Marooned! on Mars with Matt and Hilary

We’re watching the Assembly Cut (an extra 30 minutes!) of Alien3 for our latest foray into the Alien franchise.

This one takes place on a forced-labor penal colony inhabited by a strange religious sect of hyper-violent, hyper-male murderers, rapists, and scoundrels. But Ripley’s not worried because Charles Dance, who’s not at all creepy, is there.

We struggle to make some kind of synthetic sense of this film, which has an extremely circuitous production history (which we discuss) making for a confusing but nevertheless fun viewing experience, and an even more fun talking experience.

Never mind the names of the characters: they all look alike except for Charles S. Dutton and Ripley. One probably smells like garlic but he can’t help it, and besides he’s crazy.

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We're back with Bill, tracing the adventures of new mom Ellen Ripley through the vast reaches of space as she returns to LV-426, now a colony (in every sense of the word) being terraformed by the Weyland-Yutani company. Jones has been left behind to... guard the grain. OK.

James Cameron's 1986 entry in the Alien franchise takes the form of a war film, but Matt argues it's more like a western. The series from this point begins to focus on reproduction, and we begin to try to make sense of how that fits in with the settler colonial discourse, with a plot that's initiated by an attack on a nuclear family from an indigenous population. A question we end with is, if survival and survivability are so important to the corporation, or to the xenomorph, why would reproduction be necessary at all? This seems to be a contradiction, and we try to resolve it.

Along the way we note the film's move into 80s-style militarism, a la Schwarzenegger and Stallone (Ripley goes full Rambo on the Queen), compare Linda Hamilton and Sigourney Weaver along the badassery vs. everygirlness spectra, explore the Biehn line, complain about kids in films, definitively assert that Aliens is better than T2, and explore the supposed universality of motherhood. And more!

GAME OVER, MAN!

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Hop a ride on your nearest commercial towing vehicle and set a course for the stars!

We're back with a special series on the ALIEN movie franchise. Joined by our friend and one-and-only guest Bill (who joins us from a fishbowl), we will be discussing all 6 films in the series in order of their release: Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien3 (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997), Prometheus (2012), and Alien: Covenant (2017) (and Matt just wrote all those, in order, with the correct years, without having to look them up--so off to a good start!).

"Modern classic" is an over-used phrase, but Alien, directed by the not unattractive Ridley Scott, actually fits the description. Combining horror and science fiction in a new way, the film raises fascinating questions about both biological and social reproduction, as well as class, gender, and the status of labor. What does it mean to be a survivor, and why is that important for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation? How does the figure of the robot compare to the xenomorph, and what meaning can we make by putting them next to each other? Is Jonesy jealous that the alien gets to kill all those humans? And where are all the mice?

These questions and more will be answered DEFINITIVELY. We'll be back soon with Episode 2 on Aliens.

Thanks for listening, and above all: Don't Panic!

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In this FINAL episode of our discussion of Green Earth, Matt and Hilary talk about the themes of unintelligibility throughout the novel(s) and think about the ways the novel(s) insert climate change into both the political and the everyday lived realities of people who are used to living relatively comfortable lives.

We work through some issues on the historical contexts of the novel's publication and our reading of it a mere 18 (or 7) years later, but in what feels like a radically different world both politically and with regards to climate.

The ways the novel does show in a subtle way some of the holes in the kinds of solutions it posits, like the Quiblers' possibility of moving in with the Khembalis, the questionable nature of American democracy vis a vis the fixed (or unfixed) presidential election, and the cloudy relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy, especially in light of the role China plays in the denouement. 

We touch on metaphor, science, Buddhism, 1000-year projects, the Chemosphere, class consciousness among the PMC, and so, so much more.

Thanks for listening to this season! We'll be taking a bit of a break for a few weeks and will return with a series of episodes on the ALIEN movie franchise, then probably an episode on the book Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future by Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann. And eventually we'll return to KSR--we still have at least five books left to read!

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In this, our PENULTIMATE episode in our examination of Green Earth, Matt and Hilary start off by sharing what they're going to miss after the global civilizational collapse (heat in the winter, showers, i.e., relief from the pressure to be clean), and talk about how we're not talking about the very real threat of civilizational collapse. Then we talk about Chapters 25, 26, and a bit of 27 before we run out of brain power.

Here our conversation runs through decision-making and the myths surrounding it, complaints about sociobiology and evo psych and their connection to imagining responses to climate change, the ways history keeps us anchored to the present, realism and science fiction.

How will we wrest freedom from the grasp of necessity? What is the ransom adequate to save the world? Are cats a liquid or a solid?

We dive deep into Edgardo's experience of the Piazzolla concert and think about the premise that all joy is anticipatory, "dragged out from some better future time," and we lament the total unnecessariness of the misery of the present that we all, nevertheless, persist in reproducing. Whether we find all that funny is an open question.

This section also includes "Sacred Space," which depicts Rudra's death and funeral and Charlie and Frank's trip to the Sierras. We wonder about the Single-Frank Theory, also known as the Theory of Transcendent Franks.

This episode is bookended by cat appearances, so be sure to stay tuned until the end! (And don't make your hobby your side hustle.)

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Starting Sixty Days and Counting, Chapters 21-24

Again we ask the big questions:

Why are we doing this?

When does Frankie say, "relax"?

What if the 14 multinational corporations standing on each other's shoulders wearing an American flag overcoat that claim to be the USA suddenly took off the overcoat?

We have some pre-Uvalde, post-Obama thoughts about Phil Chase's idea that America is the "hope of the world," as well as housing precarity, plastic(!), hiding things in forests, and total information awareness. We don't achieve total information awareness in this episode, but hopefully we're getting close!

(This was recorded on May 15.)

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First, the name of the Buddhist climate activist who self-immolated in front of the Supreme Court was Wynn Bruce. Matt forgets his name when he mentions him, but everyone should know him.

In this episode, we finish volume 2 of Green Earth, discussing "The Cold Snap," "Always Generous," "Leap Before You Look," and "Primavera Porteño"-- in a very freewheeling manner, it must be said!

We talk about the gap between knowing and acting, seeming and being. And ponder the following questions:

Are elections meaningful? 

Is Frank's brain injury the cause of his indecision?

Is the Khembali exorcism ceremony real?

Which of them are theater?

Paranoia, bourgeois individualism, coping, illusion, co-imagining trauma and the everyday, living a whole life--big themes in this episode!

We also mourn the passing of Hilary's cat and frequent podcast drop-in Louise, and look forward to the utopia of feline immortality under communism.

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NOTE: This episode was recorded in early April.

In this episode we focus on “Is There a Technical Solution?,” “Autumn in New York,” and “Optimodal.”

But first we spend some time (as usual) lamenting the state of the world, especially the plight of the unhoused from Maine to Chicago. We decide private property should be abolished, which is also one of the best takeaways from Eric Holthaus’s The Future Earth. We also curse Barack Obama for what the Obama Center is doing to the South Side of Chicago. A bad guy, actually!

This leads us into thinking about public space and the commons, which takes us back into Green Earth and Frank’s experience living in a tree in Rock Creek Park. Here, outdoor spaces have become something more than what they were before the flood and the freeze. In the park, with Frank, the bros, and the frisbee golfers, we can find the novel’s speculative kernel, taking us outside the question of whether science can become political and whether politics can be reconciled to science.

We talk about home and habits, how the everyday lives of the characters are so partitioned and look for the things that hold Frank’s life together, one of which is the economy, indebtedness, insurance–ironically the very thing that, in the novel’s A-plot, may force the world to change course. The uninsurability of property in the face of catastrophic climate change may force capital into a different direction. In this way, Green Earth provides an actuarial imagination that gives a different relationship to the future, in ways that KSR will continue to develop in New York 2140 and The Ministry for the Future.

Meanwhile, Phil Chase is doing his Wizard of Oz routine, and Matt and Hilary reflect on what it looks like when our politics is centered on charismatic leaders. Being beholden to a pseudo-magical figure and the hierarchies and dependencies entailed by that arrangement don’t lend themselves to having a better democracy. Even Frank’s relationship with the bros seems to be one of liberal benevolence, which they do not fail to call him on.

We critique Chase’s speech calling on America to fulfill its “historical destiny” and put pressure on the possibility of threading the needle between the U.S. being a world leader without being hegemonic, “inventing permaculture” without engaging in imperialism. Can we reconcile the idea of the nation-state with the idea of a global civilization? What does “culture” mean in a borderless world?

The whole notion of “permaculture” is a weird one–isn’t culture constantly changing?

The section ends with some hints toward the need for a new global religion, with Frank dipping his toe in Emerson (and then getting beat up).

Hilary pulls a switcheroo, picks a bone with Donna Haraway, demands action, and Matt plugs Tokyo Vice.

It’s all happening.

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In this episode we talk about the first three chapters of Fifty Degrees Below, "Primate in Forest," "Abrupt Climate Change," and "Return to Khembalung."

We discuss the way this novel works within the mode of realism and look for areas where it pushes against that mode to find possibly utopian, possibly fantastical, alternatives. Our focus here is on comparing what we regard as the novel's two main characters, Frank and Charlie, and the way they are negotiating the "new normal" they find themselves in. They each seem to resist the new at the same time they are struggling to build it, whether that be in legislation (writing the book of the future) or in a treehouse (a Swiss Family Robinsonade). We talk about genre, truth claims, rewilding, and lama-grooming.

We'll be back in a couple weeks with our discussion of the next three chapters "Is There a Technical Solution?" "Autumn in New York," and "Optimodal."

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In this episode we talk about the second half of the first volume of Green Earth, Forty Signs of Rain from "Athena on the Pacific" to "Broader Impacts."

We're back! This season we're tackling Green Earth, KSR's revised, single-volume edition of the Science in the Capital trilogy. The trilogy was originally published from 2004 to 2007. Green Earth was put out in 2015.

In this first episode we discuss the (un)likability of the novel's main characters, and the way the book seems to set the table for KSR's agenda for his following novels, particularly Shaman, 2312, New York 2140, and The Ministry for the Future. We talk about how Green Earth feels very much a Bush-era book, when it was still possible to believe that the main impediment to addressing climate change was anti-science attitudes that had infested an entire party in American politics, before the Obama era revealed that the real problem was far deeper, including obviously capitalism itself, but also something far more intractable, an approach to reality that was impervious to "just the facts" or "trust science" platitudes.

One thing Green Earth does that feels very of its moment as we read it from 2022 is its attempt to make palpable the presence of climate change in everyday life. In the early 2000s, it was still possible, on an exceptionally hot day, to joke casually about "global warming," without actually feeling what that meant. From today's perspective, when fires, floods, hurricanes, tornados, bomb cyclones, heat waves, polar vortexes, et al. hit with unprecedented regularity, that attitude feels like it comes from a place of (for lack of a better word) privilege. Green Earth attempts to make those events felt by a very specific kind of historical (fictional) subject: the hyper-productive, uber-educated, scientist-bureaucrat, engaged in the banalities of the everyday in the fields of both domesticity and national politics. What is it like for a person who is raising a child and running a household, and might, at a moment's notice, be face-to-face with the President, to experience climate change firsthand? In part what we see here is KSR's attempt to bring what he had developed throughout the Mars Trilogy home--to Earth, to everyday life, to the mundane, to the United States. In taking the energies of the Mars Trilogy and localizing them, Green Earth feels like a hinge moment in his writing, while still pursuing familiar questions and concerns: what will shock someone out of inaction to action, what is it like to live in a body on a planet, how does politics happen, where are we in history, and how do we move forward?

We hope to be a bit more, shall we say, efficient with this book than we were with 2312, and we're excited to share our thoughts with you!

If you're curious, Matt and Hilary are also now published KSR scholars, having written a review for New Labor Forum, which can be found here. 

Thank you for the gift of your time, and we hope you enjoy this season!

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Our final episode of our 2312 season is here!

First, we talk about the topic on everyone's mind, the New York Times Crossword puzzle and how bad it is. We wrap that up around 6.5 minutes in.

Then, we reveal the topic of our next season, and it's....drumroll....GREEN EARTH! I know this delights many of you and disappoints an equal amount, and then the final third just can't wait for our mellifluous voices to lull them back to sleep. But whatever your reaction, we're going to dive into this 1000-page behemoth starting around February 2022. We'll probably, hopefully, have a movie episode in the meantime tide over the "true heads."

We talk then about resolutions that don't resolve things, closures that leave a lot open, comedy and the marriage plot, and the mode of the novel. Is this a novel? Is it an anti-novel?

