This Week in Space 231 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Tariq Malik [00:00:00]:
Coming up on This Week in Space, we say farewell to 2 icons of the Apollo era, Margaret Hamilton and Milt Windler. A Soviet satellite has broken up in orbit. What does that mean for the debris environment? And what's on your reading list? Rod and I get down to business when it comes to space science fiction of the past, the present, and the future. Check it out.

Tariq Malik [00:00:30]:
This is This Week in Space. Episode number 231, recorded on October 9th, 2026: Sailing the Stellar Seas.

Rod Pyle [00:00:40]:
Hello and welcome to another episode of This Week in Space, the Sailing on Stellar Seas edition. I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Ad Astra Magazine, and I'm here as always with my friend, the king of online space journalism himself and video gaming fanatic, Tarek Malik. How are you, partner?

Tariq Malik [00:00:58]:
I'm doing well, Rod. I'm doing well. You're not just sailing on stellar seas, you're sailing on Long Beach— well, I guess Long Beach Bay. Long Beach Harbor?

Rod Pyle [00:01:06]:
Yeah. Actual seas.

Tariq Malik [00:01:07]:
It's a little higher than it used to be.

Rod Pyle [00:01:08]:
If you were down here, you'd see that the posts on the dock have come up to about this because of that big Kelvin wave hitting us. So nothing bad happening here, but down the shore a bit, as you remember, in Alamitos Bay, they're getting creamed and it's going to be worse over the weekend. So my sympathies go to homeowners down there.

Tariq Malik [00:01:24]:
Everyone take care if you live in that affected area right there. Or get a boat.

Rod Pyle [00:01:29]:
Be careful. Go up and down. Uh, today we're going to talk about our favorite space science fiction books, spiced up with a big fat generational divide, which will become evident pretty quickly. Likely heard or read some of these, but I assure you there will be at least a couple that are new for everybody. I challenge you. If not, I'll eat my hair on the air.

Tariq Malik [00:01:52]:
Also, Rod's on his boat, so it's a little bit A little bit sticky. So bear with us. He's doing his best. Yeah, we're doing all right. We're doing all right. So I'm excited. I'm really excited.

Rod Pyle [00:02:05]:
Let's jump into a space joke from Tom Monahan. Just came in. Hey, Tard.

Tariq Malik [00:02:09]:
Tom. Yes, Rod.

Rod Pyle [00:02:11]:
Why do Star Trekkers prefer shopping at Costco?

Tariq Malik [00:02:14]:
Uh, I don't know why.

Rod Pyle [00:02:16]:
Because it's the only place they can buy things from Kirkland.

Tariq Malik [00:02:19]:
That's good. That's good. But Tom, Trekkies, Not Trekkers, in my opinion. But it's okay. It's okay. Okay.

Rod Pyle [00:02:30]:
But they prefer being called Trekkers, I was told.

Tariq Malik [00:02:32]:
So I guess it's tomato, tomato, potato.

Rod Pyle [00:02:36]:
I've only been to one convention, but, uh, that's another story. Now I've heard that some folks want to brand us with a Costco closeout SKU number when it's joke time in the show, but you can help as Tom did by sending us your best, worst, or most indifferent space joke to twist@twit.tv. We'll be happy to brand you with the results on the air. And now, yes, it's that time, going on to headline news.

Tariq Malik [00:03:03]:
Headline news. Well, here we are again.

Rod Pyle [00:03:11]:
Huh?

Tariq Malik [00:03:11]:
I was gonna say, here we are in headline news.

Rod Pyle [00:03:13]:
Yeah, that was helpful. Um, today we have a couple of obits leading the charts. Uh, we have a goodbye to Margaret Hamilton. who was the first software engineer, allegedly, and was a pivotal member in the team that put together the software to run the Apollo guidance computer. And most remarkably remembered for the fact that when Apollo 11 was landing and we heard a remarkably calm Neil Armstrong say, computer alarm, it's 1202, which is basically the computer saying, I want to shut down because you're giving me 2 radar inputs and I can't handle all this data with my 76K of active memory. Her routine, which she put into the software, caused the back— allowed it to shut down what was going on in the background and just concentrate on the radar readings for the landing, which is of course critical for radar altitude, speed, all that. And at one point, for a slightly different problem, she had called her managers at NASA and said, we really need some failsafe backup routines in here. And I quote, astronauts are professionals, don't worry about it.

Rod Pyle [00:04:21]:
Now, that date, that goes to Apollo 8 where Jim Lovell accidentally wiped out the memory of the computer and they had to reload it. And thanks to Margaret's work, that was easier than had she not. So goodbye, Margaret. Thank you very much for your contributions. And also, now I'll hand it off to you, Tarek.

Tariq Malik [00:04:39]:
By the way, I did learn, I didn't know that Margaret Hamilton founded the MIT Instrumentation Lab in the '60s. which is what had the contract for NASA's Apollo program for the computer code there. That was a new thing that I had learned. You'd think that I would have known that already, that she had actually founded it, not just worked there. So that was really interesting there too. But yeah, sadly, Margaret wasn't the only kind of icon of the Apollo era that we lost this week. We learned that Milt Windler, the flight director from Apollo 13, he died at 94. Or, you know, we learned about that.

Tariq Malik [00:05:13]:
He died on Thursday, so it was last week. And we learned We learned at that time. So I wanted to make sure that we kind of touched on both because they were— Margaret and Milt had these pivotal roles in the Apollo program. And people think about Apollo 13, they think about Gene Kranz from the movies and all of that. But Milt was one of the 4 leaders in Mission Control in 1970 that was overseeing that 24-hour round-the-clock mission and the team to make sure that the Apollo 13 crew— we're talking about Jim Lovell and Apollo 8 and others— were able to reach, you know, return to Earth safely and not end up as a tragedy in the history books. So just want to take a moment to recognize both Margaret and Milt and their legacies there.

Rod Pyle [00:06:07]:
All right. And speaking of departures, we had a Soviet satellite Depart, breaking up in high orbit.

Tariq Malik [00:06:15]:
Oh yeah, I should, I should point out, by the way, those obituaries, you can find them at NBC News and Collect Space. Robert Pearlman has a really good one on Milt there. But yeah, this is a Space.com story. My colleague and friend of the show Brett Tingley had this piece about this, this bit of space junk that just blew apart in space, which is, you know, problematic. You don't want that happening all the time. It is a— I'm gonna see if I can pronounce this properly. It was a— oh, it's easy. Yeah, Meteor 27 weather satellite.

Tariq Malik [00:06:50]:
So it was launched in 1981, and it was LeoLabs, that commercial company that uses telescopes all around, that spotted the fragmentation. A quote-unquote debris-generating event is what they called it, of this Meteor 27. They used it at one of their observation sites in Western Australia. And This isn't like the first thing that's happened in recent weeks. This is coming on in the last few months. We've had the US-32 spy satellite, which broke up in September, and then there was a few other events as well. So these kind of Cold War era satellites are starting to fall apart, which is really concerning because part of Meteor 27 also broke apart back in March of 2004. So it keeps kind of splintering off and creating more debris.

Tariq Malik [00:07:49]:
And, and it's pretty high up there. It's at something like 530 miles in orbit. So it's not a low orbit. And, and then of course, there was a Chinese rocket body back in August that also broke apart. But that was a low Earth orbit. And Starlink had one as well earlier this year, about 4 months before that. So in April. I don't know if that's a trend, what that says, but it does mean that that old stuff is going to come back to haunt us, especially, I mean, as we just saw with SpaceX's Starship launch, they launched something like what, the 26 V3 satellites on that Starship launch most recently, and they're going to launch a whole lot more of those.

Tariq Malik [00:08:27]:
And they need to have like their ducks in a row on the debris side to make sure it's safe for their like bajillion satellite constellation there.

Rod Pyle [00:08:37]:
Quack, quack, quack. And I should also note that we do not yet know why it broke up. It would be kind of weird if it was just spontaneous after all these years, because it's not frozen fuel pressure or something. Uh, but at 530 miles in altitude, it's well— the good news is it's well clear of any planned space station orbit. The bad news is it'll be up there for a very, very long time. Yeah, there's nothing to bring it down yet.

Tariq Malik [00:09:00]:
All right, once these companies get their, uh, their act together, we can have some space vacuum cleaners up there.

Rod Pyle [00:09:06]:
Yeah, but it's expensive to get up to those higher orbits. In the irony department, we have Mr. Elon Musk being awarded the nation's highest award for science.

Tariq Malik [00:09:17]:
That's right. That's right. You know what? I meant to put a link to this. We have a link, John, on space.com. I'll get it. I'll get it real quick. I'll get it. I'll fix it.

Tariq Malik [00:09:26]:
I'm sorry. But yeah, he got, uh, Elon— where is it? Here it is. Oh, I gotta find it. I'm so sorry, everybody. I'm unprepared.

Rod Pyle [00:09:34]:
We'll just all take a little break while you figure it out. Well, So as, as we've discussed, Mr. Musk has not been kind to NASA science. I don't want to go a lot further than that because we have other things to talk about. But, you know, if he got an award for technological achievement with the Falcon 9 and the Crew Dragon, I'd be all over that. But for science, that's a little bit of a gut punch.

Tariq Malik [00:09:58]:
Well, I mean, I, I think that you— there's a lot to be said on the different things that, uh, for the companies that he's led. It's not just SpaceX, right? Uh, it's, uh, electric cars with Tesla, and then the robots with that Optimus Prime thing. It's the brain, uh, like machine interface with Neuralink. I mean, I understand like the case that you can make. It's— there's, uh, the AI stuff with SpaceX AI. Although, did you see that they want to call it superintelligence now? I don't—

Rod Pyle [00:10:28]:
Yeah.

Tariq Malik [00:10:28]:
I don't— I don't get it. But, um, So I understand like the case for it. Now, uh, the timing is, is strange. And there— and this is all kind of part— it was the Medal of Science. Yeah, that's what it was. They gave the Medal of Technology or something like a technological achievement to the creators of Dell and, uh, and another computing company, which the name escapes me right now. Uh, and so, so they did have 2 different versions, uh, that they were awarding. And, uh, and It's kind of weird because these announcements were made at the same time as a release of a bunch of initiatives for US science, I guess, investment, something like $6 billion, which sounds like a lot, but they cut $6 billion out of NASA's budget for the proposal for the next year alone, let alone the gutting for National Science Foundation and a few others.

Tariq Malik [00:11:23]:
So it is a really kind of strange— announcement, not just for Elon's, but for all of the other awards. Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, for example, Sergey Brin of Google, and Lisa Su. So, so those folks all got the National Medal of Technology or the Medal of Science. And then Michael Dell, and I think it's Satya Nadella, that's, that's who got the Medal of Technology.

Rod Pyle [00:11:48]:
So. Let's swing ourselves into a quick break, and we'll be right back to sail the stellar seas. And we are back to sail the stellar seas with you. I think I'll probably have used that 19 times by the time this episode's over, but I like that title.

Tariq Malik [00:12:02]:
It's good.

Rod Pyle [00:12:03]:
And we're going to talk about our favorite science fiction books of all time. So if I may lead off, uh, childhood influences, Rusty's Spaceship, which my challenge is to see if anybody else in this listening to our show has ever even heard of this book. I just see that you put challenged by like a lot of them, so Yeah, well, because I think probably I was a problem child, you know, so there's probably a reason I was reading these things. It was a really, I mean, it's the most juvenile, juvenile fiction. Basically, a kid named Rusty is building a spaceship in his garage, which of course, after reading this, I decided I had to do the same thing and did. The difference is he had a metal disc that he found, I don't know, I think in a junkyard or something that he put on the nose of the spaceship to deflect meteors. But it turns out that was actually part of an alien spaceship. And so an alien, a lizard-like alien called Tiffia, shows up at his garage along with his best friend Susie and says, oh, we have to go, go into space and find where I came from because I have no memory.

Rod Pyle [00:13:07]:
So off they go to adventures on all the planets powered by magic jelly beans. And if that sounds unbelievably juvenile, it was. I bought a copy of the book a couple years ago just to see how incredibly juvenile it was and got into about half a chapter and thought, okay, this is good for me.

Tariq Malik [00:13:23]:
Oh, don't meet your heroes, Rod. Don't meet your heroes.

Rod Pyle [00:13:25]:
Yeah, but it was fun and inspiring. And when you're 6 or 7, it beats a lot of other stuff.

