Marooned! on Mars with Matt and Hilary

In which the Frankensteins summon the courage and wherewithal to not lift a finger to save an innocent girl from being executed by the state and the very fair people who run it (themselves).Sorry this episode is a little (a lot) late, but so it goes. The next episode will be a bit delayed as well because of vacations, school starting, etc., but stay tuned. And for goodness sake, if you are somehow donating money to the show, please stop!Thanks for listening! Email us at maroonedonmarspodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.socialRate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever youlisten to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space

In our inimitable fashion we spend two and a half hours talking about 20 pages. Yeah, we'll get through this whole thing in no time.The next episode should be out on July 4 (fingers crossed)! I'm sure everything will be back to normal by then.Thanks for listening!Email us at maroonedonmarspodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.socialRate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space

There's gold in them thar podcasts, I tell ya, GOLD! Talking this time about Part Five of New York 2140, "Escalation of Commitment." We get what could be an ending--finding gold, rescuing Mutt & Jeff, confronting Henry Vinson--but isn't! Our characters are getting together and scheming how they might save the building by ignoring the law, even if that means bringing down the entire global financial system. Thank you for listening, and thanks for your patience. It'll likely be a few weeks before we can get another episode out. But you can get your Matt & Hilary fix at the Wetwired Podcast soon, where Sean and Jules generously hosted us and we had a great conversation about all things KSR. Email us at maroonedonmarspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.social Rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space

In this episode we discuss "Liquidity Trap," Part Three of Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140. We talk about the citizen chapters and think about where to locate an authorial consciousness in this book, meditate on the difficulty of locating ourselves in a possibly ungraspable present between the "past" and "future," speculate on the explanatory power of numbers, ask about the status of the police state in the novel, and wonder whether this is a book about finance capital or about property. Among other things. Thank you for listening! We will be back soon with another episode and then may be more than usually intermittent for a couple of weeks...but we'll see! Email us at maroonedonmarspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.social Rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space

We're back from a long work- and life-related absence to fart around for a couple minutes trying to log in to our old accounts, and then we're off and running with the kind of meandering, half-baked musings you've all been missing lo these many months. That's right, New York 2140 is the topic of our next season (series?) and we spend this episode recalling where and when we were when the book was published and pondering what it might mean today. Here's a novel that takes both place and literature itself very seriously, in a really fun way. A massively ambitious work, drawing on the literary imagination of New York as well as characteristic KSR ideas about ecology, climate change, and capitalism, inflected here through the aftershocks financial crisis of 2007-08, including the Occupy movement and the double meaning of "liquidity," NY2140 finds itself post-Obama, mid-Trump, pre-COVID, pre-AI pump-and-dump "revolution," pre--the-shit-really-starting-to-hit-the-fan-regarding-climate-change (i.e., pre-massive summerlong forest fires that golfers still manage to play through but that block out the sun for weeks at a time from Calgary to Chicago). It's still a book that imagines America as lying at the center of a global project of capitalist hegemony, if we recall correctly, and the stickiness of capital as a force that organizes society and politics is something we'll be paying close attention to, as well as the way the novel imagines collective and personal responses to crisis. Is this an optimistic or a pessimistic novel? Was it then? Does it envision an alternative to the eco-fascist path we seem to be on in this decade of "dithering"? We do then talk about genuinely interesting things like gardening, Anya Taylor-Joy, Waterworld, weird Bryan Adams lyrics, and the relative quality of The Expanse and the joylessness of most contemporary TV, before dropping some really gratuitous spoilers about Red Mars. (This is NOT a spoiler-free podcast, for those just now joining). Anyway, we're back, we hope to bring you new episodes every week over the course of what promises to be a deadly hot summer, and we're mostly excited to be here! We'll be back next week with Part One of NY2140, "The Tyranny of Sunk Costs," so head to your local bookstore, pick up a copy, and start reading! Thanks for listening! Email us at maroonedonmarspodcast@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter @podcastonmars Follow us on Blusky @podcastonmars.bsky.social 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

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 future they don't believe will arrive, and we're all wondering when our last hot shower will happen. Happy Thanksgiving, and please to enjoy.

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

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

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 podcasts! Music by Spirit of Space

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 history while living with the legacies of the past, the weirdness of being burdened with a body, capitalism and wage labor. Described by Strahan in the introduction as neither hopepunk nor material for doomscrolling, the stories here are imaginative and engaging, and well worth checking out (if you're into that kind of thing). Next up we'll be doing a deep-ish dive into Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, published by Common Notions. There will be spoilers, so buy it and read it! (You won't be sorry!) 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

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

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 shake his foot to free himself from the grip of a dead xenomorph? Is that fingernail polish or are her nails actually that color? (And by the way, if you know the name of the popular late-90s nail polish that Hilary references, please let us know)? The answers: stop thinking about it, pigs! Just eat your popcorn and shut up! This movie made us so mad we didn't even notice the distinct and fatal absence of cats. So, again, sorry, but it's not our fault this movie exists. At least Prometheus will be pretty to look at. Thanks for listening, and sorry! 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