Marooned! on Mars with Matt and Hilary
134 episodes - English - Latest episode: 4 months ago - ★★★★★ - 76 ratingsa kim stanley robinson read-along podcast with regular forays into utopia. hosted by some friends who are into communism, science fiction and other stuff
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Episodes
The World Soul Visits His Mummy: Napoleon
December 19, 2023 00:25 - 1 hour - 69 MBOur review of Ridley Scott's Napoleon. Email us at [email protected] Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Leave us a voicemail on the Anchor.fm app Rate and review us on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/marooned-on-mars/message
Proof of Life, or, Hoping in One Hand
November 28, 2023 14:07 - 1 hour - 55.3 MBWe're still here! Grumpier than ever, complaining about things we probably shouldn't be, reading books, talking. And you're still listening! Thank you. We've been away for a long time for...reasons. But we are momentarily back, and maybe we'll be back again soon to talk about Napoleon and Ridley Scott. But this time we chat about the impossibilities and injustices of the working day under capitalism, capitalist education (indoctrination) and entertainment (propaganda), and let you in on wha...
Obstructed Viewing (A Backdoor Pilot): SABOTAGE!
September 03, 2023 04:00 - 2 hours - 119 MBA very special episode of Marooned on Mars, a backdoor pilot, as they say in the biz, of Obstructed Viewing with friends of the pod returning-guest champion Bill and Dauphin Josh debuting their new movie podcast (has anyone ever done a podcast about movies before?). The theme of the show today is sabotage and movies that feature it: The Train (John Frankenheimer, 1964) and Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977). If possible, you should watch these movies before listening, just so you know what ...
Galileo's Dream, Episode 4: Dumb Verbal Tics, Foregone Conclusions, and the Undramatic Inevitability of Grief
March 31, 2023 14:23 - 1 hour - 72.4 MBIn our final reckoning with GALILEO'S DREAM, we talk about our horrible voices and their dumb verbal tics, the trickiness of time travel narratives, anticlimactic moments, conspiratorial webs, the decentering of Event, crabbing sideways toward the good, rocking, the universal unity of grief, and Milton doing TikTok dances. Thanks for listening! We'll be back later, probably with a movie episode or several. You can let us know what you'd like us to read next by emailing or tweeting. Stop don...
Galileo's Dream, Episode 3: No Lent on Callisto
March 04, 2023 18:53 - 1 hour - 76.4 MBThis episode we discuss the Jovian society, the way the novel posits the relationship between science and religion, the entwined logics of extraction and redemption, the astrological epistemology, ecstasy, the our own Thirty+ Years War, and whales. Thanks for listening! Email us at [email protected] Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Leave us a voicemail on the Anchor.fm app Rate and review us on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space -...
Galileo's Dream, Episode 2: Sneezing, Shitting, and Fucking in Space-Time, plus the Redemption of Human Folly
February 11, 2023 17:29 - 1 hour - 79.8 MBIn probably our greatest episode ever, Matt and Ms. Partial Sentence talk about all the stuff we normally talk about, like Shark Tank, redemption, helmets, jazz, the Divine Comedy, and Constructivism. Plus Matt does drugs. Stay tuned to the very end to hear our next-level casting idea for who should play Galileo in the movie adaptation. The answer may shock and surprise you! Thanks for listening! Email us at [email protected] Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Leave us a ...
Galileo's Dream, Episode 1: Quantum Historical Fiction and the Messiness of the Future
January 26, 2023 18:50 - 1 hour - 60.4 MBBuongiorno! We're back with another thrilling series of discussions, and back to our author of choice, Kim Stanley Robinson. This time around we're discussing his weird and wonderful 2009 novel Galileo's Dream! Lots to talk about here, like history and who it's for, narrational voice, genre, science's relationship to religion, politics, money, power, and labor, and, of course, cats. For this book our conversations will focus more on big themes rather than a narrative blow-by-blow. So: spoi...