Tariq Malik [00:13:34]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:13:34]:
Yeah.

Tariq Malik [00:13:35]:
It's interesting.

Rod Pyle [00:13:36]:
I'd say the next big one for me, going in a completely different direction, was H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. Everybody knows that story. It's pretty sophisticated writing. And my kid is not a big reader, but I made him read that, I think, when he was about 12. He still reminds me from time to time what a chore that was. But, you know, I find even though that was written in the 1890s, it really holds up as a piece of dramatic narrative fiction.

Tariq Malik [00:14:05]:
Yeah. Yeah, it's good.

Rod Pyle [00:14:06]:
From the standpoint of an unnamed writer who's going through these different Perils.

Tariq Malik [00:14:13]:
The protagonist. Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:14:14]:
And it really, it just sticks with you. And it's a little bit like if you read World War Z, which by the time I was done reading that book—

Tariq Malik [00:14:23]:
That is actually a really appropriate description because the feeling, the, the, the, the, the present, what do you call it? Um, uh, the dread, the dread, like suspense is always there in, in, uh, uh, as the witness, you were the witness, right? In that, in those books. So.

Rod Pyle [00:14:42]:
Yeah. And it's, And it's real time. So by the time I was done with World War Z, there's a little part of my brain going, gosh, I'm glad we survived that. Wait a minute, this is fiction. And War of the Worlds kind of hits you the same. Um, I'm gonna close on 2 more and then I'll toss to you.

Tariq Malik [00:14:57]:
I thought we were gonna go like book and then book and then book and then book. I thought that we were gonna do it that way.

Rod Pyle [00:15:02]:
Well, we can, but in this section I just have to be a pig because this was my childhood and it was a very long time ago and I want to talk about it before I forget everything because I'm 70 now.

Tariq Malik [00:15:12]:
Yeah, right. Yeah, thanks, Grandpa.

Rod Pyle [00:15:13]:
In the complete opposite direction, was the sequel to The War of the Worlds, the inefficient sequel, written by Garrett Serviss, who was an astronomer, and I hope he was better at that than he was at fiction, called Edison Conquers Mars.

Tariq Malik [00:15:28]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:15:29]:
So after the War of the Worlds was over, Tom Edison and others got together and prognosticated that there was going to be another attack. So they used Martian technology to build spaceships. They test fly them to the moon. They got swept up in a meteor storm and brought back to Earth and land and say, oops, we didn't get there. It was a really strange story loop that went nowhere. And then off to Mars they go and they, they incinerate a bunch of Martian ships and then they land on the far side of the planet where there are less people and the adventures go on. Oh, and they, of course, something that, that Wells, uh, I think navigated with much more skill, of course. They find an attractive young woman that was captured from Earth.

Rod Pyle [00:16:11]:
The Martians are holding as an entertainer. They make her sing for them in their big globby heads. So they rescue the girl and romance ensues. And it's just, it's kind of dripping with purple prose and dreadfulness. So I wouldn't suggest it.

Tariq Malik [00:16:25]:
I wanna commend John, by the way. No, no links at all. No guidance. And he's finding all of these, these examples of, of the books themselves. So kudos.

Rod Pyle [00:16:35]:
That's because John's used to us. Which is not an easy thing to do. Okay, last for me is the one, The Only Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I think we've all read it more than once. It's a very interesting book because while it's about, and it was a stitching together of many stories he had written, so you kind of get that sense of it's not just chapters, it's like entirely different storylines. But, um, so it's a bit of an anthology. But what's interesting is you begin to realize as you're getting into it, Earth sends expeditions to Mars, the first people, then they land, they're more successful, and Earth, particularly United States in this case, begins to colonize, and I mean that in the purest sense, Mars. But there's of course a big metaphor here about what happened to Native Americans in the North American continent as we begin Usually inadvertently, but also on purpose, wiping out the indigenous Martians who by the end of the book are just about all gone.

Rod Pyle [00:17:37]:
The book closes on everybody fleeing back to Earth because a nuclear war has started. Now, if I saw Earth having a nuclear war, I'd stay on Mars. And I think so would Elon Musk. But in this case, they go back to try and help out and very few stay. And at the end of the book, a family looks into a Martian, an ancient Martian canal. and realizes they are the new Martians. And it's, you know, as far as tugging at the heartstrings and really being emotionally compelling. And Bradbury was, was a true poet, you know?

Tariq Malik [00:18:08]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:18:08]:
Poet of the soul.

Tariq Malik [00:18:09]:
Did you ever meet him?

Rod Pyle [00:18:10]:
It's a remarkable piece of writing.

Tariq Malik [00:18:11]:
Did you ever meet him? Ray Bradbury?

Rod Pyle [00:18:13]:
Yeah, a bunch of times. Yeah. In fact, yeah, I have a little Bradbury story. He, I'm not proud of this. He was at Griffith Observatory. I was hosting him around. And after he left the building, I saw this little leather-bound book like this.

Tariq Malik [00:18:28]:
I said, what the heck is that?

Rod Pyle [00:18:30]:
It was sitting over on the information counter and it was Bradbury's address book.

Tariq Malik [00:18:35]:
I thought, ooh.

Rod Pyle [00:18:36]:
So I started flipping through it and copying down some names and numbers and stuff. And then of course I called him and returned the book to him and, and lost everything I'd copied down. So that was fate getting even with me for being nosy.

Tariq Malik [00:18:47]:
Well, if you had a smartphone, you coulda, you coulda, you coulda. Uh, taking photos of all that stuff. One, then you'd have it all forever.

Rod Pyle [00:18:55]:
That would just compound my larceny.

Tariq Malik [00:18:58]:
I met, I met Ray Bradbury my freshman year of college because they produced a new, a new collection of his stories for the Toynbee Convector, uh, a series of stories. And then he signed it. I have it around here somewhere. He actually like autographed it. And, and everything. And my roommate and, and friend Doug was behind me, and I did not know this, but Ray, Ray Bradbury's middle name is Douglas. And, and that's how he signed his, his book was Ray, uh, Douglas, going Bradbury for, for my friend. And I thought that was really, really funny there.

Rod Pyle [00:19:36]:
I have a signed copy of The Martian Chronicles, which was a copy I'd taken out from the middle school library where I was attending. And never returned because he signed it. So what are you going to do, right? So I probably owe about $13 billion in fines, but that's okay by me.