We talk a lot about punishment, prison, exile, and the police. Genette reveals another side of Genette-self---and we find some prounouns attributed to "him"! ***ATTENTION STAN, ATTENTION STAN, THERE ARE STILL PRONOUNS ATTACHED TO GENETTE!!!*** We conclude that, in the end, Genette is not the noir detective, in that the inspector does not see Genette as implicated in the rot at the core of the system. Genette is not crushed by the resolution, Genette does not fail in victory. Rather, the Inspector is confident in the Inspector's [holy shit it's hard to write without pronouns!] correctness, righteous in the outcome of which Genette [*pant, pant, pant*] was crucial in bringing about.

We ask an important question: are there qubes in Congress now, and if so, are they of the Marjorie Taylor-Green variety or the Jared Golden variety?

Join us as we collapse some wave functions (make sentences) and make a podcast world.

Happy New Year, from us and Antonio Gramsci (https://viewpointmag.com/2015/01/01/i-hate-new-years-day/), and we'll see you soon! Thanks for listening!

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Back to hot opens, in another episode where we ask important questions like, “what is time? Is it just a number? Is a wristwatch like handcuffing yourself to time? What about neckties? Is it okay when Diane Keaton wears one? Should neurodivergent people join the CIA?”

We chit chat about the demonstrably untrue myth of progress in light of news from Antarctica, pandemic, and American political system, and Hilary bullies Matt into reading The Dawn of Everything. Matt would prefer to hang out and watch Seinfeld, the way social primates should. We settle the rules of subscribing to TIME Magazine before we finally get down to business at

18 minutes

When we start talking about the chapter “Swan and Pauline and Wahram and Genette.” This chapter weaves a bunch of strands together that don’t initially seem to belong to each other, in a way that’s poignant, playful, and action-packed. The team of investigators start to get to the bottom of what’s doing what to whom.

Should the world be more stable than your body? What does that have to do with the structure of feeling? Would it be better if we all lived on houseboats, like Joe Manchin, or would it be better if we all lived on houseboats, like (potentially) Sonny Crockett, or Clint Eastwood in Blood Work? (Matt was thinking of The Rockford Files, but Rockford lives in a trailer on the beach, not a houseboat. But that could be fun, too.)

In any event, we’ll only know in retrospect, just like the structure of feeling is only discernible in retrospect, from a position of difference, or loss, or absence, or mediation.

We end by noting the recurring idea of love as a paying of attention, and as a part of the gift economy.

One more episode (we think) to go!

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Hilary and The Good German are back! We're talking animals, qubes, and consciousness, embodiment and emotion, landscape and economic miracles, long stares of wolves (and tenured professors), utopia of gender, and lawn bowling with Virginia Woolf. 

(Most profanity and profundity has been edited out. For the book.)

Extracts (17) - 16:00

Swan in the Chateau Garden - 37:00

Quantum Walk (2)

Inspector Genette and Swan - 50:00

Titan - 52:25

Swan and Genette and Wahram - 54:25

Matt makes a fart joke with the longest set-up in history, 59:30-1:00:00

(Hi, NSA!)

Lists (15) - 1:11:25

Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Mobile - 1:13:45

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Hello again! First a massive apology for taking so long to get this episode out. As Matt explains in the opening, this was relatively unavoidable and not intentional, and we hope to finish our discussion of 2312 by the end of the year. As you’ll hear, the audio quality of the recording presented big problems for Matt, not an audio engineer, for making a listenable episode. He’s done his best!

In this episode we discuss chapters Extracts (15) to Lists (14), with characteristic rambling, long-windedness, and propensity for spoilers that you’ve grown to know and love. We talk about piloerection (it’s when your hair stands on end, weirdo), nature vs. culture, science vs. art, mammalness, revolution, and playful unresolvability.

Thanks for listening! We hope to be back soon!

30:30 – Extracts (15)

34:30 – Lists (12)

35:30 – Swan in Africa

45:30ish – Swan and the Wolves

56:30 – Lists (13)

58:30 – back to Swan and the Wolves

1:12:45 – Extracts (16)

1:24:20 – Wahram and Swan

1:34:25 – Lists (14)

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We start with more news from Maine: There's lithium in them thar hills! Will Elon Musk coup the governor? Stay tuned, and find out more here. We ask whether it's possible to extract these important minerals outside the demands of capital and profit, and to do it in a way that doesn't wreck the environment or the bodies of the people who will have to do this labor. We have no answers, just want to know!

Then, back to 2312. We talk a lot about the political economies of the various powers in the solar system, as the various plotlines and threads seem to start coming together and getting clearer in this chunk of chapters. How does the gift economy of the Vulcanoids and the Saturn League work? Why does the mute compulsion of economic relations still obtain on Venus? What is to be done with Earth? What's the difference between charity and a gift economy? Is charity always aggressive? What kind of revolution are Swan and Wahram driving at? We'll find out next time!

Swan in the Vulcanoids – 35:00

Lists (11) – 54:10

Wahram on Venus - 55:07

Extracts (13) – 1:09:10

Kiran in Vinmara – 1:10:35

Extracts (14) – 1:15:50

Here's a recent Jacobin piece on the hierarchy of needs, and here's the text Hilary mentions at the beginning, A World Without Money: Communism.

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We spend the first ten minutes or so of this episode talking about an issue in Maine politics that presents a conundrum that's characteristic of the false choices capitalism and American democracy give us politically: which part of the ecosystem do you want to sacrifice to mitigate the disasters of another part? What's the least bad option? To read more about Question 1 on the Maine ballot, click here or here. 

Then we're off and running, talking about narrative and genre, sexliners and surfing, and the heaviness of Earth. Swan encounters a kind of dark postmodernity in her confrontation with the reality of Earth in this chunk of chapters, where it seems impossible to theorize the totality and the world is fundamentally unintepretable. In fact, while thinking the totality may promise to be our salvation, it may be that trying to think the totality--or even thinking that we could think the totality--is kind of what got us here in the first place.

Perennial question: What are the barriers to change? What's stopping us from acting? Why are we dithering? Who's this "we"?

We talk about revolution, excuses, reasons, ideology, fantasies of settler colonialism, psychology, Bill Gates (give us money!), and Kyrsten Sinema (go away!). We also find some differences between Matt and Hilary's editions of the novel.

SPOILER ALERT: Arkady dies in the Mars Trilogy.

Thanks for listening to us talk about this thick and chewy novel!

Swan and the Inspector – 11:00

Earth, the Planet of Sadness – 19:45

Swan on Earth – 41:55

Lists (10) – 1:25:25

Pluto, Charon, Nix, Hydra – 1:27:45

Pauline on Revolution – 1:32:15

Extracts (11) – 1:44:15

Swan at Home – 1:46:55

Extracts (12) – 1:59:10

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This week's episode features coughing, an apology (not for the coughing), and cat-talk. Also we discuss science communication, agency and historical periodization, intentional urban planning, living aesthetically, programming and will, surfing and gravity, noir and detective stories (watch Cutter's Way), and large forces that seem to control our lives (or do they?) and are impossible to understand (or are they??!!).

For those of you who want to cut straight to the news about Matt's cats' diets, it's at 1:04:20.

Be on the lookout for friend-of-the-show Daniel Aldana Cohen's interview with source-of-the-material-of-the-show-and-listener-to-and-number-one-fan-of-the-show Kim Stanley Robinson on The Dig from Jacobin (@thedigradio)!

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This week’s episode is the second half of our conversation from last week’s episode, and concerns the “Swan and the Inspector” chapter. Genette takes Swan on his investigation of the strange goings-on throughout the solar system, visiting several asteroids including Yggdrasil and Inner Mongolia using the Interplan starship Swift Justice. The possibility of a conspiracy or some kind of concerted plan that potentially links Alex’s death, the destruction of Terminator, the even on Io, and the catastrophe on Yggdrasil, all involving strange qube behavior, starts to materialize for Genette.

Matt and Hilary have a long discussion about the nature of conspiracy, its possibilities and limitations as a conceptual apparatus for understanding the operation of power. While conspiracies are useful in illuminating certain aspects of the way power functions, they also contain the temptation for the analyst or investigator to throw up their hands and resign oneself to a kind of existential lack of agency. In this way, conspiratorial thinking can lead one to the conclusion that “the fix is in,” which appears as the flip side of an equally irrational faith that “the system works.” One way or another, the subject is allowed to be content in their powerlessness and merely a spectator of history rather than an active participant.

We talk about the nature of “evil,” the servile will, the concept of post-scarcity, and the problem of the concept of “human nature.” We think about Swan and Genette’s interaction with regard to their social roles, i.e., artist and cop (is Genette a cop?), before descending to the uncanny valley and watching Swan in Wonderland beat up three people claiming to be qubes with human bodies. How rude!

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We had to split this episode up into two because we talked so long! The following episode (Episode 7, or maybe 6.2?) will deal with "Swan and the Inspector." Here, we have: 

3:20 - Lists (4)

11:35 - Inspector Genette

32:28 - Lists (5)

39:00 - Swan and Mqaret

51:30 - Extracts (7)

1:01:00 - Kiran on Venus

1:08:25 - Lists (6)

Lots of discussion of identity, the state, agency, conspiracy (more to come on that), sex/gender, and detecting patterns. Genette is trying to figure out what happened to Terminator, and the solution almost immediately appears before the inspector. It has something to do with the qubes, although we're not sure what. In the next episode Matt and Hilary will talk extensively about the very creepy episode where Swan confronts 3 women claiming to be qubes. For now, please excuse Matt the neanderthal for giving Genette pronouns! No pronouns for Jean!

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This long episode is devoted to the "Wahram and Swan" chapter of 2312, when the two characters attend a Beethoven concert and the tracks on which Terminator runs are mysteriously destroyed. Wahram and Swan, along with three young "sunwalkers", then have to us the utilidor under the surface of Mercury to seek help. This is a major inciting incident for the remainder of the novel.

Matt and Hilary discuss a range of issues, including social reproduction (dyads vs. crechés), sameness and repetition, the dense specificities of place, and more.

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We talk about the form of the "Extracts" chapters, the importance of Earth in the relationships in the story, the sky, living on the side of a planet, acting vs. being, talking to frogs, sleeping with worms, O. Henry, Danny DeVito, hawala, elephants, degenerates, and "marginal capitalism" (what is it?).

Watch out for the Late Heavy Bombardment, because it's coming!

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We continue our conversation from last week, ending right before the chapter "Extracts (3)."

Matt and Hilary talk about art, chemistry, repetition, intentionality, power, capital, alliances, suffering, allegory, systems, etc. A big question is whether the spacers constitute something like an interplanetary bourgeoisie (or elite), and where capitalism is still alive in the solar system of 2312. We also talk about the role the figure of AI plays here, and whether it is allegorical to something like what we call "the market" or "capital"--in other words, the concept of a kind of an algorithmic logic that appears to operate behind the backs of the human characters. Is it independent of them? Does it act with intention? How can it be mapped and understood?

We're introduced to Zasha and Kiran, and the solar system's balkanization.

"Lists (2)" is a litany of practices of conscious embodiment and experiments in experience that are not only individual but that might also be shared, public, or communal in various ways. 

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In this episode we talk about chapters from Extracts (1) to Wahram and Swan (yes, only two chapters, how decadent of us!).

We talk about the "Ascensions," the asteroids that are hollowed out to create terraria, refugia, and farms, and try to think about the political economy of the solar system in 2312. Wahram and Swan on the Alfred Wegener asteroid lead to a discussion of decadence, habit, and constructing pseudoiteratives to live artfully and be open to finding newness in the everyday. We ask what "being productive" means and how we seize the day in capitalism. Swan and Wahram have very different approaches to the problem of living free of wage labor.

Also Hilary insists on talking about the Christian Bale/ Matthew McConaughey vehicle dragon/ tomato movie Reign of Fire (2002). It's her favorite movie, smh.

We spoke for 2 hours in this session, so we decided to split it into two episodes. The next one will drop some time next week, and we'll go up to Extracts (3), for those following along.

The clip at the end was taken from YouTube user R-Bee Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJelEXaPhJ8&t=31s

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In this episode we read from the first chapter after the prologue up to "Swan and Alex."

