Galileo's Dream, Episode 1: Quantum Historical Fiction and the Messiness of the Future

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 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/marooned-on-mars/message

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. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/marooned-on-mars/message

A 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 the heck we’re talking about. What is sabotage, who does it and why? Is terrorism sabotage by another name? What level of complicity does a saboteur need to have with the object or process that is the target of their sabotage? Why do people commit sabotage? How does sabotage relate to self-sabotage? Is it a negative or positive action? Is there a dialectics of sabotage? What is the good of sabotage in and of itself? What is the temporality of sabotage? But more importantly, how awesome are these movies, huh? Lots of stuff going on in them that’s sabotage, and perhaps even more that’s not sabotage! We talk about money, the national question, art, culture, modernity, economics, labor, politics, all the classic Marooned topics our listeners have grown accustomed to love and expect. With a special appearance by Slavoj Zizek. Follow Obstructed Viewing on your podcast app of preference! Marooned will be back sooner or later with more of whatever it is we do. Thanks for listening! Find Obstructed Viewing at obstructedviewpod.com, here, or wherever you get your p'casts! 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

In 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 donating to our podcast! 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

This 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 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/marooned-on-mars/message

In 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 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

Buongiorno! 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: spoilers ahead! (Oh, and we also discuss the concept of spoilers with relation to this book.) This episode covers roughly the first hundred pages or so, though again our conversation is mostly conceptual and thematic. But it was a fun talk to have, hopefully a fun one to listen to, about a book that is super super fun! 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 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/marooned-on-mars/message

This 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 Vehicle), call sign Tin Man. If that isn't enough names for you, please listen to us talk about this quasi-post-western of the GWOT era and wrestle with the moral conundrums surrounding the question of who, when, and where to drop bombs and "get these bastards." The answers may surprise you! (They are "the bad guys," "always," and "over there.") 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

This 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 at various times and in various forms, the Commune is the form society takes when needs are met and the ubiquitous crises of everyday life under capitalism are addressed head-on. Ordinary people tell their own stories of bringing about and sustaining this post-capital, post-commodity, post-gender, post-state future. Matt and Hilary discuss how this book makes a problem of narrative itself, as well as many of the beautiful features of the world depicted. Care and community are the focus of everyday life, but the book also acknowledges that "care" and "community" are not, and have never been, static concepts. Rather, they are always changing, and the project of human living-together is precisely the work required to meet those ever-changing needs. We see characters bringing about the new ways of life by doing them, by living them. At the same time, the future depicted is not without pain, trauma, or struggle. Rather, trauma--in all its forms--take center stage as the thing to be addressed, worked on, overcome, and healed in a social organization worthy of the name. The Commune here is not a form yet to come, but rather something that's constantly being built.  We talk about crisis, the myth of property, technology, nostalgia, commitment to a social whole, gestation, and writing a future for ourselves, that includes ourselves. We also find potential parallels to KSR, William Morris, Octavia Butler, and Marge Piercy. Buy this book! And get an extra copy for a friend, family member, or enemy, and make them read it and talk to you about it! 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 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/marooned-on-mars/message

WARNING: 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 least in passing! And in this episode we try our best to minimize spoilers, considering the format of the texts we’re reading and their recent publication. Featuring stories by Meg Elison, Tade Thompson, Daryl Gregory, Greg Egan, Sarah Gailey, Justina Robson, Chen Quifan, Malka Older, Saad Z. Hossain, and James Bradley, artwork by Sean Bodley, and an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, Tomorrow's Parties touches on many themes that that should be familiar to our listeners: political economy and ecology, trying to make history while living with the legacies of the past, the weirdness of being burdened with a body, capitalism and wage labor. Described by Strahan in the introduction as neither hopepunk nor material for doomscrolling, the stories here are imaginative and engaging, and well worth checking out (if you're into that kind of thing). Next up we'll be doing a deep-ish dive into Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, published by Common Notions. There will be spoilers, so buy it and read it! (You won't be sorry!) 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 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/marooned-on-mars/message