Marooned! On Mars With Matt And Hilary

This long episode is devoted to the "Wahram and Swan" chapter of 2312, when the two characters attend a Beethoven concert and the tracks on which Terminator runs are mysteriously destroyed. Wahram and Swan, along with three young "sunwalkers", then have to us the utilidor under the surface of Mercury to seek help. This is a major inciting incident for the remainder of the novel. Matt and Hilary discuss a range of issues, including social reproduction (dyads vs. crechés), sameness and repetition, the dense specificities of place, and more. Thanks for listening! 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 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/marooned-on-mars/message

We talk about the form of the "Extracts" chapters, the importance of Earth in the relationships in the story, the sky, living on the side of a planet, acting vs. being, talking to frogs, sleeping with worms, O. Henry, Danny DeVito, hawala, elephants, degenerates, and "marginal capitalism" (what is it?). Watch out for the Late Heavy Bombardment, because it's coming! Thanks for listening! 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 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/marooned-on-mars/message

We continue our conversation from last week, ending right before the chapter "Extracts (3)." Matt and Hilary talk about art, chemistry, repetition, intentionality, power, capital, alliances, suffering, allegory, systems, etc. A big question is whether the spacers constitute something like an interplanetary bourgeoisie (or elite), and where capitalism is still alive in the solar system of 2312. We also talk about the role the figure of AI plays here, and whether it is allegorical to something like what we call "the market" or "capital"--in other words, the concept of a kind of an algorithmic logic that appears to operate behind the backs of the human characters. Is it independent of them? Does it act with intention? How can it be mapped and understood? We're introduced to Zasha and Kiran, and the solar system's balkanization. "Lists (2)" is a litany of practices of conscious embodiment and experiments in experience that are not only individual but that might also be shared, public, or communal in various ways.

In this episode we talk about chapters from Extracts (1) to Wahram and Swan (yes, only two chapters, how decadent of us!). We talk about the "Ascensions," the asteroids that are hollowed out to create terraria, refugia, and farms, and try to think about the political economy of the solar system in 2312. Wahram and Swan on the Alfred Wegener asteroid lead to a discussion of decadence, habit, and constructing pseudoiteratives to live artfully and be open to finding newness in the everyday. We ask what "being productive" means and how we seize the day in capitalism. Swan and Wahram have very different approaches to the problem of living free of wage labor. Also Hilary insists on talking about the Christian Bale/ Matthew McConaughey vehicle dragon/ tomato movie Reign of Fire (2002). It's her favorite movie, smh. We spoke for 2 hours in this session, so we decided to split it into two episodes. The next one will drop some time next week, and we'll go up to Extracts (3), for those following along. The clip at the e

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 other topics, in ways that help illuminate the questions we discuss so much: how does change happen (or not), and what does literature (or art) have to do with it? Matt and Hilary explore some of the ways Berlant's work might shed light KSR's novels. There are elements in 2312, especially around attachment and habit and gender, that Berlant's ideas may help illuminate. We discuss pieces including Cruel Optimism, "Poor Eliza," and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. We get started talking about the novel about 37 minutes in (in case you're anxious) and talk about Swan and her relationship to herself, her ar

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, with its tendency to ties things up in neat little bows. 2312 traffics in many narrative forms and modes, including (interplanetary) romance and the detective novel, but it's also a book about home, where to find it and how to build it. Of course, we're here with our customary digressions and non-sequiturs, including, here, one about fictional universes, authorship, Michael Mann, podcasts, and the decay of higher education. We'll be back in roughly a week to talk about a chunk of the book, duration TBD (probably 50-80 pages, if history is any indication?). We hope you join us and look forward to reading with you! This se

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 make some breakthroughs on the big question these films pose: What makes Snake tick? At the end we share our picks for where we'd set a third ESCAPE FROM movie. Our movie episodes are very indulgent, and we're going to keep doing them occasionally! For those non-movie-lovers out there, we'll be back in a few weeks with our regularly scheduled programming, discussing KSR's 2012 novel, 2312! Until then, thanks for listening! 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! Musi

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 figure in Loon's world? As Loon becomes the shaman, what do his paintings mean for him and his people? We talk about the concept of genius and the role of the shaman as a medium of knowledge, as well as the nature of mediation in contemporary technological society. We talk a lot about art, cultural transformation, newness, and memory, as well as the relationship between intimacy and knowledge (and ignorance). If you're listening to this, congratulations! You're a shaman now! Before starting another Kim Stanley Robinson book we're going to do a couple episodes on movies, including John Carpenter's Escape From L.A. (or

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 this society--what a concept! At the eight eight, we see various people make bird's eye views of the land. Hilary talks about the loving relationship to place that would motivate you to make models of it, and the childlike fun of destroying them. We discuss the status of "home" in KSR's science fiction and the place of mourning and melancholy in building a new world. Matt says "plethora" twice and we conclude with kitty round-up! Thanks for listening! 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 list

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 Click? Spoiler alert: yes, obviously, c'mon. We were honored to be asked by the Seminar Co-op Bookstores to share our recommendations for an Earth Week Reading List. You can find our picks at this link, and you can also buy books for pickup or delivery (either USPS or, if you're local to Chicago, they'll bring your order to your door). Thanks for listening! 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 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/

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, they subsist on fish and seals, which are plentiful. As a result they are, as Loon sees it, "rich." They have bags of fat that they use as fuel and food, a very calorie-rich society. In addition, they have domesticated wolves and rely on the labor of captive slaves. It's unclear which came first in this chicken-or-egg scenario, and we talk about that. We also have our most extended (so far) exposure to Click, who, as listener Michael suggests, might be the closest KSR comes to writing about aliens. Click is a Neanderthal with radically different capabilities than Thorn and Loon. It's a thrilling, dudes-rock chapter in

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 theme in our discussion as well--between people, between humans and non-human persons (wolverine, Heather, and Click), and between homo sapiens and other non-homo sapiens humans (Heather and Click). We talk more about the dialectic between novelty and sameness, social organization and the place of the individual within the group in Shaman, and the patterns and diversity of experience available to pre-historic people. These chapters depict the eight eight festival, Loon's meeting Elga, and a long winter in which one member of the Wolf pack dies. At the eight eight festival, the shamans have their corroboree, and we see t

[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 contrast to the picture of the life of early humans that capitalism tries to impose on our imagination. The world of this novel has no state or politics to speak of, no written language, no phone, no lights, no motor cars--and yet, if it's not a life of luxury, it's at least one of plenty. Although there's a division of labor, that labor does not present itself as alienated. Knowledge disciplines seem undivided--the lines between science, art, history, philosophy are not yet drawn, or are drawn very differently. Political power as we know it is absent; leadership is more about responsibility to the collective than the

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 the pandemic and under capitalism more generally. Topics include: despair what kind of science fiction novel is this? Chauvet cave things we miss things we had already lacked common life basketball vs. crossfit immersion in the rigorous imagination of a completely different lifeway adventure, blood, starting fires with sticks gender and primitivism boy perspectives Thank you for listening and we hope to be back next week with regularly scheduled programing! Email us at maroonedonmarspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Leave us a voicemail on the Anchor.fm app Rate and review u

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 Pipeline by Andreas Malm, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual by Katerina Clark, Penelope Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad Lose lose lose lose lose lose lose win! We want to thank Stan again for his time, thoughts, and support! Thanks for listening! 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 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/marooned-on-mars/message

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 doesn’t belong to someone else, or to capital. Revolution isn’t necessarily recognizable as such in the moment it’s happening, and even if you’re doing a revolution, you may have to do it again. Radical democracy, the internet of animals, the personhood of plants, the return of meaning, living in loss, building on ruins science fiction's obsession with population, the shackling of science by capitalist instrumentality, family and solidarity, dignity, connection, the fundamental mysteriousness of Being, independent of the limitations capital places on us--we talk about it all, man. And we try to reconcile ourselves to

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 inevitable winding down into death, in spite of, or maybe as a part of, all the progress that's also being made. What are we mourning, and how do we suffer? What is our relationship to the present--to America, to capitalism, to progress? What is Mary's relationship to Frank--one of care, of obligation, of happenstance? How (and why) do we mourn the loss of a myth of a world that has been the cause and condition of our suffering? This is a time of stocktaking and accounting, of repair and reparation, of Pyrrhic defeat that beggars all comparison and once again demonstrates the failure of analogy while simultaneously succu

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, fables and science fiction, accidents of history, and the vicissitudes of being a herd animal. All with extreme judiciousness! 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 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/marooned-on-mars/message

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 world. Then we talk about the usual: the state, the law, the market, money, sabotage, arbitrage, organization, spontaneity, the problem of spirit, religion, animals, etc. We talk about MMT vs. a Marxist critique of capitalism, the relationship of democracy and transparency, money and power, and the everything feeling. We think about what it's like when nature looks back at you and when your cat sneezes into your microphone. We ponder the riddle of history and debate the all-too-human costs of pie. Thanks for listening! Do not email us if you have any criticisms, we only accept praise and collaboration! Email us at ma

Happy Ritualized Ideological Food Consumption Day! Matt and Hilary start with another cheery conversation designed to indoctrinate the masses into the glorious of atomized leftism by further exposing the family form as a big mess, and conclude that November is all about bad ways to perform both the family and democracy: holidays and elections. Hilary’s big thought this week is about the utopianism of this novel existing in a state of a kind of constant deferral of resolutions. No single action Mary or anyone else takes is The Solution to all the problems, so there’s a demand to try a thing without knowing how it will come out—an opening of the future. In the book, these actions often result in nothing immediately happening, which may point to a structure of feeling we may need to get used to. This opening relies on the possibility of somehow reversing Marx’s adage describing capitalism as “all that is solid melts in air.” In The Ministry for the Future, all that is air must congeal into a solid, by drawing ca