Castle", but I haven't gotten around to reading those yet. It was very funny because when I was on campus, one of my friends asked me what I was reading when I was reading the biography and I asked if they had read any of PKD and he was like, I read the popular one, which was "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". So I thought that was very, very funny.
Nate:
Yeah, that was definitely my entry point to him as well. I mean, "Blade Runner" is one of my favorite films of all time, science fiction or not. I mean, for science fiction films, it's probably in the top three, if not top two.
JM:
I didn't realize you liked it that much, but that's cool.
Nate:
Oh yeah, definitely a lot.
Gretchen:
I think it's a great film because that's also what inspired me. I was obsessed with that film in middle school. I watched it back then and I think "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" was probably one of the first real classic sci-fi novels that I read because of that.
Nate:
Yeah, I think I read it before I read any Heinlein or Clarke, I want to say. And it's cool how different it is from the film. I didn't expect it to be like totally different in its focus, but having a lot of similar elements too. It's a really nice balance between the two, I think. But yeah, I haven't read too, too much aside from that. I've read "Galactic Pot Healer", which is I guess one of his minor works, but I really, really liked it. It has a lot of cool stuff and gets into some neat translation and linguistics issues, which we will probably be talking about a bit next episode. So it's definitely a relevant theme in science fiction that we may not be discussing that work at length.
Yeah, it's a cool novel. And I also read the novel "Man in the High Castle" kind of recently. And yeah, that was a lot of fun too. And I've only read one of his short stories, "Something for Us Tempunauts", which was a really cool horror story. But yeah, I pretty much liked everything I've read by him. And that includes this one. And certainly would like to read more in the future, definitely for the podcast. I'm sure we'll be coming back to him many times. I'm sure we will.
Gretchen:
I definitely would like to read more of his short stories, especially the collection, where I first read "The Girl Who Was Plugged In", a cyberpunk collection, also has his "We Can Remember That For You Wholesale". So I would like to read that one.
Nate:
Yeah, that's the "Total Recall" story. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
So I have some thoughts. It's weird because, I mean, I'm going to say right now, I like PKD. I like everything that I've read by him. Yeah, I've enjoyed it. For me, I don't know what's going to sound. I want to be, you know, before somebody flies off the handle at me and like starts screaming at me. I feel like sometimes there's a distance between me and PKD. Maybe even a little bit of resistance on my part. I think it's a combination of him and me, actually. The him part, he's weird, but he's weird in a way that I, that's different. His writing style is pretty straightforward, I think, and it's not very adorned. It's pretty clear and straight. And yet the weirdness is almost in like things like the way people talk to each other, the conclusions, the characters draw, you're always kind of like thrown around in a weird way. And it's like, you got to ask yourself why, right?
It's an interesting approach. Sometimes I don't know if it's just his mind and the way it works, right? Like it almost feels like non sequiturs, like just the things that are coming at you. And maybe that's a perceptual thing. You know, he talked a bit about his experience with mental health. Definitely later on in his work, he opened up about a lot of that and he was on a lot of narcotics and stuff like that. And I don't know, I feel sometimes like, like he's just kind of making up stuff as he goes along. And it's just kind of really cool. And the ideas are really awesome. But sometimes I feel like, yeah, there's that just sort of weird interactions.
It's funny because, you know, I read, I read writers like Jack Vance and Clark Aston Smith, whose characters, it's a same time period, same kind of magazines and stuff. Well, okay, Smith was before mostly, but and their characters talk all floridly and flowery. And it's like, yeah, I can't really imagine people talking like that either, but it's fun to read aloud. Whereas PKD is kind of, there's this weird sort of awkwardness sometimes. And I think it's just him, you know, it's just the way he, the way he strings things together.
And then the resistance, the resistance part that comes from me is, yeah, maybe there's, it's a bit of a hype. I sometimes feel like, yeah, people come to PKD through Ridley Scott and Paul Verhoeven and Steven Spielberg, right? And it's a different like, you know, maybe it's elitist or whatever. But this is like hearing people talk about him in the mainstream and all like, seeing a hot box cafe in Toronto with a bunch of stoners and the guys going on about PKD. And it's just, sometimes I feel like, yeah, like read some other stuff, read some other good science fiction, right? It's out there. And sometimes, you know, I've had to ask myself, do I really love Dick? I don't know if I really love Dick.
Sorry, I had to get at least one in there. But from now on, I'll probably just say PKD because yeah.
Then again, like I said, I have enjoyed everything and I've read quite a bit. And I think like you guys, I think "Blade Runner" was probably the thing that introduced me to PKD, even though I think when I saw that I was 11 and I didn't know that it was based on a book and the title is different and everything. I can't remember how I found out about "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?". But I think it was not my first PKD novel. I think my first PKD novel was one called "The Penultimate Truth". Oh, that was one of his not as well known books, I guess.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, he's so prolific in both his novels and his short stories. When I was doing some research into these Argentinian authors that we'll be talking about later on, one of them wrote a Spanish language biography of PKD later on in his life. And I was just kind of flipping through it to see what he was saying about it. But he has like this table basically of all the short stories and novels that he wrote. And even by this point in his career, which is really, really early, he had published a lot. Like he was a really prolific author pretty much from the get go.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I mean, like I said, there was like 30 a year, 28 a year for short stories, while working on the novels. And it's like between 51 and 58, I think it was, I think it was a dozen, a dozen novels that he wrote.
Nate:
Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous.