Tariq Malik [00:19:54]:
That's, that's how I found— oh man, we're not— I didn't even put this on my list, but I found a, I found a Harry, um, Harry Turtlev, Guns of the South, used bookstore that was signed. You know, it's an alternative history. It's not really— well, it's science fiction, but it's, it's not space science fiction. It's always like if the South won the Civil War kind of thing. And I was really excited to have seen that. So, um, your books. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so we were talking about childhood influences.

Tariq Malik [00:20:19]:
And I have to say, like, War of the Worlds was probably— and Jules Verne. I read all of that stuff when I was a kid. And then a bunch of nonfiction, which I don't really think— like, I know that you have got— you've got First Man on the Moon there too. That's a— that's— but that was— that was— That was First Man on the Moon was, was also H.G. Wells. So it wasn't— it wasn't Jules Verne. Jules Verne was From Earth to the Moon. So, which I also had on my list too.

Tariq Malik [00:20:46]:
And so I read those as a kid, these little kind of Pocket Digest versions that had some illustrations and everything. I don't have them here though. They're all back in California. But this one right here was like, I think the first one that when I realized that, that I don't know if people can see it, if they're watching it, it's Larry Niven's The Smoke Ring. It's actually the second book in a series because the first one was The Integral Trees. And it was the first time that I realized that, that you could have different types of science fiction that were written, you know, beyond the, like the '50s or whatever it was when, when, when H.G. Wells and them were writing their books. And I guess the 1800s too, right, for Jules Verne.

Tariq Malik [00:21:22]:
And, um, and, and these books were amazing. Larry Niven, I got— I was on a Larry Niven kick, uh, when I was in high school, and I almost devoured everything that he had written. And these books were really, really interesting because I had never, um, I never thought about colonizing other planets. And this is about people that are colonizing a torus around a star. So it's not a planet, it's a habitable ring of material and stuff like that. So it's really, there's really amazing— I could talk about it forever, but John's given me the wrap-up signal for this section. So, you know, it's great. It's great.

Tariq Malik [00:22:00]:
I got one book, one book. That's, that's great. We'll go on to the next one.

Rod Pyle [00:22:05]:
All right, let's rocket ourselves into a break. And we'll be right back with more of Tarek Malik. Stand by.

Tariq Malik [00:22:11]:
So those were some of our, our, our picks for childhood books. I think Rod and I had a lot of overlap on those classic ones because I also liked The Martian Chronicles a lot. There was a TV show about that, by the way. I don't know if you ever watched it or not.

Rod Pyle [00:22:23]:
Oh, it was the worst. Rock Hudson was the only good thing in the show.

Tariq Malik [00:22:29]:
Uh, one of the things though that kind of overlaps, I think, with childhood, uh, sci-fi, uh, uh, exposure, right, is At least for Rod and I, I don't know about today's generation, is our comic books, right? Actually, it's New York Comic-Con this weekend. It's gonna be exciting. And I actually was really excited because there wasn't a new— well, I guess there was Star Trek: Next Generation was on, but I found all of our old Star Trek comic books. I was a huge fan of these. This is the Mirror Universe saga, by the way, because until DS9, we didn't have any other. Mirror Universe entries at all, aside from like the original series. And I was so thrilled to be able to watch them go into the Mirror Universe. Look at the art.

Tariq Malik [00:23:12]:
This is DC, by the way. Both Marvel and DC did this. This is amazing. So, and, and of course they have to fight their evil selves and Spock has a goatee and everything. And I was, I was, that was what comic book space comic books were to me. It was just Star Trek. And in fact, in '92, 1992, right? Is that when Star Trek VI came out? Uh, I actually went to go see it. It was a rainy day, went to go see the movie, and then went next door to Al's Comics and bought like the comic adaptation of it so that I could keep reading it after the film came out.

Tariq Malik [00:23:44]:
I was so excited about it. Uh, but I also, I read, uh, I read a few other ones, uh, which I don't have them here. I have this, this one here, which is more modern, and it probably goes in a different place. It's called Saga. I don't know if anyone else has read this one, but this is actually a space opera. Like Whole Cloth by Brian K. Vaughan, who wrote a like post-plague apocalyptic one that I really enjoyed too. I was really big on apocalypse.

Tariq Malik [00:24:09]:
I still am. I would read a lot of those about those all the time. And but Saga was really great. And then also there was one called Rising Stars by J. Michael Straczynski. And if that name sounds familiar to you all, and I'm really sorry, I don't have any of the last issues here, but he wrote Babylon 5, the TV show, like you know, as a big space opera itself. And I was really like engrossed by the pacing and the plot for that whole, that whole show. And his comic book series Rising Stars is all about a meteor that explodes over a small town.

Tariq Malik [00:24:46]:
And immediately all of the women who are pregnant, they give birth, uh, the kids that they give birth to all have like powers, like different powers. There's like a, someone that's like got super strength and there's someone else that has like mental, uh, telepathy where they can connect everyone's minds. But of course, they all get, they all get, you know, they grow up like, like regular kids and teens. So they all end up, some of them are evil, some of them are good. And it's got a whole big space twist at the end, which was really great to see. And I really, I was so suckered into that for like about 2 years, 3 years waiting for the next one to come out. And there were big gaps because he would, Michael Straczynski would would pause writing the book. I think I was already at the Los Angeles Times when they finally finished it at that point in time.

Rod Pyle [00:25:33]:
So. I forgot one book I was going to mention from my youth called, and I challenge anybody else who might have actually read this, We All Died at Breakaway Station, which I'm sure you've heard of.

Tariq Malik [00:25:44]:
We All Died? Is that what it, is that what it, We All Died? That's the name of it? Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:25:48]:
It was a '60s book. Uh, basic, the basic premise is it's space opera. So there's huge fleets. There's a big battle going on. Earth is not doing well. And it's so bad that the soldiers and, and, uh, officers and, and enlisted people on these starships that get damaged are fitted with prosthetics and then sent back to secondary use escorting hospital ships and so forth. It's really, really dark, but of course I read it multiple times because it had one little tiny, very mild by today's standards, sex scene right in the middle of the book. Because that's what you did back then.

