Marooned! On Mars With Matt And Hilary

Look, here we are again! We start our final episode on The Years of Rice and Salt by talking about what's up next for the podcast. Short answer: probably a few standalone episodes on movies and KSR short stories, followed by a deep dive into the forthcoming The Ministry for the Future, followed by our next big project. But first, a short hiatus while we solidify plans and the school year starts to start. We reflect on rebirth and retribution, teaching and learning, and finding yourself in a small community and a large world. We talk about how the characters, K and B especially, attempt to become fully human, locating themselves between the Great Man and Mass Movement models of history. And we discuss the book's fantastic and uncanny elements, and try to keep the melancholy of ending a book at bay. Stay tuned to the end to find out whether or not we recommend this book! There were some extremely funky things happening with the recording this week, so sorry for any extra-weird hiccups in the recording and editi

The penultimate episode on The Years of Rice and Salt! (I just like saying "penultimate." You've got to seize the opportunity when it presents itself.) In this, one of the longer (the longest?) chapter of YoRaS, Matt and Hilary talk about science and feminism, the aftermath of war, the aesthetics of scent, the division of labor, and history. We talk about different knowledges and forms of knowledge production and the exclusion of certain kinds of people both from that knowledge production and from the acknowledgement that those certain kinds of people in fact engaged in those certain forms of knowledge production for, like, forever. We talk about history and revolution, and human living together, and of course we end up on some profanity-laced tirades about the state of the damn world and these institutions and politicians, and not to mention These Kids Today! Matt has some sage advice for college students that will certainly kill what's left of his academic career; thankfully, no one who would be in a positi

Shout out to our great listeners, especially when they email us, and when they email us, their emails are always thoughtful and stimulating, and Hilary almost always responds to them and Matt almost always reads them but doesn’t respond to them because he is, in fact, shy, but also, more importantly, lazy, other than the whole “producing and editing the show” thing. We kick this episode off with a convo about despair and hope, but the upshot is the gift of reading these novels in community with each other and our amazing listeners (you, the reader of this). “War of the Asuras” is a phantasmagoric chapter about The Long War—basically, what if World War I—trench warfare, mustard gas, etc.—was fought in Asia instead of Europe, and what if it (almost) never ended? The depiction of the war collapses the distinction between the bardo and reality, between metaphor and realism, and exposes the insanity at the heart of modern warfare. Matt and Hilary ponder over the nature of the space the characters find themselves i

In this week's cat-heavy episode, we examine the Kerala's global anticolonial revolutionary empire. We ask lots of questions: are novels the original Turing test? Is the Kerala the K character? What does revolutionary struggle look like in this book (in the absence of whiteness, Christianity, capitalism qua capitalism, a strong sense of private property) in contrast to what it looks like in the world? What is the meaning of diversity? What does imperial power look like under the Kerala, and how does it resemble what it looks like for us? Does Travancore constitute a cult or a culture? What are the novelistic modes that this and the previous book deploy? Finally, is this utopia? 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

Book 6 of The Years of Rice and Salt is like a novel within the novel, depicting the intertwined lives of two brilliant figures in Robinson's alternate history: Kang Tongbi and Ibrahim ibn Hasam. Living in the late 18th-century, they come to realize they are part of the same jati that has been reincarnated throughout the novel, that they have known each other for 10,000 years. Through their intertwined intellectual endeavors they write poetry and history, develop theories of feminism and politics, and argue about religion. Matt and Hilary have a wide-ranging discussion that still only scratches the surface of this pivotal chapter. 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

"Warp and Weft" is one of the shorter of the books of The Years of Rice and Salt, taking place on Turtle Island/ Yingzhou nee North America, among the Hodenosaunee, a word Matt and Hilary definitely know how to pronounce. Fromwest nee Busho gets initiated as a chief in a beautiful ceremony and makes an amazing, prophetic, ecstatic speech that opens up a discussion about conceptions of history and the future, change and struggle, hope and kinship, and lacrosse and red eggs. Matt performs an exercise in grammar for your pleasure and recommends Dante again as a contrast to the bardo scenes, and Hilary reads from Nick Estes' incredible book Our History is the Future (Verso, 2019) (pages 248 and 256 if you have a copy). Can you spot the red egg that appeared earlier in the book? Let us know where it is, either over Twitter, at our email, or on Facebook. (Or you can leave us a voicemail on the Anchor app, but only if you want your message played on the podcast which, if you're like Matt and you can't stand the soun