JM:
Yeah, I read that. I read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep", "Man in the High Castle", a bunch of short stories, collections that I was dipping in and out of. Oh, interestingly, I never read this one before.
I read "Ubik" last year, and I mentioned it on the podcast. And I did really enjoy it. But it was pretty interesting. And yeah, it's strange in the PKD way. I even read one of his posthumously published attempts at a mainstream novel. I think it was called "Confessions of a Crap Artist". And I don't think he actually managed to get it published in his lifetime.
Gretchen:
I think that might have been, I think it was like right before he died. I think that was the only one that was published during his life.
JM:
Because then by then he was a well-known name, right? So he had an easier time of it. I guess you got to give it to him for trying. But maybe even his mainstream novels were a bit weird. Because I remember the first scene of the novel was about this guy who was going to the drug store for his wife. And he had to get some tampons. And he was so embarrassed about the fact that he was doing this. And he could barely stand that he was bringing them to the counter. And it was so weird.
So this would have been something he wrote pretty early on. And yeah, this is, it was interesting. You know, I'm not going to say it's a masterpiece. It was, I just kind of thought, well, let's see what a non-science fiction PKD was just like. So this was probably a good, almost 20 years ago. But I read this.
So most recently I read "Ubik". And I think my next PKD book would probably be "A Scanner Darkly". Because I watched the movie of that a couple years ago. And I actually really enjoyed it. So I'm thinking I'd probably like to read the book. And of course, most of the PKD adaptations are very different from the source material. That one is apparently one of the more faithful PKD adaptations. And it's definitely a lot weirder than, I don't know, say "Total Recall" or something. Like not that that's a bad movie. It's good. But I think half animated and half live action. There's a lot of weird kind of drug sequences and stuff like that. So it's pretty, I guess it makes use of the animation. Yeah, Keanu Reeves is in it. I can't remember who else.
But yeah, so I've had an interesting time with PKD. Even though I cautiously say it, I would say yeah, I do quite like PKD. It's just sometimes there's that distance that I feel that makes me not fully 100% embraced. But I feel like I'm going to keep reading his stuff. I think that that later stuff seems to get really, really weird. People talk about books like "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch".
Gretchen:
Yeah, that was what I kind of wanted to try out. I think that would be one of the big ones I would want to read next.
JM:
So yeah, that's interesting author. I'm glad we got to him. We'll probably do it again because it's how can we not. But if you go on YouTube right now, if you search for Nat Schachner, we'll probably be maybe one of two things that come up. If you search for Philip K. Dick, you'll never find us because you know, there's just so much, right? That's another, you know, he's definitely very talked about in all kinds of circles, including weird conspiracy theory podcasts and stuff like that.
Nate:
Yeah, it's interesting this blend over between literature and I guess the conspiracy theory/occult realm, you know, Lovecraft has a tendency to do that as well.
JM:
Yeah, Gnostic Christianity kind of stuff. So if we get on to the specificness of the story then, definitely didn't know where it was going. Once it became clear, it sort of became clear. But you know, it was for the longest time I was reading the story wondering how things were going to come together. It seemed like he was going to tie it together in this really weird way. And in the end, it actually was pretty straightforward. It just, I guess, again, it's his writing style or it's just like, it's like you're seeing two disparate things that almost look like two different stories. And you're like, but who are these people with, well, the robot? I guess it's not a spoiler. I mean, I don't know. Did you guys tweak that the thing that opened the story was a robot right away or did it take a while?
Nate:
Yeah, I figured it was a robot for a pretty much right away.
JM:
Yeah, I can't remember. It wasn't right away, but it took me it took me maybe a scene and a half or something like that. I'm like, oh, okay, he must be a robot, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah, I wouldn't say maybe in the first like couple of paragraphs or so. But like, I think there is this feeling I get where it's supposed to be sort of a reveal when they finally say that he's the robot. But like, I felt like by that, I knew.
Nate:
Yeah, it comes really early and there's definitely a lot of hints at it. Like it's implied pretty much from the get go.
JM:
Yeah, the word robot isn't mentioned till near the end of the story. But that's it's like, I definitely, yeah, by then I definitely knew. But yeah, it's just kind of interesting the way he brings it in there. Because at the first, I'm like, oh, you know, this man regaining from consciousness after a long time, has he been in like deep freeze or something like that?
Nate:
Yeah, yeah.
JM:
Every so often he would drop a hint of something like memory cells.
Gretchen:
Or like, oh, the synapse coils. And it's like, I think that the only reason that took me a while to really realize that it was a robot was because I was thinking, oh, well, you know, this could be something weirder, just knowing enough about him going in. I'm like, this could just be like a person that is experiencing something like a very bizarre thing that I didn't expect.
Nate:
Yeah. But I mean, it is kind of similar to, well, I don't know, some of the other robotic stories we've covered on the podcast before, as far as how it deals with consciousness and all that. And yeah, it's a cool angle that he takes here with, I guess, society having fallen to the state of machines being a rarity in this world and people just not knowing how to make high technology anymore, aside from this very, very small, isolated area.
JM:
Enclave, yeah. And the reason for that is that anarchists have basically destroyed every kind of human organization. And they walk around basically making sure that there's no governments. And I guess that's it. I think P.K.D. kind of knows thats silly, like he kind of seems to be aware of that.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
It's interesting because, yeah, I couldn't tell how that merged with the whole thing with the guys walking in, like it felt like a Western or something like that.
