Marooned! on Mars with Matt and Hilary

Book 6 of The Years of Rice and Salt is like a novel within the novel, depicting the intertwined lives of two brilliant figures in Robinson's alternate history: Kang Tongbi and Ibrahim ibn Hasam. Living in the late 18th-century, they come to realize they are part of the same jati that has been reincarnated throughout the novel, that they have known each other for 10,000 years. Through their intert...

"Warp and Weft" is one of the shorter of the books of The Years of Rice and Salt , taking place on Turtle Island/ Yingzhou nee North America, among the Hodenosaunee, a word Matt and Hilary definitely know how to pronounce. Fromwest nee Busho gets initiated as a chief in a beautiful ceremony and makes an amazing, prophetic, ecstatic speech that opens up a discussion about conceptions of history and...

We're pack, the science fiction literature podcast equivalent of tubing down a lazy river with a six-pack of beer! This week we talk about Book 4 of The Years of Rice and Salt , "The Alchemist," where Khalid, Bahram, and Iwang discover the secrets of the universe while attempting to placate the venal khan and suss out the political machinations of his treasurer Nadir Divanbegi. For a lot of reader...

In this somewhat delayed episode we discuss Book Three of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt , "Ocean Continents," in which a Chinese fleet accidentally discovers Yingzhou, which we know as the Americas. Admiral Kheim, the fleet's doctor I-Chin, and a Miwok girl called Butterfly find each other and escape a pretty sticky situation with the Incan executioner god! Hilary and Matt disc...

Warning: we will not be doing this book justice! Email us at maroonedonmarspodcast@gmail.com 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

Hello! We’re back. Sorry we’re late, but we’re back now, to discuss THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT, book-by-book. We recommend you read this book through once already if you’ve never read it before for its own pleasures. It’s a great, great, great book that you should just read and delight in. Then tune into our commentary for a re-read, which I assume is what a lot of you are doing. And in advance, t...

Pepsi Matt McDonald’s and Home Depot Hilary coming at you at the beginning of the after of the beforetimes, Phase 2 in full effect! The Hard Problem of this chapter is alternately deceleration, consciousness, love, and meaning, we we talk about it all! Ship is now fully the subject and the narrator of their own story, and Matt and Hilary discuss just how other or alien ship’s consciousness is from...

In this episode, for the first 25 minutes or so we commiserate about corona quarantine and talk about how we feel upset. Matt and Hilary talk cooking and share their misadventures in sourdough, a profoundly alien yet living thing. We talk about the erasure of the boundary between work and leisure under capitalism, and particularly how attenuated it is under corona. We chat about mutual aid and the...

Lots of big and new thoughts in this one, where we discuss ship's sovereignty, the fantasy bribe of the future, constituting our selves politically after long periods of political hibernation, the return of the repressed, the memory of architecture, and the myths of neoliberalism. One of our intrepid listeners has purchased the domain householdersunion.org if you are interested in organizing a ren...

In this episode, we try to avoid talking about the corona virus as much as possible. After the first ten minutes or so, anyway. We do talk about a lot of things! Many, many things, in fact, almost all of them concerning Chapter 3 of Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora , "In the Wind." In the interest of getting this out in a timely fashion I'll leave the details as a surprise. But rest assured--there is...

Special coronavirus edition! "Land Ho," we can all agree, is a true masterpiece. There's far too much to talk about in this breathtaking chapter, and Matt and Hilary do the best they can but still manage to only scratch the surface. This chapter is about a lot of stuff. On the surface, it's mostly about Freya's wanderjahr. But it's also, perhaps primarily, about ship and ship's relationship to Dev...

A very special episode of Marooned on Mars with Matt and a Beer finds Matt by himself talking at you through a microphone. If you like Hilary and you don't like Matt, skip this episode! If you don't like Matt and you listen to this episode anyway, what is wrong with you? Matt is flying solo to fill the gap created when Matt and Hilary were both sick last week and couldn't record. He talks at you a...

Aurora kicks off in typically Robinsonian fashion, with a near disaster at sea...on a spaceship! Matt and Hilary talk about names and narratives, shitholes and Hobbits, and crisis ordinary. Email us at BongRipper420 and canvass, call, text, and vote for Bernie Sanders! (Do NOT vote for billionaires.) Matt's got an extra copy of Aurora, and if you want it and live anywhere from Augusta to Portland...

Hello! Matt and Hilary are back with a preview episode of the next season of Marooned! On [Fill in the Blank]. This season we’ll be discussing KSR’s brilliant Aurora . In this preliminary episode we re-introduce ourselves and the premise of the show. We talk about what science fiction and utopia are, why we’re interested in them (and why you should be, too), and our approach to thinking about them...

Hello listeners and goodbye Mars! With this episode we leave KSR's Mars behind, as we conclude The Martians , the "apocrypha" of the Mars Trilogy.  [SPOILER ALERT: Our next venture will be KSR's Aurora , and will get started mid-January to early-February. We suggest you get your copy now and read it through once before we start (if you, like Matt, haven't already read it), then read it again...

It’s Hello! Marooned on Mars with Matt and Hilary. We're turning 50! Hilary is in stereo, I think, and Matt seems to be in mono? This may explain some differences in our levels. Anyway. Recording via the internet remains a challenge, for us, at least. If our dialogue sounds somewhat stilted, it’s because Matt is recording from an unspecified tube at some undisclosed location in the world. Hilary i...

We're back...again! We continue our discussion of The Martians , the stories "Sexual Dimorphism," "Enough is as Good as a Feast," and "What Matters." These are three amazing stories, deeply personal, comic and touching, personal and meditative. It seems these entries just get better and better. Email us at maroonedonmarspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Leave us a voicemail on...

Again we have some technical issues, which we’ve done our best to ameliorate in post-production. For the first hour and twenty minutes or so Matt might sound not-great. Thank you for bearing with us! We talk about Bernie Sanders for a bit and wish him well, self-identifying as proud identity cultists, hopefully not alienating some of our listeners. For your convenience, here are some pointers to w...

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR PODCAST PLAYER. We're using a new recording scheme, so at one point, Hilary sounds like a scary robot. But we're powering through! This week, we talk about "Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars," "Salt and Fresh," and the two sections on the Martian Constitution and Charlotte Dorsa Brevia's "worknotes." First we chat about teaching and the fine arts of giving advice, an...

We rejoin Roger Clayborne (no relation to Ann) and Eileen Monday as they're reunited for a climb up Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system. A lot to talk about in this episode, including Heidegger and Sartre, Romanticism, post-Romanticism, and nature, colonialism and history, somatic experiences, misery tourism, and worlding. Way too much to summarize! Email us at maroonedonmarspod...

Hi! We’re still figuring out how best to handle our new remote recording and figuring out sound levels, etc., so if Matt is too loud and Hilary is too quiet—sorry! This is low-effort, low-tech, labor-of-love stuff. We appreciate you bearing with us! This week we talk about two short stories, “Coyote Makes Trouble” and “Michel in Provence.” Even though they’re short, there’s tons to talk about! Fir...

Matt has overcome his rural inertia long enough to finally put out this episode! Hooray!  This is the first episode that Matt and Hilary have recorded remotely. As such, there are some technical difficulties that we're still working out, so please be patient. (They're very minor and you probably wouldn't even notice if I didn't mention it.) This time we discuss "Maya and Desmond," "Four Teleo...

Hello! We’re back in Phase Two of “Marooned! on Mars” Matt and Hilary will be discussing the short stories, essays, fragments, poems, and other literary concoctions that comprise The Martians , published in 1999. This is kind of like the apocrypha of the Mars Trilogy, things that didn’t necessarily “happen” or aren’t “canonical” to the original trilogy, but that involve the same characters and are...

Hello! We are so happy and proud to present this episode, our wide-ranging interview with the man himself! Kim Stanley Robinson, avid listener of our Kim Stanley Robinson podcast, graciously gave us some of his time during a layover at O'Hare in Chicago--hence the no doubt at times bad sound, so please forgive us. Hilary and Matt met Stan at the O'Hare Hilton bar, where we chatted over numerous to...

We’re back! Reading, talking, and listening respectfully. And sometimes swearing. Being misheard and misunderstood. We talk about student papers and Matt yammers about some of the reception studies he received, including papers about Thelma & Louise , A League of Their Own and Akira (that one’s interesting), but not for too long, just be patient or hit 15-second forward about 8 times. We chat...