Plutopia News Network

Hugo award-winning author Pat Cadigan joins Jon and Scoop to discuss her novelization of William Gibson’s first screenplay for Alien 3, the third movie in the Alien franchise. The final film wasn’t based on Gibson’s version, which had been discarded in rounds of rewriting and re-visioning. Sadly, critical response to the film was not good. Pat has created a novelization of Gibson’s first script , approved by Gibson and hailed in reviews as far better than the movie.

In this interview Pat, aka the Queen of Cyberpunk, mentions how Alien is a good fit for the cyberpunk techno-dystopian ethos.

Our May 10, 2021 interview with Pat is here.

Synopsis (via Penguin/Random House): “The Sulaco—on its return journey from LV-426—enters a sector controlled by the “Union of Progressive Peoples,” a nation-state engaged in an ongoing cold war and arms race. U.P.P. personnel board the Sulaco and find hypersleep tubes with Ripley, Newt, and an injured Hicks. A Facehugger attacks the lead commando, and the others narrowly escape, taking what remains of Bishop with them.

“The Sulaco continues to Anchorpoint, a space station and military installation the size of a small moon, where it falls under control of the military’s Weapons Division. Boarding the Sulaco, a team of Colonial Marines and scientists is assaulted by a pair of Xenomorph drones. In the fight Ripley’s cryotube is badly damaged. It’s taken aboard Anchorpoint, where Ripley is kept comatose. Newt and an injured Corporal Hicks are awakened, and Newt is sent to Gateway Station on the way to Earth. The U.P.P. sends Bishop to Anchorpoint, where Hicks begins to hear rumors of experimentation—the cloning and genetic modification of Xenomorphs.

“The kind of experimentation that could yield a monstrous hybrid, and perhaps even a Queen.”

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This time, we dig deep into the archives for a flashback to the final episode published prior to our seven-year “sabbatical”.

“Miller is as quirky and delightful as ever, treating the Southwest as a vast midden from which he plucks many odorous but tasty treasures. The fun, as usual, comes from watching Tom digest.” – Larry McMurtry

Based out of Tucson, Arizona, Tom Miller has traveled the World, capturing its cultures, its people, its good, bad and ugly for Smithsonian, The New Yorker, Life, The New York Times and his critically acclaimed series of books. Perhaps best known for his incisive studies of the US/Mexico border and Latin America, he has a unique view of that strip of land separating the two nations. “Our southern frontier is not simply American on one side and Mexican on the other. It is a strip two thousand miles long and no more than twenty miles wide. It obeys its own laws and has its own outlaws, its own police officers and its own policy makers…It is a colony unto itself, long and narrow, ruled by two faraway powers.” Miller also has chronicled, among other things, murderous cacti, the Chimichanga and Jack Ruby’s kitchen sink. Learn more about his literary output, which includes “On The Border”, “The Panama Hat Trail”, “Trading With The Enemy” and “The Revenge of The Saguaro” at http://www.tommillerbooks.com

The post Tom Miller Redux: A Plutopia flashback to an early episode. first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Stephanie Vale, the pen name of a longtime WELL member, is a semi-retired attorney and part-time university instructor in the US Pacific Northwest.  She has loved Jane Austen for more than 40 years, and has been reading and enjoying Austenesque fiction since 2008. In 2017 she finally became inspired to attempt writing her own JAFF or Jane Austen Fan Fiction. Her first book, THE COLONEL’S BROTHER was released in August. Stephanie guides us through the popular Jane Austen Fan Fiction genre and describes her journey from reader to author.

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Johannes Grenzfurthner is a happily subversive artist, filmmaker, author, and performer. He’s based in Vienna, Austria. He’s founder and director of monochrom, an international art and theory collective. He’ll be premiering his latest film, “Masking Threshold,” at Fantastic Fest in Austin (coming soon to a brainstem near you!). In this interview, we discuss nerd culture, context hacking, sex and technology, cocktail robotics, and his new film.

Johannes Grenzfurthner: “It definitely happened, I guess, sometime in the 1990s that suddenly the nerd was almost like a procreation of hate speech, in a certain way. You take a term, and wear it as a badge of honor, and turn its meaning on the head. I think that definitely happens. The term is also not that old. I mean, I did some research for ‘Traceroute,’ my film about nerd culture. And the first time that ‘nerd’ has been used by a wider population is in the late 70s and early 1980s.”

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Chris Zappone works as a foreign news editor in Australian media. Chris has written about geopolitics, space, technology, ideology, and the future. He has consulted with universities, think tanks and businesses in the area of tech disruption, information war, and cryptocurrencies. And he has an interest in history and utopia (and Plutopia!).

Chris Zappone: “I think part of the issue with the social media world is that you see something and it’s visceral, it’s in your disembodied mind. It’s overwhelming your mind. And then there’s the immediate desire to respond to it. And there’s not this sort of social construct around saying, ‘Wait a minute. If I lash out, if I just react to this, that would look bad.” As it would in the physical world, where if you’re standing with a group of people, and somebody’s saying something controversial, you might not have the desire to immediately launch back with some sort of fiery counter-argument. You might say, ‘Well, I don’t agree with you, but I’m just going to let it go.’ The social element of social media is almost a problem for democracy, because we have to be able to let our whole minds thrive, so not just sort of hot button response to something, but this more dispassionate, more reason-based, more consensus-based – that’s what we need, some sort of general air of consensus, that I think is starting to just crumble, because of the way the public is embracing social media.”

Chris on Twitter

The post Chris Zappone: Media, Social Media, and Politics first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Suzanne Stefanac, aka Zorca, is an interactive media consultant and former journalist. As a journalist, she wrote about digital issues for Wired, Macworld, New York Times and Rolling Stone, among others. With the launch of MSNBC in 1996, Stefanac was executive producer for The Site, an hour-long, nightly television program and website that explored how technology impacts modern life. Lately she’s been hosting Radio Free Zorca on kbmf 102.5 in Butte, Montana.

Suzanne’s KBMF.FM show, radio.free.zorca, streams every Saturday 4-6 mountain time at butteamericaradio.org. To view past musical themes and listen to shows, visit this link.

Photo by Geri Wittig

Suzanne Stefanac: “Butte itself is an incredibly staunch Democratic stronghold, and beyond – progressive, anarchist, and this is all because of the mining history. Labor unions became very very strong. Butte had some of the first actual unions. There are whole books written about it, and that has carried through. And so Butte’s very proud of its progressive standpoint. I did a show a while ago – each of my radio shows has a very specific theme, and it might be Arabic women singers or African guitar or blues covers or something kind of specific. Anyway I did one that was political. Of course it all leaned in one direction. And I got a couple of messages from people who listened from afar, and they were like ‘Are you still alive? Is it okay that you played all that?’ And I was like, ‘This is Butte. They all buy me drinks when I do these kinds of shows.'”

The post Suzanne Stefanac: Radio Free Zorca first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Rock and roll! Plutopia News Network cohosts Scoop and Jon talk about their internet radio show, Radio Free Plutopia. They also discuss their lifetime love of rock and roll, vinyl records, digital music, record shops, album covers, and much more!

The post Plutopian Rock and Roll first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Artist Eliza Evans returns with an update on her activist art project, “All the Way to Hell.” We also talk about fracking, the oil industry, nonprofit organizations, hybrid art forms, and much more.

Eliza Evans: “When I launched the project last fall, not quite a year ago, I had this I thought crazy reach goal of giving away mineral rights to a 3 acre Oklahoma property – giving away to 1,000 people. I thought it was a big number, reachable with a lot of effort and a lot of luck. Well, as of today, we have 1,300 signups. I think we have proof of concept. At least in terms of encouraging people to participate in a temporally and geographically distributed art project that potentially could last for generations. And I think that’s really exciting.”

The post Eliza Evans Returns: Art and Activism first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Tom Jennings joins Plutopians for a free-range, grass-fed conversation about programming and software, Afghanistan, racism, the Civil War, Tom’s FrankenRambler, and much more. Tom is a Los Angeles-based artist, tech, and AMC Rambler aficionado. He is known for his work on FidoNet, the first message and file networking system for BBSes. He’s also known for his work at Phoenix Technologies on MS-DOS integration and interoperability.

Tom Jennings: “The Civil War is actually a technological war, and a communication war, and a commerce war. And there’s a map of 1870 United States – Maine, Florida, etc. – and then you take a map of 2020, 2021, of the bad health outcome Covid states – same map. It has not changed. We have never really ended the Civil War, and we don’t even talk amongst ourselves, from grade school onward, about anything honest about the Civil War.”

Tom’s website at SR-IX.com

Also check out The Anarchist, a 1996 article for Wired Magazine by Paulina Borsook

The post Tom Jennings Redux: Civil War 2021 first appeared on Plutopia News Network.

Climate scientist Michael Tobis returns to the Plutopia podcast. He discusses the conflict of fascism vs. internationalism, the right wing co-opting of the anti-vax movement, conservative resistance to climate science, and virtue signaling on social media. Also wondering if democracy can survive the right’s fascination with fascism.

Michael is interested in the interface between science and public policy. He holds a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences where he developed a 3-D ocean model on a custom computing platform. Michael has been involved in sustainability conversations on the internet since 1992, has been a web software developer since 2000, and has been posting sustainability articles on the web since 2007.

Michael Tobis: “So now you see… incredibly stupid behavior about Covid. It’s like climate in fast forward. It’s just mind-bogglingly stupid to say, “Okay, I’m going to tie the hands of the individual cities and schools to implement their own measures. It’s just like, anti-Covid measures are intrinsically bad. Well, that’s just crazy!”

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