Spectology: The Science Fiction Book Club Podcast

Bee is back (although Estelle could not join us due to IRL events) to discuss Temi Oh's wonderful debut novel, Do You Dream of Terra-Two? (https://bookshop.org/a/1159/9781534437401). With hints of Dark Eden, Semiosis, and Unkindness of Ghosts, this novel tackles the lives on a group of young people who are sent off to colonize a new world. 

It's probably the best book I've read this year, and one of the best we've read on this podcast. I do hope you enjoy us talking about belief, depression, building relationships, and why you're right not to trust adults in this episode. And please pick up & read this novel if you haven't yet, you won't regret it. 

(One note: we forgot the content warnings at the top, so be aware that there are frank discussions of depression, suicide, eating disorders, isolation, bullying, and more in this episode.) 

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Make sure to follow Bee at their twitter & patreon.

As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast if we talk about your comment. 

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

To find links to all the books we've read, check us out on Bookshop.

Many thanks to Dubby J our music.

Lydia joins us again as we discuss The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull! 

We absolutely loved this novel, which details the life of island inhabitants living under a passively repressive regime of extra-terrestrials, who are here on Earth for unspecified reasons. 

There is resistance, there are people who want to work with the aliens, there are people who don't care. Their lives each gets looked at in depth. It's a beautiful book and one worth reading, and we have a really fun conversation, which I hope you will enjoy too!

* The Lesson on bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/a/1159/9781094081298

* The Lesson on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/31gXsTN

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

To find links to all the books we've read, check us out on Bookshop.

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

This is a somewhat personal & sometimes somber episode, recorded while the world was changing rapidly around us due to the global COVID-19 outbreak. We do our best to discuss the novel, Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, although neither of us were able to finish it due to external world circumstances. It is by far our shortest post-read ever.

We forgot to do content warnings. We have really frank discussions of grief, death, isolation, and loneliness. There is a brief mention of suicide. 

While this was recorded, Adrian was in quarantine due to having had extended contact with a confirmed COVID-19 case. I'm happy to report that the quarantine is up and I've been fortunate enough to suffer no symptoms, and my friend who was sick is on the mend. But it the fear and uncertainty of those circumstances color the whole episode.

We hope that this episode brings some light into your life at the moment. We'll be back next month with a warm, cozy, escapist book & a guest we've been excited to feature. We'll also be publishing some extra episodes on the feed while social distancing, more information to come on those soon. 

Please stay safe, stay healthy, and remember that your health affects not only yourself, but also those around you. 

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

To find links to all the books we've read, check us out on Bookshop.

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

We've finally done it! Sorry for the late episode, a few real life considerations got in the way of editing. 

We're joined again by Ben Roswell (@roswellwrites on twitter & roswellian.itch.io) to discuss Catie Disabato's postmodern novel of celebrity & architectural cults, The Ghost Network (https://amzn.to/2VtAhVc). 

We all had a lot of thoughts on this book, and for any given one two of us agreed and a third didn't, in various combinations, like a big fun podcast triangle! It was a lovely conversation, about a great book to discuss with others.

Stuff we mentioned:

* Fight Truck: https://pantamalion.itch.io/fight-truck

* Trash Theory on FKA Twigs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oXADE5bzZI

* Roxane Gay on Janelle Monáe: https://www.thecut.com/2020/02/janelle-monae-afrofuture.html

* Lady Gaga Isn't Done Shape-Shifting Yet by Rachel Symes: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/03/magazine/lady-gaga-movie-star-is-born.html

* The Wikipedia page on Selena (cw domestic violence): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selena 

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

Well, we've finally found a book we disagree on! While Matt loved A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (https://amzn.to/2GrJJzC), Adrian was more cool on it. In this episode we discuss our disagreements, which largely come down to matters of taste in the aesthetics of stories we enjoy. We also get at some of the tough questions about empire & cultural hegemony posed by the book, and discuss wether we think the book fully explored these issues. We also talk plenty about the historical worldbuilding & other elements that we both enjoyed.

It's a different episode than most, in that we disagreed, it's actually the second time we recorded the post-read (we weren't happy with the way the first session came out), and we recored in person together in Adrian's NYC apartment. 

There's a long list of other books / media we talk about at the end of the episode and I've tried to capture them all here. As always, links at spectology.com if they don't show up in your podcatcher, and any Amazon links are affiliates.

* East Goes West by Kang Younghill

* 1587: A Year of No Significance by Ray Huang

* Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

* Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

* Foreigner by CJ Cherryh

* Treason by the Book by Jonathan Spence

* Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott

* An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon (episodes 20.1 & 20.2)

* Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (episodes 6.1 & 6.2)

* Byzantophilia in the Letters of Grigor Magistros? by AnnaLinden Weller 

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

For our final book in our "classics" series, we read Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, a novel by Samuel R. Delany (https://amzn.to/2tTUHL5). This episode we're joined by Bee Gabriel (@benladen on twitter & patreon.com/benladen), an old friend of the podcast & one of Adrian's favorite cultural critics. 

This novel was an absolute joy to read & to talk about. Our discussion ranges the gamut, and our recording session went an hour over schedule because we all had so much we wanted to talk about! How gendered language affects the way we look at the world & self-identify. The ethics of eating meat. The ethics of cross-class romantic relationships. How fucking good a writer Delany is. And what is exactly a Cultural Fugue? 

Some links to things mentioned (as always, links at spectology.com if they don't show up in you podcatcher): 

* Bee's patreon cooking & cultural criticism blog 

* Bee's public blog, Uninterpretative 

* The Playdate pop-up gaming event 

* Bee's music & yearly compilations 

* Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris (briefly referred to as "Malcolm's book") 

* Gay New York by George Chauncey 

Thanks so much to everyone who has been involved with Spectology for another great year! We'll be back in 2020 with more books, guests, interviews, bonus episodes, etc.. We've had a great time & hope everyone else has too.

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

A doozy of a book, and one where we start off the episode not agreeing on how we liked it! Charlotte Geater (@tambourine on twitter and creator of wonderful bot-based poetry) joins us again after her Rupetta episodes last December to discuss the 1960s underground classic, Ice by Anna Kavan (https://amzn.to/2PRGTth). We discuss death, addiction, patriarchy, experimental fiction, and whether there are any easy allegories in this novel (answer: no). Adrian comes to terms with not having enjoyed reading the novel—but being glad he read it. 

This is a very brutal book, and if you're going to read it you might want to check out our content warnings at the 12m27s mark. 

Charlotte recommended a number of stories, books, and novels to go along with Ice. Links to them all are collected below. Go to Spectology.com if the links don't show up on your podcatcher.

* Excerpt of Sofia Samatar's novella, Fallow

* Descriptions of Jane Gaskell's unfortunately out of print novels

* Ann Quin's recently republished first novel, Berg

* "The Debutant", a story by Leonora Carrington

* Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by BS Johnson

* Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Kingdoms of Elfin

* Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson

* The Weird Tales podcast reads Lord Dunsany

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

Seth Heasley of the Hugos There podcast (https://hugospodcast.com) joins us to discuss Arthur C. Clarke's 1950s classic, Childhood's End (https://amzn.to/2srqLWa).

This is a short book about big ideas, asking what would happen if aliens came to Earth and instituted a generations-long paternalistic program to get us ready for our next stage of evolution. 

We discuss the book's major influence on science fiction, from Vinge, Niven, & Stephenson, to anime like Akira, to The Three-Body Problem. We dig deep into the books politics around colonialism. And we ask what it would be like to live through a society that has everything it could want, but knows that it's no longer in charge of its own destiny.

Here's a short list of other things we discussed on the episode. Links at spectology.com if they don't show up in your podcatcher.

* Jo Walton on Childhood's End 

* Adrian on Hugos There discussing The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin 

* All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace 

* Tobias Buckell's story The Very Last Curator of What Little Remains of the Western World (patreon pay wall)

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

[A note: the content warnings at the beginning also apply to the episode as a whole. We talk about a lot of it in depth in a way that might be uncomfortable for some listeners. This episode is probably even less appropriate for younger children than normal due to that.]

We're back having read An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon (https://amzn.to/2OMpWie), and here to talk about it in depth! 

We have a pretty far-ranging conversation about the ideas in the book, from how to be a friend and ally, to when violent revolution is necessary, to discussing the large social structures of the ship & the real world. We don't disagree about much, but we manage to argue a lot anyway! And towards the end we get to answering some of the existential questions we asked of ourselves in the post-read.

Stick around for the end to hear about what we're doing in December & early 2020 as well.

Other works mentioned:

* Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes 
* Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (episodes) 
* Semiosis by Sue Burke (episodes) 
* Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (episodes) 
* Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle (episodes) 
* Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.

Coming at you in person, Matt & Adrian sat down in the same room to record an episode about Colson Whitehead's post-apocalyptic literary novel, Zone One (https://amzn.to/2MR1hZT).

We loved this book, and had in particular have a lot to say about its relationship to other apocalyptic literary fiction, the ways the novel discusses, analogizes, and interacts with depression & PTSD, and New York City in literature and reality.

Other works mentioned:

* Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 
* White Noise by Don DeLillo 
* Cosmopolis, dir. by David Cronenberg 
* 10:04 by Ben Lerner 
* California by Edan Lepucki 
* Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson 
* Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 
* The New & Improved Romie Futch by Julia Elliott 

(Links in the shownotes at spectology.com if they don't show up in your podcatcher. All amazon links are affiliates.)

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As always, we'd love to hear from you! Chat with us on twitter at @spectologypod, send us an email at mailbox@spectology.com, or submit the episode to r/printSF on reddit. We'll reply, and shout you out in the next podcast when we talk about your comment.

And if you like the episode, subscribe at spectology.com or whever you listen to podcasts, and share it with your friends!

Many thanks to Dubby J and Noah Bradley for doing our music and art.