Rod Pyle [00:26:27]:
But, um, In rereading as an adult by Richard Meredith, it's really a remarkable piece of writing if, if you can excuse it, you know, the difference in decades since. But it's, uh, it's distressing, but well done.

Tariq Malik [00:26:44]:
Wow.

Rod Pyle [00:26:45]:
Um, I wanted to mention a couple of comic books. I used to have a big stack of Gold Key comics because they were the only ones when I was growing up that were really doing anything space. They had Space Family Robinson, which later became Lost in Space, uh, which was way better than the TV show.

Tariq Malik [00:27:02]:
I have some of those. I found some of them at a used bookshop. I'm so excited.

Rod Pyle [00:27:06]:
I had dozens and I tossed them years ago like an idiot. Uh, Magnus Robot Fighter, which isn't really space, but it's kind of a future that we're looking at right now with Optimus robots walking around.

Tariq Malik [00:27:20]:
And of course, they brought that back, by the way.

Rod Pyle [00:27:22]:
Comic book. Being a comic book, Magnus doesn't sit away and hit him with a high-powered rifle like I would. He just goes out and beats them into, into junk, which is kind of remarkable for a guy with human fists. Um, and, uh, Star Trek. Yeah, Star Trek comic books, which were also Gold Key and had photographs on the COVID So that was a big thing. All right, let's move on.

Tariq Malik [00:27:44]:
Did you, well, really quickly, really quickly, did you buy, did you ever read any of the Starfleet Academy? Comic books. They were like in the late '80s and the early '90s. Yeah. They released one all-Klingon edition at that point in time, which was new.

Rod Pyle [00:28:01]:
In Klingon?

Tariq Malik [00:28:02]:
In Klingon. It's the entire, the entire issue was in Klingon and you had to buy the other, like the English version in order to know what they were saying. And it was adorable. And I've got almost The entire run. There's like 3 issues that I haven't been able to find, and it's driving me bananas.

Rod Pyle [00:28:21]:
So where are you getting the money for all these things?

Tariq Malik [00:28:26]:
They cost like $3, you know, because they're so old and no one cares about them. It's not like, it's not like a Detective Comics #1 with Batman or whatever, you know. It's, this is like just some, some, some like off run way back when, you know. And it's different now because now IDW Has the license to do Star Trek comics, and then they, they re-up it, uh, over and over again. And they did a lot from the reboot series. They just really went wild.

Rod Pyle [00:28:52]:
You know, my father had Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #1 that his mother threw away when he went off to the Navy. Yeah. Wow.

Tariq Malik [00:29:02]:
Wow.

Rod Pyle [00:29:02]:
That would have been a nice retirement fund. All right, let's retire ourselves to a break and we'll be right back, so go nowhere.

Tariq Malik [00:29:08]:
That is very smooth.

Rod Pyle [00:29:09]:
So, uh, let's talk a little bit about the Golden Age. And I'm defining this pretty broadly because it sort of goes from the pulpy '30s up through the '50s. But, um, because you're a young man, Tara, we'll extend it into the '60s and '70s. Um, I was a big Henry Kutner fan, and I think it's, it's, it's kind of dated work now, so it may not be widely read, but he, he wrote a whole series of Venus Saga books, or at least one large one called Fury. That was the main one. And it's kind of a multi-generational, you know, empire on Venus. And of course, this was when Venus was swampy and wet and warm, you know, back before we discovered it was this scorched uninhabitable desert.

Tariq Malik [00:29:55]:
Sounds like New Jersey in August. So.

Rod Pyle [00:29:58]:
A big favorite was written by Harry Bates called Farewell to the Master. Which was the original story that spawned The Day the Earth Stood Still. But the twist in the book is at the end, as, as the robot's leaving, they say, oh, sorry that we killed your master. And the robot says, you misunderstand, I am the master. So the robots are running the show and Klaatu was just, uh, was just their meat, their meat puppet. Um, of course, Moon Is the Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. is a book that a lot of people refer back to along with things like Starship Galileo or Spaceship Galileo, Rocket Galileo.

Tariq Malik [00:30:36]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:30:37]:
Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is an interesting one. When you're young, you know, it's a real social commentary and it's kind of a hard book to get your claws into when you're a kid. I reread it as an adult, it made a little more sense. But I think I gotta go with Eric Frank Russell and his most famous famous book is called Wasp, but it's very much of the strap on the starship, push the up button, go kind of, kind of vein.

Tariq Malik [00:31:05]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:31:06]:
But it's very tongue-in-cheek, rather sarcastic, and bitingly critical of bureaucracy and human nature. And I think that's what I enjoy about it so much, because you're chuckling out loud while you read this, because of course nothing's changed from the time of the Greeks in terms of human nature and behavior. And he's kind of dragging that into Uh, you know, 300 years beyond today, but the social commentary is just brilliant and it's really, it's really fun. Eric Frank Russell, uh, it'd be worth checking out.

Tariq Malik [00:31:37]:
Is Wasp the ship or is it just like a, is there like a reason it's called Wasp or like what's the, what's the deal there? Uh, you know, I don't, I don't wanna put you on the spot, but I just, I find it, it's, it's a very interesting name for like an early, early book. Jack Vance is a great choice, by the way. He wrote a lot of great stuff.

Rod Pyle [00:31:56]:
So, well, I haven't mentioned him yet.

Tariq Malik [00:31:58]:
Oh, I thought you did. So I was reading your list.

Rod Pyle [00:32:02]:
Uh, Wasp is basically Earth is at war with the Sirian Empire, not Syrian with a Y, but Sirian with an I. Interesting choice. Um, and, uh, so we surgically alter a lone agent named James Mallory. He is dropped on the other, the bad guy's planet to be on a one-man campaign, spreads rumors, stirs up fear and paranoia and subversion. And he has no army or anything beyond his wits, but it sounds an awful lot like kind of what we see today. You could call him an influencer, I guess, influencer. And the Syrians spend themselves in oblivion trying to track him down and stop him. And, uh, the disruption saps their military strength.

Rod Pyle [00:32:41]:
So of course it's a gross exaggeration, but that's what makes it so much fun.

Tariq Malik [00:32:46]:
Yeah, I should point out there's like a lot of, a lot of classics that we're probably not going to mention, and it's not, it doesn't mean that we don't like them.

