Speaker 1: Warning. This podcast contains spoilers for the limited series Moon
Speaker 1: Night on Disney Plus, also the novel Hills, some light
Speaker 1: spoilers by Nicola Griffith, and a number of other fantasy novels,
Speaker 1: so beware. Hello, my name is Jason Stepsion. Welcome next
Speaker 1: Our Vision the Crooked Podcast, where we dive deep into
Speaker 1: your favorite shows, movies, comics and pop culture. In today's episode,
Speaker 1: and previously on lots of comic book news, lead casting
Speaker 1: announcement in the upcoming Percy Jackson series on Disney Plus Plus.
Speaker 1: The MCU's Ironheart series has named its directors, and we
Speaker 1: will do our recap of episode three of Moonnight. In
Speaker 1: the airlock. We're gonna be talking about out fantasy and
Speaker 1: sci fi authors, especially by queer and marginalized authors. And
Speaker 1: then for the Hive Mind, we'd be talking to award
Speaker 1: winning author of many stories including Ammonite, including So Lucky
Speaker 1: and one of Rosie and My favorites Hilled Nicola Griffith,
Speaker 1: and in our nerd out, a listener will pitch us
Speaker 1: on the Illuminatus trilogy. Joining me today to talk about
Speaker 1: all of that and more is The Great, the Powerful
Speaker 1: The Godzilla comic book creating various theory pieces, writing the
Speaker 1: great content creating. Rosie Knight, Rosie, how are you?
Speaker 2: It's me. I'm okay, I have it's content mind. I'm
Speaker 2: scared of the content creating minds. One day to be here.
Speaker 1: The minds are endless and they never stop, and you
Speaker 1: have to just keep mining the same stuff.
Speaker 2: It's like being Instadgy's just there's too many levels. Just
Speaker 2: you's going down, always something else to mine.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get into the news. Marvel Comics announced recently
Speaker 1: at the Fan Expo in Philadelphia a new title, All
Speaker 1: Out Avengers. This seems like it's going to be kind
Speaker 1: of in the vein of non stop Spider Man created
Speaker 1: by the creative team. All Out of Avengers is of Greg
Speaker 1: land Who, the artist Greg land Who if you've listened
Speaker 1: to us and you know Greg land can be divisive,
Speaker 1: and the novelist Derek Landy. This apparently is going to
Speaker 1: be a kind of like it seems just reading parsing
Speaker 1: the press release tea leaves gonna be something of a
Speaker 1: Ultimates kind of take on the Avengers, more action packed. Certainly,
Speaker 1: you know, the press release basically says they're going to
Speaker 1: just drop you media res into the middle of some
Speaker 1: pitch battle and it's going to be like that, just fight, fight, fight,
Speaker 1: fight fight, action action action action. Your thoughts, Yeah, thoughts
Speaker 1: on Greg Land?
Speaker 2: Well, I've had a lot of Greg Land photo tracing. No,
Speaker 2: but here's one of those artists where every soften I'll
Speaker 2: see a piece of art and I'm like, Oh, my
Speaker 2: fucking god, that's Greg Land. That is so fucking good.
Speaker 2: And I really hope he's bringing that angle to this.
Speaker 2: He can be good, he can be good like and
Speaker 2: you know what, the thing that I really like about
Speaker 2: this is it's doing the thing that Marvel does best,
Speaker 2: which is where Marvel looks to what indie comics are doing,
Speaker 2: looks to what weird other licenses are doing, and it's like, oh,
Speaker 2: we should be doing that. And there's been this incredible space.
Speaker 2: You know, We've talked about that, James Stoko, Godzilla stuff
Speaker 2: like there is you know, these unbelievable artists, Michael Fife, like,
Speaker 2: there's all these different people who are making these comics. Well,
Speaker 2: when you pick them up, you feel like you're just
Speaker 2: in an action movie. You feel even that, you know,
Speaker 2: I have a lot of moral quandaries with it, but
Speaker 2: the Keanu Reeves comic that he that he wrote with
Speaker 2: Matt Kintzak. You know that those comics, there's just this
Speaker 2: unbelievable tone, just boom boom boom boom, action explosions. It's
Speaker 2: not necessarily about like a deeper narrative or selling an
Speaker 2: ip for a movie. It's about the kinetic force of
Speaker 2: what comic book art can do. Like Young Avengers, you know,
Speaker 2: we talk about that a lot, that era of Marvel.
Speaker 2: They were doing stuff where you just go, oh my god,
Speaker 2: how how did this happen? How did you put this
Speaker 2: on the page? And I love that the description is
Speaker 2: they're just like action explosions, no questions. So I want
Speaker 2: to see what that looks like. And I'm hoping it's
Speaker 2: going to be weird and explosive and kind of really exciting,
Speaker 2: because that's not something I feel like we're getting as
Speaker 2: much in Big two comics. So I will be open
Speaker 2: minded to it, and I will definitely put the first
Speaker 2: issue on my pull list.
Speaker 1: Next we get a new big news. This is kind
Speaker 1: of big news, secretly big news, really huge read.
Speaker 2: This is definitely big news.
Speaker 1: Yes, a new origin for Thor. Marvel has announced that
Speaker 1: a new event one million BC, we'll release this ter
Speaker 1: line will delve into the newly revealed origin of Thor,
Speaker 1: our favorite god of Thunder. The image that this announcement
Speaker 1: was teased with showed the phoenix for symbol. No further
Speaker 1: details were available, but of course we learned back in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty one that Lady Phoenix, who is the original
Speaker 1: host of the Phoenix well original the host of it
Speaker 1: that we know right right, the host of the Phoenix
Speaker 1: Force in a million BC, is actually Thor's real mom.
Speaker 1: So there is da There was that reveal, So this
Speaker 1: is going to be very interesting. Your thoughts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm like, mix up this weird stuff. I the
Speaker 2: Phoenix Force. It's truly immortal in the world of Marvel Comics,
Speaker 2: like it will always be there. It's echo Hou holds
Speaker 2: the Phoenix Force every different character, you know. I love
Speaker 2: the Phoenix Force. I'm my eighties X men baby, so
Speaker 2: I'm here to see it. I love Thor, I love
Speaker 2: word cosmic stuff, so I'm open to it. As always,
Speaker 2: as we always say on the shows to the people
Speaker 2: who listen, anything like this is always interesting to keep
Speaker 2: an eye on if you love the MCU, because when
Speaker 2: they set up something like this, it could end up
Speaker 2: in a different way. I'm not saying that in Thor,
Speaker 2: Love and Thunder Thor is gonna suddenly hold the Phoenix
Speaker 2: Force or connect with it, but the idea of changing
Speaker 2: Thor's origin, of introducing something that's not fully as Guardian,
Speaker 2: that seems like they could be seeding something. Also, that
Speaker 2: issue Avenges forty three, that's got letters by like one
Speaker 2: of my favorite letters, Corey Pettit, so shout out to
Speaker 2: Corey anytime I see his name. I'm like, yeah, those's good.
Speaker 1: And to your point, we are entering a period of
Speaker 1: the MCU where we can reasonably expect to see the
Speaker 1: X Men, Jean Gray, potentially the Phoenix Force arrive on screens,
Speaker 1: you know, in the in the near term, so you
Speaker 1: never know. Exciting next up, AX, how would we pronounce
Speaker 1: his AX Judgment day? AXE Judgment Day? What do you think?
Speaker 1: Do you think this is.
Speaker 2: Pree for all? I think it's because it's called the periods.
Speaker 2: I think it's AX, but obviously the acronym is AX,
Speaker 2: so that sounds cool as hell. And they probably also
Speaker 2: want you to.
Speaker 1: Say acts from a really a wow blockbuster creative team
Speaker 1: of Kieran Gillen one of our favorites period and Valario
Speaker 1: Shitty the Wonderful Artist comes Ax Judgment Day and this
Speaker 1: so the press, Rea says, quote kicking off after the
Speaker 1: Eternals boldly attack Mutant Kind's new home in Kracoa. Why
Speaker 1: would you do that? Internal spoiler alert, don't do that.