Nate:
Totally, yeah.
JM:
You know, they're like walking into this decrepit Western town and going to the bar and being like, we've been walking for days and like it's so hot and dusty and it had a lot of that atmosphere to it. And I'm like, but what does that have to do with the robot thing or whatever? And they're like, I don't know what I was expecting. It wasn't quite what I got somehow, but it was cool. I mean, you know, it was just, it all came together in the end and then definitely had more action than I was expecting, I guess, especially towards the end there.
Nate:
Yeah. The action was a lot of fun. And that's definitely what it made me feel like it was a precursor to, you know, the "Road Warrior" knock-offs and things like that.
JM:
Right. Yeah.
Nate:
I mean, some of those things are written like exciting action scenes. And we haven't really seen that element in a lot of the previous robotic stories we've talked about. This is definitely a very different era of science fiction here. And the mid fifties then, say the 1910s or 1920s.
JM:
Oh yeah. Yeah. I think the fifties especially got this like political, maybe increased political content in American science fiction too.
Nate:
Right. Yeah.
JM:
It's kind of interesting that I wonder what John Campbell would have thought of this story. I don't think he, I'm not sure if he would have approved of the politics, but I don't know that PKD is necessarily trying to make a statement about anarchism or government.
Nate:
Yeah. Any political messaging here seems to be pretty confused and muddled. I don't know if he was trying to say anything aside from maybe that the two extremes on either end of the spectrum, either anarchism or fascism don't lead to good outcomes or something like that. I mean, it's not really that coherent and it's political messaging, I don't think. But I don't know.
Gretchen:
I feel like the politics are just kind of like set dressing for this.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
There's not really like a very, yeah, like you were saying, it's not really a very straightforward message here or like anything that's very thought out as regarding the political stance.
JM:
Right. Well, I didn't really get to sense that he was going for that, but I do kind of wonder like, I don't know, just thinking about politics in general and thinking like, okay, so here they are in the future. There's the anarchists who obviously don't believe in any government and then there's the government that's actually run by a machine, right? And you kind of, you kind of have to wonder, okay, so there was obviously like a war of some kind, right? This is like, you know, a lot of destruction and the population is probably a lot smaller than it was before. And I just kind of wonder if things got so bad that they kind of just thought, well, if we replace our politicians with machines, that might actually be a good thing. Because like, I mean, if you look at the machine there, yeah, it was old and broken down and kind of paranoid, I guess, but it was dedicated to its purpose and its job in a way that a human being might not be and that human beings are corruptible, right? And the machine is not corruptible. It may be prone to malfunctions. And yeah, it's a pretty paranoid-seeming machine, all right? But it's not going to be swayed by partisan bias or bribery or anything like that, right? I think it's kind of wondering, well, how did the war really happen, right? Or just like these anarchists all of a sudden just decided they were going to rise up. And was it the rule of the machines that really made them do that? Or was it something else?
It seems like he's almost talking about like it didn't happen all of a sudden, like it was like over a period of a long time, we're always dealing with this force of dealing with hierarchies and oligarchies and stuff like that. And there's always the people that want to destroy those things. And maybe it just got to the point where the forces were pushing so strong in both directions that it was just, yeah, like it erupted finally.
Interesting that they said that France was first because it kind of made me think of the French Revolution, obviously, right? That was obviously a long time before this apocalyptic war. But then you kind of think, well, that was kind of the start of a major anarchist movement. It has repercussions up to the present day. So I don't know, maybe since it's part of legend and stuff like that by the time they're talking about it, maybe that is actually what they were referring to. I don't know, maybe I'm making too much into it, but it is PKD, so you never know, right?
Nate:
Yeah, no, this is definitely a lot of fun, even though, as you said, J.M., it's definitely not a masterpiece. I didn't really look too much into Orbit, the magazine it was published in. I'm assuming it was one of the lesser science fiction magazines at the time with much lower circulation than the big names like Astounding and Galaxy. But regardless, PKD definitely seemed to be getting his name out there with a lot of stuff in a lot of places.
JM:
Sorry, what was the magazine it was published in?
Nate:
Orbit.
JM:
Okay, Orbit.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
And it was in the final issue, right? I think I saw that.
Gretchen:
I knew it was, I think it said it was like number five and it was like November/December, I think. Yeah, so I definitely heard of it, but I might be getting confused because there was a series of anthologies, I think they were, that Damon Knight edited called Orbit, but I think that was later.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
No, yeah, you're right. This was the last one. Yeah, there was only five issues published, so, yeah, Wikipedia says it was a Donald Wollheim magazine, so. Gretchen:
Okay, cool.
Nate:
Yeah, I guess a bit of an obscure publication, but I read this in the magazine. So if you check out the Luminist archives, they have like literally every American Pulp Science fiction magazine on there, and it's just really an incredible, fantastic resource. So if you're interested in checking these out in their original magazine form, definitely recommend you check out that website because they have it all there.
JM:
Yeah, it's very useful.
Gretchen:
I read this in the Philip K. Dick Reader. I didn't look up the, do you see what else was in this issue? Was there any other, like, notable authors?
Nate:
Yeah, let me bring that up now, hold on.
So also in this issue, we have "So Lovely, So Lost" by James Causey, "The Queer Critter" by Gordon Dickson, "Aunt Else's Stairway" by Anthony Riker, then after he Riker story is "Last of the Masters", then it is "Controlled Experiment" by Chad Oliver, then we have "Noah" by Charles Beckman Jr., then it's "The Penfield Misadventure" by August Derleth, "The Many Dreams" of Earth" by Charles E. Fritch, and then closing off with "The Enchanted Princess" by Jack Vance.
