Marooned! On Mars With Matt And Hilary

Our review of Ridley Scott's Napoleon. 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://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/marooned-on-mars/message

We're still here! Grumpier than ever, complaining about things we probably shouldn't be, reading books, talking. And you're still listening! Thank you. We've been away for a long time for...reasons. But we are momentarily back, and maybe we'll be back again soon to talk about Napoleon and Ridley Scott. But this time we chat about the impossibilities and injustices of the working day under capitalism, capitalist education (indoctrination) and entertainment (propaganda), and let you in on what we've been reading instead of KSR, namely: Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler LOTS of Philip K. Dick, especially Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, Dr. Futurity, and Clans of the Alphane Moon the crime noir novels of Jean-Patrick Manchette The Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon Ursula K. Le Guin's short story "Direction of the Road" Grapes of Wrath and Bartolome de las Casas, just as a pick-me-up You cannot hear a cat purring at around 37:40, college students are planning for a

A very special episode of Marooned on Mars, a backdoor pilot, as they say in the biz, of Obstructed Viewing with friends of the pod returning-guest champion Bill and Dauphin Josh debuting their new movie podcast (has anyone ever done a podcast about movies before?). The theme of the show today is sabotage and movies that feature it: The Train (John Frankenheimer, 1964) and Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977). If possible, you should watch these movies before listening, just so you know what the heck we’re talking about. What is sabotage, who does it and why? Is terrorism sabotage by another name? What level of complicity does a saboteur need to have with the object or process that is the target of their sabotage? Why do people commit sabotage? How does sabotage relate to self-sabotage? Is it a negative or positive action? Is there a dialectics of sabotage? What is the good of sabotage in and of itself? What is the temporality of sabotage? But more importantly, how awesome are these movies, huh? Lots of stuf

In our final reckoning with GALILEO'S DREAM, we talk about our horrible voices and their dumb verbal tics, the trickiness of time travel narratives, anticlimactic moments, conspiratorial webs, the decentering of Event, crabbing sideways toward the good, rocking, the universal unity of grief, and Milton doing TikTok dances. Thanks for listening! We'll be back later, probably with a movie episode or several. You can let us know what you'd like us to read next by emailing or tweeting. Stop donating to our podcast! 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://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/marooned-on-mars/message

This episode we discuss the Jovian society, the way the novel posits the relationship between science and religion, the entwined logics of extraction and redemption, the astrological epistemology, ecstasy, the our own Thirty+ Years War, and whales. 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

In probably our greatest episode ever, Matt and Ms. Partial Sentence talk about all the stuff we normally talk about, like Shark Tank, redemption, helmets, jazz, the Divine Comedy, and Constructivism. Plus Matt does drugs. Stay tuned to the very end to hear our next-level casting idea for who should play Galileo in the movie adaptation. The answer may shock and surprise you! 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

Buongiorno! We're back with another thrilling series of discussions, and back to our author of choice, Kim Stanley Robinson. This time around we're discussing his weird and wonderful 2009 novel Galileo's Dream! Lots to talk about here, like history and who it's for, narrational voice, genre, science's relationship to religion, politics, money, power, and labor, and, of course, cats. For this book our conversations will focus more on big themes rather than a narrative blow-by-blow. So: spoilers ahead! (Oh, and we also discuss the concept of spoilers with relation to this book.) This episode covers roughly the first hundred pages or so, though again our conversation is mostly conceptual and thematic. But it was a fun talk to have, hopefully a fun one to listen to, about a book that is super super fun! 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 podc

This week, we apologize for discussing STEALTH, an extended Incubus music video/ American military propaganda directed by Rob Cohen. Join us as we discuss the exploits of Ben "Big" Gannon (Talon 1, Josh "George" Lucas), Kara "Caraway" Wade (Talon 2, Jessica Biel), and Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx (Talon 3, "Henry"), as they face the threat of global terrorism and technological job precarity at the hands of EDI (Extreme Deep Invader), a VLO (Very Low Observable) UCAV (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle), call sign Tin Man. If that isn't enough names for you, please listen to us talk about this quasi-post-western of the GWOT era and wrestle with the moral conundrums surrounding the question of who, when, and where to drop bombs and "get these bastards." The answers may surprise you! (They are "the bad guys," "always," and "over there.") 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 podc

