Highway To Mars

There has been no end of discussion on what people don’t like about modern geek culture and specifically science fiction but less on what is going wrong.  Many think it’s ideology, but in this discussion, I look at something much more fundamental – the basic ability to tell a story. Far from agreeing with the […]

Okay, so that’s a clickbait title.  While it’s true, this is not a negative episode – I have spent much of the past 2-3 years trying to work out what is going awol with science fiction and what to do about it.  This episode doesn’t fully answer that question, but it breaks down what I […]

At last we leave the Orbit of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and what can we say about this last instalment, the radio play based on the book “And Another Thing”?  It’s better than the book? This is one for the completists and those that feel that a man who lays down in front […]

Captain Marvel is the latest Disney product to dip a toe into the Culture war and as Disneys biggest money maker it will be interesting to see what the fallout is like.  For the record I enjoyed this movie for what it was and I think that Brie Larson could be successful as the head […]

Atlas Shrugged is a controversial book – as Ayn Rand was a controversial person. In this episode I take a look at a number of key ideas in the novel and how they stand up – noting of course that this book has been the subject of intense debate for over 60 years. Does Rand […]

So this is not actually a douglas project but…. we had to do it. And another thing is not awful, it’s just boring and unnecessary. Anyway… Mostly Harmless is the end of the story, Douglas might have been thinking about pulling a George Lucas and revise – that doesn’t make it a good idea.

In this episode Stefan takes a look at the ways that science fiction is failing us – not in quality but in ideas. Taste is subjective and we don’t aim to pass judgement on the quality of the stories but the big three franchises – Doctor Who, Star Trek and Star Wars are short on […]

Let’s face it the Hitchhikers movie has some issues – that said we loved it. The challenge with hitchhikers is it doesn’t fit into any kind of three act structure, it starts bounces around and ends. The characters haven’t really learned anything (well arthur has learned how hard it is to get tea in outer […]

Am I alone in being over the Culture Wars?  In this next set of podcasts I want to move past the dumpster fire that is the culture war to focus on what I think is the most important product of Geek Culture for the past 30 years – the race to catch up with our […]

Gareth and Stefan continue their examination of the works of Douglas Adams with the Quintessinal phase, the last of the Douglas Adams sourced pieces of the Hitchhikers Guide.  There are two ways you can go with this piece – take the material as it is, or how a later regretful author might have imagined it. […]

Remember when Science Fiction used to be fun?  Those were the days my friend! I want to be clear, In this episode I am not making any comparisons with state sanctioned segregation practices of the past.  I am however pretty sure that we learned in the past that segregation is a stupid way to solve […]

In this episode I take a deeper examination of the Women in Fridges trope and how it is a classic example of how we have lost the art of communicating our problems, and solution building in this era of outrage.  

Gareth and Stefan restart their series on Douglas Adams at the very end of the Hitchhikers series.  The book stands alone, one way or another all the post douglas materials have attempted to rewrite the end and even douglas himself had his regrets.  However this is a moment where one needs to commit to the bit […]

I have always wanted to approach the Culture War beyond the moral arguments and look more to if there is an effect being felt, if so what is that affect and what does it mean longer term. In this episode I reflect on the datasets that are out there and how they are used – […]

So what is the culture war?  Unless you have been hiding under a rock you will have noticed that people aren’t very nice to each other any more and even the choice of coffee in the morning can be a polarising act.  In science fiction the battleground seems mostly to have been around the representation […]

The third radio series was a surprise improvement on the book, can the fourth do the same? A belated episode (hey it’s only 18 months overdue) we delve into the fourth radio play.  As with the third, I enjoyed most of it even more than the book. To me this is the ending of the […]

Like it or not the Culture War has seeped into pretty much every part of Science Fiction.  In truth I don’t have an ideological dog in the fight beyond the fact that there is no real world evidence that much of the remedies the SJW side will work and I dislike the fact that they […]

It’s been a strange old year in Science Fiction where content creators decided to take on fans in different ways and virtue trumped storytelling too many times.  That said there was still a lot to enjoy, if not a lot to jog the brain cells.  With that in mind, I have been spending the year […]

  Collectivism is a funny thing.  We have given it a go in various forms with varying degrees of harm to those involved.  Generally collectivism is implemented by force because while Objectivism is arrogant when it comes to the ability for society to operate without rules, Collectivism mostly seeks to override the other truth, that we […]

Ayn Rand isn’t everybodies cup of tea and I see it as somewhat ironic that before a movie was made about her book Atlas Shrugged there was the Bioshock series. Objectivism as a philosophy has some good points, that we should deal with (objective) reality, that the world can be objectively defined and we should […]