Nothing for Nobody: STEALTH and the Nu Militarism
December 28, 2022 20:46 - 1 hour - 86.7 MBThis week, we apologize for discussing STEALTH, an extended Incubus music video/ American military propaganda directed by Rob Cohen. Join us as we discuss the exploits of Ben "Big" Gannon (Talon 1, Josh "George" Lucas), Kara "Caraway" Wade (Talon 2, Jessica Biel), and Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx (Talon 3, "Henry"), as they face the threat of global terrorism and technological job precarity at the hands of EDI (Extreme Deep Invader), a VLO (Very Low Observable) UCAV (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehic...
Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072: Problems of Centrality and Narrative in a De-hierarchicalized Future
December 11, 2022 22:10 - 1 hour - 74.3 MBThis week we are reading a very special, wonderful book, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi from Common Notions. Told as a series of interviews by two ageing ex-academics (because academia has been, thankfully, finally, abolished), Everything for Everyone depicts a future in which the central organizing force of human society is the Commune. Emerging unevenly, violently, and somewhat spontaneously around the world ...
Tomorrow's Parties: Life in the Anthropocene
November 10, 2022 22:28 - 1 hour - 68.7 MBWARNING: This podcast is a paid advertisement, for a book. The payment for the advertisement that this podcast is was the book that this podcast is advertising. So, it’s not really “paid,” in the sense that the IRS should not worry about this. In this very special episode of Marooned on Mars, we discuss the recently released anthology Tomorrow's Parties: Life in the Anthropocene, edited by Jonathan Strahan and published by MIT Press. We manage to touch on every story in the collection, at ...
Last Survivors of the Covenant, 2: ALIEN: COVENANT, Automythopoesis, Empire, Kinship, and Shower Sex
October 30, 2022 16:31 - 1 hour - 67.2 MBIn the thrilling conclusion to our conversation about ALIEN: COVENANT, the final (so far) installment of the ALIEN franchise, Matt, Hilary, and Bill talk about Walter, David, and robots that (mis)quote poetry and Ridley Scott's placement of himself in a line of artists stretching from Milton to Shelley to David Lean. More on empire and settler colonialism, automythopoesis and Old Hollywood, the "perfect" organism, love and disappointment, the diversity of forms and difference, good and bad C...
Last Survivors of the Covenant, Part 1: ALIEN: COVENANT, Wheat, Cults, History, and Couples
October 27, 2022 19:22 - 1 hour - 61.8 MBPart 1 of 2! In our final episode of our miniseries exploring the Alien franchise, Matt and Hilary, joined by the inimitable Bill, discuss Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott's second non-prequel, released in 2017. We like this installment quite a bit, and have a lot of fun picking it apart. We talk wheat (the grain!), xenomorph kitty kats (to protect the grain!), and interstellar neoliberal postmodern settler colonialism (to grow the grain! and build a cabin!). Also pregnancy, reproduction, emb...
The Last Survivors of the PROMETHEUS: Universal Dumbness, the Victory of Postmodernism, and the Intersection of Desire
October 04, 2022 17:36 - 1 hour - 99 MBThe fifth and penultimate episode in our ALIEN Franchise series. Joined once again by Bill, we discuss Ridley Scott's return with Prometheus (2012), starring Noomi Rapace (pronounce as you will), Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, and that guy from UPGRADE (a really good sci-fi action movie). We spend a lot of this episode making fun of this movie instead of properly analyzing it. You can blame Matt for that. We even skip over most of its imagination of reproduction—which we will address in the ...
Last Survivors of the Betty: ALIEN: RESURRECTION, the Inexplicable Film, Boots, Whiskey, Sex-Gender Panic, and $11 million
September 05, 2022 18:48 - 1 hour - 78.4 MBWe're back, with our discussion of a serious piece of shit, Alien: Resurrection, the Joss Whedon-scripted, Jean-Pierre Jeunet-directed, 1997 mess that concludes the Ripley arc of the Alien franchise. We hate this movie, and unfortunately for you, we talk about it for an hour and a half! If you've never seen it, you might have to suffer through it just to understand what the hell we're talking about, so: our apologies. This disasterpiece is full of anxiety about sex, panic about gender, and ...
