A Meal of Thorns 16 – AURORA with Hilary Strang

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.Please consider supporting ARB’s Patreon!Credits:Guest: Hilary StrangTitle: Aurora by Kim Stanley RobinsonHost: Jake Casella BrookinsMusic by Giselle Gabrielle GarciaArtwork by Rob PattersonOpening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John BroughReferences:Marooned on Mars, a podcast about the works of KSRUrsula Le Guin’s The DispossessedMargaret Killjoy’s A Country of GhostsKSR’s Mars trilogyFredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the FutureJohn Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogyWiscon“The Hard Problem” audio project adaptation of a section of Aurora, created with Marina Abramović’s workshop, mixed/composed by Adam Tinkle, with the Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Human Imagination at the University of California San Diego.Much of the web-available multimedia about this project is lost to time and linkrot, unfortunately, but there’s a very nice write-up at this fan-run KSR site.You can still find a YouTube version of the audio here.As mentioned in the show credits, the “Into the Impossible” podcast later developed into something very different, platforming far-right whackjobs, climate deniers, TESCREALists, that kind of thing, along with lots of presumably credible scientists, so: be warned. I’m not clear on how the early “Into the Impossible” podcasts with the Clarke Centre transitioned to the later, longer-running show with Brian Keating; just don’t want to accidentally contribute to any of you going down a brain-worm-inducing YouTube/podcast-algo spiral.Leyna Krow’s Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable VoidsTom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”“Wherever you go, there you are.”KSR’s 2312 and New York 2140Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the ChainTheodore McComb’s UraniansGene Wolfe’s Book of the Long SunStephen H. Dole’s Habitable Planets for ManTracked it down: the "drop unconscious humans off on a grid to check habitability" thing is from Charlie Stross’s excellent blog.C.J. Cherryh’s Heavy Time"Enough is as good as a feast."Le Guin’s “Mrs. Brown Test” is from “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown” in The Languages of the NightKSR’s Science in the Capital Trilogy, re-released as Green Earth"Science Fiction is the Realism of Our Times""True Voyage Is Return"The Alien filmsMary Shelley's Frankenstein