Rod Pyle [00:32:51]:
Oh, absolutely.

Tariq Malik [00:32:52]:
I just realized I didn't put any A.E. Van Vogt on here. And then I was like, well, I can't, because then which one do I got to pick out of those books? You know? So, um, but yeah, did you have more that you want to talk about? Or then, because I—

Rod Pyle [00:33:05]:
No, I mean, I, I, Jack Vance came a little later. Uh, he wrote a short story called Noise about a guy marooned on a planet that had all kinds of amazing different physical characteristics. Uh, and he's there for quite a while, then he's rescued, goes back to Earth, and it's so noisy and overwhelming. And this is in the '50s. Imagine what it would be like today. that he runs screaming back to his spaceship and goes back to being ruined on that planet. Um, it's a short story. He wrote a lot of other great stuff.

Rod Pyle [00:33:31]:
That's just the one that, that came to mind. But would, to you, would that, would you consider Asimov like classic in that? Yeah.

Tariq Malik [00:33:41]:
That region, you know?

Rod Pyle [00:33:42]:
Absolutely. And you sh— it's good that you mentioned him cuz I, I, I forgot him, to be honest.

Tariq Malik [00:33:46]:
Well, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a few others. There's a lot. I mean, I, I wrote down like a lot of Heinlein too, cuz Really? I came across Heinlein in a very interesting way. Not, not like when I was reading a lot of stuff when I was younger. I found Farmer in the Sky and Between Planets, these vintage prints, in a throwaway trash box at a New York rummage sale. It was just sitting there and she's like, oh yeah, we don't want that stuff. So if you want anything in that box, you can have them. And they are these, and I could not find them.

Tariq Malik [00:34:18]:
They are in this house. somewhere. But I was reading them, you know, as you read any book and you're like, okay, this is good. The print's a little bit big, so it's meant maybe more for younger readers. And you turn the page—

Rod Pyle [00:34:30]:
Or older.

Tariq Malik [00:34:31]:
Or older, yeah, I suppose. But you turn the page and there is a fabulous woodcut. Farmer in the Sky is about a family that goes to Ganymede because it's like a land rush. They get a plot of land and they have to work it if they want to keep it. And then the family has a medical emergency with the daughter. So the young boy has to stay on the land with some robots so that they can keep the deed to the land. And so then there's a lot of environmental things. There's a big shocking thing that happens that I was telling Rod about, uh, with the, with the, the daughter.

Tariq Malik [00:35:01]:
I almost cried. But I'm reading this book and as they're getting ready to take off, I turn the page and there is a fabulous kind of black and white woodcut of the family boarding the rocket. And I was so stunned because I didn't expect to see something like that in the book. And Between Planets, which is about a kind of a college-age kid that goes to Venus and then gets wrapped up in a whole rebellion where they're trying to rebel against Earth, has the same art in it. And it was spectacular. And those are the kinds of things that I probably didn't really read much about, like when I was reading the, like the '90s, the early '90s science fiction, because these are just— You know, these are, these are Del Rey books. There's no pictures in any of these, uh, at all. Not to say that I only read books— huh? I was gonna say, I was about to say it and he didn't let me off the hook.

Tariq Malik [00:35:50]:
I don't only read books with pictures.

Rod Pyle [00:35:53]:
Classics Illustrated.

Tariq Malik [00:35:54]:
Um, but, uh, and there's, and there's others. I mean, we talked a lot, we talked about Isaac Asimov a little bit, and I think Nine Planets, Nine Worlds was a collection that I read when I was in high school that I thought was very engrossing. There was one all about People who put their, their, um, their head in a thinking machine and it tells you what you're going to do for the rest of your life. And one, one kid gets really afraid, uh, because it doesn't tell them anything and they try to escape, but it turns out, no, they can do anything. And so they need them to help find the new jobs for other people to do. And it was a very interesting kind of approach for that kind of thing. So.

Rod Pyle [00:36:33]:
All right. Um, Why don't we go to break early, John? And, uh, we'll be right back. So stick with us because we're going to go to contemporary sci-fi. Contemporary sci-fi.

Tariq Malik [00:36:44]:
Um, what's, what are we reading now?

Rod Pyle [00:36:47]:
Right. And, you know, I think there's a lot more commonality here because we're talking about stuff that a lot of people are going to have read. So I thought I'd go with a couple of outliers. One of my favorite stories, and it's a short story that I've read in the last 30 years, was called Night of the Cooters. by Howard Waldrop, and it was in a War of the Worlds anthology edited by Kevin J. Anderson called War of the Worlds Global Dispatches. And in Night of the Cooters, one of the Martian ships comes down in a backfield in Texas, and the whole thing is dealt with in a very Texan way. So the sheriff is the main character.

Rod Pyle [00:37:27]:
He's, he's based on Slim Pickens, so he talks and acts like Slim Pickens would if he was in this role. And basically they ride out there To see what's going on. And the heat ray comes up and starts cutting things down. And the sheriff gets very angry because it, it caused his favorite horse to explode and threw him clear of it. So they surround it, of course, with a jillion guns all aimed in the same direction. And one of the Martians tries to come out and they fill him full of holes. And then the larger machines start to emerge, as they do in the original book. But they haul— they call out a guy named Grover or Gordon or something with The Gun, with capitals.

Rod Pyle [00:38:05]:
Got this .80 caliber rifle from Civil War days or something. And so he loads up a few shots and there's enough to blow pieces off the first tripod that pops up. And that's very funny. And then they have to retreat to town. And not to go on too long about the story, but basically they end up in the church bell tower, next to the church bell tower with a Civil War cannon that's mounted up in front. And they, uh, You know, they remember the Alamo and they're looking for stuffing to put the cannonball in the cannon to fire at the tripod. And the sheriff has to use his favorite hat. He has a campaign hat that he's had for decades.

Rod Pyle [00:38:43]:
And he says, gold dern it, shoves it in the cannon. And they end up beating the Martians just by pure spunk. And I thought that was absolutely fabulous. It's well worth a read. Actually, I reread the thing every year or two because it's just so funny.

Tariq Malik [00:38:57]:
When did it come out? When did it come out?

Rod Pyle [00:39:00]:
'90s, early 2000s.

Tariq Malik [00:39:03]:
Okay. All right.

Rod Pyle [00:39:04]:
But of course you and I have both read, I think, The Expanse books.

