Fred and Jeff and John are the three horsemen. They never get along. They're the three horsemen. They all do that science fiction and fantasy.
Fred and Jeff and John are the three horsemen. Ride horsemen, ride horsemen. Hello, this is Jeff Patterson and it is the end of February, probably the beginning of March. By the time you hear this and it is time for a new episode of the three horsemen.
We're doing a little bit of ketchup because once again life is getting in the way. So we want to talk a little bit about culture consumed tonight and I am joined as always by my co-hosts. Say hello to Mr. John Stevens.
Hello, yes it is the end. We are here at the end of the month, hopefully just the month. I am a writer and a reviewer and a critic and a bookseller and pretty much all kinds of things related to two books and media kind of person. And I am currently mostly nosing around on Twitter as Area Dydoger and I am also nosing around on Facebook and that's about it for now.
And in the other chair Mr. Fred Kish. And I am Mr. Fred Kish.
I can't even remember what the hell I am anymore. Fred Kish on Twitter and sometimes on Facebook but mostly under other guys. This one will look at me there. Blog at Vernal Alpha and today I was named in the same sentence so take that and put it in your plate.
By whom? By Samuel R. Delaney who posted a picture of all the autograph journals he is sending out to people at the editing process. He listed me two names away from Neil Gaiman.
So there is my six degrees of Kevin Baker. There you go. That is great. And I am in six.
It is just two. Yeah. You got four to spare man. See how far you can go.
And I am Jeff Patterson. Jeff Patterson 11 on Twitter. And I think I am just Jeff Patterson on Facebook. And I do all kinds of stuff and I currently have a novelt in the anthology Reliquary, the always anthology volume two which is available for paperback on Amazon.
Still no e-book. It is being worked on. It will be there eventually. Well tonight we want to do a little bit of catch up on Culture Consume because it has been a month since we have been together and we do have some stuff planned for the weeks to come.
So I want to get some of the culture consumed out of the way. And one of the first things I want to talk about was the expanse because with the last episode that aired as of this recording they had pretty much wrapped up the first novel in the series which is nice because I was sort of expecting them to do that at the end of the last season. And they decided no we are going to extend the story into the second season which I found fairly interesting. It was exactly certain what the logic was for that.
But I kind of expected Leviathan wakes would take about a season to finish and they elected to go a season in five episodes. So it was an interesting choice. There was a few things that they did in the series that were definitely a plus bringing Christian in as a character in the first season. Certainly added a bit of weight in gravitas and I thought she was very well used in the last episode.
Not so certain about bringing Bobby in because they basically gave her a couple episodes to run around in grimace and then put her away for a couple episodes so we could wrap up Leviathan wakes. But it's been fairly interesting for the most part. A couple things that have been very nice about it and this is strictly stylistically speaking is that they've managed to kind of avoid the participatory shaky cam that we're seeing so prominent when it comes to science fiction especially when it involves face flight and ships flying around and engaging each other in close quarters. And it was kind of nice given how beautiful this CGI has been.
Some of the shots of Tycho Station they just let linger for 30 seconds and I'm like yes getting more please. But I've also been pleased with the way they managed to really go out of their way to give each character room to move with a possible exception of Fred Johnson. They kind of sort of made him a one note character for this particular story which isn't necessarily bad at least they got him some screen time. But as we got to the last two episodes and we saw them approaching the climax of the book I was really pleased with the care that they gave it to make sure that every character had a reaction and had something to say about the goings-on and managed to maintain the core characteristics that they developed over the course of the first season as they approach it.
And not to mention the fact that the last episode when Miller actually goes into aero station was just beautiful beyond my expectations in the way they managed to portray the inside of the station and the proto-molecable. I've been pretty happy with it for something that sort of rushes up against freelancer versus military versus various factions in the solar system. I think it's done a pretty good job. There was one or two episodes in the first season that I thought could have been combined and it was a bit more decompression than I would have liked to have seen and I realized about six episodes into it.
I said they're not going to get to the end of the lives in this first season and it almost seemed like they were decompressing for the sake of it just to build up tension. And it's one of those things that made me all look back and and view it differently. But I was very interested in how they were going to handle the ending of Leviathan Lakes due to the fact that that ending to me always sort of marked the point where there's no longer any denying that there's other forces at play in what's going on aside from Earthmar's and the belt. And also sort of opens up the dynamic of the story for everything that comes later, especially in the two books that we follow.
So I was very, very pleased with it. They did a nice job of incorporating all the UN scenes and the minister, president, whatever he is, his hesitancy to take action and. You mean Joe Biden? Yeah Joe Biden.
Future Joe Biden. He looks just like. Yeah, he does. That's what he's doing now.
And I also like the fact that they incorporated how Mars is going to treat this and stuff like that. The book itself is sort of stayed very close quarters when it came to the POV with Holden and Miller, which was nice because it really built up a nice little dynamic. But the fact that we actually saw how this is spilling out into the rest of the solar system, seeing Fred watching everything and Fred reaching out to Christian. It was a nice little modification of the story that served the nature of telling a serial series like this.
And in that regard, I thought it did a very, very nice job. And I forget her name. Fred Johnson's assistant, the one who winds up playing, playing handball with Naomi and then basically making the jokes with them while they're you know, talking about compromising with Earth, etc. She actually really managed to stand out.
I was quite surprised that they made her such a likable character in the course of it. Yeah, the only thing that the only thing about the run of the show up to now really was the introduction about me because it didn't really seem to serve much purpose. Probably did fulfill a service, fan service. Yeah.
Well, it's interesting because the scenes that she had were basically her scenes in the first six chapters of the second book and you know, Calivans War and it just seemed kind of odd to sort of lift those scenes up but at the front of the series. It certainly set a tone, the whole idea of there being this weird dynamic amongst the Martian troops. But that tone didn't really come into play. It wasn't really folded into the formula like everything else was like Fred and Christian and the UN and and Mr.
Mao and everyone else. It just seemed to be high. Let's get the introduction of these characters out of the way so we can just hit the ground running with them. Well, the first season they really didn't do much.
I think if I have one complaint about the whole series, it's that each season is just too darn sharp. I mean, it's 10 episodes for the first. I think they're doing 13 for the second and I feel that there's a real conflict between giving every single character enough airtime. So for the first season they pulled Christians into it and I thought they could have done so much more with her to explain what was going on with Earth and they didn't.
So this season, I mean, it looks like they dragged Bobby into it. Oh, actually, I guess we should say spoilers. Yeah. So it appears to me that they put her into this one because they're not really doing each season equals one book, but it's going to be a melding of the overall.
What's the first arc? Is that what nine books going to be? Yes, I think they've said at this point. So maybe each season will be a melding between the first half and the second half of a book with elements of another or something like that.
So in the last episode scene they showed in coming weeks, and one of them was the whole thing with Ganymede and her squad getting engaged and stuff. I guess maybe the second half of the season will be more with her. I hope so. I also did mention that they give us a little bit of the butcher of Anderson station, short story in the first season too.
Kind of a nice little drop in. It's interesting a little bit of the hint of the one story that you're in. I guess it was the second episode of the second season. Just a little bit of it.
So in this case, a little backstory. Which is nice. I'm kind of looking forward to how this plays out. But as an adaptation, I mean, there's there's a side from length actual running time.
And even then I agree with you that it went by too quickly. But once again, there were there was at least two episodes that could have been combined in the first season. The whole one where they got a pass the pass code off to the ship that's threatening to board them. Because they members the code phrase that was there.
That that did not need to be a full episode. Because a it didn't really progress the story. It just got them from one location to another. And I get it.
They're trying to drive tension and show the kind of everyday stuff that people would out the cope with. But at the same time, it just I didn't feel it really served the first season. But it's funny you should mention him. It's because he's really been.
I mean, I think everyone's been standout. But I was kind of I came into the second season and I'm watching the first episode and I said, oh yeah, they're saying this. I forgot about him. And they managed to make him such a good character, especially where he keeps replaying the simulation of the of the fight that they were in because he's obsessed by it.
That was really good. Yeah, I really have been enjoying it. And it's fun. It's fun to have an adaptation that's actually that's Alex.
Oh, I'm sorry Alex. That's the engine of the time. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Which you know, but that the same sort of thing. I mean, he had several great little bits. I mean, he's like, you know, I see a problem here. You're standing in front of my my XO.
They're from going to shoot you in the back of the head because well, you're a problem. But even the the most recent episode air, I mean, everyone, you know, a lot of his scenes, he's just been like this guy who's suffering from you know, PTSD or whatever and kind of a moral and kind of acting non-intelligent. But in this this most recent episode, he likes to start doing formulas on the amount of keeping released on the inside of arrows showing that he's oh, no, he's actually an engineer. He's or engineering assistant.
He's got to know. He's not just this free smoky. He's got to know, you know, scientists. He's a space crease monkey.
You got to know a lot of stuff. You got to know that. And one of the one of the things that got a lot of praise about that last episode in a few different reviews and a few different science blogs on top of that was how viscerally made the portrayal of gravity when they're going into the acceleration to catch up with it. And the fact that they had to use the little buffering juice that they had to pump into them, which you really hadn't seen since the first few episodes.
And also the fact that it can kill you. And they did a very nice job with that. It was one of those things that the longer you got into it, and you see Naomi's notes start to bleed and stuff like that. It was one of those really high impact moments.
Real gut punching always. I mean, the first episode of the first season when they did the flip and burn, that's when the quote made. It's like, I replayed that sequence for it. I was like, finally, someone's got Newtonian physics in their show.
Yeah, it's I had a very similar thought it was weird because just recently we rewatched a couple of Babylon five episodes and Babylon five was very good at portraying Newtonian physics when it came to the way you maneuver a ship, but it didn't portray its impact on the actual pilots. Right. So I mean, this one's got that. I mean, it's also got until the attack on the ring station, where they go up against the one's stealth ship kind of brought them pretty darn close to each other.
But in general, the battles have been far away, which I mean, here in the solar system is not interesting or space like in Star Trek, but you're out there. You've got room with the maneuver. You don't necessarily have to see the opposing body. They actually did.
They pretty good. I actually had a flashback. It was a terrible show that talks about for a while called Space Above and Beyond. But there was one thing that I did like about that show and that's when they had the enemy engagements.
It wasn't full blown shooting at each other. It was basically launching a torpedo, wait for it to see if it hits or not. You know, it was almost the space equivalent of a range war. And the way they would portray it was somebody would look out the screen that would be a fairly rapid CGI zoom in to the enemy ship coming and they did that a couple times in these last two episodes when they were zooming in on the Mormon ship and just kind of trying to show you not, hey, this is neat hiking.
I can be trying to show you what this is the relative distance that is now between these two objects in space that are approaching each other. And when arrows actually moves and we see Miller's point of view tip upward at the ship, that beautiful shot of the ship going overhead. Hey, wait a minute now. It's supposed to hit me.
You want to go? And one other thing that can be said is that this is a show that I'm very glad we had full blown HD in order to watch because this would have lost. Yeah, I mean, my God, those beauty shots at Pico station are just mesmerizing. I could stare at a still for hours just and follow all the struts and spars and piping and beautiful work, really beautiful work.
So I'm looking forward to it, but I basically we had to I wanted to tip that hat to the back of the wrap, the first book and I was very concerned about how they were going to do it. I thought they were going to kind of divvy everything up. So to have a soft division between between Leviathan Wakes and the rest of the series and they managed to do it quite well. So now we don't have to do a whole lot of character introduction leading into the events of Calivans war, which is nice.
So it should be good and bloody. So if you both read all the books, what was the last one Babylon's ashes? I have not read Babylon's ashes. I read numerous schemes.
I have not read the books. That's not a terrible terrible person. And hey, according to Wikipedia, I did not know this, but I guess in Babylon's ashes, they mentioned Mark Watley, which means that the Martian takes place in the same continuity as the experience. That's according to Wikipedia.
I am not speaking from any true authority here. This link is made semi-canon with the mention of the ship name the Mark Watley based out of Mars in Babylon's ashes. Yes, it is. I like that.
Yeah, it kind of makes sense. Do you want to write read all but most recently as you did and recently came across believe or not, there is a prelude comic now out, which I haven't gotten to yet, but it is a first issue dropped some slowly back in my my vast digital collection here, maybe two weeks ago. So we'll have to look for that. All right, here we go.
writer's credit this James, James, I say quarry art by Tiorana Farrell, if they are our yellow. So that just came out at the beginning of the month. And it's a at least listed here as a limited run one one of four from a boom. So do that for issues?
Good morning. Oh, it's a prequel. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's not it's not Leviathan's wake.
It's a prequel. So I assume that maybe it's similar to the prequel story that appeared in one of Jonathan's Ron's anthologies where he talked about the guy that came up with the space, you know, the more efficient fusion drive within the controls broke down. And now he's on his way to Proxima Centauri. Yep.
Good good fraction and like accidents happen. He could have been the richest man in the solar system, but forgot to put in those backup controls. Instead, he got screwed by physics. Yeah, screwed by physics.
Where those educational films, you know, that's right. So yeah, it's very nice having a decent book adaptation as a television show. I'm hoping the inner geek in me, I mean, I would love to have a model of some of these ships. You know, you're drooling over taiko station, I'm drooling over the rosy.
I love that design. I mean, I'd love to have like a poster of arrows or sirs or even like that opening shot where I guess this must be holding is like above the rings that are now and all the books. Yeah, and all the moons line up. I mean, that that's just, you know, some of the stuff that really grabbed me initially was just seeing some of those shots.
Yeah, that entire opening credit there with the showing how Earth and the moon and Mars are transformed. Right. But that's the weird thing. You notice that they've essentially cut that out this season.
No, it was there. Last one. You see the high shot of it. I mean, it's truncated.
We see the aerial shot. Oh, yeah, very truncated because I think they're doing more and more of the previously on dot dot dot. So that seems to take up time and then they do, you know, the opening five minutes or so and then the sequence is kind of shut short. So I'm wondering whether on the DVD that'll be restored because you really won't need the previously on the DVD version.
And the other thing I've noticed is, I don't know about, you know, I mean, I mean, I've been recording it as it first appears on Wednesday night. And the first night, the full range of cursing was in was in the mix. But like I watched the last two episodes today, and sometimes it was left in, sometimes it was chopped out. Yeah.
So I'm not sure what the judgment is that you will leave a, you know, delete an F bomb to the point where all you can hear is part of it, but leave other leave other bodily functions in. Yeah. So you hear the entire word, I have no idea what the logic is between behind that. Yeah, I don't think I've watched any of them on the first run.
So I recorded them on re airs later in the night. So I mean, I've heard that if the episode was shown again, I guess they showed, you know, first at nine o'clock or whatever, the show again at 11 or one or whatever. So on the second showing they leave the stuff in, I have no idea. It's just a rumor I've heard from another show that's on the incomparable network.
Yeah, it could be. I know that I know Canada, I think it's still called Space Up There, their version of the life I jumped. Yeah, they're running it pretty much on Sunset right now. So, okay, I know.
Excellent. I haven't really been watching too much other TV. I actually went back and watched the front. I had not watched this before the first episode of I can't think of anyone's name.
Rowan Atkinson played a great detective from the George was it. Yeah, the first episode of that from last year. And that was pretty intriguing. Beautiful atmosphere and everybody did their character very quirky and it was a couple more.
I gotta get through the first episode. Sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. I was going to ask have either of you watched the magicians.
No, no. No, okay, or read the books. I read the first one. Yeah, same here.
Yeah, I mean, I haven't seen the series, but every time I see the clips now, as I'm watching the expanse, I'm thinking, you know, this almost looks like they're trying to do Roger's last year's Amber series. It just has that feeling, you know, that they always kind of give a hint to the politics, you know, the battling of the different groups and then the fact that they keep dropping into the regular earth or whatever. I'm like, you know, I wonder if they could do an Amber series. Well, it's funny, you're not the first person to A, you're not the first person I've heard that from and B, something else I'll say is that the promos that they've run during the expanse are much more compelling than the promos they ran for the first season.
I have no interest at all in the first season, but the second season, I kind of like, who that looks like. It is actually, yeah, right, thanks. It's starting to look good. Hmm.
Well, aside from TV, a couple of the things I wanted to red flag as we as we go forward into 2017, a comic appeared out of nowhere that I had not heard of before it came out, nor was I expecting it to be really good. And it is called God Country. It's put out by Image, it's written by Donny Cates in the Arts by Jeff Shaw. And it's a story about a couple with their son that lives out in Texas that has their father who's really suffering from dementia, living with them.
And one day the father goes walking outside and there's a massive storm, and the storm seems to be targeting him. And then this big demon appears and the demon appears to be targeting him. And then this giant sword appears. And as soon as he grabs the sword, he no longer has dementia.
And those what he's doing and manages to fight back the demon. And the second issue, a war got appears and says, Hi, that's my sword. And my father would like it back. And the guy says, if I give this back to you, will I go back to being crazy?
And he says, yes, I'm afraid you will. He says, well, I can't give it to you. You're gonna have to come get it. And it all takes place in Texas.
It's a very, very interesting series so far. And I want to see where this is gonna go. I were straight ahead of the Man of Sea series like this. We haven't really seen many.
And this seems to be sort of a unit task or telling one one story as opposed to telling an ensemble story. So I'm kind of curious where that is going to go. And the first issue of the Wildstone, which is Lauren Ellis sort of rebooting his wildstone properties from the 90s, came out. And it's a kind of neat re-envisioning of it.
I got a hand at home. He's done some pretty neat stuff with it so far. Also my list of I've got it, but I haven't gotten to it yet. Now, is that related to what I pick up something else about him recently?
Oh, that's what I think I picked up the side stories or whatever they were of the planetary. We're like the back. Oh, yeah, the planetary crossovers. Yeah, there was one collection that was just the crossovers with with authority, Batman, and then the the Justice League one where he sort of portrayed the members of Planet areas, the bad guys, from the regular run.
That was rather interesting one. How superpowers would get end up getting commercialized. That was a pretty good story. I always liked that one.
