The Moon's Bounty (of Distractions)
Paper Cuts
Now that we're properly underway on our journey to mars, let's get distracted by the moon real quick! Let's be entirely fair, though, if I were handed a ticket to wander around space carte blanche, even in the here and now, if I had the time before my intended destination, I would definitely check out what's going on on the moon before heading anywhere else. I mean, it's right there! It's been a good bit since we've been there! (Notwithstanding the incoming Artemis 2 mission, but that hasn't happened yet, from my perspective! Darn you, inexorable passage of time) That's not the only tangent we...
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Edison's Conquest of Mars
Paper Cuts
This book really occupies a fascinating niche, to me. In the day and age we're in, the role of unauthorized sequel, if only for copyright law reasons, is most often firmly filled by a fanfiction author. You've got to file the serial numbers if you wanna publish that, buddy! However, in the realm of the public domain (and, by extension, the relatively loosey goosey copyright rules of the late 1800s), you've got free roam to write whatever you like. Didn't like how war of the worlds was set in Britain? Boom, now the martians are invading New York! Didn't think the aliens got their proper...
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Arcadia Arisen
Paper Cuts
Well then! Dana learned quite a powerful lesson from this book, I'd say. I suggest you take some of what we've heard to heart, too, yknow? The planet will thank you, even if some of that thanking will have to be done indirectly. I really loved reading this book on stream, and re-hearing the story as I was editing the episodes down for the podcast was quite the delight. It's got me motivated in a major way to keep trying my best to bring some small mote of what's on display here into my own life. I actually have a little garden going out in the backyard (in a series of little pots, with varying...
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Escape to the City
Paper Cuts
To be honest with you, this final act that's going on in this week's episode and the next really nails home how crushing it can feel to know there could be solutions to the sort of problems we've been experiencing of late. Well, that, and the commentary being made about the ins and outs of copyright and the importance of using that carefully! (Unstartlingly, the author is quite an advocate for Open Source, but it's also got a lot to say about corporations using the DMCA as a bludgeon) I'm really trying to not have this description come out as dire, but the happy ending is coming in next...
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Repository Committed
Paper Cuts
We inch ever closer to the answer of WHY the city does things like this in this episode, and man, does Stephens really nail the sheer confusion of someone introduced to these concepts from step one just right with the way Dana does things. There's a pervading sense of "Well if there's a better way, why aren't we bothering?" throughout this section of the book, sometimes to the point of almost feeling like we're the ones being talked to. (Which, don't get me started on how that's such a thin line to tread, between preaching to the reader, staring down the camera, in comparison to getting your...
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Flowers (And Tension) Is Growing
Paper Cuts
We're finally getting some resolution on what was set up out front, and hoo boy, it's getting TENSE in a MAJOR WAY this time, folks! I mean, you knew it was gonna be difficult the second she decided to keep the Particular Item from the Fringers, but wow, we really have that drop at perhaps the worst possible time, not to mention just how difficult things are getting with the general conflict between the two major players here, y'know? Honestly, I could really wax on for a long time about the beautiful use of the climate as an antagonistic force in stories like this, too! It really reminds you...
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A Forest Full of Ideas
Paper Cuts
It's really interesting, especially from my perspective, the real glory given to what amounts to subsistence farming in solarpunk tales like this. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a known enjoyer of that sort of thing, I have a garden in my backyard for a reason (and it's not just that I have a mighty need for the best feasible tomato for my various tomato needs)! But in my humble opinion, the angle that's going to really return a much more fruitful crop in regards to inspiration is the process of mending things that you've already got on hand. Plants are infamously fickle, and there's a reason...
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Kites Make Flights of Fancy
Paper Cuts
The kite generator mentioned here is actually some really neat tech! I kinda accidentally hit on how they work when we're talking over the potential approaches to a turbine in the kite generation system, essentially, these things take pre-established data on how the windspeed changes based on altitude, and then autonomously pilots it in a neat-looking figure eight pattern, in order to pull a tether out to spin a turbine where the windspeed is high, then move it back down to where the windspeed is low, pulling the kite back in. Interestingly, the article that I found the explanation of the...
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Solarpunk means Community!
Paper Cuts
Phew! We made it out of the city! Luckily, now that we've got that place well behind us, we're able to see the true thrust of the world that made me fall in love with the genre as a whole, and Arcadia in specific. The technology on display being so, so close to what we've got these days is remarkably motivating, at least, in my humble opinion. I do go on in the show itself about it, most especially appealing to me being the building of aeroponic gardens in the spare storage space of the Rigs. If I ever do wind up back in the rv, you know I'm FULLY invested in building that out. I mean, I could...
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Wheelers
Paper Cuts
The return of author permission happens pretty quickly, turns out! Welcome to Arcadia, a world in which the years and years of using copyright law as a bludgeon to stop people from doing the easy solutions to save the planet has been taken to its logical extreme. Well, that's the perspective of our protagonist, Dana, intially anyway. However, when she can't afford the utility rates on her inherited house any longer, she's taken to an infringement center and summarily jailed. Surprise surprise, though, her brother's some kind of wild-man revolutionary, who lives outside the city. The cops...
info_outlineWhat do you think is the deal with these Gnomes? I mean, it's not really unpacked in the story very far, but it's kinda gently implied there's a sort of queen-and-workers sort of vibe going on. Sure, it's probably just there to give Sarka a target for this whole superiority schtick, but I'm the type of person to wonder about the ecology of a foreign planet after we've read the story they're set on. Sure, sure, I'm not too worried about it when we're in the middle of reading the tale, mostly because a lot of the stories we read aroud here just sort of glaze over that sort of thing, but I genuinely think between Dune and all the solarpunk I've been reading I'm stuck like this!
Even if the framing often makes no sense to the modern eye, there's plenty to enjoy in these old books. As I've made very clear, I'm a known enjoyer of these short story collections strictly BECAUSE they're not all polished and perfect. There's so much more room to take risky, big swings in the case of a shorter story, y'know?
I do provide a disclaimer, since these books are aged and not well-remembered:
TL;DR up front: Paper Cuts is almost all public domain stuff, and some of it hasn't aged well. I'll be doing my best to warn you, but I'm not changing any of it, I don't believe censorship is the path forward here.
Paper Cuts, by necessity, has to be a majority books that are in the US public domain. That means it's almost exclusively going to be content produced in the 1920s, or earlier. These works may have aspects that have not aged well to a modern viewer/listener. Now, I'm never one for censorship, but I do believe we are entitled to being able to filter the leisure content we don't want to see. So, this results in the following policy:
- I'll do my level best to warn you, the viewer, at the beginning of the episode, what's likely to come up.
- A great example is something like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which had some passages describing natives of various places in a fashion I'd charitably describe as unkindly.
- In cases where something sneaks up on me unwarned, I will be reading the content unedited, with my sincerest apologies for the lack of active warning.
All that said, I'm gonna cover my bases with some common warnings that have come up often in books I've read before:
- Descriptions of "savage natives"
- Various racial slurs, unkind terms, and/or Descriptions of groups that have taken on a worse connotation
- General mistreatment and misrepresentation of cultures
Generally speaking, if something I'm reading is on the page? Don't expect me to have opinions aligning with it. We're here to have fun, not disparage people!
Want to grab the book to read along with us? check it out here, free of charge!
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29768 (Astounding Stories, August 1930)
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