Semi-regular audio, from semi-crazy participants
This episode we talk book to movie adaptations, the good the bad the Ugly and the ones that we don’t bother talking about.
The top subjects were:
John Carter of Mars
The Lord of the Rings
2010 The Year we Return
StarShip Troopers
On the cast this week:
Doc Coleman
Laura Nicole
JP Losier
Zach Ricks
Scott Roche
Jeff A. Hite
Plus our weekly random question. Comment and let us know your random answer
“Nineteen-Eighty-Four”, or “Hunger Games: 1949″, by George Orwell
In my continuing effort to become more grounded in classic science fiction I went back to the internet. I looked for the first top ten list I’d used to get ‘Flowers for Algernon but couldn’t find it right off and ended up with the top ten science fiction novels to change the world.
I went to Audible.com and purchased two books; ‘Brave New World’ and ‘Nineteen-Eighty-Four’.
Seeing how I had actually lived through the time period, I started with ‘Nineteen-Eighty-Four’ to see how close Orwell had gotten right.
I want to break this review into three parts; as Science Fiction, as Social Science, and a story.
The basic story is that sometime after the first or second war, it’s hard to tell, the world broke into three separate, yet identical, totalitarian states. We spend our time in Oceania which includes Great Britain, America and bits and pieces of a few other places; They needed frontiers with the other two enemies so that war could continue indefinitely.
Our man, Winston, works for the Ministry of Truth. He’s an ‘outer’ party member who’s job is to take old news articles and change them to the current belief of the party. He realizes this is to create a lie and that the party, therefore, must be liars. He begins his search for an opposition to the party. To get more of the plot, you’ll either have to read the book or go to wikipedia. (However, there are plot spoilers. I feel like I am speaking to the people who have already read this.)
Here’s what I thought.
As science fiction, I was disappointed to see that Orwell missed the computer completely. The only true science fiction aspect of the story, as far as I am concerned, is the ‘View Screens’ in everybody’s homes and work places. These screens play music, show news broadcasts, and at the same time, allows somebody on the other end to watch everything you do.
There are three groups of people. The inner party makes up about 1.5% of the population. The outer party is maybe 6% to 10%. The remainder are the ‘Prolls’. They are the poor, the unknown, and essentially, the unwatched. For 1.5% of the population to watch the 6% to 10% both day and night would be absolutely impossible without the use of computers. Yet, our man is watched, even down to the point of his facial expressions, or dilation of his pupils.
As a commentary on society, I believe he missed the mark again.
That’s easy for me to say looking back. When you consider the political environment when the novel was written in 1949, and the radical political changes on the horizon, it isn’t hard to understand the book’s outlook. Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito had just been dealt with and we had the cold war looming ahead.
But what do we have now? We have the Hunger Games. A totalitarian society where the majority of the population are kept in abject servitude under the continuously watching eye of the Capitol. Where the Hunger Games got it right was, there was a resistance.
The book ends with ‘Big Brother’ winning when Winston finally understands he loves Big Brother. Having watched race riots and social reforms from the 60′s and 70′s, the Berlin wall coming down in the 90′s, the gay rights movements going on, even as we speak, I don’t believe that an entire society could ever be cowed into accepting the totalitarian rule from an imaginary ruler proliferated by an impassionate ruling minority.
My contention is, in a sociological nutshell, that to have a society which is ruled by a small inner circle of informed who keep the secondary elite subjected and suppressed by fear and micro management would be impossible to maintain for any length of time.
If you look at our most popular recent dictators, Castro, Hussein, Mugabe, Gorbachev, these were the single figure heads, the ‘Big Brother’. Their craving for power and control was passionate, and to keep so many people suppressed, you would have to be passionate. In Orwell’s book, there is no actual figure head, but a minority bureaucracy works impassionately to control the people and extract from them their passion.
This couldn’t last long in Orwell’s scenario. In no time one man’s passion for power would outweigh another’s and then would come factions and dissolution of the whole project. Even with the aforementioned dictators, there were active resistance efforts, political refugees and discontent by passionate people.
Winston argued with O’Brien that the inner party couldn’t succeed and O’Brian asked him if he believed in God. Winston said he didn’t so O’Brian countered with, “What will drive man to resist, to overcome the party?”
Winston said it was man’s spirit, though, he agreed there really wasn’t one.
My contention is that man’s passion wouldn’t allow himself to be subjected as Orwell has them. The party would have to individually torture every person into insanity to overcome man’s inborn needs and hormonal urges. We just had too much time making our own choices to be bluffed and baffled out of our desire to do so.
Orwell was obviously pleased with his sociological model, as he spend much of the third part of the novel waxing most eloquently long at its premises.
Winston gets the illegal book by the non existent revolutionary. He spends hours reading it, and as he did, I could see he was reading a justification of everything the party was working at and not at all what a discontent would have to say. The book finally ends with an epilogue of what the “NewSpeak” dictionary and language were all about. It was marginally interesting, at first, but then became more pontificating.
As a book I thought the story was good, until the reading of the political theories. If you suspend reality enough to ignore the impossible number of man hours required to maintain such a society it could generate some anti socialism fears, if you wanted it to. I guess I’m just too much a believer in man’s ability to adapt and overcome, and in his desire for self expression and other irrepressible passions. I would give the story three stars out of five. But, since it’s a classic, if you haven’t read it, you probably should. And if you get it from Audible.com, or on loan from your local library, you can listen to it in about nine hours.
Philip ‘Norvaljoe’ Carroll is a staff editor at Flying Island Press, the author of the Podiobooks.com novel, The Price of Friendship, has a Bachelor’s in Science in Business Administration from Hawaii Pacific University and has a Podcast Minor in Psychology and Sociology from iTunes University. He has many more opinions than truly coherent thoughts.
Semi-regular audio, from semi-crazy participants
This week we talk with Justin R. Macumber of The Dead Robots Society. We discuss his new book Haywire. The differences between hard and soft Sci/Fi and many other things. And don’t forget to play along with this week’s Random Question.
On the Cast this week:
Justin Macumber
Doc Coleman
Laura Nicole
Scott Roche
JP Losier
Zach Ricks
Jeff Hite
Semi-regular audio, from semi-crazy participants
On the Cast this week
Nobils Reed
Doc Coleman
Scott Roche
Zach Ricks
J.P. Losier
FlagShip's February Issue
FlagShip Feb 2012 – BOTH TEXT AND AUDIO – 2.99 US – in ePub, mobi, and PDF, as well as mp3 audio.
FlagShip Feb 2012 Audio Version – 1.99 – in mp3 audio.
FlagShip Feb 2012 – Text Only – 1.99 US – in ePub, mobi, and PDF.
View From the Captain’s Deck
Finding the Way Forward
by Zach Ricks
What is the purpose of story?
I’ve been reading a lot of David Farland in the form of his daily kicks, and a lot of Chuck Wendig’s thoughts about writing, and while there is a bit of whiplash, the similarities are interesting…
Princesses Don’t Breathe Fire
by Sarina Dorie
When Princess Draciona was born, it was obvious something wasn’t quite right. She had emerald eyes and viridian hair. Most unusual of all was her scaly, moss-tinted skin.
“This baby looks a little like a … ahem … dragon,” said Prince Rupunzelson (named after his great-grandmother).
“No, no,” insisted his wife, Princess Penelope. “That’s just green eczema. She’ll outgrow it.”
Prince Rupunzelson nodded and decided to let his wife worry about it. He would rather think about battle.
But Princess Draciona did not outgrow her eczema. To make matters worse, when she started to teethe, she grew sharp, dagger-like fangs. When she didn’t get her way, she sometimes breathed fire…
Hither and Yon
by Anatoly Belilovsky
…In seconds, the sky darkened and began to churn; thunder rolled over us as air tingled with ozone. I started across the street. It wasn’t that wide; a few drops of rain weren’t going to stop me.
I would have made it, too, most places. Not in Bermuda.
