Marooned! on Mars with Matt and Hilary

In this episode we read from the first chapter after the prologue up to "Swan and Alex." First, Hilary and Matt start by discussing the work of Lauren Berlant, an eminent literary critic and feminist theorist from the University of Chicago who passed away recently. Berlant's work focuses on affect, agency, attachment, the sentimental, literature, politics, human-being, normativity, and innumerable...

We're back to reveal your desires to you! We're starting on our new season, which will focus on 2312 . In this episode we talk about far-future science fiction, posthumanism, and some of the broad themes and topics this book focuses on, such as gender and sexuality, habit and ritual, art and performance. We talk a bit about how the book tends to subvert its own narrative, and narrative itself, wit...

Matt and Hilary are joined by their boon companion Bill Hutchison to discuss John Carpenter's (identical) films ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) and ESCAPE FROM L.A. (1996). The gang talks about the concept of the prison-island-city film and 1980s science fictions of popular cinema. We get into the western qualities of the films, discuss the logics of settler colonialism and the myth of the law, and we...

Based on Matt’s joke opening, your friendly hosts talk about JFK and JFK for the first ten minutes, so you can probably skip that to get to the good stuff, our discussion of the last chapter of Shaman , “Shaman”! Topics include social connection, the modern divisions between work and leisure, public and private, and art as a rarified form that takes place in a specific place and time. How does art...

In this episode we discuss "All the Worlds Meet," in which Loon recuperates after his ordeal, Click haunts Thorn, Thorn dies, Loon builds a new pair of snowshoes, and the Wolf Pack begins to break up. We talk about teaching and the formation and passing on of knowledge in the context of Thorn and Heather's different teaching styles. There appears to be no such thing as intellectual property in thi...

The sixth chapter of Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson, "Hunted," has Thorn, Click, Loon, and Elga fleeing from the northern jende people. It is an absolutely harrowing chapter in which several major taboos are violated--murder, cannibalism, and burial. Matt and Hilary talk about reading and interpreting signs, the state's monopoly on knowledge, and not romanticizing the primitive. Did Thorn kill Cli...

In this episode we discuss "Under the Ice," where Elga is kidnapped, Loon goes to rescue her, he gets captured, and Thorn and Click rescue them. A lot to discuss! Here we're introduced to the northers, or the jende as they call themselves, a northern pack that, contrary to what we might expect, live in relative luxury compared to the Wolf Pack. Though they spend 10 months of the year in winter, th...

Happy (belated) birthday, Kim Stanley Robinson! Is he the author of this podcast? Hilary says, in some ways, yes. Matt says, most certainly, no! You be the judge! Anyway, it's weird to have a podcast that people listen to and seem to enjoy... This episode we talk a lot about art, making art, the experience of art, and the work (pun intended) of art. Language and communication seems to be a key the...

[NB: We had some technical audio issues this week, especially on Matt's end. Something to do with Zoom, we presume. You probably won't notice most of them, but there's one point where Matt had to re-record himself reading a passage from the book; hopefully it won't be too jarring.] This week we discuss the first two chapters of Shaman. Matt and Hilary talk about the abundance of Loon's world in co...

Hello! We are coming back, with a new season of discussing Kim Stanley Robinson novels! This season we'll be doing Shaman (2013), so get your copies ready and start re-reading. New episodes will hopefully be dropping starting next week. This week Matt and Hilary chat about what kind of science fiction novel Shaman is, what we're looking forward to talking about, and what we're missing, both during...

We sit down with the one and only KSR to discuss The Ministry for the Future . Stan indulges Matt and Hilary as they ask about a wide range of questions that address topics like: technical problems of writing riddles Orwell on the radio PTSD ambiguity rule of law religion, science, and economics violence MMT "the future" Some references: The One vs. the Many by Alex Woloch, How to Blow Up a Pipeli...

This is our last, if not best, episode concerning The Ministry for the Future . (What does the phrase “if not” mean, anyway? We’ll never know!) We talk the failurewin (or successlose) of progress. Trying things is about failing at them, there’s no such thing as fate. Need a posture of openness toward the future that’s about being willing to work, try, fail. Faith in the future, it’s not given, it...