This week we are reading a very special, wonderful book, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi from Common Notions. Told as a series of interviews by two ageing ex-academics (because academia has been, thankfully, finally, abolished), Everything for Everyone depicts a future in which the central organizing force of human society is the Commune. Emerging unevenly, violently, and somewhat spontaneously around the world at various times and in various forms, the Commune is the form society takes when needs are met and the ubiquitous crises of everyday life under capitalism are addressed head-on. Ordinary people tell their own stories of bringing about and sustaining this post-capital, post-commodity, post-gender, post-state future. Matt and Hilary discuss how this book makes a problem of narrative itself, as well as many of the beautiful features of the world depicted. Care and community are the focus of everyday life, but the book also ac

WARNING: This podcast is a paid advertisement, for a book. The payment for the advertisement that this podcast is was the book that this podcast is advertising. So, it’s not really “paid,” in the sense that the IRS should not worry about this. In this very special episode of Marooned on Mars, we discuss the recently released anthology Tomorrow's Parties: Life in the Anthropocene, edited by Jonathan Strahan and published by MIT Press. We manage to touch on every story in the collection, at least in passing! And in this episode we try our best to minimize spoilers, considering the format of the texts we’re reading and their recent publication. Featuring stories by Meg Elison, Tade Thompson, Daryl Gregory, Greg Egan, Sarah Gailey, Justina Robson, Chen Quifan, Malka Older, Saad Z. Hossain, and James Bradley, artwork by Sean Bodley, and an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, Tomorrow's Parties touches on many themes that that should be familiar to our listeners: political economy and ecology, trying to make histo

In the thrilling conclusion to our conversation about ALIEN: COVENANT, the final (so far) installment of the ALIEN franchise, Matt, Hilary, and Bill talk about Walter, David, and robots that (mis)quote poetry and Ridley Scott's placement of himself in a line of artists stretching from Milton to Shelley to David Lean. More on empire and settler colonialism, automythopoesis and Old Hollywood, the "perfect" organism, love and disappointment, the diversity of forms and difference, good and bad Christians, science vs. luck, and rudely interrupted shower sex. We'll be back eventually to cover ALIEN VS. PREDATOR, and soon to talk about some books! 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

Part 1 of 2! In our final episode of our miniseries exploring the Alien franchise, Matt and Hilary, joined by the inimitable Bill, discuss Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott's second non-prequel, released in 2017. We like this installment quite a bit, and have a lot of fun picking it apart. We talk wheat (the grain!), xenomorph kitty kats (to protect the grain!), and interstellar neoliberal postmodern settler colonialism (to grow the grain! and build a cabin!). Also pregnancy, reproduction, embryos, history and/ of/ by prequels, robots with accents, and kinship. Back very soon with part 2! 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

The fifth and penultimate episode in our ALIEN Franchise series. Joined once again by Bill, we discuss Ridley Scott's return with Prometheus (2012), starring Noomi Rapace (pronounce as you will), Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, and that guy from UPGRADE (a really good sci-fi action movie).  We spend a lot of this episode making fun of this movie instead of properly analyzing it. You can blame Matt for that. We even skip over most of its imagination of reproduction—which we will address in the next episode! What we do talk about is puffy humanoid aliens who might be related to Jesus, the way corporations express love, TED Talks, vulgar Nietzscheanism, Frankenstein, Lawrence of Arabia, the Tower of Babel, intelligent design, and Armond White. 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:

We're back, with our discussion of a serious piece of shit, Alien: Resurrection, the Joss Whedon-scripted, Jean-Pierre Jeunet-directed, 1997 mess that concludes the Ripley arc of the Alien franchise. We hate this movie, and unfortunately for you, we talk about it for an hour and a half! If you've never seen it, you might have to suffer through it just to understand what the hell we're talking about, so: our apologies. This disasterpiece is full of anxiety about sex, panic about gender, and downright hatred of women. It's an abysmal example of what Matt terms late-1990s Hollywood Baroque, containing no ideas and making no sense. The phrase "it raises more questions than it answers" could be used here, but only in the worst way, because Alien: Resurrection isn't even interested in the questions it raises in the first place, let alone answering them. Why, for instance, does whiskey come in solid cubes? Why does the Ripley clone know how to fly a spaceship but not how to work a fork? Why doesn't Christie just sha

We’re watching the Assembly Cut (an extra 30 minutes!) of Alien3 for our latest foray into the Alien franchise. This one takes place on a forced-labor penal colony inhabited by a strange religious sect of hyper-violent, hyper-male murderers, rapists, and scoundrels. But Ripley’s not worried because Charles Dance, who’s not at all creepy, is there. We struggle to make some kind of synthetic sense of this film, which has an extremely circuitous production history (which we discuss) making for a confusing but nevertheless fun viewing experience, and an even more fun talking experience. Never mind the names of the characters: they all look alike except for Charles S. Dutton and Ripley. One probably smells like garlic but he can’t help it, and besides he’s crazy. 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

We're back with Bill, tracing the adventures of new mom Ellen Ripley through the vast reaches of space as she returns to LV-426, now a colony (in every sense of the word) being terraformed by the Weyland-Yutani company. Jones has been left behind to... guard the grain. OK. James Cameron's 1986 entry in the Alien franchise takes the form of a war film, but Matt argues it's more like a western. The series from this point begins to focus on reproduction, and we begin to try to make sense of how that fits in with the settler colonial discourse, with a plot that's initiated by an attack on a nuclear family from an indigenous population. A question we end with is, if survival and survivability are so important to the corporation, or to the xenomorph, why would reproduction be necessary at all? This seems to be a contradiction, and we try to resolve it. Along the way we note the film's move into 80s-style militarism, a la Schwarzenegger and Stallone (Ripley goes full Rambo on the Queen), compare Linda Hamilton and S

Hop a ride on your nearest commercial towing vehicle and set a course for the stars! We're back with a special series on the ALIEN movie franchise. Joined by our friend and one-and-only guest Bill (who joins us from a fishbowl), we will be discussing all 6 films in the series in order of their release: Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien3 (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997), Prometheus (2012), and Alien: Covenant (2017) (and Matt just wrote all those, in order, with the correct years, without having to look them up--so off to a good start!). "Modern classic" is an over-used phrase, but Alien, directed by the not unattractive Ridley Scott, actually fits the description. Combining horror and science fiction in a new way, the film raises fascinating questions about both biological and social reproduction, as well as class, gender, and the status of labor. What does it mean to be a survivor, and why is that important for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation? How does the figure of the robot compare to the xenomorph, and

In this FINAL episode of our discussion of Green Earth, Matt and Hilary talk about the themes of unintelligibility throughout the novel(s) and think about the ways the novel(s) insert climate change into both the political and the everyday lived realities of people who are used to living relatively comfortable lives. We work through some issues on the historical contexts of the novel's publication and our reading of it a mere 18 (or 7) years later, but in what feels like a radically different world both politically and with regards to climate. The ways the novel does show in a subtle way some of the holes in the kinds of solutions it posits, like the Quiblers' possibility of moving in with the Khembalis, the questionable nature of American democracy vis a vis the fixed (or unfixed) presidential election, and the cloudy relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy, especially in light of the role China plays in the denouement.  We touch on metaphor, science, Buddhism, 1000-year projects, the Chem

In this, our PENULTIMATE episode in our examination of Green Earth, Matt and Hilary start off by sharing what they're going to miss after the global civilizational collapse (heat in the winter, showers, i.e., relief from the pressure to be clean), and talk about how we're not talking about the very real threat of civilizational collapse. Then we talk about Chapters 25, 26, and a bit of 27 before we run out of brain power. Here our conversation runs through decision-making and the myths surrounding it, complaints about sociobiology and evo psych and their connection to imagining responses to climate change, the ways history keeps us anchored to the present, realism and science fiction. How will we wrest freedom from the grasp of necessity? What is the ransom adequate to save the world? Are cats a liquid or a solid? We dive deep into Edgardo's experience of the Piazzolla concert and think about the premise that all joy is anticipatory, "dragged out from some better future time," and we lament the total unnecess

Starting Sixty Days and Counting, Chapters 21-24 Again we ask the big questions: Why are we doing this? When does Frankie say, "relax"? What if the 14 multinational corporations standing on each other's shoulders wearing an American flag overcoat that claim to be the USA suddenly took off the overcoat? We have some pre-Uvalde, post-Obama thoughts about Phil Chase's idea that America is the "hope of the world," as well as housing precarity, plastic(!), hiding things in forests, and total information awareness. We don't achieve total information awareness in this episode, but hopefully we're getting close! (This was recorded on May 15.) Thank you 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