Speaker 1: This complex saga will pay off various plants thirds that
Speaker 1: have defined these franchise in recent years, including muton Kinds
Speaker 1: new found immortality, the Eternals discovery of long hidden truth
Speaker 1: about their species, and the Avengers intense dealings with the Celestials.
Speaker 1: So a pretty big crossover event with and this one,
Speaker 1: I think for sure will have some revealed absolutions in
Speaker 1: the MCU going forward.
Speaker 2: We we've long said and this is not just us too,
Speaker 2: This is we as the general fan. This is you
Speaker 2: who's listening. This is people at home, This is people
Speaker 2: who have only really read a couple of trades. It
Speaker 2: has seemed like for a long time a really smart
Speaker 2: way for them to bring the X Men into the
Speaker 2: MCU would be some kind of Avengers versus x Men.
Speaker 2: That's a badass team up explosion. It's the kind of
Speaker 2: thing everyone wants to see and now that the Eternals
Speaker 2: exist in the MCU, it seems like it's probably not
Speaker 2: a coincidence to reimagine that battle including the Eternals, who
Speaker 2: have often been on the outside of things. I'm sure
Speaker 2: there's a different universe, a different timeline that we would
Speaker 2: be living in where this would be Avengers, X Men
Speaker 2: and the Inhumans, but that's not the world we're living in.
Speaker 2: We're living in the world of the Eternals, you know,
Speaker 2: And so I think it's very telling. I think this
Speaker 2: is really exciting because I read amore X Men number one,
Speaker 2: which was Kieran Gillan jumping back on the X Men
Speaker 2: after a while, and it was so good and so
Speaker 2: funny and so exciting. It launches the new age of
Speaker 2: the Second Age of Krokoha, which they're calling the Age
Speaker 2: of Destiny, because the lady and icon Destiny is back.
Speaker 2: I love her, and she's.
Speaker 1: Back saying she's crazy.
Speaker 2: It's some crazy Sun's so crazy. Will never win. Everyone
Speaker 2: knows that's the rule. Like, you can't do anything about it.
Speaker 1: So every time she's got something to say, I'm like that, Oh,
Speaker 1: there we go.
Speaker 2: Oh that's why Moira tagget, you know, she didn't want
Speaker 2: her back. She said, no, pre cogs, it's a bad idea.
Speaker 2: And so I think this is going to be a
Speaker 2: massive event. I think the creative team is badass.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 2: If you have recently set up a Paul List and
Speaker 2: have X Men books on it, you may experience for
Speaker 2: the first time the epic highs and devastating lows of
Speaker 2: an event where suddenly there's twenty five books in your thing.
Speaker 2: But it seems like this will be relatively small. I
Speaker 2: think it's going to be like Immortal X Men X
Speaker 2: Men Red, so it's going to be X tight or heavy.
Speaker 2: But this is one I think to keep an eye
Speaker 2: on because, like we said, blockbuster Creative Team unreal art,
Speaker 2: but also could potentially seed some things that we may
Speaker 2: be seeing in the future of them.
Speaker 1: I agree. So it's interesting to think about, like, really,
Speaker 1: how close I mean, two of the three teams already exist, right,
Speaker 1: We've got the Avengers here, Eternals are here, X Men
Speaker 1: to come. But I keep thinking, so, you know, in
Speaker 1: the comics, the Avengers eventually move into the like the
Speaker 1: body of a celestial to use as their new Age
Speaker 1: Q And of course at the end of Eternals, right,
Speaker 1: we've got this celestial that is sticking out of the
Speaker 1: ocean and very cool looking, very very cool, and I
Speaker 1: have to assume that at some point an Avengers team
Speaker 1: is going to move in there. Do you have any
Speaker 1: thoughts about who would be a member of that team?
Speaker 2: Surprisingly, I do so. I think that we're about to
Speaker 2: enter the era that we have so smartly how the
Speaker 2: Jacket Avengers they wore bomber jackets. They included you know,
Speaker 2: Circe who he saw. They included Dane Whitman as Black Knight.
Speaker 2: They included uh, you know, wonder Man, somebody who we
Speaker 2: know is deeply connected to wander and Vision. You know.