Tariq Malik [00:39:09]:
All of The Expanse books. Yeah, those are amazing. Those are amazing.

Rod Pyle [00:39:12]:
Uh, we're both Jack McDevitt fans.

Tariq Malik [00:39:14]:
Yes, I have. Oh no, I don't have a Jack McDevitt book here. They're all downstairs. So, oh, I do. I do.

Rod Pyle [00:39:19]:
Let you talk about that.

Tariq Malik [00:39:21]:
I do. I have deep space.

Rod Pyle [00:39:21]:
I'll let you talk about that. But just 2 quick outliers. A guy named James Angel Ross wrote a series called Radiation Angels, which was, uh, kind of, they're, they're like quasi-military mercenary troubleshooters that go down and take care of problems for people on planets. And a fun one by a guy named Craig DeLouie, who I've corresponded with quite a bit, called The Great Planet Robbery, which is basically The Man Who Would Be King set in the future where they're trying to take over a planet instead of just a little piece of the the Mideast. To you.

Tariq Malik [00:39:55]:
Yeah. Yeah. No, I think The Expanse books are really great. Jack McDivitt is a very interesting writer because he began writing much later in life, if I remember, if I'm thinking of the same writer. I think I am because I think he wrote his first book, he was in like his, he was about my age or maybe a little bit older when he wrote his first book. And then now he's been prolific. And that really gives me some inspiration that my whole plan to be a sci-fi writer before I became a space reporter, can still happen, right? But I mentioned him because of this book right here, which is called Deep Six. I'm showing to the thing.

Tariq Malik [00:40:29]:
And he had— Jack McDivitt has a couple of different— what would you call those? Are they like franchises or series?

Rod Pyle [00:40:40]:
Yeah.

Tariq Malik [00:40:41]:
One is about Priscilla Hutchins, and she goes by Hutch. She's a starship pilot. And that's what Deep Six was. This is the first one that I read, and it's all about the adventures that they have all around, uh, around the world. And I believe that this one, Deep Six, is about a planet that's going to hit another planet. And so scientists get really excited about it, and they, they go out there and they send one last expedition to look at the inhabited planet. It doesn't have any, you know, aliens or whatever on it, but they find some ruins and they're like, oh, we got to explore it before it crashes into a gas giant. And it just like the craziness and action just goes up and up and up and up and up until, you know, they're trying to skyhook a starship from space to try to save people.

Tariq Malik [00:41:24]:
It's crazy. And I, I've read it, I think, about 3 or 4 times, just pull it off the shelf when I want to have like an adventure. And there's just a whole bunch. There's another one called Chindi about a, a giant kind of museum-type ship that flies through the solar system, and they go and they kind of— hitch a ride on it for a while and learn all about other alien life. And it's just a whole universe. And the Alex Benedict series, which is another one, he's like an antiquities dealer. So think about like far, far year 3, 4,000.

Rod Pyle [00:41:53]:
Indiana Jones in space.

Tariq Malik [00:41:55]:
Well, more like Sherlock Holmes, because it's told— the first book was told from his point of view. And, you know, he's like a high-end, uh, antiquities dealer. So the stuff that NASA is launching now, they're all like the antiques that he's trying to find and source in the far, far, far future. And it's all the later books are all told through his pilot, like this woman pilot that is his Watson and is always trying to get him out of trouble that he gets into. And it was really interesting because I wrote to him once to just tell him how much I loved his books and everything. And I think to ask him what he thought about like the space program. I think this is back during Constellation Program. And he's like, hey, I got a whole book about like the moon program and Apollo artifacts coming out.

Tariq Malik [00:42:45]:
You should be on the lookout for it. And I was like, yes, we will. Thank you very much. You know, um, we were talking about female writers earlier, uh, during one of the breaks. Martha, Martha Wells and Anne, um, Anne Leckie are, are 2 writers that I follow very closely. Martha Wells, if for folks who don't know, uh, wrote the, the Murderbot Diaries series about like a security robot type automaton that gets sentience, but all it wants to do is watch future soap operas. And they made an Apple TV series that's actually really quite good about it. But it's just hilarious because it's like a sarcastic robot, but not in a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy way.

Tariq Malik [00:43:28]:
It's just, it's really like a robot who just could not, you know, you know, could not give any bleeps about what's going on, and they only want to do their thing, but they have to deal with us measly humans. And they are well worth the read because we were talking about action earlier, and there's always something crazy going on in those books. And Ann Leckie has this Ancillary Justice series of books. I think it's a trilogy. There might be 4. But Ancillary Justice is about a, like, a woman who used to be a starship, like an entire starship. And now, like where she controlled all bunch of officers, like thousands of people on it, but now there's only one because the starship got destroyed and they have to deal with being that one singular person and this whole conspiracy that, that destroyed the ship. And, and then what goes on after it.

Tariq Malik [00:44:15]:
And there's a whole big war in the background. It was the strangest plot I'd ever read, uh, when it, when the book first came out. And, uh, And it was a very nice string of stories all the way through. So I really dig those, those stories themselves right now.

Rod Pyle [00:44:31]:
So during the break, when we were talking about women authors, I was trying to remember a couple of them that wrote under pseudonyms back in the day when women authors for some reason weren't taken very seriously in sci-fi. Andre Norton.

Tariq Malik [00:44:45]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:44:46]:
One, I read a ton of that stuff and that was actually Alice Mary Norton. And C.L. Moore, who publishes C.L. to obscure her gender. And one that I was not as familiar with, uh, that, that Claude says was famous was James Tiptree. It was a pseudonym of Alice Bradley Sheldon.

Tariq Malik [00:45:07]:
Huh. Did you read any Ursula K. Le Guin growing up?

Rod Pyle [00:45:12]:
Yeah, tons.

Tariq Malik [00:45:12]:
Yeah? Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:45:13]:
Yeah. So, um, I, I should have mentioned, by the way, before I go, because of course war is always a great thing to, to give you you know, good fodder for sci-fi. Uh, Ian Douglas, which is a pen name for William Keith, wrote a whole series of sprawling military space opera stuff, but with a little bit of a modern twist. The, the ships are, are metamaterials, so they morph into different shapes as needed, and their propulsion systems, instead of, you know, the, the stuff I read when I was a kid that just said it's an atomic rocket, they didn't explain anything more. He goes into great detail about the technology behind a singularity drive that has a tiny black hole in your, in your fighter ship. And, um, lots of, of that along with very traditional kind of space opera fare. So yeah, that's good to check out too. And, you know, I know there's people out there going, they didn't mention X, you know, my favorite book.

