Deer Tick

Some thoughts: I was kinda surprised that wells only wrote forward into time. Maybe he thought of the butterfly effect kind of conundrum ( where going backward u might cause yourself not to exist) and decided it was best to just go forward. You go forward, likely never come back and are not seen again. Wells writing style. I liked the comment in the podcast about how he would say " now I have proven this to you". Etc. it strikes me as being the way my parents and previous generations were taught to write essays. Basically they would write in the first sentence what should be obvious from the title, " in this essay, I will describe the causes of the French Revolution", or something like that. I laughed out loud at Dan hating Dickens. I enjoyed a tale of two cities, and would recommend it... But tried reading david copperfield recently and just got lost in the endless characterization. And found so much of his realistic writing of the vernacular, in phonetic form to be a slog.

Rjoy, That trailer looks fairly cool. I think that it having been made in a place so foreign to me, with people speaking English in such a different accent can help to make it feel more genuinely futuristic.

I found it funny that mention was made of the two fisted punch already. I wonder how many fistfights in TOS do not have a two handed punch?

Here's a thought for you B7 and Dr. Who fans: Star one: inspired by "Genesis of the Daleks?" Remember the doctor deciding that he could not destroy the daleks, and yet a dalek crossed the detonation wires and destroyed the incubator room full of them anyway? Star one seems a bit derivative, with Blake intending to destroy star one, then finding that he cannot, and yet it was partly failing anyway.

I have been doing a bit of a rewatch and relisten to the podcast. I had a couple thoughts on Bounty: When escaping from the locked room, Blake threw his exploding necklace at the Amargen and it exploded... but did it explode because he threw it, or because the Amargen was pointing the microwave transmitter at him, and pushing the button? If that was what he was doing then I would assume all the other exploding necklaces would have exploded too (and that would have been messy). Everyone but Blake seem to be pretty clueless in thinking Jenna had betrayed them. When she checks on the crew who have been locked up, they are all sitting with arms behind them, pretending to still be handcuffed. Jenna walks over by the pile of handcuffs, looks down, audibly nudges them with her foot and then says she is glad to see they are all behaving themselves.

I tried to come up with actors who played a wide range of roles Gary Oldman.... Played Dracula, Beethoven, that cop in the professional Daniel Day Lewis.... An Irishman, a western oil tycoon, adopted son of a Mohawk chief Jeff Bridges.....the dude, frontier gun for hire, tron guy Ben Kingsley... Gandhi and the scariest a hole ever in "sexy beast" Charlize Theron.... Quoted as desiring to play unusual roles, but not sure of the range of things she has done.

Sorry, meant to post in the suggestions column....but... I came across some British SF shows listed in a write up for the BBC4 production "the cult of"... Shows listed that went less than 3 seasons are: Star cops (seriously?) The changes The tripods Would any of those be good?

I enjoyed the first podcast about this book and felt like good insights were provided. One thing I have often heard is people comparing and contrasting this book to 1984. II guess it is mainly about the ideas of a future communist society in BNW and a future fascist (?) society in 1984, but to me the latter is so much scarier and bleak that i find them hard to compare.

Enjoyable pilot episode. As far as suggestions: I have one thing in mind to try to keep count of throughout the podcast: the number of times Kirk's shirt is torn in a fight.

I'm wondering if there are any great or iconic works/creators of cover art out there that we can discuss and/or post images of (or would that be a violation of copyright?) thanks! D

I may be jumping ahead here, but there is one thing I remember about this book that I have gotta throw out.... and I'll try not to spoil anything... I hope I am remembering correctly, as I don't have access to a copy of the book, but I remember the very last sentence had a very strange choice of words that just stuck in my head. I find myself wondering why the author wrote what he did. Anyone with any thoughts, please let us/me know. thanks! D

A couple things strike me about this fairly old sci fi tale: 1. The hard science in the story (both book and radio play) is really nice for me.... clinical and curious about how the alien tech works. The concept of microorganisms being responsible for killing the invaders is spot on for the science of the time, not 30 years or so since Pasteur's discovery of the "putrefactory" effect of microbes and Koch's isolation of the anthrax bacterium, a 1micron size football shaped ball that can kill a cow with its disease. (incidentally, those discoveries changed food, medical and sanitary science in a huge way and changed people's perceptions of disease and the means of transmission. For a book and play of similar time period that would demonstrate how disease can move through all classes of society see Schnitzler's "Reigen", or "La Ronde." Not sci fi, but controversial in showing how "intimate diseases" can be transmitted.) Oh, and much later the concept of an "andromeda strain" would come about in both fiction and in scientific circles, something that seems unlikely given our modern knowledge of host/virus etc biology. Sorry for the diversion from Sci fi, I'm big on my "bugs." 2. The reference to state militia on the broadcast.... I looked it up and apparently some states, like New York have their own state guard units that are run by the states. NY has both state army and naval guard, while New Jersey has only state naval guard (at least currently, according to wikipedia). I found the use of the term to be odd, and had to look into it. I just thought to kick it out there for anyone who was curious, like I was.

Spoilers! Read no further if you don't want to know stuff that happened in the film, unmentioned in the 'cast.... I enjoyed the review to this film, and it's one of my favorites. I've got to say that there are so many golden little moments in it that you didn't mention like when Lorre's character is being followed, and he buys a little girl some fruit, pulls out a knife and the guy shadowing him is about to take action before seeing Lorre's character calmly peel the fruit with the knife. I liked the mention about the honor among criminals, as the scene where the police chief, Lohmann interrogates the one guy who was still in the warehouse is classic too. Acting as if the guy is up for more than breaking and entering because he knocked out a guard and.... oh, is that a call from the hospital? Oh... it looks bad for you, my friend.... cut away to the guard sitting in another room down the hall, eating and drinking greedily.... ha! great stuff. again, I really enjoyed the discussion of the film, I just wanted to remind y'all of those gems....

I wanna thank Dan and Wendee for this great idea for a podcast. Going away from the visual media and back to the basics with books is great. The realisation of the idea in the actual content of your podcast is great also and I wanted to register my praise. Having said that, I looked at the list of top 200 sci fi novels and noted something... Almost all of these books come from the English speaking world. All but Jules Verne, a couple Russians and a Polish author are represented who would have written in a language other than English. I feel like sci fi is such a big, mind expanding thing that I wonder how it can be that almost all of the greatest novels come out of "the English speaking world?" I think there is room for a huge discussion on sci fi elements in various works of classical literature, folk and fairy tales and other places that the list doesn't include, and like to hope that such discussion could be pursued in the future. Anyway, I noted that one book on the list of top 200 that was written in a language other than English, and that I would recommend is "The Futurological Congress" by Stanislaw Lem. It is a book that is fairly short and enjoyable to read and strikes me as having a very good translation to English by Michael Kandel. thanks, D