Review by Michelle.

It was interesting reading a book that proudly declared “Copyright 1985″ on the cover — the year I was born!  Originally published in 1954, though as a “substantially different version,” this book is surprisingly enjoyable and timeless.

Search the Sky is about dying human colonies and the search for Why?  The story quickly runs through four or so planets — being only 200 pages long — which mostly frustrate and threaten to imprison or kill our protagonists.  At the end they do finally meet some smart people who know about the Why, and so life goes on in an optimistic way, quite in contrast to the Poe-esque tone at the beginning.  The answer is satisfactorily scientific, involving the real-world formula of L(subT) = L(sub0)e-^T/2N which is repeated throughout the book.  If you don’t already know the answer, don’t spoil it by looking it up!  The text itself may give you enough clues to guess before it is revealed in the last couple of pages.

People who might not like this book? Die-hard populists and feminists, isolationists, and those who absolutely hate Faster Than Light travel.

As always, Pohl does an excellent job collaborating, and now I’ll have to look up the early deceased C.M. Kornbluth. The two also collaborated on The Space Merchants, and both were part of the Futurians, an influential group of science fiction fans, writers, and editors.

Dear Editor: From now on all my communication with your office will be written in third person in the hopes that you will take it more seriously.

definition

How it relates to first person

Degrees of unreliableness, from tricking the reader to making a funny

examples:

• Jane Eyre: manipulation + fate
• Huck Finn: chilluns
• Edgar Allen Poe: Cask of Amontidillo + Tell Tale Heart
• Mystery Stories
• Frankenstein - monster narrates
• Oryx & Crake
• Left Hand of Darkness - insider/outsider
• As I Lay Dying (My mother is a fish)

Review by Michelle

Sanderson’s Mistborn series is fantastic as a whole.  Forceful characters are balanced by a logically explained setting.  His heroes and heroines feel like real people…

Sorry about the delayed release.  Computer leprechauns corrupted the original mp3 I uploaded.

IMPOSSIBLE, we say - http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1394

Quality Warning: Mysterious white noise in the background towards the end.  Mysterious!

Content:

• Time Travel:
  • Hyperion
  • Star Trek — lol let’s circle the sun? http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1307
  • Poul Anderson — time travelers strive to preserve the “original” timeline — time travel is for action/adventure and for the meeting of different cultures
  • OSC’s PastWatch — a complicated version of “if you could go back in time and kill Hitler…”
  • Timeline by Michael Crichton
  • Rip Van Winkle — what? I fell asleep!
  • Thomas Covenant — serves to complicate plot and add danger

• Cheating Time: (Remember that cheating distance is arguably the same as cheating the time it would have taken to travel that distance)
  • Frederick Pohl’s The World at the End of Time — cryogenics + relativistic travel
  • OSC’s Worthing Saga — “Somec” allows people to sleep away the years, and the society based on it.
  • Neuromancer
  • Futurama
  • Hyperion: Yes, it’s cheating if you can step through a door and end up on another planet
  • Search the Sky by Frederick Pohl (referred as “something Michelle read”)
  • www.qwantz.com - Dinosaur comics, specifically: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1554 PS. The guy who does this comic is really nice.  He helped me find this specific one!

Music by Pasqualino Ubaldini http://www.dogmazic.net/Pasqualino_ubaldini http://www.myspace.com/pasqualinoubaldini

Personal Effects: Dark Art http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312383827/ and 7th Son: Descent http://jchutchins.net/site/order/ by J.C. Hutchins

Topic: Today we discuss books that have been made into movies, both the good and the bad.  Of course, we only cover movies that we’ve actually seen.

Content Warning: Dude, we cursed! Also used the phrase “black people.” Heh heh heh

Baby Warning: You can totally hear cute baby noises in this episode. :O

Content:

• Changing stories to fit movies
• Resident Evil games + movies
• LOTR and Tom Bombadil
• Narnia, especially Prince Caspian
• Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and Jim Carrey
• Coraline by Neil Gaiman, additional character
• Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin - miniseries was epic fail
• The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind - again with the random hat
• The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper - super epic fail

OMG we forgot to mention Blade Runner!  The movie sucked.  The book rocked.  Theeeeeeeeeeere you go.