So most of those I don't recognize, I only recognize the names of PKD, August Derleth and Jack Vance, and I haven't read the August Derleth and Jack Vance stories, so.
JM:
So I haven't heard of a lot of those authors actually, so that sounds a little interesting, too, as it seems to me.
Gretchen:
I do think I may have heard Chad Oliver, but I am not recalling where I've heard the name before. I think I might have come across it in some anthology I was looking at.
Nate:
Yeah, I'd imagine a lot of those authors got around in the sf pulps, too, because certainly by this time, there were a lot of them. It's not like it was just Amazing and Astounding going at it.
JM:
Basically, the paperback SF movement, starting to kick in, but maybe five years before or something like that.
Nate:
Yeah, and I know I mentioned this on the podcast, perhaps even in this block of stories, but yeah, that transition from magazine to the paperback novels, first in fix-up form and then novels and then the series is something I do want to cover on the podcast at some point. I guess we'll figure out the best way to do that. Since Donald Wollheim was the editor.
JM:
We're going to be hearing that next episode.
Nate:
Yeah, yeah, we could definitely, yeah.
JM:
We're going to talk about one that was published just a few years after those stories.
Nate:
Yeah, but Donald Wollheim was a major figure in that transition happening, and he was the editor of this publication here. So I guess it all does fit together in its own little way here. But yeah, so that's where this one initially was, which was kind of neat.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
(music: sparse bells)
spoiler summary and discussion
"The Last of the Masters" begins with an individual named Bors regaining consciousness, unable to move as he waits for some men to assemble him. One of the men, Peter Green, greets him when he wakes telling him it'll be a busy day for him. Bills to sign, decisions to make.
Another man, Fowler, arrives with a group who work on Bors, fixing him up so that he can feel and move, though not completely. Fowler informs Bors that his motor system is wearing down. Some of the synapse coils broken. His legs and soon his arms, then the rest of him will be paralyzed, though he'll still be able to see, hear and think and broadcast. Despite the bad news, Bors turns his attention to present concerns as he is lifted and carried from the room to a car.
Meanwhile, an Edward Tolby, his daughter Silvia and Robert Penn, members of the Anarchist League, head into a town to have a drink. At the bar, the other patrons ask them about the league, and Tolby recounts the formation of the league and how it took down the governments, burning and destroying the government records and the robots 200 years ago.
They found a location of nuclear weapons and destroyed them. He implies that the reason he, Silvia and Penn are in the area is due to rumors that there is a reemerging support for government there, which the townspeople deny. Two of them, a woman named Laura and a man named Pete, offer to drive them to their place to stay overnight.
While on the way, the car veers off the road and crashes. The crash kills Pete and Laura as well as Penn. Silvia and Tolby are injured but alive. Tolby, who gains consciousness first, tends to Silvia and begins pulling her from the car when a helicopter arrives.
Tolby hides and learns that the crash was intentional. Laura and Pete wanted to kill them. When the people from the hospital see Laura, who is now awake and trying to escape, Tolby emerges from hiding and kills several of the group before they can kill Silvia.
He doesn't get all of them and is forced to retreat. He realizes that the remaining people who left on the helicopter have taken Silvia. He climbs a hill to see what is in the direction they came from and sees that beyond the hills was a government.
Switching back to Bors, he is alerted by Green of Tolby's attack on his people. He is informed that one was taken and another got away. Bors decides to have them prepare for war. When Green is incredulous that the anarchist league could be such a major threat, Bors and his government have weapons after all. Bors reminds him that though the anarchists aren't organized or as heavily armed, they make up for it with their numbers.
Bors wants to talk with Silvia and is brought to see her. Silvia, upon seeing Bors, recognizes him as one of the robots the league thought they had destroyed. She asks how he can keep everyone following his orders and Bors tells her that the knowledge she has given to his people, knowledge from when there was government, has led them to trust him. He points out that he won't be around forever but he says he's eternal even when his body is paralyzed he'll still be able to think and communicate.
Silvia then kicks out her leg and catches one of the chairs upon which Bors' body rests toppling him. She tries to escape but is caught by his repair crew. Distressed by the incident, Bors is brought back to his room where he forces himself to keep working. The system must be preserved he thinks and the system is connected to the people. They exist only if the system exists. The system exists only if he exists.
Tolby watches as Bors' people prepare for war. He takes one member hostage and finds out through him that the head of the operation is a government robot. After shooting the man and taking his motorcycle he heads into Bors' city. He encounters soldiers seeing they are young and scared and experienced in fighting. After killing some guards, Tolby gets into the city's main building where he runs into Fowler who recognizes him as the escaped league member and takes him to where Bors is located, because he wants Tolby to kill Bors.
Tolby works his way through the area to get to Bors and then encounters Green. Green tries to kill Tolby but gets shot by Fowler. Tolby finally makes it to Bors and tells the robot to start running. When he doesn't, Tolby strikes him with his staff destroying him.
Fowler leads Tolby to Silvia. When she hears the news of Bors' death she wonders if they made a mistake. Bors thought he was doing the right thing and his factories produced a lot of goods. Tolby says he also produced guns but Fowler remarks that the league does as well. Tolby retorts that the league doesn't have war.
