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.

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In this episode (recorded a few days after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, hence the opening discussion), we talk about Part Four of New York 2140, "Expensive or Priceless?" Our (long) wide-ranging conversation takes a rather critical view of the novel, or at least this part of it. We're trying to suss out what the rest of the world outside New York looks like, and what the status of the "police state" is. To do this we start to talk about the book's concept of citizenship, which we'll have to continue in future episodes. We also try to think about what is "sticky" in this novel as regards our own world (the question of whether this is an allegory of the present or a vision of the future). While decarbonization has happened and the fossil fuel industry evidently demolished, a lot of the political and social structures and institutions of our present reality (which themselves are integral to the fossil fuel economy as well as capitalism writ large) appear relatively unchanged in 2140--the law, the Federal Reserve, the NYPD, the United States of America. However, we're also interested in other sticky social forms that New York 2140 seems to wrestle with, if not criticize: the couple form, the romance plot, the bourgeois family. And as ever, Robinson's novel also tends to valorize literature itself as not merely a utopian space, but a utopian action: after all, is not even the law itself a (flawed) attempt to write the world that we want to see into existence? Or is it?

Thanks for listening! Sorry for the long delay between episodes. We'll be out with a new episode shortly, but then alas there will likely be another long delay of at least a couple of weeks. Good thing we have the most patient fanbase in all of podcasting!

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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!

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Hello! This week we continue our conversation of New York 2140, talking about Part Two, "Expert Overconfidence," in which our various experts get in over their heads (some more literally than others--actually, all of them do it literally, since this is literature...anyway, we don't have time to sort this out right now). We talk about the nature of the future being envisioned here around food production, property, borders, and various overlapping layers of non-state governmentality, both visible and invisible. And, of course, polar bears.

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In this episode we declare there's not much to say, this is just a table-setting section of the novel, we won't discuss each and every subchapter, but then we talk for nearly two hours, starting with Matt and Hilary's Garden Round-Up. Then it's a shallow dive into Part One of NY2140, "The Tyranny of Sunk Costs." Hope you enjoy and we'll be back soon with Part Two!

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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

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!

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Our review of Ridley Scott's Napoleon.

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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.

A very special episode of Marooned on Mars, a backdoor pilot, as they say in the biz, of Obstructed Viewing with friends of the pod returning-guest champion Bill and Dauphin Josh debuting their new movie podcast (has anyone ever done a podcast about movies before?).

The theme of the show today is sabotage and movies that feature it: The Train (John Frankenheimer, 1964) and Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977).

If possible, you should watch these movies before listening, just so you know what the heck we’re talking about.

What is sabotage, who does it and why? Is terrorism sabotage by another name? What level of complicity does a saboteur need to have with the object or process that is the target of their sabotage? Why do people commit sabotage? How does sabotage relate to self-sabotage? Is it a negative or positive action? Is there a dialectics of sabotage? What is the good of sabotage in and of itself? What is the temporality of sabotage?

But more importantly, how awesome are these movies, huh? Lots of stuff going on in them that’s sabotage, and perhaps even more that’s not sabotage!

We talk about money, the national question, art, culture, modernity, economics, labor, politics, all the classic Marooned topics our listeners have grown accustomed to love and expect.

With a special appearance by Slavoj Zizek.

Follow Obstructed Viewing on your podcast app of preference! Marooned will be back sooner or later with more of whatever it is we do.

Thanks for listening!

Find Obstructed Viewing at obstructedviewpod.com, here, or wherever you get your p'casts!

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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!

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