Maybe we need to revisit Mr. Ellis again. Perhaps, perhaps. And Mike Kerry has a new book out and I can't think of the damn name of it.
Like, it's driving me nuts. Was it? Yeah, it was the darkness visible. Yeah, it's darkness visible, which is up by IDW.
And he's co-writing it with Avrin deep and David and Ben Cahill's doing the rather interesting art. And on page three, we have a woman opening her trench coat and her basically her entire torso was a giant beaten face. And it was rather, oh, so we're going in this direction. Yeah, kind of neat.
Yeah, everything else I'm just going to reading for other other crossover events that either begin or end. So we can finally get our cosmic characters back into space and where everyone belongs. And we'll see. I know Jason Aaron's finally going to bring Dr.
Strange and Thor together. The two books he's been writing lately are coming together. So I'm kind of psyched for that. Yeah, it's been a few things.
There's a new Highlander comic, which I'm certain everyone's dropping. They're doing and running out and get. No, I was trying to explain Highlander to somebody that I said, okay, the first movie is really good provided you don't think about it afterwards. Don't watch anything more than 10 seconds.
I thought the whole thing goes apart. Johnny, what have you been reading? I have been reading not as much genre as usual, but I did read the first two volumes of Gail Simone's Clean Room, which was Freaky. Very Freaky.
Not just that it's Freaky, but that manages to maintain the Freakyness. That's an interesting point because I was sort of comparing it to a little bit to Neo-Nomicon at first, not because they're similar stories, just because Freaky. But what I realized was that Neo-Nomicon depends on a Lovecraftian sort of existential dread, whereas Clean Room feels much more visceral. It's going to sound weird, but much more character-driven.
And also in a way, it's somewhat more mature too. There's definitely horror, it's definitely about terrible things. It seems to really function much more maturely. It's just, when I read it, I feel a lot more in grasp of the characters.
I guess that's one way to put it right. That's like the things I encounter. Right. The other thing for me with that book was that so much of the horror that is encountered is inevitable because of the character baggage.
To the point where it's almost like undergoing these experiences is somehow cathartic and therapeutic to them, which I found just brilliant. The way she did that was brilliant. I think it really goes in a direction we have rarely seen for, certainly comic book horror. The almost unapologetic Lovecraftian influences that we've been seeing so much of.
I thought that it just really took things a little more seriously and definitely in a less cliched way. Because what I find happens a lot with derivative of Lovecraftian stuff is that in trying to use Lovecraft's conventions, it's almost inescapably cliched in some ways, but also strangely predictable. It's like only really good writers, I think, pull off their Lovecraftian homage in any really substantial way. I liked this but this was something different.
It's just really surprising and horrifying. Even to a jaded old guy like me. I'm really looking forward to reading more of it. I read that.
I've been reading some non-genre-ish stuff. I read a book on Sophie Shaw on the White Rose that was useful in some ways. The White Rose was a resistance group in Nazi Germany, comprised of college students who wrote a series of pamphlets that sort of people to resist Hitler. They were very well known for a period of time, but they got caught and unfortunately most of them were executed.
The story of them itself is just the story of doing the only thing they felt they could do, even though they knew it was going to get them into lethal amounts of trouble. This particular book is not a scholarly analysis. It's a very general reader kind of story. The strength of that is I think you get to know the characters better and you're not worrying so much about something in an electoral baggage.
I think the downside for me was I sometimes felt that the politics and philosophy kind of fell to the wayside in attempting to take a more sort of casual approach essentially to describing the events surrounding the White Rose. But I thought it was still a valuable read and the thing that I like to most about it actually was the attempts to contextualize how the group came about by using biographical information on the members to talk about their lives before they started doing the White Rose activities and how it's often easy to think of Germany during the Third Reich as some sort of monolithic society. But it was hugely like people were hugely ambivalent. There were there were there were fanatics and the fanatics were powered the the whole system but a lot of other people were very ambivalent and essentially went along to survive.
They went along with things to survive and a lot of them. There's captures a very good amount of attention to of making you know what is sort of a morally compromising decision. So yeah so I like that. I would recommend if you've never heard anything about the White Rose before but if you want to go really deeper into it you should probably pick up on the other books.
There's a lot of material but this was a good primer I think. And I read some more of my Chinese from a poetry because apparently I'm hooked on old Chinese term it's complaining about the sunrise. Funny how that speaks to me. So the only thing they complain about?
