More Words, Deeper Hole

Science Fiction in the Age of Revolution (Robert Silverberg)

This is a speech given by Silverberg in at Worldcon in 1970, when he was in his middle period. This placed him somewhere between the reactionary conservatives of the Analog gang and the placard waving revolutionaries of Ellison's set, out in the crossfire. I really wish this was in text form because an awful lot of it needs footnoting.

I never realized how much like Tom Lehrer Robert Silverberg sounded.

And that's it for the Time Traveler Show. Not sure where I go from here.

"A Most Unusual Greyhound" & " "Distant Replay" (Mike Resnick)

The first is a Damon Runyon pastiche in which the narrator bookie tries to help a werewolf find some way to make enough money to pay the bookie the money the bookie feels the werewolf owes him. The ending is kind of abrupt; I got the feeling the author got bored.

The second, a Hugo nominee, is a sentimental tale of an old man who notices a younger woman who looks a lot like his dead wife back when she was young and also not dead. The similarities go farther, which puts the old guy in an interesting spot that does not include him mashing on the woman in question.

Speaking of Hugo nominated, this ends with Resnick talking to his audience. His campaigning for the Hugo is pretty amazingly shameless.

Interview with Jim C. Hines

Exactly what it says on the tin. Hines also reads from Goblin War, which at the time of the interview had not been released.

"Prone" by Mack Reynolds; "An Incident on Route 12" by James H. Schmitz; "Will You Wait?" by Alfred Bester

"Prone" by Mack Reynolds

The military struggles to deal with an accident-prone soldier too well-connected to simply eject from the armed forces. Happily, there is a service for which he is peculiarly well suited.

(I think I read this in The Best of Mack Reynolds)


"An Incident on Route 12" by James H. Schmitz

A ruthless hijacker runs into a colleague.

(I have no idea where this first ran. Also, apparently there's more than one way to pronounce Karres)


"Will You Wait?" by Alfred Bester

A man tries to sell his soul to the devil. The manner in which this process has been depicted in fiction turns out to have simplified in the interests of narrative brevity.

(This has been collected in a number of places but I somehow managed to miss them all)

Pseudo Meta Beta Cast 1.0

This is an interview with Anne Murphy of the Science Fiction Oral History Association but the sound quality was too low for me to make any of the words out.

Slow Djinn (Mack Reynolds)

Read by Jeremiah Costello, this details the comic misadventures of a man who foolishly agrees to accept ownership of an extremely stupid djinn.

There's really so much to appreciate here: the moron jokes, the fat jokes, the casual acceptance of slavery and abduction for sexual purposes. I cannot see why this was not reprinted.

The Art of Collaboration (Fred Pohl & Jack Williamson

This is exactly what it says on the tin: a 1977 lecture by Williamson and Pohl on collaboration.

Their political differences get mentioned a few times. I have to admit I never particularly thought of Williamson having politics.

This got delayed because one of my earbud thingies died and the combination of Williamson's accent and soft spoken ways meant I needed both to have any hope of understanding him.

2BR02B (Kurt Vonnegut)

As read by William Coelius, this is a story about a man in a world with strict population limits looking for an innovative way to find room for his three newborns.

Of course, this all falls apart if birth control is available and reliable because then you can schedule births once deaths have freed up slots; even if it's not 100% reliable - and it won't be - it should make it possible to avoid situations like this guy is in. Often I'd give stories like this a pass for predating the Pill but this is from Worlds of If, January 1962 and the Pill was approved for use in 1960.

The Night He Cried (Fritz Leiber) & panel discussion at ConFusion 2007

The story, read by Clarissa der Nederlanden of the Red Panda Show, is one that has come up before, a send up of the violently misogynist Micky Spillane stories.


The panelists were "Elizabeth Moon, Howard Waldrop, John Scalzi, Tobias Buckell, Karl Schroeder and more"; it felt to me like a sampling of the conversation and ranged in topic from ebooks to Moon's experiences raising an autistic child.

Time Traveler Show 10 - Asimov Speaks!

Dick's first published story as read by Mac Kelly. A human space man buys a Martian creature, a Wub, planning to eat it. The Wub objects but the captain seems resolute in his purpose.

This is a short episode (although it also includes some excerpts of other works)

I've run into this before, haven't I? From time to time the voice of the Wub reminded me of Richard Nixon, which was a bit odd.