Rod Pyle [00:46:11]:
How could they not? Well, feel free to send, uh, your emails in addressed to Tarek J. Malik and, uh, Tell him what he forgot and, uh, we'll, we'll address it next time. I'm sorry, go ahead.

Tariq Malik [00:46:23]:
No, no, I was gonna say please, please, because I'm, I, I don't— I'm surprised that we haven't talked about sci-fi books like yet, you know. Uh, and so I'm sure we're gonna have more to talk about in the, in the future. This is like our, our entry. We're gonna probably have another book, book sesh, uh, way back. So send us your recommendations, maybe we'll read them.

Rod Pyle [00:46:43]:
We didn't talk about The Martian, right, with Andy I was gonna mention, yeah, we completely left Andy Weir. I was gonna mention Martian and Artemis.

Tariq Malik [00:46:51]:
Yeah, that's right. As well as, as well as Hail Mary, you know, another mega, mega hit. Lathe of Heaven was the Ursula K. Le Guin book that really stuck out to me about the guy that dreamed his own reality. I did want to just give a shout out to Michael Flynn. This is Firestar, but he has a whole Falling Skies series about near-Earth. I just dropped all the books that I set aside for this episode on the floor.

Rod Pyle [00:47:13]:
Well done. Can you fall out of your chair for us?

Tariq Malik [00:47:16]:
I know, I know, still on the blocks. You would think after 4 years, but no. Uh, but Michael Flynn has a whole thing about near-Earth asteroids and how they're going to come in, like, destroy the Earth. And a super rich billionaire person, um, you know, she, she dreams up an entire reusable rocket industry and private commercial spaceflight industry in order to defend the Earth. And then there's, there's lots of plot twists, but the really weird thing is that the woman that starts everything, this rich kind of businesswoman, lives in Short Hills, New Jersey, which is like not very far from where I am these days. So it's all around like the central, like northern, northern bits of New Jersey is where the action seems to happen, which is a really weird place to base the start of your like multi-book series. So I just thought it was really, really tickled that I ended up here. And then I'm like, oh yeah, this is, there's the, that's the mall she talks about.

Tariq Malik [00:48:10]:
That's, this is the, the, the, the nature preserve that they talk about. So, and here it, here it all is. So.

Rod Pyle [00:48:15]:
Well, before we close, now that you've mentioned New Jersey, I, I remember now I was doing a special for the History Channel called Beyond the War of the Worlds. And, uh, I, I got sent to Grover's Mill, New Jersey.

Tariq Malik [00:48:28]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:48:29]:
Outside Princeton.

Tariq Malik [00:48:30]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:48:30]:
And they have a park where they have a plaque. This is where the Martians landed. The park was covered in goose dung, so it was kind of hard to get to the plaque. But because I'm a steady TV producer, I wandered out there and got shots of it. And then I drove around for a bit and found the water tower that's still filled with holes from buckshot because somebody saw it and thought it was a Martian tripod and shot the heck out of it. So that was great fun.

Tariq Malik [00:48:54]:
If anyone is in the area, a trip to Grover's Mill is a hoot because there is the plaque that's still there, and it's a big engraved thing. It's like 10 feet tall or 7 feet tall. And a bunch of Boy Scouts for an Eagle Scout project made like a War of the Worlds walk along the edge of the park. It's by this—

Rod Pyle [00:49:12]:
Oh, really?

Tariq Malik [00:49:13]:
It's by this lake. Yeah. And, and so there's every like 10 feet, there is like an info session, uh, with like a kiosk that says something about War of the Worlds, the book, or the Orson, uh, the Orson Welles radio play, or what was going on in Grover's Mill at that time and everything and what happened. And it was really, really cool. And it's made It makes like kind of going there more of like a pilgrimage and an experience rather than like a kitschy thing. Plus there's like Rover's Mill, like coffee shop that's in a strip mall.

Rod Pyle [00:49:46]:
So, well, and if you happen to be in Woking in England, which is where they landed the original book, there's a big chrome Martian tripod downtown that you can look at. That's pretty cool.

Tariq Malik [00:49:57]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:49:57]:
On your, on your account. Well, I want to thank everybody for joining us today for episode 231 that we're calling Sailing Stellar Seas. Tarek, where can we find you reading your next piece of juvenile literature?

Tariq Malik [00:50:08]:
Well, I'm actually reading Martha Wells' latest entry in, um, in The Murderbot Diaries, uh, Platform Decay, which I've got right here, uh, which is really exciting. So you can find me reading that on, uh, on my Kindle. Uh, this weekend, uh, you can find me at New York Comic-Con because there's a big Star Trek panel tomorrow. I am thrilled for it. I'm gonna take my daughter. on Sunday. It's gonna be a hoot and a half. And you can find me at space.com, as always, on the socials at Tarek J.

Tariq Malik [00:50:37]:
Malik. And if you do like video games, you can find me playing Fallout and Fortnite and a lot of other space stuff @spacetronplays.

Rod Pyle [00:50:48]:
And who doesn't like video games?

Tariq Malik [00:50:50]:
Who doesn't, right? Aside—

Rod Pyle [00:50:52]:
Other than me. And you can always find me at pilebooks.com or at adastramagazine.com, where I like to hang out. Remember, you can drop us a line. You can say anything you want. Could be nice, could be less nice. Just remember, if we missed a book, it's Tarek's fault. twis@twit.tv. We always welcome your comments, suggestions, and ideas, and of course, space jokes.

Rod Pyle [00:51:13]:
And I have to say, you've been stepping up. We got, uh, 3 or 4 batches of them this week, and that's probably a record. So you must really be getting tired of the whole time you're sitting on the show. So I appreciate that. Uh, new episodes of this podcast publish every Friday on your favorite podcatcher, so make sure to subscribe, tell your friends, and give us reviews. You can also follow the TWiT Tech Podcast Network @TWiT on Twitter and on Facebook and twit.tv on Instagram. Thanks, and we'll see you next week.