We start this episode with Matt immediately blowing out the microphone with his holiday cheer, which didn't, this year, for him, include the solstice, but he did watch The Treasure of Pancho Villa , which was good. Hilary had a fire, but missed the Great Conjunction due to clouds. In this chunk of chapters, as The Ministry for the Future begins its denouement, we discuss mourning and loss, the ine...

Matt and Hilary are approaching the end! As is capitalism, but that's another story. Actually, it's this story, the one they're talking about The Ministry for the Future . But whatever, this one's kind of low energy. We recount our intellectual journeys through Raymond Williams and Mike Davis and Walter Benjamin, and work on wrangling cats and sequencing the novel. We talk about loss in utopia, fa...

We're back! In this episode we achieve our lowest minutes-to-pages ratio yet, with 25 pages discussed in 90 minutes! Only for true KSR/ Marooned on Mars heads! We start by taking stock of some of Stan's recent interviews and some of the (glowing) reviews that have been coming out about the book, and skip forward to Chapter 85, a weirdly emotional list of organizations that are working to save the...

One of the great things about this book is how it keeps you on your toes. Matt and Hilary do their best to keep up with its digressions and interruptions, following the flow into conversations about the state, democracy, capitalism, lizard men, and the collective joy of Pepsi commercials. For the first 24 minutes or so they despair over the election of Joe Biden and the vast political emptiness th...

In a shrewd bit of counter-programming, we're releasing this episode on the day of what we're told is the most important election of our lifetimes...since the last one, and until the next one. This chunk of chapters seems occupied with a breakdown in the metabolic functioning of the lifeworld, and it asks us to shit or get off the pot. The primary science fictional technology KSR seems to be deplo...

In this (very long) episode we discuss roughly chapters 18-37, with a special focus on Frank. What does Frank want? Does he know? The gap between intention and action under capitalism, trapped in our subjectivity and ideology, is a focus of the first part of the ep. Then we run into the technical difficulties and pick back up to talk about the challenges this novel poses to us as a novel. If the r...

We're back from the movies, ready to do our podcast old school, like a couple of old fools. We're SO EXCITED to start reading Kim Stanley Robinson's BRAND NEW novel, The Ministry for the Future ! Matt has finished it, Hilary is about halfway through, so there are sort-of spoilers but not really, but you should try reading the whole book first before you start listening anyway. This book is expansi...

We're still marooned at the movies, with John Carpenter, "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, our friend Bill, a very special guest all the way from Slovenia, and a bunch of yuppie ghouls! That's right, today in this super-long episode Matt and Hilary welcome their friend Bill to help them ponder over the confectionary marvel that is John Carpenter's THEY LIVE!, his sci-fi, creature feature, action allegory that'...

Hello! As we not-so-patiently await the publication of KSR's latest forthcoming masterpiece, The Ministry for the Future , Hilary and Matt embark on a bit of film chat, movie talk, cinema discussion, if you will. This week we discuss the early 80s punk-verité masterpiece Born in Flames , which asks, what if there was a revolution and nothing changed? Ten years after a successful socialist-democrat...

Look, here we are again! We start our final episode on The Years of Rice and Salt by talking about what's up next for the podcast. Short answer: probably a few standalone episodes on movies and KSR short stories, followed by a deep dive into the forthcoming The Ministry for the Future , followed by our next big project. But first, a short hiatus while we solidify plans and the school year starts t...

The penultimate episode on The Years of Rice and Salt ! (I just like saying "penultimate." You've got to seize the opportunity when it presents itself.) In this, one of the longer (the longest?) chapter of YoRaS, Matt and Hilary talk about science and feminism, the aftermath of war, the aesthetics of scent, the division of labor, and history. We talk about different knowledges and forms of knowled...

Shout out to our great listeners, especially when they email us, and when they email us, their emails are always thoughtful and stimulating, and Hilary almost always responds to them and Matt almost always reads them but doesn’t respond to them because he is, in fact, shy, but also, more importantly, lazy, other than the whole “producing and editing the show” thing. We kick this episode off with a...

In this week's cat-heavy episode, we examine the Kerala's global anticolonial revolutionary empire. We ask lots of questions: are novels the original Turing test? Is the Kerala the K character? What does revolutionary struggle look like in this book (in the absence of whiteness, Christianity, capitalism qua capitalism, a strong sense of private property) in contrast to what it looks like in the wo...