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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...