Halfway across, lightning and thunder hit me in a single body blow, and rain roared in my face like a rabid fire hose…
After Glory
by T.J. Dipple
People still nodded to him and praised him on the street. It had been a year since the business with the king and the dragon, but people still remembered him. He smiled thinly at the people who greeted him. As he walked his eyes shifted at the slightest noise, he had been trained to look for danger all his life, and he saw it everywhere. As people passed him he spotted three concealed weapons, and he fought his urges to take them in, he had to focus now.
In the markets he saw the traders cheating their customers; they shaved their coins before giving change, and again Garron fought the urge to call them on it. No one ever tried it with him, it was either a sign of respect, or they knew he would catch them…
Courage!
by Scott Roche
—
Sarina Dorie
As a child, Sarina Dorie dreamed of being an astronaut/archeologist/fashion designer/illustrator/writer. Later in life, after realizing this might be an unrealistic goal, Sarina went to the Pacific NW College of Art where she earned a degree in illustration. After realizing this might also be an unrealistic goal, she went to Portland State University for a master’s in education to pursue the equally cut-throat career of teaching art in the public school system. After years of dedication to art and writing, most of Sarina’s dreams have come true; in addition to teaching, she is a writer/artist/ fashion designer/ belly dancer. Sarina’s novel, Silent Moon, won two second place awards through Romance Writers of America and two third place awards in the paranormal category. She has sold stories to Daily Science Fiction, Untied Shoelaces of the Mind, Crossed Genres, and Roar. Now, if only Jack Sparrow asks her to marry him, all her dreams will come true.
Find her at www.sarinadorie.com
Anatoly Belilovsky
Anatoly Belilovsky came to the US at the age of 15 and learned English from Star Trek reruns. He is now a pediatrician in New York, in an area where English is the 4th most common language. He is a member of SFWA since 2011, with fiction published in NATURE, Ideomancer, Kasma, Immersion Book of Steampunk, Stupefying Stories, and podcast at Tales of Old and Cast of Wonders.
Find his blog at apogrypha.blogspot.com.
T. J. Dipple
T.J. Dipple was born in Birmingham and lived there for 24 years before moving to Stourbridge with his wife. He graduated from Newman College of Higher Education with a degree in History. He has loved writing and reading fantasy ever since he was a child and will continue for the foreseeable future. Find more at www.tjdipple.com
Zach Ricks
Zach Ricks is an attorney / project manager / writer / aspiring imperialist warmonger living in Austin TX with a very understanding wife and daughter. He found science fiction at five years old when his parents made the tactical error of taking him to see “Star Wars” while visiting family in Alaska. They later recalled that it was the first time they’d taken him to a movie where he hadn’t been whining about having to go to the bathroom or wanting popcorn. And while it was a welcome change, it also sort of freaked them out. He grew up on a potato farm in Idaho, which gave him a lot of time riding around on tractors and pondering “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” Today, he can be found occasionally posting short stories at MadPoetFiles.com. His latest project is Flying Island Press – a publisher of e-magazines for anything with a screen or a pair of earphones.
Scott Roche
Scott Roche is the Marketing Director for Flying Island Press. He has had his work published in Hub Magazine and is very active in the podcasting community. Writing and creating are part time unpaid gigs for the most part, but he’s actively working to change that. You can find Scott’s musings on spiritual matters at http://www.spiritualtramp.com. He had a podcast novel called Archangel at http://www.archangelnovel.com. Finally, his thoughts on writing, social media, and podcasting are available at http://www.scottroche.com/blog.
‘Flowers for Algernon’: A book review.
‘Flowers for Algernon’ by Daniel Keyes was first written as a short story in 1958 and published in ‘The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy’. It got the Hugo for best short story in 1960. The author spent several years expanding it into a novel which was published in 1966 by Harcourt.
I’ve said, as you, my faithful readers would know, that I am trying to expand my foundation of classic science fiction. I pretty much only read fantasy as a youth and adult. I’m sorry I missed so much good stuff. I went to a list of the top ten science fiction novels of all time. Somewhere in the middle was ‘Flowers for Algernon’. In the blurb about the story it referred to this book as probably the most quoted yet unread classic of science fiction. I will admit that I had heard the name many times since my son was diagnosed with autism, and hadn’t had a pressing desire to read it until I found it on that top ten list.
I’m glad that I read it, or should I say, listened to it. The recording I got from Audible.com was excellent, as usual. The narrator grasped the differences in Charlie as he changed in intelligence, and translated that into his diction and attitude as he recited the “progress reports” Charlie wrote.
The premise is Charlie, who had an IQ of 68, would have a surgery which could potentially increase his intelligence. He will be the first human subject. There is a mouse, Algernon, who has successfully had the surgery, and early on Charlie ‘races’ the mouse through a maze. He had a lot of respect for this very intelligent mouse, who beats him repeatedly through the maze.
There is sex in the book. I understand that this book has been banned from many schools in the U.S. and Canada. I think it would be appropriate for students in 11th and 12th grades, but I wouldn’t recommend it to a much younger audience.
Charlie writes progress reports which include his feelings, fears, and discoveries as he grows in intelligence. The growth in IQ is rapid and large, however, his emotional growth occurs at a much slower, normal rate. I felt the sex scenes were appropriate to the story and handled maturely. Unlike the sophomoric and gratuitous sex scene at the beginning of the second chapter of, “7th Son.”
If you plan on reading this story and don’t want any spoilers, stop here. I will tell you that I give it five stars for all the things I usually gush about in a story, characterization, pace, language, narration, etc. It was a fascinating look at how a man changes and his reaction to new experiences.
I will now say some things about the plot that I found interesting, so if you don’t want to hear them, take off, hoser.
I was surprised at how he was rejected for becoming smarter. Granted, the crowd at the bakery should have felt lower than snail slime for the way they treated the poor guy when he was too stupid to know better. Yet, even though he figured out how mean they had been to him before, he still counted them as his only friends. Then at the end, when they accept him back after his intelligence has dropped back to where it had been before, with loving arms, I’m surprised they could even look at him without feeling any kind of guilt. They should have gushed and apologized sufficiently for it to have sunk in enough to have made it into a progress report.
There were two other things that didn’t seem resolved to my satisfaction.
I’m not sure how he made his first couple progress reports. I didn’t think he could write at that point.
Also, Charlie borrows a car a couple times. I might be wrong, but I wouldn’t put a skill, like driving a car, on a scale with intelligence. While you may be able to understand how a person should drive a car and what the laws are concerning driving a car, I don’t think the eye-hand-road coordination would come to a genius any faster than learning to throw a baseball or the uneven parallel bars. They never talk about him learning to drive. (But that’s just me.)
As I read this book I often thought of my son who has autism. When we first got his diagnosis I figured it was something he would grow out of, or mature out off, or be educated out of. Six years later, he’s still not up to speed with the kids his age. In some ways he’s brighter; he has a fantastic memory. However, he’s big, difficult to understand, has difficulty expressing what he wants, and his writing is terrible. I don’t know if he will ever be main streamed into school, hold a job or have a relationship with a girl.
‘Flowers for Algernon’ gave me a lot to think about.
Again, I would recommend this book to anyone, well most anyone, over the age of sixteen as a valuable example of how a person faces new environments and how to treat people with disabilities with respect and understanding.
Semi-regular audio, from semi-crazy participants
We talk about kinds of things influenced us as writers and creators.
On the Cast
<h3><a href=”http://ellengable.wordpress.com”>By Ellen Gable</a></h3>
I have to admit that when I first started reading this book I was not sure I would like it. I have a very soft spot kids and especially babies. The thought of something bad happening was not appealing to me. But I found that once I had started reading I could not put It down.
The book was well written, and the characters we all very real. One thing that I have noticed about many “Christian” books the Christian aspects overwhelm the story. This is not the case with Stealing Jenny, the the Christian aspects are definitely there but they enhanced rather than took away from the story.