Silvia says the times were against Bors and with them. In Fowler's pocket are three undamaged synapse coils just in case he said to himself, just in case times change.
I will say that I think it's very interesting that we read this after "Nightfall" too because there is this feeling of like a cyclical nature in that last bit of like the times turning against people, the wheel moving forward that kind of feels like the cyclical nature that we see in "Nightfall".
Nate:
And it's kind of interesting that PKD was writing this in the 50s like long before big tech and computing and AI was really a thing outside of military application, and it just feels really prescient with today's world specifically like right now in early March of 2025 where we have like a lot of crazy things going on in the world and I just watched this one video on YouTube talking about the billionaire class and how they're just pumping a lot of money into I guess these insane accelerationist policies that seem to serve no purpose other than to crash the economy and general society so that billionaires can build their own little private feudal enclaves in the midst of all this chaos. These billionaires are all tech people so you know of course it'll be governed by some autonomous machine that arbitrarily makes decisions for how the whole society is run and Bors here is definitely portrayed more of like a bureaucrat who's kind of running around and doing these tasks.
JM:
He's always shuffling papers on his desk like no matter what's going on right that's what he's doing.
Gretchen:
Yeah not necessarily as accurate to the techno feudalist future that we have going on.
Nate:
No I mean back in the 50s computers they didn't really have electronic displays there was like a lot of printouts and a lot of them were still running on punch card inputs and all that stuff.
JM:
Well you know how it is it's the 1950s and they sometimes like you know everything's fancy everybody talks to each other on video phone but they're still doing everything with paper.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
You know that's copying copies of everything and everything. But it's kind of cool because like Bors is portrayed as quite I don't know I mean he seems consciously anyway sort of human right like you know it's the point where I wasn't quite sure at first that he was a robot and then obviously there's hints.
What I thought was really funny was late in the story when Tolby who by the way I really thought wasn't going to make it to the end of the story I was almost sure he wasn't going to make it. Maybe it was in part because he was such like he was kind of an ass too you know he's just like that the end is just like shooting kids left right and center you know it's just like I don't know it's just tough.
Gretchen:
It is very I will say it was very, I guess funny to me, that he has this whole moment where he's realizing like wow all these soldiers and guards they're just children like they don't know what they're doing they're so inexperienced and it follows with him just murdering them.
Nate:
It's a good advantage in battle I guess.
Gretchen:
Yeah it's like I guess that makes them easier to kill.
Nate:
No I was definitely surprised at the level of violence and gore in some of the scenes in this story, even for some of the horror things we read in the magazines they not like this is extreme or anything like that, but the car crash scene where they get impaled and all that and I was like wow I wasn't really expecting that to happen.
Gretchen:
Yeah that was quite something.
JM:
I was going to say, before we get way off to something else, I just kind of made the aside about Tolby, but I was going to say that towards the end of the story, when he's asking the kid, and he's like, who's your superior? And he goes off rallying all this stuff. And Tolby cuts him off and he goes, the top man, the top of the pillar, who's at the top? And the kid's like, Bors. And instantly he's like, "that doesn't sound like a man's name. That sounds like......" And, you know, it's funny because like, you know, I was thinking like all the things that added up to make him a robot.
And then, you know, I was actually thinking, oh, Bors, you know, that's actually a pretty good name for a robot, right? Like, not only does it feel like it could stand for something, but if you turn it around, it's Rob. Right, Rob. Like Robot, Rob, and Rob the Robot, kind of. And Bors just makes me think of that computer in the Doctor Who story BOSS that stands for Biomorphic Organizational Supervision System or something like that. This is like, could be something like that. But also at the beginning, when I saw Bors, I'm like, what is that? Scandinavian?
Nate:
Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Yeah, it's like Bors Johansson or something like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. And they're like, oh, OK, he's a robot. It makes sense. And even Tolby at the end is like, that's a robot's name.
Gretchen:
I want to know the names of those other government robots now.
Nate:
Yeah, they're apparently 200 years in the past. And they mentioned that they destroyed the microfilm records, which I thought was a nice touch. So I don't know, it might be to the point of legend for these people. I'm sure there's a lot of anarchist tall tales and heroic figures and legendary stuff passed on.
JM:
So Bors has really extreme reactions, too. Like, there's like one point where he's just going into the mic and he's like, he's like, close all the roads. Shoot everyone we don't know. Like, is it is like, wait a minute, it's just one guy. Why are you doing this? And like, the one guy kind of seems to react that way. But the other guy's like, that's great. That's exactly what we need to do. We have bombs and guns and bacteria pellets.
I wasn't aware, I guess, it didn't seem clear that when they're in the bar, the anarchists are in the bar and they meet this woman. And she's like, oh, let's go for a drive. We can go to my house, right? And like, so they're they're going and they get into this accident, right? This is very sudden. And I honestly thought like this was going to be the point of the mind twist, right? Whereas like, this is the accident. What happens after the accident, right? This is like, that's just normally the part in the David Lynch movie where reality shifts to become something else. Right? I thought that was the point there. Oh, this is going to get super weird now. And it didn't do that. But at the same time, it's like, that's such an extreme, weird thing to do. And they even killed the woman who's the agent of the government agent, right? She turned out to be.
Gretchen:
Yeah, she's the one that gets impaled.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, really graphically.
JM:
I was like, why did they do that? Why? Why? Why did P.K.D., why? It's like, you know, they were going to her house. She could have just like poisoned their coffee or something like that. And like, what, why did they do this violent car wreck?