We're pack, the science fiction literature podcast equivalent of tubing down a lazy river with a six-pack of beer! This week we talk about Book 4 of The Years of Rice and Salt, "The Alchemist," where Khalid, Bahram, and Iwang discover the secrets of the universe while attempting to placate the venal khan and suss out the political machinations of his treasurer Nadir Divanbegi. For a lot of readers, this is the chapter where the book really starts to click. As Hilary puts it, this is where she figured out the project of the book is really to tell the story of the emergence of modernity without a progress narrative and in the absence of Eurocentrism--because, of course, "Europe" doesn't exist! This book is also where we see how scientific knowledge develops alongside a different set of ideologies, both religious and political. Here, Robinson dramatizes how scientific “discovery” exists within other forms of knowledge and inhabitation of the world. Science is historically contingent and situated among other ways

In this somewhat delayed episode we discuss Book Three of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, "Ocean Continents," in which a Chinese fleet accidentally discovers Yingzhou, which we know as the Americas. Admiral Kheim, the fleet's doctor I-Chin, and a Miwok girl called Butterfly find each other and escape a pretty sticky situation with the Incan executioner god! Hilary and Matt discuss the differences between discovery and encounter, estrangement and the real, knowledge and superstition, structure and contingency, control and luck, and the phenomenon of abundance without surplus. Alas, they don't talk enough about the elements and the chapter's deep symbolism of earth, wind, fire, and water--but it's there! Moral relativism aside, we can all agree: Human sacrifice is bad, whether that’s to an Incan executioner god or the market. Recommendations: Tubthumping by Chumbawumba, Inferno by Dante We may have to take next week off, but will certainly be back after that! Thanks for listening! Email us a

Warning: we will not be doing this book justice! 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

Hello! We’re back. Sorry we’re late, but we’re back now, to discuss THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT, book-by-book. We recommend you read this book through once already if you’ve never read it before for its own pleasures. It’s a great, great, great book that you should just read and delight in. Then tune into our commentary for a re-read, which I assume is what a lot of you are doing. And in advance, thank you for listening! Matt apologizes in advance for his complete ignorance about Buddhism. “Awake to Emptiness” follows Bold Bardash and his adventures with the slave eunuch Kyu. Matt and Hilary talk about this book’s mode of narration, its unique mixture of materialism and spiritualism, and the way that, from the perspective of someone who has been raised in America in the American education system, it completely defamiliarizes the reader as regards world history and geography. Matt and Hilary compare this to the Mars books a bit and we talk about the patterns of subjectivity that emerge between characters. Chara

It's our season finale, where we bid a fond farewell to Freya, ship, and the cast of KSR's transcendent Aurora! We're experiencing some good ol' audio issues, but they're nothing compared to Freya's mythic struggles with the sun and the ocean. It's hard to sum up this book, and somehow equally as hard to sum up this chapter, but we do our best. This chapter is a lot about the difficulty of putting the feeling of being on earth into words--some call it defamiliarization, others call it estrangement, we call it art, and it rocks. For Hilary, this chapter is about feeling. For Matt, it's about overcoming the difference between reality and fantasy. For both of them, it's a joy. Takeaways: Utopia is hard, but necessary. It's not going to be found "out there." It's going to be built, like a beach or a work of art. Freedom is found in letting go. Don't feel bad if you have trouble letting go of your ideas, or if you find that others can't help but live in their ideas: that's where we live! And, go to the beach! Our

Pepsi Matt McDonald’s and Home Depot Hilary coming at you at the beginning of the after of the beforetimes, Phase 2 in full effect! The Hard Problem of this chapter is alternately deceleration, consciousness, love, and meaning, we we talk about it all! Ship is now fully the subject and the narrator of their own story, and Matt and Hilary discuss just how other or alien ship’s consciousness is from human consciousness. This takes Hilary into a vital detour into the greatest novel ever written, Frankenstein, and Matt into a self-indulgent Werner Herzog impression. We discuss the limits of consciousness, sensation, perception, meaning, love as a form of attention, narration as an effort to constitute oneself beyond just a mass of experiences, through language. Hilary doesn’t feel superior to her gut flora, which is what makes her a better person than Matt. Sustaining relationship to another gives the ship language, gives ship the language that allows it to say “we” Matt's seasonal Werner Herzog impression unders

In this episode, for the first 25 minutes or so we commiserate about corona quarantine and talk about how we feel upset. Matt and Hilary talk cooking and share their misadventures in sourdough, a profoundly alien yet living thing. We talk about the erasure of the boundary between work and leisure under capitalism, and particularly how attenuated it is under corona. We chat about mutual aid and the struggle to become the kind of person who does mutual aid and not just the kind of person who believes mutual aid is good. Discussing the willful change in habits that becoming a revolutionary subject requires finally gets us around to talking about the fifth chapter of KSR’s Aurora, “Homesick.” Ship and the gang are heading home to earth and everything is going really, really badly! The inhabitants of ship are confronted with a new set of material conditions that impose upon them new acts, practices, habits, and rituals that turn them into somewhat revolutionary subjects, but in a different way. They gradually arri