The well balanced mix between story and Catholic teachings was honestly a breath of fresh air.
After a slightly slow start this turned to be an incredible book, and certainly worth your time to read it
<em>In the interest of full disclosure I did get this book as part of a contest on twitter. However, I have of my free will recommended it to several other people as I am recommending it to you now.</em>
Semi-regular audio, from semi-crazy participants
This was an all crew cast were we discussed some feed back we had received and how it related to content delivery in general and how it related to our content delivery specifically.
On the Cast
I got up this morning and realized I hadn’t written my weekly blog post.
“Oh, no,” I thought. “What will all my fans think?”
Feeling sufficiently remorseful, I thought I would try and get it written during my lunch. Now, don’t take me wrong. Giving up my lunch to write a blog post may not sound like a great sacrifice. The one hour in the middle of the work day is probably my most coherent, and therefore, my most creatively productive, hour of the day. During Nanowrimo I would often get 1200 to 1500 words written. (I would go over 15 minutes or so if I didn’t have a patient waiting. I don’t think I ever got 1500 words in one hour.) Some of my best ideas, plot twists and conflicts came to me over a Subway sandwich. So I could be editing my current novel or working on the rewrite of my next podiobook.com serial, but, no. I am dedicated to my faithful followers and want to give you my regular 600 words of drivel.
Today’s easy, though. It’s the review of Tim Powers’s book, ‘On Stranger Tides’. Besides, I have to write that one today; I’ve started listening to another book, and the first will soon be lost to my limited memory if I don’t write it down soon. (I thought I would build my repertoire of ‘Classic Science Fiction’ stories under my belt and have started listening to ‘Flowers for Algernon’, which I will likely review next week.”
Having completed my second Tim Powers book, I would gladly declare myself a Tim Powers fan. (James P. Blaylock is still in first place.) Powers creates a believable fantasy that sucks me in. His writing is descriptive and absorbing. I know that’s how I describe any book I like, but, that’s what I’m looking for in a story. I want to be taken away from real life and immersed into a new world with fascinating characters, colorful, dimensional environment, and riveting conflict and action. I want to see characters grow and change. It all happens in this tale of piracy, magic and romance. Romance? Come on, it’s a pirate story, there had to be some love story in it.
When I looked on the internet to see if any of the characters, besides Blackbeard, were people from real life, I found a lot of references to ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides’, and I thought, “Huh. They named the fourth movie in their series the same name as Powers book.” One wiki, somewhere, said that Powers wrote his book shortly after the first ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movie and Disney optioned it to use as the basis for their fourth movie.
If you never heard that, you would never see any resemblance between the two works. At one point in the book, the main character, John Shon-don-yack, (I never saw it written, so I don’t know how to really spell it) renamed Jack Shandy by the pirate captain, Philip Davies, runs along a banquet table. As I remember the move, Jack Sparrow does that too. And in the movie, I think they’re looking for the fountain of youth, I don’t really remember, I just remember the mermaid in the glass case, but, that is the main idea of the book; Finding the fountain of youth, living forever, and magic that the pirates used.
There are multiple colorful characters. Blackbeard is one of them, though not must more than Philip Davies. John Shandy is resourceful and believable. In most cases I ended up liking the pirates who came off as the good guys. I also liked that the bad guys weren’t the royal navy. Though they did play a protagonistic part with the pirates, the bad guys were two men plotting for immortality, seeking the fountain of youth and having evil designs for the girl John Sandy falls for.
Again, I give it five stars. One review I read only gave it three because he didn’t like how it ended. I couldn’t see it having a permenent conclusion any other way. The narration on the Audible recording was excellent with multiple voices, both male and female.
Philip ‘Norvaljoe’ Carroll is a staff editor at FlyingIslandPress.com and the author of the podiobooks.com novel, ‘The Price of Friendship’. He is old enough to remember when they added the Pirates of the Caribbean ride to Disney Land. He has two exceptionally bright grand children and is currently restoring his 1965 Barracuda, which he named, ‘The Goldfish’.