No they complain about a lot of stuff but they also have you know it's it's really funny because it's it can be sort of bitter at light at one in one poem the next poem will be you know like it's great like this fabulous and and done in this very dis-tansiated almost attached kind of poetry. But yeah it's it's really fun to read. I just got I just actually got a new collection I'm going to dive into which is I'm going to mispronounce that name but it's Li Hei who was a disolute relative of one of the I think one of the Tang emperors who would go get up in the morning and on his horse go ride in the woods and he would then stop when the inspiration took him he would write a poem and then crumple it up and throw it on the ground and there was a servant walking behind and would pick up the poems he threw on the ground. Okay that was how he composed his poetry and he died at the age of I think 25 probably you know the story goes because of drunkenness and excess.
But I'm looking forward to reading the poetry because there as a lot of the stuff is there are brief poems there their meaning often doesn't reveal itself in the first reading and the thing about his poetry is it's supposed to be much sharper more critical poetry in some ways than a lot of the other stuff I've been reading. So I'm looking forward to that and yeah that's that's I'm working on a couple of books that I haven't finished. I was sick for a bit so I watched a lot of TV I find it hard to read when I'm sick because my concentration just goes but yeah that's that's mostly it for me. Red how are you?
Well the project that is eating my brain is still eating my brain but I'm desperately trying to find balance so I've done some short stories. I finished the first volume of Fritz Lieber's Fafford collection and that was a nice thing to revisit. Kind of in the vein of the expanse I did read again the Butcher of Anderson station thinking of that but I've also been working my way through Alan Steele who is an author that really puts me in mind with the expanse along with like some you know Larry Niven and several other people like Ring of Z Gelloon you know all very similar stuff but I've been reading the aptly named Sex of Violence in Zero G the complete near space stories quote I'm sorry parentheses expanded edition on parentheses which is means that I mean every time he puts a new one in or out he gets added to this ebook and released as a even more expanded edition so that's kind of nice that I still have everything in one place. So those are fun stories and it does you know it does remind me that you know the expanse comes from a rich tradition of gritty science fiction set in our solar system so you know if you like the expanse there's plenty of the read I mean there's even another series another trilogy with another Royal Sinanti Alexis Gillian or the trilogy about a space colony and you know they've got a a ais and striking workers and governmental contracts that I get well Sean and all sorts of neat stuff so you know that those three are out as ebooks at the very least they don't have the wonderful Rick Stern back covers that Del Ray had for them years ago but you know you can still get them in there a fun little short read I have those and in fact the title of one of them is Risenante.
Yes well they're all it's a long shot from Roussainti the Pirates of Roussainti and the third one also mentioned Roussainti. Yes you know it's lovely you know great minds think alike or something so reading lots of short stories and on the book end of things I've been I too have been reading poetry John. Ooh snazzy. But not quite it's not Chinese hermits but hermits in the US Army.
A guy named Randy Brown who is known as Charlie Sherpa on Twitter wrote a collection called Welcome to FOB Haikou war poems from Inside the Wire and it's mostly from his experiences in Iraq I believe I can't remember whether it was also in Afghanistan or not or maybe I'll flipping maybe it's all from Afghanistan and not Iraq but it's a short collection but you know it spoke to me as a veteran so there you go and in history I also went back to World War I and I read a book about the birth of the American Tank Corps called Freedom Rough which I read and I'm like man some things we still haven't learned have we because of the units a lot of very familiar things like you know the American Army decided to adopt the French Tank. Varyus US companies got the contract to build a French tank and because of the not invented here syndrome never actually managed to get a French tank built in the US before the war ended so it was just you know the more things changed the more they stay the same yes and I'm also reading or have read um and I'm still reading and this is what I wanted to talk to you about John I mean you read that non-fiction book about Bouschold if I read correctly. Now have you read any Bouschold? I have read actually it's funny when I when I first got the book I immediately thought well you know I don't read a lot of his old so I'm wondering how I'll take it but then as I read the book I sort of remembered you know stuff that I had read and I eventually realized I've actually read a good amount of Bouschold I just I haven't read her best known stuff very much okay so I've read um Chris O'Chalion I've read the other one whose name is now escaping me no no the um there's a sharing knife the yes I read the sharing knife in that in that series but I've also read the other the kind of sequel the Chris O'Chalion and its name is totally escaping me now.