First, Hilary and Matt start by discussing the work of Lauren Berlant, an eminent literary critic and feminist theorist from the University of Chicago who passed away recently. Berlant's work focuses on affect, agency, attachment, the sentimental, literature, politics, human-being, normativity, and innumerable other topics, in ways that help illuminate the questions we discuss so much: how does change happen (or not), and what does literature (or art) have to do with it? Matt and Hilary explore some of the ways Berlant's work might shed light KSR's novels. There are elements in 2312, especially around attachment and habit and gender, that Berlant's ideas may help illuminate. We discuss pieces including Cruel Optimism, "Poor Eliza," and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City.

We get started talking about the novel about 37 minutes in (in case you're anxious) and talk about Swan and her relationship to herself, her art, Alex, and Wahram. The role of art in 2312 seems especially important, particularly because the people of Mercury appear to be able to live their lives incredibly artfully, so that science, art, technology, and life-making all seem continuous in ways they may not appear to us in our lived experience. We explore ways this novel plays with narrative and detective fiction, and the ways that agency seems here to extend out beyond figures that we tend to think of as agential.

Thanks for listening! We'll be back soon with more!

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We're back to reveal your desires to you!

We're starting on our new season, which will focus on 2312. In this episode we talk about far-future science fiction, posthumanism, and some of the broad themes and topics this book focuses on, such as gender and sexuality, habit and ritual, art and performance. We talk a bit about how the book tends to subvert its own narrative, and narrative itself, with its tendency to ties things up in neat little bows. 2312 traffics in many narrative forms and modes, including (interplanetary) romance and the detective novel, but it's also a book about home, where to find it and how to build it. Of course, we're here with our customary digressions and non-sequiturs, including, here, one about fictional universes, authorship, Michael Mann, podcasts, and the decay of higher education.

We'll be back in roughly a week to talk about a chunk of the book, duration TBD (probably 50-80 pages, if history is any indication?).

We hope you join us and look forward to reading with you! This season goes out to all the messy individuals who love drama and whistling.

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Matt and Hilary are joined by their boon companion Bill Hutchison to discuss John Carpenter's (identical) films ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) and ESCAPE FROM L.A. (1996).

The gang talks about the concept of the prison-island-city film and 1980s science fictions of popular cinema. We get into the western qualities of the films, discuss the logics of settler colonialism and the myth of the law, and we make some breakthroughs on the big question these films pose: What makes Snake tick? At the end we share our picks for where we'd set a third ESCAPE FROM movie.

Our movie episodes are very indulgent, and we're going to keep doing them occasionally! For those non-movie-lovers out there, we'll be back in a few weeks with our regularly scheduled programming, discussing KSR's 2012 novel, 2312! Until then, thanks for listening!

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Based on Matt’s joke opening, your friendly hosts talk about JFK and JFK for the first ten minutes, so you can probably skip that to get to the good stuff, our discussion of the last chapter of Shaman, “Shaman”!

Topics include social connection, the modern divisions between work and leisure, public and private, and art as a rarified form that takes place in a specific place and time. How does art figure in Loon's world? As Loon becomes the shaman, what do his paintings mean for him and his people? We talk about the concept of genius and the role of the shaman as a medium of knowledge, as well as the nature of mediation in contemporary technological society.

We talk a lot about art, cultural transformation, newness, and memory, as well as the relationship between intimacy and knowledge (and ignorance).

If you're listening to this, congratulations! You're a shaman now!

Before starting another Kim Stanley Robinson book we're going to do a couple episodes on movies, including John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. (or New York...or both?). If you have a suggestion for a movie you'd like to hear us gab about, you can contact us via the links below. We're still undecided on the next KSR novel on our list, so if you'd like to weigh in on that, please feel free! We'll get to them all eventually...

Thanks for listening! Again!

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In this episode we discuss "All the Worlds Meet," in which Loon recuperates after his ordeal, Click haunts Thorn, Thorn dies, Loon builds a new pair of snowshoes, and the Wolf Pack begins to break up.

We talk about teaching and the formation and passing on of knowledge in the context of Thorn and Heather's different teaching styles. There appears to be no such thing as intellectual property in this society--what a concept!

At the eight eight, we see various people make bird's eye views of the land. Hilary talks about the loving relationship to place that would motivate you to make models of it, and the childlike fun of destroying them.

We discuss the status of "home" in KSR's science fiction and the place of mourning and melancholy in building a new world.

Matt says "plethora" twice and we conclude with kitty round-up!

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The sixth chapter of Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson, "Hunted," has Thorn, Click, Loon, and Elga fleeing from the northern jende people. It is an absolutely harrowing chapter in which several major taboos are violated--murder, cannibalism, and burial. Matt and Hilary talk about reading and interpreting signs, the state's monopoly on knowledge, and not romanticizing the primitive.

Did Thorn kill Click? Spoiler alert: yes, obviously, c'mon.

We were honored to be asked by the Seminar Co-op Bookstores to share our recommendations for an Earth Week Reading List. You can find our picks at this link, and you can also buy books for pickup or delivery (either USPS or, if you're local to Chicago, they'll bring your order to your door).

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In this episode we discuss "Under the Ice," where Elga is kidnapped, Loon goes to rescue her, he gets captured, and Thorn and Click rescue them. A lot to discuss!

Here we're introduced to the northers, or the jende as they call themselves, a northern pack that, contrary to what we might expect, live in relative luxury compared to the Wolf Pack. Though they spend 10 months of the year in winter, they subsist on fish and seals, which are plentiful. As a result they are, as Loon sees it, "rich." They have bags of fat that they use as fuel and food, a very calorie-rich society. In addition, they have domesticated wolves and rely on the labor of captive slaves. It's unclear which came first in this chicken-or-egg scenario, and we talk about that.

We also have our most extended (so far) exposure to Click, who, as listener Michael suggests, might be the closest KSR comes to writing about aliens. Click is a Neanderthal with radically different capabilities than Thorn and Loon.

It's a thrilling, dudes-rock chapter in this 50% woman podcast!

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Happy (belated) birthday, Kim Stanley Robinson! Is he the author of this podcast? Hilary says, in some ways, yes. Matt says, most certainly, no! You be the judge! Anyway, it's weird to have a podcast that people listen to and seem to enjoy...

This episode we talk a lot about art, making art, the experience of art, and the work (pun intended) of art. Language and communication seems to be a key theme in our discussion as well--between people, between humans and non-human persons (wolverine, Heather, and Click), and between homo sapiens and other non-homo sapiens humans (Heather and Click). We talk more about the dialectic between novelty and sameness, social organization and the place of the individual within the group in Shaman, and the patterns and diversity of experience available to pre-historic people.

These chapters depict the eight eight festival, Loon's meeting Elga, and a long winter in which one member of the Wolf pack dies. At the eight eight festival, the shamans have their corroboree, and we see that not only do these people have a very accurate calendar, they also, according to the song sung by Pippi, have a sense that the world is probably round, and very big. But the key thing is Thorn and Loon's journey into the cave to bid farewell to the year and to get immersed in painting and art. In what may be KSR's most extended depiction of the process of art-making, we get a discussion of representation and abstraction, naturalism and realism, and the ability humans have to communicate with each other across eons and to alarm themselves with what they make.

Along the way we also mention John Lanchester's review of Kindred, the book on Neanderthals by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, for the London Review of Books, and Matt reads a passage from James C. Scott's Against the Grain about the possible mass deskilling of early humans with the late Neolithic revolution. We also thank Shred Magazine and Sean Estelle @chitrans_plant and Daniel Aldana Cohen @aldatweets for a wonderful conversation last week about KSR's oeuvre. The full recorded conversation can be found on YouTube here.

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[NB: We had some technical audio issues this week, especially on Matt's end. Something to do with Zoom, we presume. You probably won't notice most of them, but there's one point where Matt had to re-record himself reading a passage from the book; hopefully it won't be too jarring.]

This week we discuss the first two chapters of Shaman. Matt and Hilary talk about the abundance of Loon's world in contrast to the picture of the life of early humans that capitalism tries to impose on our imagination. The world of this novel has no state or politics to speak of, no written language, no phone, no lights, no motor cars--and yet, if it's not a life of luxury, it's at least one of plenty. Although there's a division of labor, that labor does not present itself as alienated. Knowledge disciplines seem undivided--the lines between science, art, history, philosophy are not yet drawn, or are drawn very differently. Political power as we know it is absent; leadership is more about responsibility to the collective than the artificial propping up of a system imposed from the past. Stories convey a truth of living-in-common that prohibits the teller from lying for his own self-aggrandizement. 

The end of the episode deviates from a discussion about the book; instead we talk about: weather, seasons, dads, wearing layers, pandemic, Chicago's bad mayor, baseball fans and their burials.

Texts referenced:
Society Against the State by Pierre Clastres
Against the Grain by James C. Scott
Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins

Next time we'll talk about the next 2 chapters, the old ones, and the wolverine, and we'll touch on this book review from the London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n24/john-lanchester/twenty-types-of-human

On Wednesday, March 17 at 8pm Eastern, Matt and Hilary will be joining Daniel Aldana Cohen, author of A Planet to Win, and Sean Estelle from Shred Magazine as part of Shred Fest, the weeklong launch of Shred Magazine, an online space dedicated to exploring complex questions about life through a dialectical lens, meaning we examine the dynamic and interwoven nature of life and society holistically. We'll be chatting about the works of Kim Stanley Robinson and the ways they encourage us to not only imagine a new world but bring a new world into being. Join us at the link: https://www.facebook.com/events/363565941294547

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Hello! We are coming back, with a new season of discussing Kim Stanley Robinson novels! This season we'll be doing Shaman (2013), so get your copies ready and start re-reading. New episodes will hopefully be dropping starting next week.

This week Matt and Hilary chat about what kind of science fiction novel Shaman is, what we're looking forward to talking about, and what we're missing, both during the pandemic and under capitalism more generally. Topics include:

• despair
• what kind of science fiction novel is this?
• Chauvet cave
• things we miss
• things we had already lacked
• common life
• basketball vs. crossfit
• immersion in the rigorous imagination of a completely different lifeway
• adventure, blood, starting fires with sticks
• gender and primitivism
• boy perspectives

Thank you for listening and we hope to be back next week with regularly scheduled programing!

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We sit down with the one and only KSR to discuss The Ministry for the Future. Stan indulges Matt and Hilary as they ask about a wide range of questions that address topics like:

• technical problems of writing
• riddles
• Orwell on the radio
• PTSD
• ambiguity
• rule of law
• religion, science, and economics
• violence
• MMT
• "the future"

Some references: The One vs. the Many by Alex Woloch, How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual by Katerina Clark, Penelope Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad

Lose lose lose lose lose lose lose win!

We want to thank Stan again for his time, thoughts, and support!

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This is our last, if not best, episode concerning The Ministry for the Future. (What does the phrase “if not” mean, anyway? We’ll never know!)

We talk the failurewin (or successlose) of progress. Trying things is about failing at them, there’s no such thing as fate. Need a posture of openness toward the future that’s about being willing to work, try, fail. Faith in the future, it’s not given, it doesn’t belong to someone else, or to capital. Revolution isn’t necessarily recognizable as such in the moment it’s happening, and even if you’re doing a revolution, you may have to do it again.

Radical democracy, the internet of animals, the personhood of plants, the return of meaning, living in loss, building on ruins science fiction's obsession with population, the shackling of science by capitalist instrumentality, family and solidarity, dignity, connection, the fundamental mysteriousness of Being, independent of the limitations capital places on us--we talk about it all, man. And we try to reconcile ourselves to the fact that even if we fix the planet we're still going to suffer. It might just mean that we keep going on and continuing to live. Life is in the living, and nothing is inevitable. Except suffering! Cool...

Also Escape from New York was set in 1997; Johnny Mnemonic was set in 2021. And should we do a newsletter?

Thanks for listening! We'll be back in a few weeks with an interview with KSR, some movie episodes, and our next Robinson book.

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We start this episode with Matt immediately blowing out the microphone with his holiday cheer, which didn't, this year, for him, include the solstice, but he did watch The Treasure of Pancho Villa, which was good. Hilary had a fire, but missed the Great Conjunction due to clouds.

In this chunk of chapters, as The Ministry for the Future begins its denouement, we discuss mourning and loss, the inevitable winding down into death, in spite of, or maybe as a part of, all the progress that's also being made.

What are we mourning, and how do we suffer? What is our relationship to the present--to America, to capitalism, to progress? What is Mary's relationship to Frank--one of care, of obligation, of happenstance? How (and why) do we mourn the loss of a myth of a world that has been the cause and condition of our suffering?