Gretchen:
Like, yeah, because I believe, isn't it like the people that come from the helicopter, they're like, well, she was always quite zealous overzealous. And it's like, I guess that makes it normal for her to just let herself be impaled. Like, yeah, to basically commit suicide for the mission.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Right. Because she was a fanatic, right? That's what they said afterwards.
Gretchen:
Fanatic, yeah.
JM:
She's a fanatic. She was going to die for the cause, I guess. I don't know. It just seemed so like, it felt like it was there to add this like very sudden moment of violence to the story. And it was effective in that sense. Like, it just like comes out of nowhere. You're not expecting it. And all of a sudden, like, oh, shit, three of them are dead now. Wait, whoa.
Nate:
Like, yeah, a lot of then come out of nowhere too.
JM:
Describing the bloody twisted bodies and stuff like that. Yeah. This is like, oh, okay. But it just seems so extreme, right? It just seems, I don't know, that's not what I would do if I was like, she was being friendly, right? She was going to take them somewhere. That was, that's where I would have done the thing. But I don't know. It's just, this is a PKD story. So there had to be this moment. Again, that was where I thought, okay, so he's going to wake up and he's going to go, he's going to find like some weird time twist is going to happen like in "Ubik" or something like that where it's not really like that. That this is an earlier PKD story, I guess. So he's not quite doing the shifting realities and stuff like that at this point. But yeah.
Nate:
But I mean, there's definitely hints of his later work in here for sure. I mean, it definitely foreshadows a lot of stuff that you would see in "Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep?" Even though the stories play out completely differently, I think it does touch upon some of the same themes.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, it's a lot of focus on consciousness, I guess. And Bors waking up and like, not sure where he is and what he is. That really fascinating beginning of a story that I always find where like, you don't know, you don't know any of the rules yet or where you are, where you're going.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I really liked that first scene. It is like disorienting and you're kind of still trying to figure out. And of course, you know, that's kind of the echoing how it feels to just wake up and gain consciousness, that disorientation that you feel.
Nate:
It's definitely good at capturing that.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, character wise, nobody really stood out for say, but it's difficult of not necessarily just PKD, but it's not really that kind of story, I guess. Everybody has something to do. So that's cool. Like everybody plays their part. There's a, it seems you can kind of pigeonhole them pretty easily, like Fowler's the doubting the guy who works for the government, but kind of doubts what they're doing and kind of sees the reality of the fact that the robot's falling apart. And Green is the guy is like, no, no, this is great. We got to go ahead and do this and do what he says and shoot everybody that comes in and close all the roads and arrest as many people as possible. Silvia, you know, she's the one that tries to talk to the robot and tries to, and at the end is kind of doubting the wisdom of what they've done. I don't know, Tolby's just kind of a violent, thuggish kind of personality, it seems like mostly at the end, you know, he's like, he's his daughter is really important to him. So the reunion is very happy and kind of haves him a moment of reflection as well, where he's like, man, that thing was so helpless, you know, and I just beat it to a pulp. And then like, it was like beating a person to death. I couldn't do anything. Right. This is like, he kind of felt worse about that, that shooting those soldiers in there on the way in, right? This is like, but that makes sense, because that was from a distance with a gun, whereas he got up close and personal. And it's not just like he hit it with a big piece of iron, and it fell over. It was like showering him with bits of cobalt wires and coils and electric fluid was coming out.
Gretchen:
Robot gore.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, definitely a classic robot death scene.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Definitely. I'm glad we read this one, because yeah, this is kind of following a tradition we have, which will continue with very soon. Not necessarily getting into these big time authors with the big names stories to start with. We kind of promised like maybe we'll get there eventually. We'll do some of those things. But I mean, it's kind of like silly to be the 25th podcast to be talking about, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" or something like that, right? "Foundation" or whatever. I mean, we could do it. And maybe we will.
But like, this is kind of a little more interesting because, yeah, like, no, people don't talk about this stuff. And maybe not as, not as profound or memorable a piece in some ways, perhaps, but it's an effective and in some ways, idiosyncratic fifties story of its kind.
Nate:
And I think it's also cool to see the evolution of these authors, too.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Especially people like PKD who are writing for a good, I don't know, 20 years or so.
JM:
Yeah, 30, almost 30 years. Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah. And how they change and how they say the same and how their work develops over time. But it's just kind of cool to look at it from that way, I think.
JM:
Yeah. And as a reader, that's always fun to do as well. You know, we only have so many opportunities on the podcast. You know, I was kind of thinking about this recently, how people read differently a lot of the time and for pleasure, I should say, you know, like people read, sometimes they just pick up, they pick up whatever books are popular or whatever books their friends are reading or, you know, whatever catches their eye in the bookstore. And they might not ever read another book by that writer. Whereas some people, they get a book and then they're like, well, that was really interesting. I want to see what else that person did. And then they like, maybe start at the beginning and they try to work their way forward. And they're like, yeah, like now I'm familiar with all this person's work.
I'm not going to say necessarily one method is better than another. But I mean, you know, it's just kind of it is interesting to get a feel of writer and how they develop. And I definitely think somebody like PKD, he doesn't come out of the gate fully formed as the weird savant of pop culture, mystical reality altering, narcotizing stuff that everybody knows him as by the 1980s.
Gretchen:
There is a quote that Philip K. Dick actually has about some of his earlier work. I thought I'd read it here because it kind of fits into this like idea of the evolution of the writer and seeing where they start and where they go.
"The majority of these stories were written when my life was simpler and made sense. I could tell the difference between the real world and the world I wrote about. I used to dig in the garden and there is nothing fantastic or ultra dimensional about crabgrass. Unless you are an SF writer, in which case, pretty soon you are viewing crabgrass with suspicion. One day the crabgrass suits will fall off and their true identity will be revealed. By then the Pentagon will be full of crabgrass and it'll be too late. My earlier stories had such premises. Later, when my personal life became complicated and full of unfortunate convolutions, worries about crabgrass got lost somewhere. I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but up from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen. Your wife and child could leave you and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for. In addition, the Martians could bore through the roof and get you."
Nate:
Yeah, that's pretty good.
Gretchen:
But yeah. You definitely can see, like we were saying, there is some moments in it and some themes in it that hold true for later works by him. But it is interesting to see where he and where other writers that do go on to be very prolific and very well known where they start.
JM:
Yeah. And we have been doing that pretty consistently. We've talked about two pretty early Asimov stories so far. And I guess I didn't 100% have an in perspective. I didn't think about it too much, but like somebody like Asimov, yes, he's very, very prolific at everybody who talks about him, talks about how prolific he is. But most of his books are not science fiction books and most of his science fiction work was done over a period of the 1940s and 50s. After that, he didn't write very much, except for short stories every now and then and a few novels in the 70s and 80s, but like definitely not that many.
So, you know, he's a very prolific short story writer and a very prolific writer of science and other stuff, maybe not not totally prolific. So like, you know, I was thinking about PKD and there's like, I don't know exactly how many novels he wrote, but, you know, I'm always like remembering the titles of other ones that sounded interesting to me that I haven't read yet. And you know, there's like quite a large number. So yeah, yeah, it's like you said. It's very, pretty much from the 1950s to the late 70s, early 80s. And you think like, I don't know, by the end, maybe he was finding it difficult to keep turning out the stuff. And it was definitely getting more esoteric as he went.
Nate:
Well, he's got a lot of cool stuff. And he's definitely an author that I would like to come back to more than a few times on the podcast. And yeah, I think it was a cool introduction to his work.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah, I'd definitely be interested in checking out some other works by him in the future. All right, well, I have no idea what we'll get to, but I have a feeling it won't be "Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep?" Yeah, maybe not "Man in the High Castle" either. But we'll see. We'll see. There's a lot of a lot of choices when we're trying to do some more themes and, you know, more theme oriented episodes. So something may come up.
Nate:
Well, speaking of theme oriented episodes, I guess it lets you guys have anything else on this. Why don't we talk about what we have for next time?
JM:
I don't really have any other thoughts about this. It was good. It was an interesting experience. And it's fun to talk about and relate how we feel about it. But I don't know that there's a ton beneath there. Like I said, we said, we don't really think the social commentary is that important in this. And, you know, this is interesting to think about where he was going with this and how he might have written something like this 20 years later. Yet, maybe I will discover something in the 70s where he writes about anarchism. Again, I have no idea. Obviously, I'm interested to find out.
But yeah, so yeah, let's talk about it next time. So like I said before, we've been kind of concentrating on doing some themes and we want to do more themes in the future. And because it's kind of fun to relate stuff. And this is actually a good way of uncovering maybe lesser known works. So the theme next time around is actually a very important one in science fiction circles, I think. You can think of so many examples of where it comes up and how. And speaking broadly and generally the theme is, well, communication. Or, more specifically, language and linguistics and yet some of the more popular examples in the field that are part of mainstream culture. How do we communicate with aliens? What actually is a language? Can language influence the way people think? If so, how?
So we're going to be talking about these things and I think we've come up with a really interesting block of stories to do. And this is going to probably take us through the next several months. And it's going to be really interesting. So let's go through it. So we're going to actually do exactly what I've been talking about previously and introduce a new author, another famous author, Ursula K. Le Guin, and we're not going to be doing "The Dispossessed". We're not going to be doing "Left Hand of Darkness". We're not doing "Lathe of Heaven" yet. Instead, we're doing a short work of hers and I take this because I think it's just a really cool way of introducing the theme on the podcast. So it's less, you think we're just being contrary by picking this like really small, tiny work from such a well-known author that nobody's read within most people other than her fans probably haven't read. No, it specifically fits the theme and the name of this piece is "The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of Therolinguistics". This was published in 1974 and it can be found in her book, "The Unreal and the Real, Selected Stories Volume 2". It's basically comprised of three sections, very short sections. The first is indeed "The Author of the Acacia Seeds, also known as Manuscript Found in an Annthill". And yeah, there's three very short excerpts and really kind of an interesting way to start this whole topic off.
We'll also be doing "The Languages of Pao" by Jack Vance. I'll be happily finally getting him on the podcast. I was kind of talking about him before I almost picked "Emphyrio" as the host choice, but at the end of the day, I decided to change my mind in the last minute. But Jack Vance has been an author that I've really enjoyed for a long time. It's kind of interesting because to me, he's one of science fiction's best stylists, but he's not necessarily a profound writer in the sense that a lot of the time his books are adventure stories, and they're stories where people travel around maybe a single planet, or maybe multiple planets, or maybe a fantastic society. Like, not everything he does is strictly speaking science fiction. He's done a lot of mysteries and thriller type books as well. I think one of his strengths, though, is portraying unusual societies and basically "world building" what they would call it now. But he does it in a way that's very concise, very interesting and clear and sharp. And yeah, he's one of the few writers of this genre who can include footnotes and end notes in his books and not make it seem pretentious and weird. But yeah, Jack Vance may not be for everybody, but I really, really like him a lot and I'll be glad to finally do him on the podcast. So this is "Languages of Pao", published in 1958 by Avalon Books. This book is basically making use of something we'll talk about later when we do this, but it's the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of language, which basically suggests that language can directly influence thought, human thought, and perhaps impose limitations as well as different structural hierarchies on the way people think. So the "Languages of Pao" is basically a social experiment.