The Last Survivors of Fury 161: ALIEN CUBED, End of History Bafflement, Postmodern Genre Mishmash, Rumor Control and Religion
August 09, 2022 22:36 - 1 hour - 85.4 MBWe’re watching the Assembly Cut (an extra 30 minutes!) of Alien3 for our latest foray into the Alien franchise. This one takes place on a forced-labor penal colony inhabited by a strange religious sect of hyper-violent, hyper-male murderers, rapists, and scoundrels. But Ripley’s not worried because Charles Dance, who’s not at all creepy, is there. We struggle to make some kind of synthetic sense of this film, which has an extremely circuitous production history (which we discuss) making fo...
Last Survivors of the Sulaco: ALIEN$, Reproduction, Settler Colonialism, and the Military Turducken
July 31, 2022 15:24 - 1 hour - 74.2 MBWe'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 ho...
Last Survivors of the Nostromo Episode One: ALIEN, Labor, Robots, and, of course Cats
July 26, 2022 18:53 - 1 hour - 73.7 MBHop 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...
Green Earth, Episode 8: "Terraforming Earth," "The Dominoes Fall," and "You Get What You Get": Unintelligibility, the Everyday, and Climate Politics
June 23, 2022 19:18 - 1 hour - 84.6 MBIn 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 differe...
Green Earth, Episode 7: "Undecided," "Sacred Space," "Emerson for the Day:" Necessity, Joy, and Cats
June 13, 2022 17:35 - 1 hour - 75.1 MBIn 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 surr...
Green Earth, Episode 6: "60 Days and Counting" 1, Exhaustion, Plastic, Solidity, Total Information Awareness
May 30, 2022 17:54 - 1 hour - 72.8 MBStarting 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...
Green Earth, Episode 5: "Fifty Degrees Below" 3, Indecision, Mutual Aid, Election Theater, and Bailiwicks
May 09, 2022 04:01 - 1 hour - 80.4 MBFirst, 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...
Green Earth, Episode 4: Permaculture, the Commons, Destiny
May 05, 2022 06:36 - 1 hour - 96.1 MBNOTE: 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 ...
Green Earth, Episode 3: "Fifty Degrees Below," Robinsonades, Realism, Lama-Grooming
March 30, 2022 12:28 - 1 hour - 80.4 MBIn 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 the...
Green Earth, Episode 2: Sweatpants, Buddha Nature, and Nukes
March 07, 2022 13:57 - 1 hour - 94.7 MBIn 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." --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/marooned-on-mars/message
Green Earth, Episode 1: "The Buddha Arrives" to "Science in the Capital": Setting the Table, the Literature of Banality, and Science in the W. Era
February 19, 2022 23:44 - 1 hour - 70.2 MBWe'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 fe...
2312 Episode 14: "Kiran on Ice" to "Epilogue': The Final Countdown!, Crossword Puzzles, Exile, Pair Bonding, Pronouns!
January 05, 2022 23:19 - 2 hours - 126 MBOur 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 ...
2312 Episode 13: "Swan and Pauline and Wahram and Genette," and Diane Keaton and Joe Manchin and Sonny Crockett and Jerry Seinfeld
December 26, 2021 21:00 - 1 hour - 72.3 MBBack 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 ...
2312 Episode 12: "Extracts (17)" to "ETH Mobile" (I'm not even going to try to spell it): Utopias of Gender, Virginia Woolf, the Long Stare of the Tenured Professor
December 19, 2021 17:04 - 1 hour - 71.3 MBHilary 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 f...
2312 Episode 11: "Extracts (15)" to "Lists (14)": Piloerection, Multispecies Solidarity, Land Art, Freedom
December 05, 2021 18:42 - 1 hour - 89.1 MBHello 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...
2312 Episode 10: "Swan in the Vulcanoids" to "Wahram on Earth": Political Economy, Aggressive Charity, Gifts
October 29, 2021 22:23 - 1 hour - 89.5 MBWe 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 ...