This is a time of stocktaking and accounting, of repair and reparation, of Pyrrhic defeat that beggars all comparison and once again demonstrates the failure of analogy while simultaneously succumbing to its inevitability.

We reflect on left melancholia and self-delusion and the utopia of scientific conferences. We reflect on the impossibility of measuring the scale between the loss of a life and the loss of an ocean. We solve the riddle of Chapter 95. Well, Hilary does. Matt is too doped up on holiday cheer.

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Matt and Hilary are approaching the end! As is capitalism, but that's another story. Actually, it's this story, the one they're talking about The Ministry for the Future. But whatever, this one's kind of low energy.

We recount our intellectual journeys through Raymond Williams and Mike Davis and Walter Benjamin, and work on wrangling cats and sequencing the novel. We talk about loss in utopia, fables and science fiction, accidents of history, and the vicissitudes of being a herd animal. All with extreme judiciousness!

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We're back! In this episode we achieve our lowest minutes-to-pages ratio yet, with 25 pages discussed in 90 minutes! Only for true KSR/ Marooned on Mars heads!

We start by taking stock of some of Stan's recent interviews and some of the (glowing) reviews that have been coming out about the book, and skip forward to Chapter 85, a weirdly emotional list of organizations that are working to save the world.

Then we talk about the usual: the state, the law, the market, money, sabotage, arbitrage, organization, spontaneity, the problem of spirit, religion, animals, etc.

We talk about MMT vs. a Marxist critique of capitalism, the relationship of democracy and transparency, money and power, and the everything feeling. We think about what it's like when nature looks back at you and when your cat sneezes into your microphone. We ponder the riddle of history and debate the all-too-human costs of pie.

Thanks for listening! Do not email us if you have any criticisms, we only accept praise and collaboration!

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Happy Ritualized Ideological Food Consumption Day! Matt and Hilary start with another cheery conversation designed to indoctrinate the masses into the glorious of atomized leftism by further exposing the family form as a big mess, and conclude that November is all about bad ways to perform both the family and democracy: holidays and elections.

Hilary’s big thought this week is about the utopianism of this novel existing in a state of a kind of constant deferral of resolutions. No single action Mary or anyone else takes is The Solution to all the problems, so there’s a demand to try a thing without knowing how it will come out—an opening of the future. In the book, these actions often result in nothing immediately happening, which may point to a structure of feeling we may need to get used to.

This opening relies on the possibility of somehow reversing Marx’s adage describing capitalism as “all that is solid melts in air.” In The Ministry for the Future, all that is air must congeal into a solid, by drawing carbon out of the atmosphere. Chapter 66 gives us a delightful first-person account of the flows of carbon that Matt points out is so miraculous one wonders why we need religion.

We talk about democracy, rule of law, accountability, narcissism and Götterdämmerung capitalism, the judo of the bureaucrat, heroism, putting the rentier class out of its misery, and the book’s critique of economics. Can capitalism be tricked into producing good poop? History will decide!

Stay tuned for some thoughts about Napoleon, right before Matt's brain begins to die.

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One of the great things about this book is how it keeps you on your toes. Matt and Hilary do their best to keep up with its digressions and interruptions, following the flow into conversations about the state, democracy, capitalism, lizard men, and the collective joy of Pepsi commercials.

For the first 24 minutes or so they despair over the election of Joe Biden and the vast political emptiness the 2020 presidential campaign seems to signify, so if you're not interested in that, skip it! But if you want to hear Jon Ossoff compared to the ghouls from THEY LIVE!, don't skip it!

Then they ask you to stop listening to podcasts. THEN they talk about Crash Day: no more planes, no more cows.

A big theme in this episode is the role of the state and the possibility for democratic processes to address the crisis of capitalism, and we'll talk a lot more about that in the next episode. Here, we talk about how America and India variously embody the notion of "nation." We talk about flows and dynamism, of human populations and photons, animals and information. We wonder if bankers really are terrorists (kind of) and what the suggestion of a carbon coin actually means for the relationship between democracy and capitalism (again, more on that next time).

Happiness, attachment, cat fights, and the horizon of possibility.

Recommended reading: 

The Dream Life of Citizens: Late Victorian Novels and the Fantasy of the State by Zarena Aslami (Fordham University Press)

Other stuff Matt & Hilary are reading

Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav (Verso)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

The Einstein Intersection by Samuel Delaney 

Thanks for listening! Permafrost melt is now self-sustaining!

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In a shrewd bit of counter-programming, we're releasing this episode on the day of what we're told is the most important election of our lifetimes...since the last one, and until the next one.

This chunk of chapters seems occupied with a breakdown in the metabolic functioning of the lifeworld, and it asks us to shit or get off the pot.

The primary science fictional technology KSR seems to be deploying in this novel is one of political economy. We touch on carbon quantitative easing, but we're more concerned with issues of circulation and metabolism. Now that capitalism seems to have reached its terminal phase, entering an apocalyptic moment, as Mike Davis has recently argued, how ought we be managing the residuum, the surplus, the effluvia of goods, and of people? 

Here we're interested in the surplus, excess, remainders, containment, entrapment, enclosure, capture, and incomparability.

What happens when the taps run dry? (Society.)

Would it help to hijack Davos? (Unclear, but it would be hilarious.)

Do rich people love their kids? (Sort of? Maybe?)

Is the family form a mechanism of individuation that keeps us from collective thinking? (Duh.)

Can we imagine a nonsentimental human being outside of the calculations of economic rationality, and make it real? (We'd better.)

Q: What do you call it when Benjamin's angel of history goes to the bathroom? A: Making progress.

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In this (very long) episode we discuss roughly chapters 18-37, with a special focus on Frank. What does Frank want? Does he know? The gap between intention and action under capitalism, trapped in our subjectivity and ideology, is a focus of the first part of the ep.

Then we run into the technical difficulties and pick back up to talk about the challenges this novel poses to us as a novel. If the realist novel of the 19th century focused itself through a charismatic main character with broadly heroic qualities, The Ministry for the Future is a significant departure from that. We talk about how TMftF challenges us to think beyond individuals and gives us a bigger picture of the multi-dimensional and multi-generational problems humanity will face between now and basically the rest of its existence. No charismatic megafauna are going to either save you or give you an adequate locus of your pathetic cathexis. Today, the challenge is to abandon liberal empathy as a criterion for deeming an other worthy of living and having their needs met in favor of a politics that encompasses the impersonal, one that creates space for the rights of people from the future and non-human people today to exist.

Also we discuss how cool it would if there were an eco-terrorist James Bond franchise and at 1 hour 26 minutes a cat purrs into the microphone.

Still to come, one of our favorite topics: structure of feeling!

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We're back from the movies, ready to do our podcast old school, like a couple of old fools. We're SO EXCITED to start reading Kim Stanley Robinson's BRAND NEW novel, The Ministry for the Future!

Matt has finished it, Hilary is about halfway through, so there are sort-of spoilers but not really, but you should try reading the whole book first before you start listening anyway. This book is expansive, complex, harrowing, hopeful, and above all provocative. It challenges the reader to confront the realities of our day related to the climate, our politics, morality, ethics, violent direct action, and the desire for the future that falls under the name "utopia." What is the situation that confronts us today, and what are the options available to us, today, to change it?

This book is in many ways, especially its opening sections, a blunt instrument, refusing to let us escape from the seemingly intractable and overwhelming crises and catastrophes that confront us. In other ways, the book is subtle and sharp, cutting into the uncomfortable realities of our (America's, Americans', the First World, the reader's) complicity in the climate crisis that is threatening to destroy organized human life, and asking what we are prepared to do to fix it. What does justice look like, if it exists at all? Can this be done within the rule of law? How can we create a new relationship to the world and to ourselves that will create a path for us to follow that is not only compelling but regenerative and reparative?

We talk about uneven development, justice, metaphor, realism, ideology, estrangement, literary style, empire, blame, trauma, guilt, happiness, the rule of law, hegemony, capitalism, and, as always, history, the past, and the future. We share some laughs about ISAs. This is a book of uncomfortable provocations and serious challenges, and it invites and encourages its reader to think more, to generate ideas, to wrestle with assumptions, to get mad, to be hopeful, to not give up. We hope you'll read it and listen along!

Please feel free to email us, tweet at us, or leave us a voicemail. You can also donate to the show through Anchor.fm (but only if you really really really want to).

Next week: PTSD, cognitive behavioral therapy, Gini coefficients, happiness indexes, and so much more!

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We're still marooned at the movies, with John Carpenter, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, our friend Bill, a very special guest all the way from Slovenia, and a bunch of yuppie ghouls!

That's right, today in this super-long episode Matt and Hilary welcome their friend Bill to help them ponder over the confectionary marvel that is John Carpenter's THEY LIVE!, his sci-fi, creature feature, action allegory that's either the most Marxist movie to ever come out of Hollywood or a dumb piece of nonsense. We talk class war, truth and perception, manifest material conditions, and ideology, ideology, ideology. We bravely ask the questions few dare to ask, like what do the ghouls want and what are they selling? What would Nada see if he were to look at a bulldozer? And why Wayfarers?

Please excuse our audio quality on this episode, but we hope you enjoy the discussion of this great filim. We'll be back next time (in a week or so) with our first episode about THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE! Thanks for listening!

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Hello! As we not-so-patiently await the publication of KSR's latest forthcoming masterpiece, The Ministry for the Future, Hilary and Matt embark on a bit of film chat, movie talk, cinema discussion, if you will.

This week we discuss the early 80s punk-verité masterpiece Born in Flames, which asks, what if there was a revolution and nothing changed?

Ten years after a successful socialist-democratic revolution (think Bernie Sanders winning the presidency), things are not looking so hot for certain members of society, namely women, LGTBQ+, and minorities--so, basically, everybody. And even the men ain't too thrilled, being forced into the new benevolent government's meaningless "workfare" jobs. In steps Adelaide Norris, a black queer female construction worker, rec league basketball player, and community organizer who's becoming increasingly militant. Adelaide is part of the so-called "Women's Army," a grassroots coalition of various women agitating for fundamental change in the organization of society and, importantly, work. She interfaces with a number of different factions and tendencies, including pirate radio hosts Isabel (Radio Ragazza) and Honey (Phoenix Radio), the editorial board of the Socialist Youth Review (featuring Kathryn Bigelow whe Point Break wasn't even a glimmer in her eye), and Zella Wiley, played by civil rights icon Florynce "Flo" Kennedy (defender, famously, of H. Rap Brown, Assata Shakur, the Black Panthers, and Valerie Solanas, among others).

This is a film that takes seriously the notion of "science fiction as the realism of our time," decades before Kim Stanley Robinson coined the phrase. There are no ray guns, spaceships, aliens, or even advanced technology. Instead, the film takes the social, political, and economic conditions of the day and asks "what if?" The way the film answers those questions, in terms of both form and content, result in a truly independent film with shades of neorealism, cinema verité, and punk, which resonates with films ranging from Battle of Algiers to They Live!. This is a film enacts the notion that "the personal is the political," asks what that would mean in all its complexity, and that understands that liberal feminism is just a bunch of bullshit.

A couple references:

Johanna Isaacson, "Hollywood Kills Feminism: the work of Lizzie Borden," Blind Field

Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Duke)

Lizzie Borden interview

We'll be back soon with more of whatever!

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Look, here we are again!

We start our final episode on The Years of Rice and Salt by talking about what's up next for the podcast. Short answer: probably a few standalone episodes on movies and KSR short stories, followed by a deep dive into the forthcoming The Ministry for the Future, followed by our next big project. But first, a short hiatus while we solidify plans and the school year starts to start.

We reflect on rebirth and retribution, teaching and learning, and finding yourself in a small community and a large world. We talk about how the characters, K and B especially, attempt to become fully human, locating themselves between the Great Man and Mass Movement models of history. And we discuss the book's fantastic and uncanny elements, and try to keep the melancholy of ending a book at bay.

Stay tuned to the end to find out whether or not we recommend this book!

There were some extremely funky things happening with the recording this week, so sorry for any extra-weird hiccups in the recording and editing. We are going to use your donations to the show (yes, you can donate to the show via Anchor, but you really don't have to!) to buy Hilary a new microphone, which we hope will banish Robot Voice to hell.

Thanks for listening, and see you soon!

You can contact us at: 

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The penultimate episode on The Years of Rice and Salt! (I just like saying "penultimate." You've got to seize the opportunity when it presents itself.)