Speaker 2: I think that there's a lot of potential hercules someone
Speaker 2: that we've been expecting to see in this Avengers for
Speaker 2: a long time. I think that we could see I
Speaker 2: think that we're on the right track imagining that we're
Speaker 2: going to see multiple different versions of the Avengers. But
Speaker 2: I think that if we're going to get like a
Speaker 2: primary just Avengers team, I think we're looking more at
Speaker 2: that kind of like Jacket Avengers kind of wild era
Speaker 2: that also is an era that could cross over with
Speaker 2: like a Monica Rambo. Yeah, Avengers, you know which I
Speaker 2: think is very likely. So could we see a sword
Speaker 2: kind of created Avengers. I want to see them living
Speaker 2: in that celestial That was like so cool.
Speaker 1: I think it's going to be Monica Rambo, Jane Foster
Speaker 1: thor doctor Strange.
Speaker 2: Oh you know what Falcon Captain America.
Speaker 1: That with Falcon Cats in America ye blade Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and then whatever they're going to like, uh whoever the
Speaker 1: new Black Panther.
Speaker 2: Is yes, which we will see when Wakanda Forever comes out.
Speaker 1: So very exciting. Yeah, I can't wait to pick this
Speaker 1: one up. Next up, we go to d C DC's
Speaker 1: Death of Justice League and Dark Crisis. DC is promoting
Speaker 1: the Justice League's demise in the Death of Justice League
Speaker 1: the final issue of the series, and that's it. They're
Speaker 1: not going to do Justice League anymore again. Ever again,
Speaker 1: it happened over, It's done, that's it. Fans were told
Speaker 1: Justice League. Justice League would face a dark army of villains,
Speaker 1: but now we get our first look at who makes
Speaker 1: up this villainous group. In preview RT for Justice League
Speaker 1: number seventy five, which is out will be out next week.
Speaker 1: It has come from the creative team Josh Williamson and
Speaker 1: artist Ralfisnoval your thoughts on the death of Justice League
Speaker 1: in Dark Crisis.
Speaker 2: I'm such a fan of Joshua Williamson and everything that
Speaker 2: he's done on this. I really discovered him during his
Speaker 2: time on Flash, and I just think he's doing a
Speaker 2: lot of really exciting stuff. I deeply respect and appreciate
Speaker 2: the editorial idea of basically eliminating the Justice League just
Speaker 2: before this kind of huge trial of the Amazons and
Speaker 2: introducing this new age of themis gerra I think it's
Speaker 2: really smart. I love creepy dark Dark Crisis. I like
Speaker 2: the you know, I like the metal stuff that they
Speaker 2: were doing with DC. It was really over the top
Speaker 2: and kind of ninety six. Dream Raffer is a great artist,
Speaker 2: so I think this is really interesting. It it feels
Speaker 2: almost a bit like to me, like people aren't talking
Speaker 2: about it, and I feel like when it happens, people
Speaker 2: are going to start talking about it, you know, Like
Speaker 2: this is even though we know as comic book fans,
Speaker 2: the Justice League is not gonna go away forever spoiler right, spoiler,
Speaker 2: it's still a big deal. Like remember when they killed
Speaker 2: Superman Superman, that's we still talk about that event, Like
Speaker 2: this is a thing that is occurring. I mean it's.
Speaker 1: As I cried, an Adventures dissemble and this was like
Speaker 1: the second time in five years that didn't even think.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also, there's like really cool artists, Like I really
Speaker 2: like Stephanie Phillips, She's done a brilliant job writing like Harlequin,
Speaker 2: a bunch of cool stuff. Leila del Luca is an
Speaker 2: amazing artist. Emmanuela Lupaccino, like they're gonna have They're gonna
Speaker 2: they're bringing in like an a team, And I want
Speaker 2: to see what the ramifications are because there's a lot
Speaker 2: of books people really love at the moment, you know,
Speaker 2: the night Wing stuff is like so spectacular. Like, I
Speaker 2: want to know how this affects it. What does it
Speaker 2: mean for Trial of the Amazons? You know, is it
Speaker 2: gonna be is that gonna leave a power vacuum that's
Speaker 2: gonna impact that? Or is this more of a kind
Speaker 2: of will there be a twist that means this doesn't
Speaker 2: really affect it. I like to see how these things
Speaker 2: tie in, so I think it's really cool.
Speaker 1: Next up, Percy Jackson on Disney Plus Casts its title
Speaker 1: role cast. It's Percy, the Percy Jackson and the Olympian
Speaker 1: series at Disney Plus has cast Walker Scobell from you
Speaker 1: might know him from the Netflix film The Adam Project
Speaker 1: and title role. The series, of course, is an adaptation
Speaker 1: of the Rick reard In book series and was ordered
Speaker 1: by the streamer back in back in January. This is
Speaker 1: relevant because, and particularly for today's episode, where we're trying
Speaker 1: to focus on creators who are elevating voices and working
Speaker 1: from a personal experience that is out of perhaps what
Speaker 1: people are considered the mainstream. We're talking about disability, literature,
Speaker 1: queer creators, queer characters, etc. And Percy Jackson has both
Speaker 1: ADHD and dyslexia and triumphs and takes part in a
Speaker 1: bunch of rip roaring adventures despite these his disabilities NERD
Speaker 1: and has long been an advocate for marginalized and underrepresentative
Speaker 1: of voices in why fiction. And I know that this
Speaker 1: is something as our producer Saul was telling us in
Speaker 1: the pre pro meeting, this is something that a lot
Speaker 1: of fans of the series have really been waiting for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like the movies didn't necessarily deliver for everyone on
Speaker 2: kind of the scope of what these can be, So
Speaker 2: I think a series gives a long kind of format
Speaker 2: storytelling is like a better space for telling these kind
Speaker 2: of epic stories of a kid who's like half god,
Speaker 2: half human, you know. And yeah, and he definitely the
Speaker 2: ADHD and dyslexia thing is way ahead of its time,
Speaker 2: and the way that Rick writes it is it is,
Speaker 2: it's helpful, it's what makes him him, you know. It's
Speaker 2: very much in the mindset of how people think about
Speaker 2: disability now, which is it's a part of you, and
Speaker 2: it's a good part of you. It's just society that
Speaker 2: doesn't see it. And I'm a big fan of Rick,
Speaker 2: not just because of these books, which obviously, like we read,
Speaker 2: they were one of those primary sci fi fantasy kind
Speaker 2: of books when you're a kid, but he has a
Speaker 2: he actually has an imprint called Rick Rawdan Presents, which
Speaker 2: is like specifically focused on publishing brilliant middle grade and
Speaker 2: kind of sci fi fantasy, magical books but like from
Speaker 2: underrepresented authors. And I've seen so many incredible books come
Speaker 2: out of that imprint, and I just think he's kind
Speaker 2: of doing that thing that you always hope when somebody
Speaker 2: writes something that's really special to you, which is the
Speaker 2: bigger his platform grows, the more good he does with it.
Speaker 2: And I think something that's really exciting about a Percy
Speaker 2: Jackson show on Disney plass is I think that that
Speaker 2: mentality is going to come through into the show and
Speaker 2: I'm really excited to see how it translates to the
Speaker 2: on screen representation as well. And I like that they
Speaker 2: cast the actual kid this kid as well, he's a baby,
Speaker 2: Like that's what I want to see.
Speaker 1: Up next, Ironheart gets its directors. Ryan Coogler is joining
Speaker 1: as a producer. This per Deadline, Marvel's Ironheart series on
Speaker 1: Disney Plus is moving into the different stages of production now.
Speaker 1: Of course, Ironheart is the story of Reary Williams, who
Speaker 1: is as of now canonically the smartest character in the
Speaker 1: Marvel universe, a genius inventor, kind of like the heir
Speaker 1: to a lot of the things that Tony Stark has done.
Speaker 1: She will get her own advanced suit of armor. And
Speaker 1: of course we're down, We're down in iron Man right now.