No it's not. No words escaping me too. But um the the penric yeah yeah the five the five gods is what I think what the series is now called but um and I've also read some early space opera stuff I think falling free is a wonderful novel and also I've read Ethan of ethos and I read I've read a couple of the um the vorka segan book vorka. Well I started with shards of honor again I read I think I read falling free when it was serialized and I've read some of the other like you know when uh Miles appeared in the story called The Weatherman right which was an analog so I've read bits and pieces that way and I've read the books but I haven't read them any long time so I started with shards of honor again and I actually just finished a very yard today and yeah it's just weird how you see you come back to something every years and years later you get an entirely different spin out of it right but I mean you know the whole series everyone focuses on Miles and but the first two books or at least those two books they were not written one after the other but they both deal with uh Cordelia right and her experiences in getting the barrier and living there right but what really struck me this time was the tragic figure of Sergeant Pathori who is you know Harold's uh kind of like arms men in the first book and then uh helps Cordelia a lot in the second book and just you know he's I mean the guy was used and abused by various people throughout the years to where he like basically had no soul left but you know she Cordelia was the one who saw that there was good in him right and redeemed him and he ultimately redeemed himself by killing the uh the usurper yeah and uh and then you know later goes on to uh be you know a guide for Miles and eventually meets with the tragic end but you know just you know I I don't I mean I know her father was a um an engineer and that's where she got the basis for uh a lot of the stuff in falling free for the engineering you know with like the the the welding and zero gene stuff like that we're in vacuum but I don't know what her experience was as far as the military was concerned but you know just she really hasn't authentic ring to it you know not only in the way people act you know the officers and the NCOs and things like that but just the the experience I think you know from people in combat you know how they react and what's left afterwards you know she talks about like uh Aril after he uh gets let go um from the Imperial Service before he gets gets called back again he's like going for throw rides and you know the light flyer and crash just twice and drink some stuff right so there's I think in there a lot of stuff that people didn't recognize until after 9-11 and stuff when we finally started realized that people have this thing it's not shell shark whatever you know it's it's a mental problem right but you know she seems to have caught on to it a lot earlier yeah I mean I think Edward James invokes this in the book in his book on her from a more from something more stepped back um perspective of her ability to really understand her character's psychology you know she she's very adept at taking their their back story their history you know the sort of context in which they've emerged and really think about you know how would how would a person you know what a person be like if this was their their background how would they react and when things change and you know she loves change she lives to document how how change affects people that um it's something that she folds really adeptly into into her characterizations and you know it's funny that you mentioned you know that you mentioned um Aril's situation when he's you know sort of sort of forced off duty that um you know the way he reacts isn't in a classical way really he he does something that you know you can definitely predict you know based on our basic ideas of you know how people do it stress but she really pulls that out of and folds it back into the character really well and you know and like the James R.
talks about her characterizations is one of the big strengths of her work and I think it's true I mean she even in like the the sharing life books weren't my favorite but she had a really good grasp on how the characters would act and it felt very it felt that you could establish a rapport with the characters too like most of her characters aren't inscrutable they may be hard to understand sometimes but they're they are accessible in a level to the reader and I think she works pretty hard at making them accessible so I think that's you know what I you know and I love that in um in falling free too the how the um I'm gonna figure what they call the squabbies right thank you I suppose how the quaddies yeah it's been a while it's only been like 30 years or something like that so squat swabbies is more something that you watch out of your trials here uh there's the catch and kindergarten or there you know there four lorren sailors on a ship or something what really captivated me about that book was that they're not just an an oddity presented with one characteristic like a lot and a lot of and a lot of science fiction that I actually read that book you know aliens and modified humans and such were just strange looking creatures that had the sort of one defining like we are the angry aliens and we are the you know we are the noble mutants and stuff like that but the quad is on her on her forehead start right next generation your makeup has no honor and uh but with the with the quaddies she did a really good job of integrating their physical reality into their characters no so I mean the other thing I noticed this time around was the humor a ton of humor I mean you know sordonic humor you know slapstick just social social observations I mean especially cordially observing right barryar in a society and then a barrier of the book I mean I've accumulated a lot of games from a company called gmt lately in this one series called coin you know counterinsurgency and reading barryar I'm like this could make a great coin game because you've got you know the governmental factions and you know who holds the emperor and who holds hostages and you know who wins at the propaganda war you know it's just like it's and in so many in interplanetary sense too like their struggles with with cedaganda and yeah and even with supposedly friendly planets there's there's a lot going on you know it's like churri was with you know when we read that picture you know so much you know with the politics you know so much deeper than just uh space battles and then the uh the other things uh only other two things I can I want to mention is that um on the role playing game front I got a copy of a adventure for kolofka thule called the orane express and this is a reboot of one that