In this, one of the longer (the longest?) chapter of YoRaS, Matt and Hilary talk about science and feminism, the aftermath of war, the aesthetics of scent, the division of labor, and history.

We talk about different knowledges and forms of knowledge production and the exclusion of certain kinds of people both from that knowledge production and from the acknowledgement that those certain kinds of people in fact engaged in those certain forms of knowledge production for, like, forever. We talk about history and revolution, and human living together, and of course we end up on some profanity-laced tirades about the state of the damn world and these institutions and politicians, and not to mention These Kids Today! Matt has some sage advice for college students that will certainly kill what's left of his academic career; thankfully, no one who would be in a position to hire him will be listening!

I mean, we just talk about a lot of stuff! It's a great chapter!

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Shout out to our great listeners, especially when they email us, and when they email us, their emails are always thoughtful and stimulating, and Hilary almost always responds to them and Matt almost always reads them but doesn’t respond to them because he is, in fact, shy, but also, more importantly, lazy, other than the whole “producing and editing the show” thing.

We kick this episode off with a convo about despair and hope, but the upshot is the gift of reading these novels in community with each other and our amazing listeners (you, the reader of this).

“War of the Asuras” is a phantasmagoric chapter about The Long War—basically, what if World War I—trench warfare, mustard gas, etc.—was fought in Asia instead of Europe, and what if it (almost) never ended? The depiction of the war collapses the distinction between the bardo and reality, between metaphor and realism, and exposes the insanity at the heart of modern warfare.

Matt and Hilary ponder over the nature of the space the characters find themselves in, and the nature of the spectacular suffering they live through, with no one left in the world to spectate, let alone judge.

We talk about the structures of repetition and revisiting between the books of the novel, and come at the question of the difference between the Mars Trilogy’s longevity treatments and this novel’s reincarnation from a slightly different angle.

Necropolitics, guns, superiority, the self, optimism vs. hope. We got a lot going on in this episode—the longest episode yet, for the shortest chapter of the novel! It do be like that sometimes, though.

Shout outs to Gravity's Rainbow, Going After Cacciato, and ZARDOZ.

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In this week's cat-heavy episode, we examine the Kerala's global anticolonial revolutionary empire. We ask lots of questions: are novels the original Turing test? Is the Kerala the K character? What does revolutionary struggle look like in this book (in the absence of whiteness, Christianity, capitalism qua capitalism, a strong sense of private property) in contrast to what it looks like in the world? What is the meaning of diversity? What does imperial power look like under the Kerala, and how does it resemble what it looks like for us? Does Travancore constitute a cult or a culture? What are the novelistic modes that this and the previous book deploy? Finally, is this utopia?

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Book 6 of The Years of Rice and Salt is like a novel within the novel, depicting the intertwined lives of two brilliant figures in Robinson's alternate history: Kang Tongbi and Ibrahim ibn Hasam. Living in the late 18th-century, they come to realize they are part of the same jati that has been reincarnated throughout the novel, that they have known each other for 10,000 years. Through their intertwined intellectual endeavors they write poetry and history, develop theories of feminism and politics, and argue about religion.

Matt and Hilary have a wide-ranging discussion that still only scratches the surface of this pivotal chapter.

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"Warp and Weft" is one of the shorter of the books of The Years of Rice and Salt, taking place on Turtle Island/ Yingzhou nee North America, among the Hodenosaunee, a word Matt and Hilary definitely know how to pronounce.

Fromwest nee Busho gets initiated as a chief in a beautiful ceremony and makes an amazing, prophetic, ecstatic speech that opens up a discussion about conceptions of history and the future, change and struggle, hope and kinship, and lacrosse and red eggs.

Matt performs an exercise in grammar for your pleasure and recommends Dante again as a contrast to the bardo scenes, and Hilary reads from Nick Estes' incredible book Our History is the Future (Verso, 2019) (pages 248 and 256 if you have a copy).

Can you spot the red egg that appeared earlier in the book? Let us know where it is, either over Twitter, at our email, or on Facebook. (Or you can leave us a voicemail on the Anchor app, but only if you want your message played on the podcast which, if you're like Matt and you can't stand the sound of your own voice, you may want to think twice about). The reward is our thanks!

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We're pack, the science fiction literature podcast equivalent of tubing down a lazy river with a six-pack of beer!

This week we talk about Book 4 of The Years of Rice and Salt, "The Alchemist," where Khalid, Bahram, and Iwang discover the secrets of the universe while attempting to placate the venal khan and suss out the political machinations of his treasurer Nadir Divanbegi.

For a lot of readers, this is the chapter where the book really starts to click. As Hilary puts it, this is where she figured out the project of the book is really to tell the story of the emergence of modernity without a progress narrative and in the absence of Eurocentrism--because, of course, "Europe" doesn't exist!

This book is also where we see how scientific knowledge develops alongside a different set of ideologies, both religious and political. Here, Robinson dramatizes how scientific “discovery” exists within other forms of knowledge and inhabitation of the world. Science is historically contingent and situated among other ways of being in the world, incarnated in the character of Bahram and his Sufi-influenced conception of the world, wiht a heavy emphasis on love. The story about ideas is always a false story - scientific discovery is imbricated with power, specifically imperial power and violent state power. With Khalid, Iwang, and Bahram, as well as the old texts they consult (and frequently discard) discovery is shown to be a communal activity.

The speeds of sound and light, poison gas and WMD, ballistics and baseball, love and learning (love as a giving of attention, like in Aurora)--all these and more are discussed in this very man-heavy chapter where patriarchy is very much still the dominant force.

Tune in to our friends' podcast Better Read than Dead this coming week when special guest Hilary will lend her expertise on Ursula Le Guin's masterpiece, The Dispossessed!: https://anchor.fm/better-read7

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In this somewhat delayed episode we discuss Book Three of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, "Ocean Continents," in which a Chinese fleet accidentally discovers Yingzhou, which we know as the Americas. Admiral Kheim, the fleet's doctor I-Chin, and a Miwok girl called Butterfly find each other and escape a pretty sticky situation with the Incan executioner god!

Hilary and Matt discuss the differences between discovery and encounter, estrangement and the real, knowledge and superstition, structure and contingency, control and luck, and the phenomenon of abundance without surplus. Alas, they don't talk enough about the elements and the chapter's deep symbolism of earth, wind, fire, and water--but it's there!

Moral relativism aside, we can all agree: Human sacrifice is bad, whether that’s to an Incan executioner god or the market.

Recommendations: Tubthumping by Chumbawumba, Inferno by Dante

We may have to take next week off, but will certainly be back after that!

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Warning: we will not be doing this book justice!

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Hello! We’re back. Sorry we’re late, but we’re back now, to discuss THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT, book-by-book.

We recommend you read this book through once already if you’ve never read it before for its own pleasures. It’s a great, great, great book that you should just read and delight in. Then tune into our commentary for a re-read, which I assume is what a lot of you are doing. And in advance, thank you for listening! Matt apologizes in advance for his complete ignorance about Buddhism.

“Awake to Emptiness” follows Bold Bardash and his adventures with the slave eunuch Kyu. Matt and Hilary talk about this book’s mode of narration, its unique mixture of materialism and spiritualism, and the way that, from the perspective of someone who has been raised in America in the American education system, it completely defamiliarizes the reader as regards world history and geography.

Matt and Hilary compare this to the Mars books a bit and we talk about the patterns of subjectivity that emerge between characters. Characters appear not as monadic individuals, but rather as being produced in and through networks of relations that are both social and, in this case, cosmic.

We talk alternate history, provincializing Europe (shout-out to Dipesh Chakrabarty), and the way the book reveals that what we understand to be modernity has in fact been produced to a significant extent in places that are not Europe and by peoples who are not European. And, of course, we return to the structure of feeling.

For tons of more info and analysis of this book, see the kimstanleyrobinson.info page, which also has a key to what the characters represent. Our method of reading is to find the text’s pleasures and discuss its mysteries without thinking that the only (or main) goal of reading is to uncover an author’s intent. For us, texts should remain open to readerly interpretation, and giving some kind of authoritative account about what the meaning of the novel “really” is tends to be limiting. BUT all that said, the kimstanleyrobinson.info page has invaluable information and we’ll probably rely on it at various points during this season.

Thank you for listening!

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Pepsi Matt McDonald’s and Home Depot Hilary coming at you at the beginning of the after of the beforetimes, Phase 2 in full effect!

The Hard Problem of this chapter is alternately deceleration, consciousness, love, and meaning, we we talk about it all!

Ship is now fully the subject and the narrator of their own story, and Matt and Hilary discuss just how other or alien ship’s consciousness is from human consciousness. This takes Hilary into a vital detour into the greatest novel ever written, Frankenstein, and Matt into a self-indulgent Werner Herzog impression.

We discuss the limits of consciousness, sensation, perception, meaning, love as a form of attention, narration as an effort to constitute oneself beyond just a mass of experiences, through language.

Hilary doesn’t feel superior to her gut flora, which is what makes her a better person than Matt.

Sustaining relationship to another gives the ship language, gives ship the language that allows it to say “we”

Matt's seasonal Werner Herzog impression underscores the realization ship arrives at, that the dream of heading to the stars, exposing it as a nightmare that relies on false understanding of what human beings and life and livingness are, of what history is, and deeply misunderstands what it means to come from a planet.,

We discuss ship's loneliness and what they do to fill the time while everyone on board is asleep (ship's version of doing a sourdough starter).

This chapter gets at the way the idea of consciousness as a problem of the individual mistakes something about what it is to be a living human (and probably what it is to be any other conscious creature) -- the recognition of ourselves as selves doesn’t happen by ourselves, it happens always in relation to others. Unfortunately, ship is not going to be able to be in a society, and winds up just like Terminator 2.

We discuss the role of comedy and humor in this chapter, we critique the ideology of reproduction that's grounded in capitalism and settler colonialism, the opposition of love and connection vs. the ideology that’s happy to abandon others to loneliness and death (playing out on the news every day), and we try to drive home the point that:

Humans are NOT the virus, capitalism is NOT a disease — Please avoid metaphorizing social conditions as disease! They play into racist fantasies! Capital is carried on by human beings in ways we are helpless to do anything about as individuals, but ways that we are NOT helpless to do anything about as a mass—as a we! Humans make history, not under conditions of our own choosing.

Like capitalism, love, attention, meaning, and joy are also things humans make, have made, and will continue to make, and, collectively, we can choose to make more of the latter and less of the former.

Terminator 2 is a great, but dumb movie, and Dune is just a stupid book.

This show is brought to you by podcasts, the only thing that brings positivity into the world under our current affective regime.

If you email us or send us something you’ve created and don’t hear about it, please don’t be offended. We are a mess.

And yet

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In this episode, for the first 25 minutes or so we commiserate about corona quarantine and talk about how we feel upset. Matt and Hilary talk cooking and share their misadventures in sourdough, a profoundly alien yet living thing. We talk about the erasure of the boundary between work and leisure under capitalism, and particularly how attenuated it is under corona. We chat about mutual aid and the struggle to become the kind of person who does mutual aid and not just the kind of person who believes mutual aid is good.

Discussing the willful change in habits that becoming a revolutionary subject requires finally gets us around to talking about the fifth chapter of KSR’s Aurora, “Homesick.” Ship and the gang are heading home to earth and everything is going really, really badly! The inhabitants of ship are confronted with a new set of material conditions that impose upon them new acts, practices, habits, and rituals that turn them into somewhat revolutionary subjects, but in a different way. They gradually arrive at a new ideology that points to a new obviousness: they will have to put themselves in ship’s hands and go into an experimental mode of hibernation (which they must invent!) in order to survive the journey home.

We further discuss models and analogies, extinction, colonialism, contingency, control, capitalism, government, law, norms—all the biggies, you know the deal.

There are a couple anti-commercials when we encounter our recurring and charming technical difficulties.

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Lots of big and new thoughts in this one, where we discuss ship's sovereignty, the fantasy bribe of the future, constituting our selves politically after long periods of political hibernation, the return of the repressed, the memory of architecture, and the myths of neoliberalism.

One of our intrepid listeners has purchased the domain householdersunion.org if you are interested in organizing a rent strike in your building and creating a new world. Hilary mentioned a story on Italian mutual aid in communmag.com. Matt was compelled to make a snide comment about Elizabeth Warren, but that's just because he's a bad person.

Thanks for listening!

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In this episode, we try to avoid talking about the corona virus as much as possible. After the first ten minutes or so, anyway.