The next book we're talking about also makes use of this hypothesis, which I understand is considered slightly dated now in linguistic studies, but I don't know, I guess I'll get into it. We'll definitely talk a little bit about the background of this kind of stuff when we do the episode. But the next book is "Babel-17" by Samuel R. Delany, a writer we kind of teased a little bit when we were talking about W.E.B. Du Bois recently. This was published by Ace Books in 1966 and it was the joint winner of the Nebula Award with "Flowers for Algernon" in 1967. So I'm really looking forward to that one as well. I have read that one before and I really enjoyed it. So definitely something very different.
We're definitely getting into more contemporary eras of science fiction and not more so than the final piece that we'll be doing for our next block, which is "The Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. This was originally published in an anthology called "Starlight #2" in 1998. I think that makes it the most recent work that we've been will be doing on the podcast up to this time.
Nate:
Yeah, it is. It's also in "The Big Book of Science Fiction", which we've referenced numerous times on the podcast before.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I read this one previously and I read it in the other short story collection of Ted Chiang's "The Story of Your Life and Others".
JM:
Yeah, I was just going to mention that. So that was published in 2002 in his collection, which you'll probably find it more easily there than in the "Starlight" anthology. I personally haven't read this one. I read one or two other things by him that I quite enjoyed. Not a very prolific science fiction writer. Apparently he spends a lot of time writing technical manuals or something like that. This is a nonfiction writer. But he's actually a very, very good science fiction writer. So this story is actually famous now because it is the basis for the film from, I believe it was 2015.
Gretchen:
Either 15 or 16.
JM:
Okay, yeah. I can't remember. So, I mean, I liked the film. The film had some things that I didn't know. I don't know if I really liked it. I think maybe it was just, I don't know. I feel like maybe these things would be straightened out in the story. I might actually enjoy the story more, but we'll see. I'm going to watch the film again and we'll talk about that too when we do the episode.
But yeah, really, really interesting stuff that I'm really happy to be getting to. I think everybody's looking forward to it. I think we should definitely check those out and tune in next time for Chrononauts.
Nate:
Yeah. And on the subject of linguistics more broadly, definitely check out our blogspot where we'll be posting a lot more translations of Latin American short stories in the upcoming months. And in particular, tying into this theme, we have a very, very short story coming up called "Nothing But Earthlings", where these really weird non-humanoid aliens just kind of flutter their vibropods at one another and call each other filthy earthlings and kind of laugh at earthly customs. It's very, very strange.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And yeah, those would be fun to talk about when we cover those. But yeah, they're going up on the blogspot and there's definitely a lot there. So stay tuned for some really cool stuff.
JM:
And, you know, we may talk about that in the next block because, yeah, I mean, the subject of translating stories is features, even though we're not doing any of these in this block, it definitely ties in with what we're trying to do at bringing some of this non-English stuff to life for the first time. So.
Nate:
Especially translating science fiction stories and science fiction terms and, well, how do you make it sound like a science fiction story? And yeah.
JM:
And we talked about that last time when we did Nervo, right?
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. It's like, you know, some weird things with the two different translations that one seemed to be trying to aim for a more literary angle, I guess, maybe. I didn't use some of the cool words that he was hinting at.
Nate:
Yeah. But yeah, no, a lot of stuff to get into. And yeah, definitely looking forward to this story block. The only author I've read stuff by is Ursula Le Guin, and I haven't read this story, so it'll be cool to see what she does with this because I really liked all of her work that I've read so far. And she has a lot of really interesting things to say about, I guess, life and the world and how we look at the universe in general.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to, well, I have read Chiang's story and I've read "Babels-17" very recently, but I'm really looking forward to discussing that one. And I love what I've read by Le Guin so far, so I'm curious about that. And I'm curious to get into some Jack Vance since the only thing I've read so far by him has been "Bad Ronald", which is very far out of the range of sci-fi.
JM:
Yeah, I read "Languages of Pao" back in 2009, so I'm looking forward to reading it again. It's been a while, so.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Well, that's great, guys. This has definitely been a fun journey to the end of the world. Now we're traveling back in time to 2025. And yeah, it still sometimes seems like the apocalypse might be brooding over the horizon, but many generations of humanity have had to live with that in the last 100 years. So, yeah. I guess, hang on to your podcasts, and yeah, if it's the end of the world, I don't know, listen to a lot of podcasts. That's important, right?
Nate:
Sure.
JM:
Especially the Chrononauts Podcast. That's who we are, and we'll be back very soon. Good night, and thanks for listening.
Bibliography:
Capanna, Pablo - "Idios Kosmos - Claves para una biograpfia de Philip K. Dick" (1992)
Luminist Archives: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Weird Fiction Periodicals https://www.luminist.org/archives/SF/
Sutin, Lawrence - "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick" (2005)
Music:
Johnston, J. S. - "Electric polka" (1878) https://www.loc.gov/item/2023830168
