Frankenstein 1.4-7: The Consolation of Elizabeth

Special mystery guest "Daniel" joins us to discuss the incomparable Volume 2.Some of the greats in Western thought pop their heads in, including Wollstonecraft, Rousseau, Milton, and Brooks (Mel).Thanks for listening, sorry for the delay!Email us at [email protected] us on Twitter @podcastonmars Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.socialRate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever youlisten to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space

In which the Frankensteins summon the courage and wherewithal to not lift a finger to save an innocent girl from being executed by the state and the very fair people who run it (themselves).Sorry this episode is a little (a lot) late, but so it goes. The next episode will be a bit delayed as well because of vacations, school starting, etc., but stay tuned. And for goodness sake, if you are somehow donating money to the show, please stop!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 youlisten to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space

In this episode we cover Frankenstein Volume 1, Chapters 1-3, Victor's family, his childhood, and his college years--right up to the creation of the creature!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 youlisten to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space

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