We do talk about a lot of things! Many, many things, in fact, almost all of them concerning Chapter 3 of Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, "In the Wind." In the interest of getting this out in a timely fashion I'll leave the details as a surprise. But rest assured--there is talking in this episode!

Thank you for listening!

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Special coronavirus edition!

"Land Ho," we can all agree, is a true masterpiece. There's far too much to talk about in this breathtaking chapter, and Matt and Hilary do the best they can but still manage to only scratch the surface.

This chapter is about a lot of stuff. On the surface, it's mostly about Freya's wanderjahr. But it's also, perhaps primarily, about ship and ship's relationship to Devi. The complexity of this chapter is too great to put into words without writing a dissertation!

Thanks for listening and social distancing with us! Stay safe and healthy!

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A very special episode of Marooned on Mars with Matt and a Beer finds Matt by himself talking at you through a microphone. If you like Hilary and you don't like Matt, skip this episode! If you don't like Matt and you listen to this episode anyway, what is wrong with you?

Matt is flying solo to fill the gap created when Matt and Hilary were both sick last week and couldn't record. He talks at you about:

1. (Briefly) Canvassing for Bernie

2. Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick (1964)

3. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Ranald MacDougall, 1959)

4. The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, 2019)

He does NOT talk about Aurora or Kim Stanley Robinson. ONLY listen if you want to hear him drink beer and talk about those four things!

Hilary will be back (with Matt) very soon to discuss the second chapter of Aurora!

Hello! Matt and Hilary are back with a preview episode of the next season of Marooned! On [Fill in the Blank]. This season we’ll be discussing KSR’s brilliant Aurora.

In this preliminary episode we re-introduce ourselves and the premise of the show. We talk about what science fiction and utopia are, why we’re interested in them (and why you should be, too), and our approach to thinking about them.

We also decide how many episodes you should expect. After consulting with your psychoanalysts, we resolve to read this chapter by chapter, so there will be 7 episodes after this, maybe an additional one after that.

Stop at 40 minutes if you are only interested in science fiction and don’t want to hear Matt and Hilary rant about politics and vociferously endorse Bernie Sanders and enumerate his positive qualities and the glorious future his presidency will usher in, while simultaneously maintaining a healthy skepticism about electoralism and the State. We talk about knocking on doors, solidarity, making a new world, being here for each other, being a person. Hilary shares her experience canvassing for Bernie in Iowa, and next week Matt will share his experience of knocking doors in New Hampshire.

I don’t know what’s up with the audio on this episode, why Matt sounds like he’s in a fishbowl for like 40 minutes or whatever, why his beard seems to have its own soundtrack, etc. I’m not an audio engineer. Just take what you can get.

At one point Matt laughs so hard at Hilary uses the accurate appellation “Mayor Cheat” that he knocks his microphone out and disconnects the connection. Good stuff!

Around 1:08:00 Matt starts talking about Maine politics so if you’re not interested in that or indulging his idle thoughts, just stop listening. But listen to the joker who represents Matt’s district in Congress.

Other texts and thinkers we discuss in this episode include:

Jose Munoz, Cruising Utopia https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781479874569

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780262521994

Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction https://www.indiebound.org/book/9783034319485

Fredric Jameson

Encyclopedia of Science Fiction http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/

World Without End https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049964/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_2

Other generation ship novels:

Molly Gloss, The Dazzle of Day https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781481498470

Gene Wolfe, Book of the Long Sun https://www.indiebound.org/search/book?keys=book+of+the+long+sun

Stan’s essay Dystopias Now https://communemag.com/dystopias-now/

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Hello listeners and goodbye Mars! With this episode we leave KSR's Mars behind, as we conclude The Martians, the "apocrypha" of the Mars Trilogy. 

[SPOILER ALERT: Our next venture will be KSR's Aurora, and will get started mid-January to early-February. We suggest you get your copy now and read it through once before we start (if you, like Matt, haven't already read it), then read it again with us!]

We leave Mars in a mood similar to that created by the ending of this collection, with a mixture of melancholy and relief. It's hard to leave these works behind, but we're looking forward to new adventures and a new book!

Here we talk about the two final sections of The Martians, the collection of poems "If Wang Wei Lived on Mars" and the autobiographical "Purple Mars."

Matt and Hilary find a lot to talk about regarding the form of poetry and what it demands and makes possible for us readers. We dive deep into poems including "Visiting," "After a Move" & "Canyon Color" & "Vastitas Borealis," "Six Thoughts on the Uses of Art,"  "Report on the First Recorded Case of Areophagy," and "The Red's Lament." These poems are thoughtful, sad, profound, hilarious, and, in a word, brilliant, resonating with the history of poetry from Dante to Wordsworth (and likely beyond). If you thought Stan was good at writing novels, dig his sci-fi poetry!

Here the line between fiction and reality completely blurs, and the political themes of the Mars Trilogy give way to a much more personal constellation of concerns and expressions.

There is a brief bout of unavoidable audio distortion at about 22 minutes (mitigated by a musical interlude) and a brief digression into film criticism somewhere around 1 hour 20 minutes.

Then we share our favorite moments from "Purple Mars." Hilary appreciates the thoughtfully hilarious description of the absurdity of the writing process, and Matt wonders aloud why we never saw any of the Mars characters go poop. Try harder, Stan!

We have had such a great time reading through this world with you and we hope you join us in 2020 as we bask in Aurora and beyond! Thank you for listening and supporting us!

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It’s Hello! Marooned on Mars with Matt and Hilary. We're turning 50!

Hilary is in stereo, I think, and Matt seems to be in mono? This may explain some differences in our levels. Anyway. Recording via the internet remains a challenge, for us, at least. If our dialogue sounds somewhat stilted, it’s because Matt is recording from an unspecified tube at some undisclosed location in the world. Hilary is, presumably, in Chicago.

This time we enter the home stretch and talk about five entries in The Martians. This selection really has a sense of being late in the day, a mixture of regret and loss, but something to move on toward and look forward to.

Coyote Remembers

Our relationship with Coyote ends on a kind of sad/ melancholic note. We discuss the setting of this story, or what we can extrapolate as the setting and the “you” it addresses. Themes of loneliness, “brotherhood,” and relation are foregrounded here. Coyote remembers and accounts for the people he has lost. What does it mean to be done with something, when that something has been the whole world to you?

Sax Moments

Nietzschean aphorisms and paradoxical homilies and jokes, or the News from Lake Wobegon on Mars? Can it be both? The overall joke here seems to be just imagining Sax reading Nietzsche (and other philosophers) at all, and then getting frustrated with lateral or “non-scientific” thinking (as he might deem it). Sax living in the limits between epistemology, rationality, embodiment, and experience.

The Names of the Canals

Naming, life, and love. Scale.

[Something happens with Hilary’s track here where there’s a lot of distortion {which actually gave Matt in the editing process evidence that may suggest a solution to other problems, but let’s leave that aside for now}. SORRY!]

The Soundtrack

We talk music! We talk strategies of music + writing (- writing avoidance). Matt blames his cats for all his problems. Again. Hilary plays music for her cats, who hate Philip Glass. So that tells you all you need to know about our two hosts!

A Martian Romance

The tension between melancholy and hope. When do stories end? Whose is the romance of the title? Climate crisis on Mars storyline and Roger + Eileen romance are both cashed out. Death and the future. Structures of feeling. Reading this in our current moment.

Our podcast does not recognize holidays!

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We're back...again!

We continue our discussion of The Martians, the stories "Sexual Dimorphism," "Enough is as Good as a Feast," and "What Matters."

These are three amazing stories, deeply personal, comic and touching, personal and meditative. It seems these entries just get better and better.

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Again we have some technical issues, which we’ve done our best to ameliorate in post-production. For the first hour and twenty minutes or so Matt might sound not-great. Thank you for bearing with us!

We talk about Bernie Sanders for a bit and wish him well, self-identifying as proud identity cultists, hopefully not alienating some of our listeners.

For your convenience, here are some pointers to when we start talking about which stories in this extra-long episode of Marooned on Mars!

12:30 — We finally start talking about something else besides the world sucking, namely, The Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson.
Start by going back a bit to the Michel in Provence chapter.

22:30 — Jackie on Zo
Extremely touching story about Jackie’s relationship to her daughter, with a very sad ending.

43:00 — Keeping the Flame (Nirgal)
Comparing Hiroko and Phyllis, their legacies, cults or practices of remembrance around them.

1:04:00 — Saving Noctis Dam
Pseudo-Nadia story about saving a town from a hurricane with plywood - work done under conditions of necessity. Who is Stephan??

1:11:00 — Big Man in Love
Matt’s version of the story: “Big Man grows a penis like an Impossible burger so he can have sex with a kelp lady.”

Listener Michael drew a comparison to Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home

1:20:00 – Distortion break: Matt’s end becomes much more listenable

Discussion of increasing slippage between folktale and science and fact slides into discussion of language and words in…

An Argument for the Deployment of All Safe Terraforming Technologies
Experience of the body is an argument that can’t be rendered in words—the rhetoric of the ineffable.
Temporal change, experience of time, temporality of riding a wave. Robinson’s “knots in time” connect to Wordsworth’s “spots in time”? Matt is looking for the terms Erfahrung and Erlebnis (he thinks…he’s probably wrong).

1:41:00 — Selected Abstracts from The Journal of Aerological Studies

1:49:00 — Odessa

We end with an agricultural update, especially regarding turnips and turnip greens, as well as a plug for an upcoming podcast spinoff project about the Alien franchise of movies that you can look for in a few months.

Thanks for listening!

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DO NOT ADJUST YOUR PODCAST PLAYER. We're using a new recording scheme, so at one point, Hilary sounds like a scary robot. But we're powering through!

This week, we talk about "Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars," "Salt and Fresh," and the two sections on the Martian Constitution and Charlotte Dorsa Brevia's "worknotes." First we chat about teaching and the fine arts of giving advice, and having that advice ignored, and ignoring advice. Then we get into the most important thing, which is baseball and the communities it makes. Then we talk about "Salt and Fresh," which is very cool. Then we talk about the second most important thing, which is crafting a legal framework for governing a planet, and how it would be like if we controlled the terms under which we work and had a say in the kinds of labor we do, how the products are distributed, and what gets produced. SPOILER ALERT: things would be better. Then we end with a riff on trees and how good they are, in contradistinction to the governing bodies of the city of Chicago. Trees discussed include chestnut and apple. Let's decommodify the food system by planting trees and working them communally! It's not that big an ask.

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We rejoin Roger Clayborne (no relation to Ann) and Eileen Monday as they're reunited for a climb up Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system.

A lot to talk about in this episode, including Heidegger and Sartre, Romanticism, post-Romanticism, and nature, colonialism and history, somatic experiences, misery tourism, and worlding. Way too much to summarize!

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Hi! We’re still figuring out how best to handle our new remote recording and figuring out sound levels, etc., so if Matt is too loud and Hilary is too quiet—sorry! This is low-effort, low-tech, labor-of-love stuff. We appreciate you bearing with us!

This week we talk about two short stories, “Coyote Makes Trouble” and “Michel in Provence.” Even though they’re short, there’s tons to talk about!

First, some inane chatter about stupid techno-alternatives to walking, like Segways and electric scooters. And cars. That comes out of some delight in the fact that KSR writes SF stories about hiking, which reflects his commitment to the quotidian and everyday and something that really matters.

In “Coyote Makes Trouble,” we talk about Coyote’s place within the revolution, as an agent who also has to mediate between conflicting tensions within the movement. He wants to go faster than Maya, but also is not happy with the aggressive stance of the Reds, and he’s also constantly at risk of having his spy network infiltrated. Here he’s on a mission to do a banner drop. We talk about the relationship between action and strategy, violence and tactics, small demonstrations vs. large-scale revelations of power. We talk about the science-fictional quality of luxury liners and cruise ships and Coyote’s unique place in the books as someone from an entirely different place and background than the other members of the First Hundred, and we wrap up by discussing the place of laughter and joy within revolutionary movements like the ones going on today.

Our discussion of “Michel in Provence” starts at about 33 minutes with a call for 800 more listeners to the show per episode so we can make enough money for Matt to buy lunch two days a week, if we run ads for mattresses.