had in the I think it was the 80s yep except it is now a humongous humongous humongous 10 pound box set with all sorts of goodies yes it has grown imestrably now and then through the rune quest kickstarter I now have mejowd four hardcover volumes of from break safford's own notebooks there's a volume of the play test manuscript a volume called the west sorcery and orcat a volume called dragon pass in the wilds and finally the encyclopedia or antha and this is a wow combination of scanned paper pages that were typed or scanned pages from his notebooks so you've got his original maps and notes from his campaign wow handwritten drawings of things like the iron tower and uh you know various parts of dragon pass and whatever so for a fan of that game this is like treasure yes there's a sea that's pretty cool yep we um my keeper actually in the cse game that i'm in now was discussing the possibility of running um their oriented express for our next campaign it's but he said it's daunting yes yes i mean we ran it way back when and we also ran like masks of nyrolotha tips with the user i think to run and orane express was about the same i can't tell whether they really expanded the adventures just all the aodons and doodads and whatever but it's like it's 10 pounds my goodness it weighs more than the actual game you know so and that's me now that we put jeff asleep nope i'm here well i actually i got a lot of stuff that i haven't started reading it i got a new elm doubt like a lot of action black feathers uh which i'm really looking forward to her last three or four collections in a row with an spectacular um i got north mythology by no game and i haven't started that yet i got richard the sun uh i forgot that came out yeah i got the new michael sisco the richard the sun i haven't started that yet but one book that i have started is yes there is the richard the sun's um uh but the one book i wanted to mention as it may appeal to science fiction fans of the more analytical strike uh the philosopher you all know a harari has written a book called homo gaya subre history of tomorrow and i picked this up because i've been reading a lot of uh philosophy books lately and the first chapter of this one called the new human agenda is a pretty stunning read where basically he discusses the role of famine disease and war in humanity and history and how little of an impact it has on the modern world famine in particular um you know going on with the fact that more people die from obesity than hunger uh worldwide and also pointing out that the the percentage of people that die of old age now is is a complete sea change from from even the early 20th century the two premises of this book and basically it talks about theoretical advancements in in humanity and the way it deals with its technology and everything else there are two premises in this book the first one is that human beings thinking intellects are effectively behave indistinguishable from biological versions of algorithms he backs this up with a lot of stuff but i'm still not convinced of his first point that he's making the second point that he's making that i find far more interesting is the fact that this is the first time in history where the primary cause of death or just about everybody is their own behavior as opposed to external factors the things that we do ourselves personally physically and sociologically do more damage to us than the plague lack of food you know being in a war etc and while he does not discount or dismiss the current outbreaks and wars and everything else that comes into play he does break it down to very broad numbers and he does not do this personally either he's he's a very good um at times almost lyrical writer when it comes to expressing a lot of this um but it's so far i'm about two thirds of the way through and getting to the point where he starts looking at you know theoretical forms of the way consciousness can be developed and things like that so i'm plowing through it looking to see where he's going with this but it is rather fascinating that we can that the the as he points out the main cause of death in the interfacing is ourselves as opposed to you know the invaders blocking the army the blocking the road that the the bread comes out and stuff like that right um it's it's fairly interesting if you're a you know in reading it i was thinking a lot about brin and i was thinking a lot about uh captain and saro and i was thinking a lot about you know any any uh long-form themes where future development are pretty pretty important um and it also has got me thinking about the way post-scarcity concepts are expressing science fiction as well um as opposed to as a you know as a you know a just being given lip service as opposed to being really really you know when he's been and becoming part of the story so that's been a very fascinating book i'm very sensitive to and he wrote a book called um uh sapiens which was sort of the history of the history of humanity how we developed where we are which i have not read but which i'm probably going to try to get ahold of other having read this um because it's it's pretty neat he's launching a few i had just finished a little while ago the iron tactician by els or metals and oh and i was really happy with it because i love the merlin stories and he brought in some very interesting characters once again he's he sort of has his when he's he has this habit of dropping interesting characters in very near the end of the story i think the only other person pulls it off as well as him is maybe uh china megal who who can just you know have somebody walk on you know halfway through the third act and go ah this is the this is the information you don't have um and in thinking about that in the way that uh uh merlin is dealing with moving through the galaxy at relativistic speeds and seeing how development changes in various parts of the of the cohort um a lot of that was coming into play in my mind as i was reading this particular book so uh fascinating very very thought-provoking um and i cannot wait to finish it so i'm reading the other one and that's about all i got and i i think that's enough so anything else gentlemen well hopefully we will be back to you mid-month mid-March with our long long delayed and eternally side-tracked special episode yes i wish i would not say anything else because i don't want to curse it first yes yes it's it's getting to be like the last dangerous visions he's on no that's that's our our interview with chuck windick yes truly it is a white whale yes we love you chuck all right well john did you have anything else no i'm good all right well then we hope you all had a very good February and we hope march is good to you and we will see you all very soon you all have a good night good night