Episode Details

The SFFaudio Podcast #760 – The Poison Belt by Arthur Conan Doyle, read by Mike F. Smith (for LibriVox.org). This is a complete and unabridged reading of the book (3 hours, 17 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Paul Weimer, Bryan Alexander, Trish E. Matson, and Terence Blake

Talked about on today’s show:
1913, The Strand, republished, 199 pages, 3 hours and 15 minutes, what we might call a series, The Lost World, never even mention dinosaurs, does this book stand on its own, from a plot perspective, fall into the byplay, as characters, building on those characters, what character we needed, such a step down in terms of length, the mind blowing idea, discovered dinosaurs 3 years earlier, everybody dies, what challenger was doing, reverses all the damage he does, less potent thus less famous, the reception, invasion novels, village, how the rest of the world responds, golfers and babies, the end of the world, straight up, a giant stride being taken, the big setup, skull island, the plateau of Leng, Edgar Rice Burroughs, in Challenger’s wife’s boudoir, no action, the story as an idea, a request from publishers, more of that Challenger stuff, the adventures of these guys again, this story gets super-existential, I can’t report the news now, that old lady worrying about her stocks, in despair, we still have science!, all the roles that Conan Doyle is himself playing, aspects of his own personality, Sumerlee is the worst parts, Challenger is the guy who wants to be, Roxton is the manly man, the reversal, Aristotle’s unities, war imagery, corpses lying every which way on the ground, pseudocorpses, a gas attack, even more striking, propaganda operations, that’s where he got his, keeping up with the fairies, keeping up with everything topical, Danger!, England being attacked by an enemy using uboats, the spectre of death, War Of The Worlds, newspaper reports, telegrams, he wanted an Professor@Challenger.uk email address, clericals and anarchists, Paris has riots in the streets, racialism, the nigger at the beginning and the end, less complex societies, Sumatra, odious ideas of race, the pinnacle is all these people, after he bites his housemaid, a superman, making fun of challenger, short legs, the ride in on the traincar, doing a cockatoo, some rando, perfect for England in 1913, no colonies east of Sumatra, we peel around the world moving west, continues past England, eerily prescient, really poignant, layers of mediation, a snapshot of attitudes in this peak of colonialism, the Slovenians falling, the Teutons were slower to be affected, Doyle’s everybody here, could he have written this 20 years later, kinda stupid premise, ether is not a thing, ether has come back, Einstein, we don’t need this shit, you don’t need ether for the plot, a map of local interstellar space, a bubble of low density interstellar medium, pre-Einsteinian ether theory, cosmic particles, panspermia, what we’re looking at is not a gas, like the Force, allowing light to do its thing, it doesn’t make any sense, change the overall mixture, it can’t actually be a gas, the earth orbiting through this gas, diluting it, they wax papered the windows, A Pail Of Air by Fritz Leiber, a bucket of oxygen, a frozen gas vs. an et