This is a lovely chapter, melancholy, but sweet and hopeful (as hopeful as Michel can be at any rate). It picks up after the events of “Michel in Antarctica,” charting a different history of human settlement of Mars. A different mission to Mars creates a different kind of Martian subject, one who’s only a tourist and can’t wait to get home. Nevertheless, Michel is beset by regret and self-recrimination, wondering what might have been. He thinks Mars might’ve been able to stand as a symbol…but we know that’s not what happened in the actually existing world of Martian settlement. It wasn’t a symbol, they didn’t exist as an emblem of togetherness. They created an actually existing system that had its own conflicts and contradictions that were certainly not harmonious. There’s also a different kind of life extension here, one that reinforces the status quo hierarchies of rich and poor. We touch on the elemental imagery that we’ve come to expect from KSR, especially in a Michel chapter, and discuss Michel’s various “projects.” Here he seems able to overcome the nostalgia that cripples him in the Mars Trilogy with regard to his beloved Provence and come to different terms with his attachment to place, or form a different attachment to Provence that we can see as hopeful (if still sad), informed by his brief time on Mars that he didn’t like. Maya, as always, helps him organize his feelings and actions around his project.

Next week, “Green Mars!” It's going to be a big one, so get your Heidegger, Sartre, and Melville ready!

New show motto: Expect things to get better!

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Matt has overcome his rural inertia long enough to finally put out this episode! Hooray! 

This is the first episode that Matt and Hilary have recorded remotely. As such, there are some technical difficulties that we're still working out, so please be patient. (They're very minor and you probably wouldn't even notice if I didn't mention it.)

This time we discuss "Maya and Desmond," "Four Teleological Trails," and "Discovering Life."

In "Maya and Desmond," Matt and Hilary talk about the way the books depict major events while at the same time giving a sense of everydayness, uneventfulness, and mundanity. We talk about the entirely different perspective this story gives us of the events of the entirety of the Mars Trilogy, as it appears to span most of the 200-or-so-year span of the original books. It makes a difference to know that Hiroko's farm crew abandons the First Hundred in Red Mars not because of Hiroko but because Maya tipped Desmond off that (essentially) the cops were coming. We talk about the way this story condenses and elides time, and the ways people find to make their own lives even in moments of revolution.

In "Four Teleological Trails," Matt makes a weird connection with Edgar Allan Poe's "Man of the Crowd," probably just because anytime he reads anything with someone walking he thinks of "Man of the Crowd," but also because of the uncanny landscape that’s described, the ambiguity between nature and culture, the past and the future, the narrator's attempt to kill his parents by bringing them up Precipice Trail, and trail phantoming. We talk about haunting and discovering being flip sides of the same kind. Thanks to Listener Stever for pointing out (on the KSR Facebook fan page) that the "Dorr" who is mentioned refers to George Dorr, the driving force behind the  creation of Acadia National Park, making this story a clear reference to hiking there. This chapter explores the limits to the functionality of metaphor and seems repeatedly to undo the distinction between nature and culture.

Finally, in "Discovering Life," Matt gets a dose of nostalgia for Los Angeles traffic. Another story that highlights the everydayness and mundanity of space travel, "Discovering Life" is mostly melancholy with a hopeful ending. The mundane everydayness of this chapter is just a continuation of our own crappy reality, not the utopian hopefulness of the Mars Trilogy. The future depicted here feels much more like our present, or even our past, with the 1950s remaining a touchstone of something. The NASA press conference depicted all-too-eerily resembles those of the original space missions, especially in their clear domination by men. But it also depicts a nice sense of conviviality among co-workers (rocket scientists are laborers after all), and ends with the idea to "terraform Earth instead"--a good idea!

Thanks for listening, as always!

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Hello! We’re back in Phase Two of “Marooned! on Mars” Matt and Hilary will be discussing the short stories, essays, fragments, poems, and other literary concoctions that comprise The Martians, published in 1999. This is kind of like the apocrypha of the Mars Trilogy, things that didn’t necessarily “happen” or aren’t “canonical” to the original trilogy, but that involve the same characters and are set in the same basic world with the same basic presuppositions. 

M & H start by talking about the way we’ve been approaching the books in general, which must represent some synthesis of the different ways the two of us read texts. M admits to a predilection to close reading, which probably accounts at least in part for our focus on them as books populated by characters. H's approach to science fiction (M suggests) revolves more around Darko Suvin’s concept of the novum (which H has discussed a few times), so is more focused on the world created and the political-economic and social ramifications of the new thing posited by the text. This seems to have resulted in a balance of readings strategies for which no one has rescinded our PhDs, so we’re happy about that.

It also sheds light on the way the Mars books engage with 19th century realism. They have characters that are worth paying attention to as characters while simultaneously giving a sense of scope, presenting an entire world that does more than never just tell a story about individual people but rather is always about a world and its possibilities.

Then M goes on one of his patented pointless rambles, this time about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Seriously, even Matt doesn’t know what he was saying, just skip ahead. Something about rich interior life. This is all part of our collective plan to give ourselves license to be even stupider than we already are about these books, because neither of us has read The Martians before. 

Anyway, these stories demonstrate a kind of formal experimentation and complexity that’s really exhilarating as a reader, with wild perspective shifts (compared to what we’re used to from the Trilogy) and whole revisions of major events. Perhaps no segment of The Martians better illustrates this than MICHEL IN ANTARCTICA, the first one, which ends, hilariously, with the entire trilogy being negated! They don’t go to Mars! M & H talk about Michel's intelligence and unprofessionalism. Michel ends up arguing that the necessary characteristics for a successful member of the First Hundred are full of double binds that are just too complex to be overcome. We talk about those contradictions and the structure of feeling vis a vis the past inhabitants of Antarctica.

EXPLORING FOSSIL CANYON follows a tourist expedition led by one Roger Clayborne (who?) told through the eyes of Eileen Monday. We discuss the sublime as an aesthetic tourist experience, and marvel at the idea that Mars has changed so enormously that, unlike the First Hundred, you don’t have to know anything about the planet to live on it. Eileen was born there, lived her life in a city, and has never the outback. So in a weird way she’s both Martian and alienated from Mars…wonder what that’s like? 

THE ARCHAEA PLOT is a delightful piece of folklore that warns us of the anaerobic revolt to come. It’s a great example of the shift in perspective this collection makes possible.

THE WAY THE LAND SPOKE TO US also does extremely cool things with the sublime, voice, and perspective. We read the entirety of the flatness section and are basically rendered speechless because it’s depiction of the constant state of misperception where we find our being is so beautiful and profound. H shares a story about Big Sky Country.

Listen to our friends! (But only after you listen to us!)

We’re back! Reading, talking, and listening respectfully. And sometimes swearing. Being misheard and misunderstood.

We talk about student papers and Matt yammers about some of the reception studies he received, including papers about Thelma & Louise, A League of Their Own and Akira (that one’s interesting), but not for too long, just be patient or hit 15-second forward about 8 times.

We chat a little bit about other science fiction things that we’ve watched and read in the meantime.

THEN we talk about the future of the podcast. Some changes are in store! But for the immediate and foreseeable future it will still be KSR-centric. We’re going to have an interview with Stan, and then do The Martians, divided in larger episodes we talk about together, and solo episodes about the shorter chapters. Then probably the Three Californias. But Matt is moving to New England, not writing a science fiction trilogy, probably getting a lame job under lame capitalism. The podcast will continue, remotely, you lucky listeners!

And FINALLY (after 15 minutes, for the impatient among you) we get into the FINAL chapter of Blue Mars.

Hilary promised she was going to cry on the podcast—will she??? Surprises are in store…

The prologue of this Ann chapter tells the story of the Third Martian Revolution, then goes into a stream of collective consciousness of different conversations bleeding into each other. The settlers’ aggression is diffused in the replay of first contact by people who have rejected the power relations of settler colonialism.

History knocks on the door and the First Hundred demands a negotiated settlement between the Martian and Terran governments. Finally, this one moment in history, things don’t dissolve into violence, a mass sense of conscious recognition. These books recognize that argument, anger, and dissatisfaction are all parts of democracy, not things that can be wished away.

Then the chapter proper starts with an initially ambiguous focal character, but, of course, it’s Ann. We talk a bit about why the novel ends with Ann, especially Ann in a non-Ann setting, and a non-Ann set of things for Ann to be doing. Ann and Sax getting together—is this a cliché novelistic ending, where the personal and political resolve themselves?

Were the visions of John, Frank, and Arkady actually more conjunctural or contingent than the long view of the scientists Sax and Ann? Hilary doesn’t think so!

Do you know what “saxifrage” means? Find out here!

Ann avoids a near-death experience, thankfully. Then we read the end of the book, and it’s very emotional!

Mars is now, for Ann, a scene of living together. We talk further about the children, and the horizon on Mars, its closeness, something you could reach and be present with.

This podcast is HISTORY! We end on a note of mutual appreciation for each other and for YOU, the listener! We did it, and we’re gonna continue to do it, and it will be continuously cool. Go buy The Martians from a used bookstore or get it out of your library.

THANK YOU!

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In the penultimate chapter of the Mars Trilogy, Sax names colors with Maya, works on the memory problem at Acheron, and goes sailing with Ann--and Matt and Hilary talk about it! We talk a bit about the moments of adventure in the books, and speculate about what they're for and why they happen when they do. But mostly we have a freewheeling conversation about memory, knowledge, and longevity. We discover that, hey, isn't life the ultimate "experimental procedure?" Sax encounters Zeyk, strapped to a thingamajig that's scanning his Marilu Henner-style brain. We explore the parallels between the remaining First Hundred taking the memory treatment and a far-out drug experience. We argue over the origin of the phrase "Wherever you go, there you are" (it's Buckaroo Bonzai, not Hitchhiker's Guide, btw). There's stuff about political commitment and memory here, about not living in the past so that you can be present to the present so you can live toward the future (which is the route Maya opts for). And, of course, a great rendition of the specific variety of social maladjustment that's endemic to grad school and that makes it almost impossible for pure academics like Sax and Ann to have a relationship. 

Everyone's favorite characters return in this chapter! George, Roger, Mary, "Andrea"--the gang's all here! 

One more chapter of the Mars Trilogy! Tune in next week to hear Hilary cry and how awkwardly Matt responds to that. 

Thanks for listening! 

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Hello yes!

We're (finally) back (again) with a double-stuffed, one-year anniversary episode! Here we discuss the long Maya chapter from Blue Mars, "It Goes So Fast." Ironically titled, as this is our longest episode yet and it is full of pointless diversions and digressions that will no doubt frustrate and alienate everyone! What can we say--Matt has a hard time maintaining a train of thought, and we were drinking bourbon.

Our discussion of this beautiful, sad chapter starts with a consideration of other angry, bristly women in KSR novels and other utopian science fiction, particularly that of Joanna Russ, a big favorite of Hilary's. We touch on the new conceptual schemas that Sax offers Michel to understand Maya--why not throw quantum mechanics into the mix of medieval humors and see what comes out?

We talk about life and history, and the appeal of theater to Maya as an adjunct to politics. We FINALLY get to talk about why no one goes to the movies on Mars, and longtime listeners will be happy to know that Matt gets it, and agrees: The Avengers sucks.

Cultural assimilation, materiality and the limits of the imagination, the increasing complexity of a life lived, third-person limited perspective, analogies on analogies on analogies....it's all here! Good luck sorting it out.

(Hey, if anyone wants to create cool image art for us, y'know... feel free. All's I've got the time and skill for is a picture of Mars I took from a 3-second web search that I've long ago quit updating. Starting to get kinda stale!)

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Part Two of our discussion of Blue Mars Part 11, "Viriditas"!

Last episode was about Zo. This episode is about how cool living on the other planets is, and how the politics of the solar system are congealing. We drank beers on this one, so it might be a little more scattered. Matt uses the word "grok."

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Matt and Hilary let you into one of our planning sessions, demystifying the amazingly shallow and slapdash way we decide what to talk about. This chapter is so rich that we figured we'd have to divide it up into two episodes. This episode focuses mainly on Zo and the kind of problems we have with her and the kind of problems that she presents to us.

We ask really fundamental questions that the book puts to us at this point in the narrative, including about the nature of pleasure and freedom in a world that spans the solar system and in which humans can expect to basically live forever. The big question we seek to answer across this and the next episode (which we probably don't ever answer) is, as articulated by Hilary: What do we make of the relationship between the things we’re learning about the transformations in the solar system (accelerando/ explosive diaspora) and what we learn about Zo?  

