A Meal of Thorns 16 – AURORA with Hilary Strang

A Meal of Thorns

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Credits:

• Guest: Hilary Strang
• Title: Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Marooned on Mars, a podcast about the works of KSR
• Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed
• Margaret Killjoy’s A Country of Ghosts
• KSR’s Mars trilogy
• Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future
• John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy
• Wiscon
• “The Hard Problem” audio project adaptation of a section of Aurora, created with Marina Abramović’s workshop, mixed/composed by Adam Tinkle, with the Arthur C. Clarke Centre for Human Imagination at the University of California San Diego.
• Much of the web-available multimedia about this project is lost to time and linkrot, unfortunately, but there’s a very nice write-up at this fan-run KSR site.
• You can still find a YouTube version of the audio here.
• As mentioned in the show credits, the “Into the Impossible” podcast later developed into something very different, platforming far-right whackjobs, climate deniers, TESCREALists, that kind of thing, along with lots of presumably credible scientists, so: be warned. I’m not clear on how the early “Into the Impossible” podcasts with the Clarke Centre transitioned to the later, longer-running show with Brian Keating; just don’t want to accidentally contribute to any of you going down a brain-worm-inducing YouTube/podcast-algo spiral.
• Leyna Krow’s Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids
• Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”
• “Wherever you go, there you are.”
• KSR’s 2312 and New York 2140
• Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
• Theodore McComb’s Uranians
• Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun
• Stephen H. Dole’s Habitable Planets for Man
• Tracked it down: the "drop unconscious humans off on a grid to check habitability" thing is from Charlie Stross’s excellent blog.
• C.J. Cherryh’s Heavy Time
• "Enough is as good as a feast."
• Le Guin’s “Mrs. Brown Test” is from “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown” in The Languages of the Night
• KSR’s Science in the Capital Trilogy, re-released as Green Earth
• "Science Fiction is the Realism of Our Times"
• "True Voyage Is Return"
• The Alien films
• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein