Welcome to Life, Death, Sci-Fi, where hosts Chris and Eric dive deep into the realms of speculative fiction. In this episode, we delve into Philip K. Dick’s mind-bending novel Now Wait for Last Year. This story is a chaotic fusion of drug...
Your apartment door clicks, locking itself behind you as you enter the shared stairwell. You make your way down, cement step after cement step, descending past the dusty, yellowing walls, walls plastered with license-plate-sized stencils in black or...
Our heros yo-yo back and forth through time meeting the future and the past and then the future in magnificent ships floating through the sea of time. Lifedeathscifi hosts Chris and Eric try to make sense of what is happening in Stephen...
Chris and Eric try to wrap their minds around a planet Mars with a host of characters that may appear again in The Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe. This mind-bending experience takes our hero on a journey of kidnapping, ransom, escape, and...
Lifedeathscifi looks into the well of time and sees H.G. Wells spinning a tale of science and time. The excitement of the first to travel into the vast beyond. Is it science fiction or just another fantasy of the 19th century? If you were sitting in...
Mark Watney is marooned on Mars, not the first literary lost on the red planet, and probably not the last. Lifedeathscifi talks about how he McGivers his way out of some life-or-death spots and earns his spot to the spaceman’s ball. The world...
Space travel, Mars settlement, and planet-building on a grand scale, Kim Stanley Robinson takes us on an epic journey that extends our lifetime and shows us what humans can make and take apart. Would you take the treatment? Image: Cover photograph...
Finally, space is more like 21st-century space in this wacky ride to Mars. Eric and Chris talk about Demogorgons, wispy beards, the Stalin lounge, HT serum made from bears, The Mary Poppins, and much more about this near-future vision of space...
Okay. This is part of the chronological journey of Martian stories. We began in 1912 and now seven stories later, We’re in 1988. So far, most of, if not, all these stories use Mars in name only; like a stage backdrop, meaning it could have...
A wild-west walkabout on the thirsty surface of Mars. Our heroes travel a path of time-travel and mind, balancing between the now and madness.Image: Martian Time Slip by Philip K. Dick (1964) Got It CoveredMusic: (Alien 1963) Music No Copyright...
War, invasion, conquest all happening again on Mars. Beautifully written and one of our favorites. Bradbury makes the unbelievable believable with his poetry-like prose. Image: photo of cover by E. Bueschlen Music:(Alien 1963) Music No Copyright...
Margaret Atwood gives us a memoir and some insights into the sci-fi genre. We talk about gizmos, definitions, feminism, censorship, and more. And finally, we reveal the them for the next season of life death sci-fi! Image: linkMusic:(Alien 1963)...
Another turn of the 19th century Russian author writing about space travel and life on other planets, mainly Mars. Because this story was written by one of the founders of the Bolshevek movement, of course there is a connection to Ukraine. Shout out...
Chris and Eric talk about Aelita by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Mysterious and wonderful in its fantasy sprinkled with some surprising sci-fi tidbits. Think about how long Russia has been enthralled with space and Aelita may have been the twinkle...
The #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements have found me a woke old white privileged guy who is wondering how to resolve these injustices and my own complicity for what is now clearing like a gauzy AQI 500 fog in front of me. It is a shocking...
Lifedeathscifi hosts Chris and Eric explore the humorous side of science fiction with John Carter’s Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. This giggly sci-fi romp gives us more fantasy adventure than sci-fi but we both agree that it is...
Lifedeathscifi with hosts Eric Bueschlen and Chris Herzberg talk about how they perceive life on the Feed. Feed by M.T. Anderson is a story written for young adults set in a near future where corporations know everything. Where water, air, and...
Hosts Chris and Eric talk about The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke. Sri Lanka, Taprobane is the setting for this story and real-life home to the author. Questions about whether the myths and illusions that fill the early history of the...
Hosts Eric Bueschlen and Chris Herzberg debate this epic series of environmental changes through "first contact". We include Jeff Vanderveer's whole Southern Reach Trilogy because we couldn't stop reading with just Annihilation, the first book...
Hosts Eric Bueschlen and Chris Herzberg hail The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. This is the third try for this episode. First, try Eric Didn’t press record, second Chris didn’t save, and this is the third try. This podcast...
Lifedeathscifi hosts Eric and Chris talk about Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi classic, Fahrenhiet 451. Did the war in this story blow up the city at the end of the book? Our hosts talk about war, education, the 1%, chaos, villains, heroes. There is a...
Hosts Eric Bueschlen and Chris Herzberg relate to The Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. A 70-year-old story with relevance today. What was the earliest “last person on earth” story? Ish drives across the country looking for survivors...
Is the essence of humanity the birth of ideas—creation? In this episode, we dig into all the sci-fi connections in E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops. We cannot believe how prescient Forster was back in 1909! Is he a time traveler? As with so...
And what is a league, anyway? In this episode of Life Death Sci-fi, we catch up after a pandemic pause, diving into Jules Verne’s classic whale, er—spoiler—squid of a tale, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. We ask: “Who IS Captain...
Would you want to live forever? In this episode, we are awed by the scope of this setting and the diversity of the cast of characters in Larry Niven’s Ringworld. Luck, free will, and destiny are surprise guests in this space opera. Think big...
What’s an alien without a purpose? In this episode, we explore the first book of Jeff Vanderveer’s Southern Reach Trilogy. Is it a story of first contact? Horror? A love story? Perhaps a fairy tale? What mysteries does the lighthouse...
Hells Bells! That’s a lot of misogyny! In the premier episode of Life Death Sci-fi, we try to grok Robert A Heinlein’s science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Colorful arguments arise about this “first contact”...