We talk about our problems with Zo. Both of us didn't like Zo at all the first time we read this book, and the second time through we're discovering that we understand her a little bit better now. But we still don't like her! At the forefront of our displeasure with her is her experience of pleasure, which often seems to come at the expense of others. 

The way Zo treats Ann and Sax are real triggers for us here. Zo's youthful dismissal of Ann's communion with rocks, or of Sax's contemplativeness, open onto a discussion of relationships between generations. The contrast between Nirgal and Zo, set up at the end of the previous chapter, is borne out here through their genetic and spiritual lineages back to John Boone and Frank Chalmers. Zo's hedonism and adrenaline junky-ness, her interest in Nietzsche, her weird references to Keats, all of these indicate a youthful arrogance and solipsism that we find distasteful.

And yet... Why shouldn't she be able to tell these old farts to fuck off?

Ultimately we're presented here with a new version of the problem of what freedom is and where pleasure is found. Hilary raises the issue of the recent left's taking up of the language of morality and moralism. Matt compares Zo to the stock broker character from New York 2140, whose name he still can't remember and he's not going to go look it up because there's a cat in his lap. 

References: Paul Lafargue, "The Right to be Lazy." Stan was recently interviewed on The Antifada podcast (really excellent interview if you haven't heard it).

Freedom (according to Matt): not feeling the need to be doing anything other than the thing that you’re doing right now.

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In this episode we discuss Part Ten of Blue Mars, Werteswandel, a Nirgal chapter.

Nirgal is running around Mars--running in circles, running from something, outside and inside himself at the same time. Running looks like a new technology on Mars, just like the new technology discussed in the prologue, of super-fast interplanetary travel. The only thing comparable is...nineteenth century train travel (thanks, Wolfgang Schivelbusch!).

Nirgal (literally) runs into a society of feral hunter-gatherers, who seem like they'd fit right in at the FYRE Festival. There he meets Zo, and, well...it's complicated.

This is one of those really short chapters where Matt and Hilary get to really dig in and be very expansive. If you're not interested in hearing our end-of-quarter conversation about teaching and corrupting the youth by opening their minds to utopian thinking (or just thinking), skip the last twenty minutes or so. But if you'd like to hear Matt's groundbreaking bumming-students-out-as-pedagogy technique, feast your ears!

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After another unexpectedly long hiatus, Matt and Hilary are back to talk about our favorite topics--Martian and Chicagoan politics and Martian and Chicagoan weather!

"Natural History" is a Sax chapter, and finds our favorite jumble of rats in a lab coat juicing himself up with crocodile DNA. Sax is radically hybrid in both body and mind, but he's also still mystified by the women in his life. To Hiroko and Ann is added the math genius Bao Shuyo, and it's hard for him to wrap his mind around the hybrid she presents to him--a woman math genius! Who knew?

"What's this Bao episode doing here?" Hilary asks Matt. Matt babbles for a while and stumbles into an answer about feared loss of patriarchal dominance. Of course this chapter is also about nostalgia and the passing of time. Sax stumbles onto a project to give Mars a new moon, Pseudophobos, a talisman in the sky that will concretize a past moment and prove he has control over things once again, as Hilary puts it. This appears to be a nostalgic project that reaffirms his place in the present--does Sax want to Make Mars Great Again?

We are given the amazing gift of carbon offsets, and we cross our fingers about India and Pakistan.

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We're back, after an unexpected and unexpectedly long hiatus!

This chapter finds Nirgal trying to find himself, to locate and perhaps localize himself on the planet Mars, amid the network of force relations constituted by his family, the Martian political system, the changed and changing environment, and the mythology of his own existence. 

Matt starts by making a joke about blackface, which is so last week. Hilary is teaching Aurora for the first time, and it's a very emotional book! It doesn't help that it's Winter Quarter at the University of Chicago, the longest and most stressful quarter there is. They also talk about the Green New Deal and how important and good and awesome it is.

Then they get into it. Mars is, as predicted, working as a kind of psychological safety-valve for the people of Earth, or that's how it seems to William Fort and his crew. This chapter is about scale and scalability in many ways--how the problems of a single person, or two people, or a bunch of weird micro-micro-microorganisms no one knew existed might just amount to a hill of beans, or at least marmots, in this crazy mixed-up world(s).

Nirgal is unrooted. He has a problem with Jackie raising a child alone, for some reason, but he has no problem with fleeing from any role in the official politics of Mars. He's still on the hunt for some sort of parental anchor, listening to John Boone's A.I. He runs into Coyote on a park bench.

Matt and Hilary try to figure out what "the green and the white" means, or rather what it's for, what its use is. Does it make sense? To whom? What sense does it make? It seems like a conceptual framework that at least makes sense to Nirgal, kind of like a screen he can project onto. Of course it's ideological. But that just presents him with another problem: how to make that concept manifest in the world. How can he use it to organize his material reality?

He becomes an ecopoet. That doesn't work out so good. But Hilary's hellebore and euphorbia seems to be making it through our harsh Chicago winter!

This chapter has breathtaking landscapes seen from really cool jetgliders. Nirgal floats around the world like a dandelion spore, living in fairytale time, "looking for an image of himself." We are all just tubes of sentient worms.

Then Matt and Hilary try to figure out our finances, and conclude that you should all get 5000 of your friends to give us one dollar every month. (Just kidding!!!!) (But seriously, thank you for your donations!)

This, in my view, was a good episode, even though we’re both audibly yawning at various moments.

Hello Australia! Stay cool!

We are charismatic megafauna, and you can: 

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Music by Spirit of Space. Download their album “Extra Extra” on iTunes and Bandcamp

In this episode, Matt and Hilary discuss the Nadia chapter "Making Things Work," as Nadia figures out what it means to be the first President of Mars, ponders what it will be like to have a new pinkie finger, and wishes she could get her hands dirty with some real work.

Matt and Hilary share tales of the polar vortex, which include chickens coming indoors to roost and watching a bad-ish Mars movie from the late 1990s. Then it's on to the KSR talk.

Nadia is frustrated for much of this chapter, as the groundwork is laid for the future political processes of Mars. Is process more important than outcome? This is a lesson hard-learned by Nadia.

A different kind of groundwork is happening with the construction of soil, a task which Nadia is surprisingly able to lend a hand in. (Get it?)

Nadia's regrowing finger gives us a picture of life as recursive rather than linear, but Art's desire for a child seems to point to a residual element of human living-together--the persistence of the couple and the family form! It seems it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of gender.

Matt leaves us all with a special wish for Howard Schultz, our new President.

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This episode Matt and Hilary discuss the masterful chapter, "Ann in the Outback." Matt and Hilary love love love this chapter, perhaps to the point where words fail them. Well, words fail Matt. Hilary, as always, is killing it.

It's very cold in Chicago--perfect, Marslike weather for discussing Ann and the many (two) bears she meets, her awkward conversation with Sax, and the shittiness of eco-tourism.

Tune in until the end when one of the luminaries of New German Cinema makes a surprise appearance!

Extra Extra! Head on over to iTunes where The Spirit of Space, composer of our theme song, is selling his wares. It's an album called--you guessed it--"Extra Extra"!

Thank you for listening, and thank you to our donors!

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This week, Marooned on Mars discusses Part 5 of Blue Mars, "Home at Last." In this part, Michel returns home to his beloved Provence to find everything changed and unrecognizable.

Matt and Hilary ponder psychologist Michel's weird psychology, where his whole identity is wrapped up in the woman he's in a relationship with. In Matt's words, he sees himself as "a worm who eats uncured olives."

We think about personal history versus world history, the curiosity of memory, looking at old photos of yourself, Roman aqueducts, and, of course, how to get Tom Hanks to give us a million dollars. Or maybe Sigourney Weaver.

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Music by The Spirit of Space

On this episode of Marooned!, we're discussing Part 4 of Blue Mars, "Green Earth," a Nirgal chapter. Nirgal, Sax, Maya, and Michel have traveled to Earth as a Martian delegation to attempt to normalize relations to the home planet and help out where they can. Nirgal goes off on a series of disorienting and hallucinatory adventures and comes back sick!

Matt and Hilary spend some time chatting about what they've been up to since the last episode. Hilary "moderated" a "panel" at an event co-sponsored by the Chicago Humanities Festival and Humanities Without Walls as part of the MLA conference (or something). N. Katherine Hayles and Evan Selinger had a lot to say! Delightful weirdos who strangely think the humanities are important were in attendance--including the president of the MLA!

In our "Mars in Popular Culture Roundup of the Week" segment, which will doubtless be expanded to a weekly extra episode once Tom Hanks gives us a million dollars, Matt watched two Mars-related movies that were bad: Capricorn One and something on Netflix (2036: Origin Unknown). 

Then we get to the good stuff.

This chapter is hallucinatory and impressionistic, anchored in Nirgal's bodily experiences, but also full of subtle references to the history of colonialism, literature, and post-colonial thought, as we discover. Connections we make include  C.L.R. James, Frankenstein, Treasure Island, Freud, Agatha Christie, Mr. Belvedere, Jamaica Kincaid, Great Expectations, Moby-Dick, K-19: The Widowmaker, New York 2140.

Home at last, Nirgal encounters a planet that wants to kill him, where he feels most at home in zones that are out of reach of earthly life--high in the Alps on a glacier and beneath the sea, polluted and more dangerous than before. We reflect on Nirgal's perennial homelessness as a constitutive lack, which takes his experience of the overwhelming colors, heat, and moisture of Earth from the hallucinatory to the uncanny, or unheimlich in Freudian thinking. This is appropriate because he also keeps running into doppelgängers of his parents, Coyote and Hiroko.

All the while, the relation between Earth and Mars is up for debate. Hilary gives a critique of the concept of population and Malthusian logic, and makes a case for faith in people's willingness to figure out the common good in the here-and-now rather than defer decision-making to an investment in an unknowable future. People should get to live good lives while they're alive! Back to our common Arendtian refrain: why put all your faith in the future when you could work to make the present better?

Elsewhere, Matt becomes as smart as Jamaica Kincaid when he discovers that you can take the colonies away from the empire, but you can't take colonialism away from the colonizers, and he does a really bad British accent. A very fond farewell to all our listeners across the pond!

Things Hilary doesn't like: Tom Hanks, The Family Guy, Avengers: Infinity War (discussed off-mic).

Ways Matt can't identify with Nirgal: Scared of scuba diving, does not routinely wake up to find multiple strange women having sex with him.

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Music by The Spirit of Space

Happy New Year!

This episode follows Art Randolph as he helps in the drafting of a new constitution! Matt and Hilary share some tips and tales about articles, definite and indefinite.

Before we get to the chapter itself, we chat again about RED MOON (great book), which leads us to share some of our experiences over the holiday. Matt also would like someone to write an MA thesis about how SF is imagining China right now, specifically in RED MOON and MR. ROBOT.

"A New Constitution" centers on Art as the decentralized coffee- and kavajava-brewer for the constitutional congress, which Nadia, wielding "the charisma of the sensible," is de facto chairing. We talk about the folkloric prologue that finds Mars's little red men becoming one with the Dalai Lama, and producing a structure of feeling conducive for the collective project of constituting the present in this opening of potentiality in history.

We talk about Vlad's epic takedown of Antar at the table of tables, and the concept of generationality, of which Hilary gives a brilliant critique. We try to get to the bottom of why Jackie favors capitalism, and we discover that PARKS & RECREATION and THE WALKING DEAD are the same show, especially if you're Hannah Arendt.

Attention HBO! Hilary Strang would watch a show about drafting a constitution!

Also she has written this, about Aurora, for The Blackstone Review!

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Music by The Spirit of Space

Schoooooool's out for winter! Schoooooool's out for Solstice! Schoooool's out for Marooned! on Mars with Matt and Hilary!

In this Sax chapter, Matt and Hilary discuss Sax's inability to leave Ann alone and let her die already. General Sax is up to his old tricks of acting unilaterally, this time at the end of the chapter to save Ann's life. But before that, he partakes in the dream of every red-blooded American male: driving across the surface of the planet, free!

Matt and Hilary talk about Sax's difficulty with symbolism and psychoanalysis, and Michel's pathologization of Ann's interest in science and her whole ethical project. We question the autonomy of nature and find some gaps in Sax's etymological studies, and we ponder the role of language in forming constitutional nation-states. And....Hiroko, the oceanic mother of freedom, is back! Or...is she???

At your holiday meals, divide into Green and Red teams (the Christmas colors!) and have an argument about eco-Marxism! Happy Solstice!

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Music by The Spirit of Space