Episodes
Friday Feb 01, 2019
Philip K. Dick Book Club: Episode 129: The Electric Ant
Friday Feb 01, 2019
Friday Feb 01, 2019
In Philip K. Dick's final story from the 1960s, "The Electric Ant" we get a mixture of reality bending metaphysics and android anxt.
Tuesday Jan 29, 2019
Philip K. Dick Book Club: Episode 128.4: Galactic Pot-Healer, 4
Tuesday Jan 29, 2019
Tuesday Jan 29, 2019
The conclusion of my thoughts on Philip K. Dick's greatest novel "Galactic Pot-Healer". We are coming to the end of this very long series on Dick's publications of the 1960s. Excited to move into the 1970s with "Maze of Death", the antithesis novel of GPH.
Monday Jan 28, 2019
Philip K. Dick Book Club: Episode 128.3: Galactic Pot-Healer, 3
Monday Jan 28, 2019
Monday Jan 28, 2019
This podcast is the third in my series on "Galactic Pot-Healer" by Philip K. Dick. In this part of the novel, we explore the theme of entropy. What does it have to do with meaningful work?
Thursday Jan 24, 2019
Philip K. Dick Book Club: Episode 128.2: Galactic Pot-Healer, 2
Thursday Jan 24, 2019
Thursday Jan 24, 2019
Part 2 of my review of my favorite Philip K. Dick novel "Galactic Pot-healer". Joe Fernwright is guided by the Glimmung to a new life with an actual purpose.
Thursday Jan 24, 2019
Episode 287: Herman Melville: Billy Budd
Thursday Jan 24, 2019
Thursday Jan 24, 2019
We get to the end of Herman Melville's prose writing with our look at "Billy Budd", published in 1924. It is a great little novel on power, the law, and duty.
Monday Jan 21, 2019
Philip K. Dick Book Club: Episode 128.1: Galactic Pot-Healer
Monday Jan 21, 2019
Monday Jan 21, 2019
Let's raise Heldscalla! "Galactic Pot-Healer" is my favorite Philip K. Dick novel. Let me tell you why.
Monday Jan 21, 2019
Episode 286: Herman Melville: The Confidence Man, Part 2
Monday Jan 21, 2019
Monday Jan 21, 2019
Part two of my review of "The Confidence Man" by Herman Melville. Maybe we will get the final answer to the age old question: should you trust your neighbor?
Wednesday Jan 16, 2019
Episode 285: Herman Melville: The Confidence Man, Part 1
Wednesday Jan 16, 2019
Wednesday Jan 16, 2019
Part one of Herman Melville's exploration of America's market economy, "The Confidence Man." Can the economy work without confidence and charity? We will explore these and other questions in this review.
Wednesday Jan 16, 2019
Philip K. Dick Book Club: Episode 127.4: Ubik, Part 4
Wednesday Jan 16, 2019
Wednesday Jan 16, 2019
The quite bleak finale of "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick. It is not entirely clear what is going on as this novel closes. You will either love it or hate it, but in my view it does not ruin a fascinating novel.
Sunday Jan 13, 2019
Philip K. Dick Book Club: Episode 127.3: Ubik, Part 3
Sunday Jan 13, 2019
Sunday Jan 13, 2019
Joe Chip, our story's hero, tries to make sense of a world in which everything decays and even technologies revert to earlier forms, in part three of our look a Philip K. Dick's "Ubik". Maybe the secret is that everyone is dead.
Sunday Jan 13, 2019
Episode 284: Herman Melville: Assorted Short Fiction
Sunday Jan 13, 2019
Sunday Jan 13, 2019
We finish up looking at Herman Melville's short fiction in this episode. Some great tales about class, family, and technology. These may not all be known as Melville's greatest works of short fiction, but they are mostly all entertaining and rich in meaning.
Thursday Jan 10, 2019
Episode 283: Herman Melville: Essays and Early Short Fiction
Thursday Jan 10, 2019
Thursday Jan 10, 2019
In this episode, I look at an assortment of Herman Melville's assorted short prose: some book reviews and short stories. Part one of a two part series on these uncollected works.
Thursday Jan 10, 2019
Philip K. Dick Book Club: Episode 127.2: Ubik, Part 2
Thursday Jan 10, 2019
Thursday Jan 10, 2019
This is part two of my review of "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick. With an android bomb, the posthuman industrial spying plot winds down as we find our characters in a world of decay and entropy. We will struggle with them to find out footing.
Tuesday Jan 08, 2019
Philip K. Dick Book Club: Episode 127.1: Ubik, Part 1
Tuesday Jan 08, 2019
Tuesday Jan 08, 2019
The first part of my review of Philip K. Dick's "Ubik". This novel would have been great it if was just about industrial espionage and post-humanism, which is what we think we are getting in the beginning of the story.
Tuesday Jan 08, 2019
Philip K. Dick Book Club: Episode 126: Not By Its Cover
Tuesday Jan 08, 2019
Tuesday Jan 08, 2019
"Not By Its Cover" by Philip K. Dick looks at religious texts, preservation, reproduction and authenticity. It is a nice story that is firmly in Dick's period of religious speculation, but it may be more significant for what it says about knowledge preservation in a digital age.
Thursday Jan 03, 2019
Thursday Jan 03, 2019
This episode is the second in my review of Herman Melville's "The Piazza Tales". Two of these stories are quite strange, but "The Encantadas" is a brilliant quasi-historical account of the changing Pacific. Read it!
Thursday Jan 03, 2019
Thursday Jan 03, 2019
Poor Deckard. Doomed to be kipple, but maybe he can find some meaning in an electronic frog. Let's read the final chapters of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and move onto a book with a much shorter title.