Frankenstein Episode 2: Walton's Letters

In our inimitable fashion we spend two and a half hours talking about 20 pages. Yeah, we'll get through this whole thing in no time.The next episode should be out on July 4 (fingers crossed)! I'm sure everything will be back to normal by then.Thanks for listening!Email us at [email protected] us on Twitter @podcastonmars Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.socialRate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space

Hello!We're back with an exciting new concept for a podcast: reading a book not written by Kim Stanley Robinson and talking about it!Not that the above is not a superb and innovative and worthy concept for a podcast...Anyway, we have decided to get back to our roots so to speak and talk about another book that's dear to our hearts, namely Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This first episode is just to reacquaint ourselves with our loyal listeners, to catch up a bit, and to set up the coming "season." We hope to put out an episode every two weeks or so discussing this amazing, crystalline, modern mythical novel in our inimitably long-winded fashion.Note to listener: We are reading the 1818 VERSION of the novel. 1831 enthusiasts can GTFO!Note to listener part 2: Apologies for what may be poor audio quality in this first episode, but we were recording LIVE and IN PERSON for the first time in....6 years?!?!...so we only had one microphone and blah blah blah. Audio quality should be back up to its previous levels of mediocrity in the next ep.As always thank you for listening and we hope you enjoy our witty insights and our profound bon mots.Email us at [email protected] us on Twitter @podcastonmars Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.socialRate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space

There's gold in them thar podcasts, I tell ya, GOLD! Talking this time about Part Five of New York 2140, "Escalation of Commitment." We get what could be an ending--finding gold, rescuing Mutt & Jeff, confronting Henry Vinson--but isn't! Our characters are getting together and scheming how they might save the building by ignoring the law, even if that means bringing down the entire global financial system. Thank you for listening, and thanks for your patience. It'll likely be a few weeks before we can get another episode out. But you can get your Matt & Hilary fix at the Wetwired Podcast soon, where Sean and Jules generously hosted us and we had a great conversation about all things KSR. Email us at [email protected] Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.social Rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space

In this episode (recorded a few days after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, hence the opening discussion), we talk about Part Four of New York 2140, "Expensive or Priceless?" Our (long) wide-ranging conversation takes a rather critical view of the novel, or at least this part of it. We're trying to suss out what the rest of the world outside New York looks like, and what the status of the "police state" is. To do this we start to talk about the book's concept of citizenship, which we'll have to continue in future episodes. We also try to think about what is "sticky" in this novel as regards our own world (the question of whether this is an allegory of the present or a vision of the future). While decarbonization has happened and the fossil fuel industry evidently demolished, a lot of the political and social structures and institutions of our present reality (which themselves are integral to the fossil fuel economy as well as capitalism writ large) appear relatively unchanged in 2140--the law, the Federal Reserve, the NYPD, the United States of America. However, we're also interested in other sticky social forms that New York 2140 seems to wrestle with, if not criticize: the couple form, the romance plot, the bourgeois family. And as ever, Robinson's novel also tends to valorize literature itself as not merely a utopian space, but a utopian action: after all, is not even the law itself a (flawed) attempt to write the world that we want to see into existence? Or is it? Thanks for listening! Sorry for the long delay between episodes. We'll be out with a new episode shortly, but then alas there will likely be another long delay of at least a couple of weeks. Good thing we have the most patient fanbase in all of podcasting! Email us at [email protected] Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars  Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.social Rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts!  Music by Spirit of Space

In this episode we discuss "Liquidity Trap," Part Three of Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140. We talk about the citizen chapters and think about where to locate an authorial consciousness in this book, meditate on the difficulty of locating ourselves in a possibly ungraspable present between the "past" and "future," speculate on the explanatory power of numbers, ask about the status of the police state in the novel, and wonder whether this is a book about finance capital or about property. Among other things. Thank you for listening! We will be back soon with another episode and then may be more than usually intermittent for a couple of weeks...but we'll see! Email us at [email protected] Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.social Rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space

Hello! This week we continue our conversation of New York 2140, talking about Part Two, "Expert Overconfidence," in which our various experts get in over their heads (some more literally than others--actually, all of them do it literally, since this is literature...anyway, we don't have time to sort this out right now). We talk about the nature of the future being envisioned here around food production, property, borders, and various overlapping layers of non-state governmentality, both visible and invisible. And, of course, polar bears. Email us at [email protected] Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars  Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.social Rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts!  Music by Spirit of Space

In this episode we declare there's not much to say, this is just a table-setting section of the novel, we won't discuss each and every subchapter, but then we talk for nearly two hours, starting with Matt and Hilary's Garden Round-Up. Then it's a shallow dive into Part One of NY2140, "The Tyranny of Sunk Costs." Hope you enjoy and we'll be back soon with Part Two! Email us at [email protected] Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.social Rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space

We're back from a long work- and life-related absence to fart around for a couple minutes trying to log in to our old accounts, and then we're off and running with the kind of meandering, half-baked musings you've all been missing lo these many months. That's right, New York 2140 is the topic of our next season (series?) and we spend this episode recalling where and when we were when the book was published and pondering what it might mean today. Here's a novel that takes both place and literature itself very seriously, in a really fun way. A massively ambitious work, drawing on the literary imagination of New York as well as characteristic KSR ideas about ecology, climate change, and capitalism, inflected here through the aftershocks financial crisis of 2007-08, including the Occupy movement and the double meaning of "liquidity," NY2140 finds itself post-Obama, mid-Trump, pre-COVID, pre-AI pump-and-dump "revolution," pre--the-shit-really-starting-to-hit-the-fan-regarding-climate-change (i.e., pre-massive summerlong forest fires that golfers still manage to play through but that block out the sun for weeks at a time from Calgary to Chicago). It's still a book that imagines America as lying at the center of a global project of capitalist hegemony, if we recall correctly, and the stickiness of capital as a force that organizes society and politics is something we'll be paying close attention to, as well as the way the novel imagines collective and personal responses to crisis. Is this an optimistic or a pessimistic novel? Was it then? Does it envision an alternative to the eco-fascist path we seem to be on in this decade of "dithering"? We do then talk about genuinely interesting things like gardening, Anya Taylor-Joy, Waterworld, weird Bryan Adams lyrics, and the relative quality of The Expanse and the joylessness of most contemporary TV, before dropping some really gratuitous spoilers about Red Mars. (This is NOT a spoiler-free podcast, for those just now joining). Anyway, we're back, we hope to bring you new episodes every week over the course of what promises to be a deadly hot summer, and we're mostly excited to be here! We'll be back next week with Part One of NY2140, "The Tyranny of Sunk Costs," so head to your local bookstore, pick up a copy, and start reading! Thanks for listening! Email us at [email protected] Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.social 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

Our 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

We'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 what we've been reading instead of KSR, namely: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler LOTS of Philip K. Dick, especially Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, Dr. Futurity, and Clans of the Alphane Moon the crime noir novels of Jean-Patrick Manchette The Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon Ursula K. Le Guin's short story "Direction of the Road" Grapes of Wrath and Bartolome de las Casas, just as a pick-me-up You cannot hear a cat purring at around 37:40, college students are planning for a future they don't believe will arrive, and we're all wondering when our last hot shower will happen. Happy Thanksgiving, and please to enjoy.