2312 Episode 9: "Swan and the Inspector" to "Extracts (12)": Totalities, Interpretability, and The Sad Planet
October 16, 2021 21:52 - 2 hours - 116 MBWe 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 sur...
2312 Episode 8: "Lists (7)" to "Quantum Walk (1)": Noir, Late Feudalism, and the Long Postmodern
September 28, 2021 03:07 - 1 hour - 104 MBThis 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' di...
2312 Episode 7: "Swan and the Inspector," Swan in Wonderland, Post-Scarcity Conspiracies, and the Nature of Evil
September 12, 2021 15:47 - 1 hour - 64.9 MBThis 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 c...
2312 Episode 6: "Lists (4)" to "Lists (6)": Patterns, Agency, Cops, Detection
September 07, 2021 22:17 - 1 hour - 66.7 MBWe 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 happ...
2312 Episode 5: "Wahram and Swan:" A bird and a toad go for a walk and whistle Beethoven
August 22, 2021 17:54 - 1 hour - 91.8 MBThis 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 repeti...
2312 Episode 4: "Extracts (3)" to "Extracts (6)": Rainbows, Frogs, Worms, and Heterogeneous Economies
August 10, 2021 14:57 - 1 hour - 82 MBWe 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! Thanks for listening! Email us at [email protected] Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Leave us a voicemail ...
2312 Episode 3: Intentions, Aporia, Freedom
July 30, 2021 15:20 - 1 hour - 57.5 MBWe 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 somethin...
2312 Episode 2: "Extracts (1)" to "Wahram and Swan": Decadence, Dragons, Seizing the Day in the Pseudoiterative
July 23, 2021 19:33 - 1 hour - 58.9 MBIn 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...
2312 Episode One: Attachment, Habit, Gender, and Purloined Letters
July 12, 2021 06:13 - 1 hour - 82 MBIn 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 h...
2312 Episode Zero: "Prologue," Far-Future Posthumanism, Narrative, Gender, Habit, and Ritual
June 27, 2021 20:44 - 1 hour - 67.5 MBWe'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 ...
Marooned at the Movies! Escapes From New York and L.A.
June 01, 2021 20:32 - 1 hour - 95 MBMatt 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 en...
Shaman 8: "Shaman," Art-Making, Transmitting Knowledge, Portrait of the Shaman as a Young Man
May 12, 2021 19:32 - 1 hour - 82.8 MBBased 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 ...
Shaman 7: "All the Worlds Meet," Anthropology, Home, Teaching, and the Bird's Eye View
April 29, 2021 16:46 - 1 hour - 71.9 MBIn 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 ...
Shaman 6: "Hunted," Butt-Eating, Hermeneutics, and Barack Obama's Almonds
April 14, 2021 18:43 - 1 hour - 74.5 MBThe 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 Boo...
Shaman 5: "Under the Ice," Metabolics, Captivity, and Thermal Abundance
April 07, 2021 01:00 - 1 hour - 76.3 MBIn 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...
Shaman 3 & 4: "Elga," "The Hunger Spring," Art-Making and -Experiencing, Neanderthals, and Poor Richard's Podcast
March 24, 2021 19:24 - 1 hour - 79.6 MBHappy (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, ...
Shaman 1 & 2: Loon's Wander, The Wolves at Home, Abundance, Scarcity, and Life Before Capitalist Ruins
March 14, 2021 19:57 - 1 hour - 79.6 MB[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 imagin...
Shaman Episode Zero: Caves, Common Life, Adventure, and Fire
March 02, 2021 16:46 - 51 minutes - 47.1 MBHello! 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 scien...
The Ministry for the Future: The Kim Stanley Robinson Interview
January 28, 2021 17:33 - 2 hours - 124 MBWe 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 Fi...
The Ministry for the Future 97-106: Promethean Authority, Invisible Revolution, Guggenmusik, No Fate, Dignity
January 05, 2021 22:03 - 1 hour - 110 MBThis 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...