A Floating City?

Despite my immediate nitpicking of the science that goes on in this particular story, this is actually quite the fun little tale! I mean, it's got everything you'd want from an alien invasion story, random alien nonsense stumbled upon by a put-upon scientist, a random dame that has dubious high society connections, and most of all, the wild threat to New York, dispelled by hastily-thrown-together technobabble solutions! 

On the note of technobabble, it's really fascinating to me that I don't try NEARLY as hard to unpack the ins and outs of the science in a modern story, but the second these older stories go for any sort of loose accuracy with the science I go "WEll acTUALLY-", and I do wonder if that's more of an issue with my familiarity with the science they're using for the technobabble in particular, or more with the expectations of what science is being used as the base for the technobabble itself, y'know? There's certain key concepts that science fiction nowadays really likes to bend (and break) rules of, but these older stories instead like to wrangle oddities of the electromagnetic rather than the strangeness of the quantum, and I just don't catch on quite as fast, let alone noting how much more of an intuitive sense of electricity and magnetism I have in comparison.

Either way, once I get out of my own way, this last little bit of the August issue of Astounding Stories is a real hit! 

I do provide a disclaimer, since these books are aged and not well-remembered: 

TL;DR up front: Paper Cuts is almost all public domain stuff, and some of it hasn't aged well. I'll be doing my best to warn you, but I'm not changing any of it, I don't believe censorship is the path forward here.

Paper Cuts, by necessity, has to be a majority books that are in the US public domain. That means it's almost exclusively going to be content produced in the 1920s, or earlier. These works may have aspects that have not aged well to a modern viewer/listener. Now, I'm never one for censorship, but I do believe we are entitled to being able to filter the leisure content we don't want to see. So, this results in the following policy:

I'll do my level best to warn you, the viewer, at the beginning of the episode, what's likely to come up. A great example is something like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which had some passages describing natives of various places in a fashion I'd charitably describe as unkindly. In cases where something sneaks up on me unwarned, I will be reading the content unedited, with my sincerest apologies for the lack of active warning.

All that said, I'm gonna cover my bases with some common warnings that have come up often in books I've read before:

Descriptions of "savage natives" Various racial slurs, unkind terms, and/or Descriptions of groups that have taken on a worse connotation General mistreatment and misrepresentation of cultures

Generally speaking, if something I'm reading is on the page? Don't expect me to have opinions aligning with it. We're here to have fun, not disparage people!

Want to grab the book to read along with us? check it out here, free of charge!

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29768 (Astounding Stories, August 1930)

Have a book to request? Maybe some chats to chit? Finally interested in that bread I bake? drop by the discord!

https://www.discord.gg/PBZNsjn

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https://www.twitch.tv/glacier_nester/