Dystopias (Recorded Live at VCON)

Special guests science fiction legend Larry Niven and Buffy/Angel/Firefly editor Lisa Lassek join Kevin, Joe, and Toren at Vancouver’s VCON! We cover the dysfunctional tech society of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”, the system-spanning Alliance of Firefly, the comic book supervillain heaven of “Wanted” and more!

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12 Responses

  1. Awesome episode. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR remains one of my favourite movies. Amazing how Richard Burton somehow still seems warm and reasonable even when he’s torturing John Hurt.

    btw- Karl Urban is from New Zealand (he’s in my own Spank Bank 🙂

    Gavin

  2. Obligatory comment lamenting the episode’s lack of Half Life 2. The developers definitely took a lot of themes from 1984 when crafting City 17, the game’s big dystopian metropolis.
    The backstory, for those who are unfortunate enough to be uninitiated with Half Life, is that an alien force called The Combine have taken over earth. However, they didn’t do it by blowing everything up, they made an agreement with a man named Wallace Breen to enslave humanity instead of eliminating it.
    The combine set up suppression fields around cities, which eliminate the humans’ ability to breed. They also set up their own military police force that will beat the everloving shit out of you if you so much as look at them the wrong way.
    Breen, now a figurehead “ruler” of Earth under command of the Combine appears on big monitors scattered across the city, warning the citizens of the dangers of nonconformity.

    http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Breen
    http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/City_17
    http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Combine#Combine_dominance_on_Earth

  3. In Time isn’t just inspired by Logan’s Run; Harlan Ellison is being his usual court-happy self and pushing for an injunction against its release, claiming that it rips off his “Repent, Harlequin!”, Said the Ticktockman… which is a swell story, but really? Much as I love the guy, doesn’t he ever get sick of claiming to own every third plotline ever set to paper?

  4. Have to say ‘V for Vendetta’, like League and etc is screwed up in the movie. V in the comic is pretty crazy from his backstory. That is why he is training a replacement. He also leaves the final act of his plan to his successor as he knows he is too vengeful to make the choice. There’s also a lot of meaning in the comic that the people wear NO masks in the comic and are masked in the movie. It is visually impressive but defeats the meaning of individuals taking responsibility for their country (the comic suggests fear led to deportation and then genocide, but not in the movie).

  5. Felt it was a shame you guys didn’t cover some of the more famous dystopic novels such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or Huxley’s Brave New World. Otherwise it was a great podcast.

    1. Limited time. I actually watched the Brave New World TV movie (?) as research for this ep and it was awful. Also we discussed Fahrenheit 451 in an earlier episode (Burns?) so it didn’t take precedence here.

  6. If you liked the premise of The Island but hated the delivery, you may like The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer. I read it about ten years ago, and it is very dystopian. I don’t remember which details you aren’t supposed to know at the beginning, but it takes place in a future in which a strip of land between the USA and Mexico has been converted into essentially a drug lord’s private kingdom. Not a particularly difficult read, but well worth the time.