Lots of big and new thoughts in this one, where we discuss ship's sovereignty, the fantasy bribe of the future, constituting our selves politically after long periods of political hibernation, the return of the repressed, the memory of architecture, and the myths of neoliberalism. One of our intrepid listeners has purchased the domain householdersunion.org if you are interested in organizing a rent strike in your building and creating a new world. Hilary mentioned a story on Italian mutual aid in communmag.com. Matt was compelled to make a snide comment about Elizabeth Warren, but that's just because he's a bad person. 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

In this episode, we try to avoid talking about the corona virus as much as possible. After the first ten minutes or so, anyway. We do talk about a lot of things! Many, many things, in fact, almost all of them concerning Chapter 3 of Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, "In the Wind." In the interest of getting this out in a timely fashion I'll leave the details as a surprise. But rest assured--there is talking in this episode! 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

Special coronavirus edition! "Land Ho," we can all agree, is a true masterpiece. There's far too much to talk about in this breathtaking chapter, and Matt and Hilary do the best they can but still manage to only scratch the surface. This chapter is about a lot of stuff. On the surface, it's mostly about Freya's wanderjahr. But it's also, perhaps primarily, about ship and ship's relationship to Devi. The complexity of this chapter is too great to put into words without writing a dissertation! Thanks for listening and social distancing with us! Stay safe and healthy! 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

A very special episode of Marooned on Mars with Matt and a Beer finds Matt by himself talking at you through a microphone. If you like Hilary and you don't like Matt, skip this episode! If you don't like Matt and you listen to this episode anyway, what is wrong with you? Matt is flying solo to fill the gap created when Matt and Hilary were both sick last week and couldn't record. He talks at you about: 1. (Briefly) Canvassing for Bernie 2. Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick (1964) 3. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Ranald MacDougall, 1959) 4. The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, 2019) He does NOT talk about Aurora or Kim Stanley Robinson. ONLY listen if you want to hear him drink beer and talk about those four things! Hilary will be back (with Matt) very soon to discuss the second chapter of Aurora!

Aurora kicks off in typically Robinsonian fashion, with a near disaster at sea...on a spaceship! Matt and Hilary talk about names and narratives, shitholes and Hobbits, and crisis ordinary. Email us at BongRipper420 and canvass, call, text, and vote for Bernie Sanders! (Do NOT vote for billionaires.) Matt's got an extra copy of Aurora, and if you want it and live anywhere from Augusta to Portland (Maine), hit us up. 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

Hello! Matt and Hilary are back with a preview episode of the next season of Marooned! On [Fill in the Blank]. This season we’ll be discussing KSR’s brilliant Aurora. In this preliminary episode we re-introduce ourselves and the premise of the show. We talk about what science fiction and utopia are, why we’re interested in them (and why you should be, too), and our approach to thinking about them. We also decide how many episodes you should expect. After consulting with your psychoanalysts, we resolve to read this chapter by chapter, so there will be 7 episodes after this, maybe an additional one after that. Stop at 40 minutes if you are only interested in science fiction and don’t want to hear Matt and Hilary rant about politics and vociferously endorse Bernie Sanders and enumerate his positive qualities and the glorious future his presidency will usher in, while simultaneously maintaining a healthy skepticism about electoralism and the State. We talk about knocking on doors, solidarity, making a new world,

Hello listeners and goodbye Mars! With this episode we leave KSR's Mars behind, as we conclude The Martians, the "apocrypha" of the Mars Trilogy.  [SPOILER ALERT: Our next venture will be KSR's Aurora, and will get started mid-January to early-February. We suggest you get your copy now and read it through once before we start (if you, like Matt, haven't already read it), then read it again with us!] We leave Mars in a mood similar to that created by the ending of this collection, with a mixture of melancholy and relief. It's hard to leave these works behind, but we're looking forward to new adventures and a new book! Here we talk about the two final sections of The Martians, the collection of poems "If Wang Wei Lived on Mars" and the autobiographical "Purple Mars." Matt and Hilary find a lot to talk about regarding the form of poetry and what it demands and makes possible for us readers. We dive deep into poems including "Visiting," "After a Move" & "Canyon Color" & "Vastitas Borealis," "Six Thou