WOW. I always enjoy the Hardcore History podcast, but Dan Carlin has really outdone himself with his latest offering, a three-part episode on the Punic Wars. A few years ago I bought an audiobook about Hannibal, but it was so dull I gave up on it after just an hour or two. After listening to the Hardcore History treatment of the same subject, I’m simply flabbergasted that anyone, even a professional historian, could have made these events boring. This has got to be one of the most riveting, mind-blowing stories I’ve ever heard, and Dan Carlin tells it like a real story, with characters and conflict and dramatic episodes. This is the story of how Carthage’s greatest general, Hamilcar Barca, never defeated on the battlefield but betrayed by a weak political leadership back at home, raised his three sons, including his eldest son Hannibal, to be the greatest military leaders of the age, and how he made them swear oaths when they were children that they would make Rome pay, and of how they devoted their entire lives to doing just that. You really have to listen to this. (Start with Show 21 – Punic Nightmares I.)

ETA: I interviewed Dan Carlin for Episode 15 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Tai Chi Masters YouTube Video

Tobias S. Buckell’s story “Resistance” is now available as a free podcast from Escape Pod. This story features Buckell’s dreadlocked superhuman badass character Pepper (pictured below) and originally appeared in John Joseph Adams’s anthology Seeds of Change.

I just came across this in the bookstore. Wizards of the Coast has repackaged Troy Denning’s novel The Verdant Passage in a really nice-looking trade paperback edition:

The book is set in the Dark Sun game world (which Denning co-developed). This is the campaign setting I was most into when I played Dungeons & Dragons back in middle school. It’s basically Lord of the Rings meets Mad Max (most vegetation has been wiped out by life-devouring magic, gladiatorial combat is big, and the hobbits are all feral cannibals). The world is absolutely brutal. All player characters were supposed to start out at level 3 just to give them a fighting chance, and even so you were supposed to roll up three or four characters per player because it was just assumed that the characters wouldn’t be lasting long.

This new edition of the novel uses the same cover art (by Brom, whose spectacular artwork was always key to defining the look of the world), but with the addition of that gigantic black number 1. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had this thing involving book series with numbers on them — those damned numbers practically compel me to collect the whole set, and that they put the number in gigantic typeface on the cover … I mean, that’s just not fair. It took an enormous act of will to return this book to the shelf.

It did remind me, though, of an incident I’d completely forgotten about. I read The Verdant Passage during a day that I stayed home sick from school. I spent the whole day reading, and as is wont to happen when you spend hour after hour reading a book, the book started to seem more and more real and reality receded further and further into the background. This effect was amplified by the fact that I was running a tremendous fever, and by mid-afternoon I had become positively delirious. In the story, the band of heroes — which includes a gladiator — discover that the vile sorcerer-king intends to sacrifice everyone in the arena as part of an evil magical ritual. I remember crawling out of bed toward the door, but being too weak to keep going, and I lay there on the floor with my forehead pressed into the carpet, with sweat just pouring off me, and I was somehow convinced that I was both myself and the gladiator character, and that if I didn’t manage to drag myself off the floor and out the door and go save the world, then everyone was going to die.

Eventually, of course, my fever came down, and I realized that I am not in fact a totally badass gladiator warrior. (Wait. Or am I? Actually, I guess I kind of am. But I digress…) It was actually a pretty cool experience, and sort of made me wish that I could read books while delirious more often.

Fellow Alpha staffer Karina Sumner-Smith‘s story “The Voices of the Snakes” is now available as a free audio program over at Podcastle. The story, told from the point of view of Medusa as she converses with her head of snakes, is beautifully written and evocative.

“Hello poison, hello grave-specter, hello nightmare,” the little green grass snake called, his tiny voice high and all his sibilants hissed. He flicked his tongue and uncurled his sleepy coils. “Hello dung heap, hello monstrosity, hello ruin.”

This podcast appeared last week over at Fantasy magazine, and while I was over there I noticed that another Alpha person, workshop alum Jeanette Westwood, also has a story up, “The Banyan Tree,” which I remember reading at Alpha.

Here’s a shot of a restaurant in Palo Alto called Pluto’s. Strangely, I feel right at home in this place. Can’t really put my finger on why…

I also stopped by a gallery that’s showing work by Maggie Taylor, whose gorgeous and surreal Victorian-themed art combines photography with computer effects. (Reminds me a bit of Magritte and a bit of Alex Gross.) Many of the pieces can be seen on her website or on the gallery’s site. Here’s the cover of one of her books:

I just saw that Greg Van Eekhout’s short story “Anywhere There’s a Game,” a medley of vignettes about very unusual basketball players, is now up on PodCastle. I really enjoyed this story when I read it in Realms of Fantasy, and the story made it onto my list of my favorite stories I read in 2006. It takes a lot to overcome my near-total apathy toward spectator sports, so the fact that I enjoyed this one as much as I did says something. Check it out.

Here’s the latest music video from Derek James (a friend of mine from high school). I got an invite to be an extra in this, but unfortunately I couldn’t make it that day, though the video seems to have turned out pretty well even without me. I wish I could have been there though. Looks like it was an interesting day.

MC Chris – Nrrrd Grrrl music video

Back in my political science-major undergrad days, I used to have the TV in my dorm room constantly tuned to CNN or C-SPAN, but in recent years I’ve completely given up watching TV news because I’ve been so disgusted at the way that national news shows just pass along whatever political figures are saying and don’t bother to analyze whether or not those statements are actually factual, let alone whether or not those statements are consistent with what that person has stated in the past. But my friend Rob recently got me hooked on Keith Olbermann’s show on MSNBC. The show is still way more bombastic and tabloid-esque than I’d really like, but in an era when I can scarcely distinguish CNN from The National Enquirer, I’ll take what I can get. At least with Keith Olbermann’s show you get the sense that there’s somebody home, and the program does a decent job at pointing out corrections to whatever new flood of bullshit has spewed forth during the previous 24 hour news cycle. One hilarious recent segment (available on YouTube) dealt with John McCain’s astounding admission that he’s just now “learning to get online.” Anyway, the previous night’s show is available daily as a free (and ad-free) video podcast, so it’s easy to give the show a try and see if it’s for you.

I recently came across this great coffee-table book: Secret Lives of Great Authors by Robert Schnakenberg.

It’s a quick survey of the lowlights from the personal lives of a few dozen famous authors. The book is full of illustrations and fact boxes that make reading (or browsing) through it a breeze. Of course I already knew a lot of this stuff, but there was still plenty I wasn’t aware of. And having it all collected in one volume makes a pretty powerful collective impression: To wit, authors’ lives really suck. Some of the info in here I’m pretty sure was wrong, but it was still a fun read. Anyway, here’s a sample:

“Gerard de Nerval, the French symbolist poet, had a pet lobster, which he often took for walks through the streets of Paris. Lobsters make great pets, he wrote, because they’re ‘peaceful, serious creatures who know the secrets of the sea, and don’t bark.’ Nerval went insane in 1841.”

“Today, we call them ‘little people,’ but even in Tolkien’s day his use of the term dwarves caused an uproar. After The Hobbit was published in 1937, grammarians assailed him for not using dwarfs, which is the preferred plural form according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Luckily for Tolkien, he had a persuasive defense: He had edited the dictionary.”

“One of the few jobs Faulkner did manage to hang onto was postmaster of the University of Mississippi post office, from 1921 to 1924. Not surprisingly, the effete, haughty genius proved to be the very model of a toxic employee. Faulkner was rude to customers (when he wasn’t ignoring them) and oblivious to his responsibilities. He spent most of his workday writing or playing bridge and mah-jongg with cronies he hired as clerks. He was often caught throwing people’s mail into the garbage. When a postal inspector was assigned to investigate him, Faulkner agreed to resign. He later summed up his experience: ‘I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.'”

“Gore Vidal vs. Norman Mailer: The long-simmering feud between the two egotistical novelists — both of whom wanted to be considered America’s preeminent wordsmith — came to a head one evening at a tony New York dinner party, where Mailer challenged Vidal to a fight and threw a drink in his face when Vidal ignored him. Unperturbed, Vidal remarked, ‘Once again words have failed Norman.'”

Here are a few podcasts I’ve discovered recently that I’ve enjoyed. Check ’em out.

Comic Geek Speak

Hardcore History

Savage Love

Real Time

Freethought Radio

Recommended: Right At Your Door

Whoa. That was intense.

One of my favorite brand-new writers is Cory Garfin, who works at Skylight Books in Los Angeles and whom I’ve seen read there a few times. His first publication, “The Carousel,” came out recently in the west coast lit mag Zyzzyva. Like all his stories that I’ve heard, this one’s short, well-written, quirky, and charming. Read it now.

Darth Vader Being a Smartass

Award-Winning Author Robert J. Sawyer Speaks About the Importance of Science Fiction

This is a great keynote speech by Robert J. Sawyer in which he explains to a general audience the vital importance of science fiction. His points are probably not news to anyone reading this, but the world would certainly be a much better place if everyone were required to listen to this speech (or something like it) at least once.

I really enjoyed this book: Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics: Hollywood’s Best Mistakes, Goofs, and Flat Out Destructions of the Basic Laws of the Universe by Tom Rogers. It’s a fast, funny read, and focuses mostly on sci-fi movies, so I think it would be perfect for teenage science fiction writers who want to get an entertaining overview of some of the knowledge that science fiction writers need to be familiar with. And I think everyone will probably find a few nuggets in here that’ll make them say, “Oh yeah, I never really thought about it, but yeah, that is pretty dumb.” For example, in the movie Independence Day, a big deal is made over whether or not it’s reckless to deploy nuclear weapons against the alien invaders. Eventually the alien ship hovering over D.C. is destroyed by other means. But, the book points out (crediting the numbers cited to physicist Lawrence Krauss), if you actually shot down a fifteen-mile-long alien saucer, the saucer would plummet to earth, releasing in the process “10,000 times as much energy as the nuclear bomb used on Hiroshima.” Another example: In the movie Armageddon, a ragtag team of drillers/astronauts uses a nuclear bomb to blow apart a Texas-sized asteroid that’s on a collision course with earth. But the book asks you to imagine: What if you dug a big hole in the middle of Texas and set off the largest nuclear bomb ever made — 100 megatons? The resulting explosion will seem big to us but will barely make a dent in Texas. And finally: During the Zion siege scene in The Matrix Revolutions, The Kid uses his trusty wheelbarrow to keep the APUs (giant gun-toting robot suits) supplied with ammo. Only: “Let’s assume a firing rate of six hundred rounds per minute for each APU cannon, and a cartridge similar to the 30 x 113-millimeter round used by the U.S. military in Apache helicopter gunships. Each cartridge has a mass of 447 grams. The total mass of ammunition required for one minute of sustained fire by an APU with both cannons blazing is a whopping 1,180 pounds. A box containing one hundred rounds would weigh over 98 pounds. With both cannons firing, the box would last a mere five seconds.”

If, like me, you’ve been considering joining a fundamentalist polygamist cult, you might want to reconsider. Turns out that life in such a community is not all beer and skittles, by which I mean, actually, that beer and skittles will get you excommunicated, as will, no exaggeration, uttering aloud the word “fun.” At least, according to Escape by Carolyn Jessop. I picked up this book after being intrigued by the cover copy: “I was born into a radical polygamist cult. At eighteen, I became the fourth wife of a fifty-year-old man. I had eight children in fifteen years. When our leader began to preach the apocalypse, I knew I had to get them out.” The book starts out weirdly fascinating, becomes arduously grim, but then ends on an upbeat note. The author’s ex is a husband so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and life in his family is horrific in a way that I would not have thought possible in 21st-century America. Seriously, no matter how much you think your life sucks, you haven’t had to care for seven kids, one of them requiring round-the-clock care, while in the midst of your third life-endangering pregnancy, and while also being forced to have really, really bad sex with a husband whom you hate more than anyone on earth, in order to afford the barest measure of protection to your children from constant physical abuse. And the most terrifying thing of all is that everyone you know — your parents, your siblings, your neighbors, the police — believe that all of this is God’s will, and they will do anything they can to stop you from trying to leave. And that’s before an obvious psychopath who makes animal torture a part of his sermons ascends to the highest leadership position, “Prophet.” There’s something so backward and otherworldly about all of this that I always did a mental double-take whenever the author mentioned a specific year (Wait, this is 2003?). There’s too much outrageous stuff in this book to even summarize in a blog entry. If you’re curious about all the gory details, check out the book. The resilience of the author in the face of so much adversity is flabbergasting.

Cloverfield, in my humble opinion, is made of 100% pure awesome.