A Meal of Thorns 13 – THE THIS with Anna McFarlane

A Meal of Thorns

Podcasts, reviews, interviews, essays, and more at the Ancillary Review of Books.

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Credits:

• Guest: Anna McFarlane
• Title: The This by Adam Roberts
• Host: Jake Casella Brookins
• Music by Giselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork by Rob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough

References:

• Anna's books, including Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology, The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture, and Adam Roberts: Critical Essays
• Mary Butts’ “Mappa Mundi”
• Jordan S. Carroll’s Speculative Whiteness
• Adam Roberts’ The Thing Itself, Lake of Darkness, New Model Army, and nonfiction
• Christopher Priest
• The Thing, dir. John Carpenter
• Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
• Deleuze’s concept of The Fold
• Nabokov’s Pale Fire
• Michael Swanwick Stations of the Tide & Vacuum Flowers
• Cory Doctorow & Greg Egan
• Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash
• William Gibson’s Neuromancer
• Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This
• Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers
• Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War
• Star Trek’s Borg
• E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”
• George Orwell’s 1984
• Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit
• "The sky above the port was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel"
• The idea of the pharmakon
• The Big Read podcast on The This
• Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex
• Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation
• Robot monkey/wiremother experiments
• Roberts’s review of The Book of Elsewhere
• Roberts on Bluesky
• Black Mirror
• Thomas Disch’s 334 & Camp Concentration
• David Lynch
• Peter Watts’ Blindsight & Echopraxia
• Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, & Galapagos
• Vonnegut thing about delivering a letter
• Vonnegut’s “Biafra: A People Betrayed”
• Fix-up novels
• Jo Walton's “On Selecting the Top Ten Genre Books of the First Quarter of the Century”
• Casella's essay on This Is How You Lose the Time War
• Lavie Tidhar's Central Station, The Circumference of the World, Osama, A Man Lies Dreaming
• A line from Hegel to Marx to Darko Suvin
• The conclusion to Walter Pater's The Renaissance
• Molly Templeton’s “A Modest Request for a Little More Genre Chaos”
• Young Frankenstein dir. Mel Brooks
• Anna on Bluesky
• The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities