S&L Podcast - #403 - Like a Santa Hat on Ursula K. Leguin
/Mallory O'Meara from Reading Glasses is back and she's very skeptical about adapting the Sparrow for television. The hands alone! Also new Game of Thrones universe TV options and our final thoughts on The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline.
WHAT ARE WE DRINKING?
Tom: Talisker 10 year (for Burns Night on the 25th)
Mallory: High Wire Distilling New Southern Revival
QUICK BURNS
Jan: The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction
John (Taloni) Heaven's River, the 4th Bobiverse book, is out of its Audible exclusive period and now available in ebook format.
Jan: The nominees for the 2021 Philip K. Dick Award have been announced.
Trike: Ursula K. Le Guin will be on a commemorative US postage stamp.
Trike: Queen’s Gambit showrunner to adapt Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow as a limited series on FX.
John: Tor have a blog post with details of books to be released in 2021
BARE YOUR SWORD
Feedback from the audienceMark: The Sword & Laser Wiki has 200 pages! to which Tassie Dave added "I guess I'm responsible for the majority of those. 😉 At an educated guess I'd say I've made over 150 pages 😮 and contributed to at least another 10+ pages and I'd say Mark has contributed to more pages than me 180+ "
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Ruth: On the subject of dreams, .... I actually love the ‘monster’ kind of nightmares though because they are like my own private horror movies.Last night’s was a zombie dream where some ‘local teens’ had gone into some old abandoned mines/caves in a small town somewhere in the US and there had been an accident. I was a reporter who went to the town looking for a story. The mines/caves had been covered over with plastic sheeting but you can bet it didn’t stay that way for long! I’d watch that movie!
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Jan: There was recently an interesting episode of the Scriptnotes podcast where Maria Dahvana Headley talked about her new feminist translation of Beowulf and explained that every translation (especially from a dead language) is always an adaptation as words can mean different things or are not directly translatable at all. A good example can be found in this review of her tranlsation that shows how Headly sets a completely different tone by translating the opening intensifier Hwæt as "Bro!" and not for example “Lo!” like Tolkien did. In any case, that discussion did make me wanna read that translation of Beowulf very much! On a slightly more mundane level: In Germany it was in the 70s quite common to dub TV shows in a way that had nothing to do with the original. The "I Spy" TV show was for example turned from a more realistic spy drama with some humor into a goofy show with meta humor and puns every other sentence. But I don't know any case where that happened to novels (or at least modern ones)
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Mark: Ok. No one else has brought up the heffalump in the room podcast. Mallory just blew through the difficult author names like they weren't there. What's up with that?
BOOK OF THE MONTH DISCUSSION
NEXT MONTH
Picked by our February guest host, Rod Simmons form the SMR Podcast!
WRAP UP
The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline
Lisa: Maybe I'm being too literal, but am I the only one who thought that from a practical standpoint it just didn't make any sense that they were killing off the indigenous people? Even if the marrow that they extract is a cure (vs. a treatment) for the dreamlessness, how do they know they won't run out of Indians before they treat the whites? And what if it recurs later, either in the same people or future generations?
Possibly even darker than killing the indigenous people would be keeping them as breeding stock, like slaves, like another species. Is that too dark for a YA book? Was Dimaline trying to keep the story simpler?
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Ruth: Weirdly, I felt like it was darker than I’d expected. I found that there was so much hopelessness within the book, to me this shadowed even the uplifting parts. Maybe because I hope people are better than show here, despite what history shows us.
Edit: Actually, thinking about it more, I think this books seemed bleak to me for the same reason isn’t didn’t to Trike - groups like the ones in this novel have already been so appallingly treated in the very recent past (or it still goes on) and that is very upsetting to me. It makes it harder to distance myself from the dystopia of it all.
I agree ... the narration is excellent!
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John: I finished the book a few days ago and have to say I hugely enjoyed it.
It was refreshing to read a story where the "plot" was firmly in the background, and the focus was very much on the characters and their development. Those portraits were excellent and I got a very strong sense of their struggle to survive.
I didn't have any expectations going into the book and certainly didn't find it bleak. The fact that [French was reunited with his father ] and [Miig and Isaac were reunited \o/ ] made
Good choice - 5 stars from me and I am looking forward to the next guest pick
Reading Glasses Podcast
ADDENDUMS
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