Sofanauts 3!

Hey, so the new podcast over at Starship Sofa — Sofanauts, which is a sort of remote-pub-chat about SF — is up, and I’m one of the people in on the discussion, along with the wonderfully opiniontastic Jeremy Tolbert (now of Escape Pod) and the inimitable voice talent Ray Sizemore, as well as The Tony himself.

The discussion ranges from Nebula Award winners and Locus Award shortlist to The Singularity, gaming as literature, and sentimentality about Heinlein “juveniles.” It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this, and I’m appropriately confused and scattered at points — I’m not much of a gamer and not so into Heinlein, after all — but it was a fun chat, and you can check it out here.

4 thoughts on “Sofanauts 3!

  1. Confused and scattered my butt. You were the rational voice of reason to oppose my ridiculous ranting, and totally on the ball. I kept thinking “well, yeah, what Gord said really, what I said was just crazy.”

    Opiniontastic. I’m quoting you there at some point.

  2. Jer,

    Heh, rational? Hee. I’m still trying to figure out what the difference between “It will happen” and “I would be surprised if it didn’t happen” exactly is. As an EFL teacher I know there’s a nuance difference and it feels like splitting hairs but if a student asked me I’d insist on a difference. I think it’s a difference of certainty versus confident speculation. :)

    Stay opiniontastic, bro. It’s good for us. :) (And fun to listen to.)

  3. I listened to the entire podcast and loved it! Particularly the part where 4 grown men talk about the disadvantages of staging the audio of a wrestling match, with mud. “Lots of grunting…” LOL!

    And I love hearing Jeremy’s thoughts on Wall-E.

  4. Hey Steph,

    Yeah, it was fun. And I still do wanna see (hear?) a mudwrestling match between JEr and Tony. Big fun.

    Jer’s thoughts on Wall-E were sharp, though I have to say I’m not sure it’s not more of a case that we’ve become blasé about the ecological collapse of the world.

    I first started wondering about that when I started watching How I Met Your Mother, the sitcom. There are these references in the narration (which is supposed to be about 20 years from now) to how the eco-lawyers failed to save the environment. They tried, gave it their best shot, but to no avail.

    And I’m thinking, what does that mean? I don’t mean to be so stiff I can’t take a joke — I laughed and all — but some part of me was uncomfortable with the joke. And started looking for other such jokes. They seem to be all around. Are we now so resigned to ecological collapse that jokes about it don’t even faze us?

    And that’s why what Jer said was interesting. Because Disney used the destruction of the Earth (in a relatively believable fashion) as the backdrop to a sweet, cute, fantastical romance. Social criticism was there, yeah, but it seems to me we’ve moved from writing about comfortable catastrophes to looking at uncomfortable catastrophes that may well be on our horizon in the same way.

    False sense of security, is what I worry about. Or wonder, anyway.

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