Podcast Novels:

Goblin Market - Story about a girl who gets kidnapped into the world of fae and the sister who risks every thing to save her.  - http://jenniferhudock.com/goblin-market/

FETIDUS - (The Foundation for the Ethical Treatment of the Innocently Damned, Undead, and Supernatural) - gritty, post apocalyptic mystery complete with zombies and vampires - http://www.fetidus.org/

The Gearheart - very fun, pulp fiction-y steam punk about a mysterious construct that begins preying on magi - http://www.thegearheart.com/

The Dreamer’s Thread - about a woman who finds out that she creates dreams, and gets sucked into a dream world to help them fight the nightmare realm - http://www.thedreamersthreadnovel.com/

Nina Kimberly the Merciless - fantasy, comedy, about a warrior princess trying to ditch her ditsy suitor. - ninakimberly.com

Murder at Avedon Hill - fantasy mystery about a murder in a small town that controls an important pass into the mountains - http://pgholyfield.com/maah

Short story podcasts:

EscapePod - escapepod.org

PodCastle - podcastle.org

Clonepod - clonepod.org

Also mentioned: Podiobooks.com

Content:

• Mica has a baby, who is squirmy and makes noise often.
• Vicki is in college, and just recovered from a bad cold.
• Our sister is staying in Nevada for the next six months!  Wish her well!
• Mica has read the latest Mistborne book, and Vicki is stuck with textbooks again.
• Recording is difficult, but we’ll try - thanks for your patience!

Dear Editor: Do you prefer men or women?  I mean, you know, in all of your vast experience rejecting manuscripts.

Content:

• Are men better writers than women, or vice versa?
  • There is no answer because it all comes down to reader preference
  • There has been a historical dominance of literature by men
  • Personal experience may be random. Maybe you just happen to read all the bad male (or female) authors.
• OK, but is there a difference between male and female authored text?
  • Short answer: YES.
  • Long answer: Yes, especially in INFORMAL writing, readers can guess gender with an 80-90% accuracy.
  • Published literature is much more difficult to distinguish, with readers having a maximum of 60% accuracy.
  • However, there are statistical difference between men and women in published works, including:
    • Fiction vs. Nonfiction
    • Descriptive Words
    • Pronouns
    • Choice of Genre

Content:

Fantasy and Scifi treat the afterlife differently

• Fantasy gets away with a lot more
• Scifi must try to explain most paranormal activities
• If the afterlife is present, it often is based on a real-world mythology
• People don’t like fantasy in their scifi and vice versa

Examples

• Sword of Truth, which includes communication with the dead and quick travel
• Hyperion series, which features the “Love” dimension

Alienating the Reader vs Boring the Reader

• Use of context is also important
• Nonfiction targeted at specific demographics, does not need to worry so much

Quotes from Thomas Covenant:

• “Her percipience found no evidence of him at all.”
• “The enervation in his bones suddenly swamped him.”
• “A crepitation like the discharge of slow lightning made the air squirm.”

When I picked up Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, all I knew about it was that it was the “inspiration” for Blade Runner, a move that I could never bring myself to like. Of course, “inspiration” means just that, kind of like fanfiction but with even less adherence to the original world built by the author…

Very Vocabularly Podcast

Crazy Vocabulary Examples

• cordon
• efferent
• resplendent

Alienating the Reader vs Boring the Reader

• Children’s Literature must take special care and often actually explain the words outright - see A Series of Unfortunate Events
• Genre specific or occupation specific vocabulary, especially re: sci fi

Review by Victoria Earl

A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity is a autobiography. Many of our listeners may know the author from the O’Reilly Factor, a prime time news show on Fox News. If you’ve watched the O’Reilly Factor, you’ll know pretty much what to expect from this book…

Review by Michelle

Back in October I reviewed another story by Ian Creasey, Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone. Both stories are about death, but in a way, this one is more about life.

SPOILERS

Content:

• Michelle
  • Is very, very pregnant
  • No longer has a working laptop
  • Has been sick
• Vicki
  • Has been sick
  • Will be fixing Michelle’s laptop soon

Review by guest Jonathan.  You can find him on twitter (@dreamrock).