Speaker 1: We need we need someone in the armor right now,
Speaker 1: and it very much could be Reree Williams at some
Speaker 1: point in time. Your thoughts, This is really exciting, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really exciting.
Speaker 2: It connects to one of the things that we love
Speaker 2: the most, which is like the reality that really is
Speaker 2: going to be a big part of the Black Panther world.
Speaker 1: It's Yeah, with.
Speaker 2: Ryan being there, it seems like that is the case.
Speaker 1: We were talking about this in a pre pro and
Speaker 1: you had I don't know if this is your theory,
Speaker 1: but it was the first I heard of it. You
Speaker 1: had a good theory about how they may approach Black
Speaker 1: Panther going forward.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is my current theory. I think that Marvel
Speaker 2: really sees the impact that Black Panther had and the
Speaker 2: what it meant to people around the world, what it
Speaker 2: meant to black people, what it meant to African American
Speaker 2: people in America, and I think that they're going to
Speaker 2: use it as a tempole space for black heroes, and
Speaker 2: I think that is going to be their hub. I
Speaker 2: think that Reary Williams, who went to MIT and it
Speaker 2: is like this unbelievably smart student. I don't think it's
Speaker 2: a coincidence that Ryan Coogler is producing that show and
Speaker 2: that Black Panther is one of the few movies were
Speaker 2: kinda Forever that has ever been allowed to film actually
Speaker 2: on the MIT campus because they said it would elevate
Speaker 2: the school and promote the meanings. I don't think that
Speaker 2: you're going to go to MIT and not see re Re,
Speaker 2: you know, and we just say, you know, Rua Williams
Speaker 2: created by Eve Ewing, who's just so brilliant, Mike Darto,
Speaker 2: Brian Michael Bendis, Kevin Lebron, They're like, this is a crew.
Speaker 2: But Eve was such a huge part of bringing Reedy
Speaker 2: to life and making this character that we just all
Speaker 2: love so much who immediately became a fan fave. And also,
Speaker 2: if you think about re Read, the thing I think
Speaker 2: is really exciting about this is this is not just
Speaker 2: about new black characters. We're about to go into Armor Wars,
Speaker 2: so we're gonna have this story where Roady is going
Speaker 2: to be at the center of Armor Wars. It's going
Speaker 2: to be a story about somebody misusing Stark Tech, and
Speaker 2: Roady is going to need as many people as possible
Speaker 2: on his side who understands Stark Tech, who understand technology.
Speaker 2: Tony is no longer there. I would love to see
Speaker 2: re Re brought in have a major part of that storyline.
Speaker 1: And I don't think it's a I don't think it's
Speaker 1: a mistake either. That uh MJ played by the wonderful
Speaker 1: Daya and in Spider Man No Way Home where she
Speaker 1: going to college, she's going to Mit. I think that
Speaker 1: they are. It can't be a coincidence we're looking. I
Speaker 1: would imagine that they will meet. And to your point,
Speaker 1: maybe this is the the we're kind of witnessing the
Speaker 1: early formations of what will be a hub for the
Speaker 1: Brown superheroes in the MCU. Let's go to our recap
Speaker 1: of Moonnight episode three, The Friendly Type, written by Bodomeo
Speaker 1: and Peter Cameron and Sabir Prasada and directed by Mohammed Diab.
Speaker 1: This was I was not expecting this episode to delve
Speaker 1: into Stephen slash Marks experiences with this kind of like
Speaker 1: consciousness dislocation, essentially mental illness in the way that it presents,
Speaker 1: and this did it in a really evocative and interesting way.
Speaker 1: Let's get into recap. Okay Layla had We open with
Speaker 1: what we can only expect to be some kind of
Speaker 1: cold open of which we will learn more. Layla is
Speaker 1: having her passport forged, and she is griping about Mark
Speaker 1: and what just went down with the SCAAB and how
Speaker 1: now she has to go back to home to Egypt,
Speaker 1: and she's not really too enthused about going back to Egypt.
Speaker 1: She's been gone ten years, during which time she has
Speaker 1: been busy repatriating ancient relics, which is a highly moral,
Speaker 1: of course activity, also a very illegal activity, and also
Speaker 1: one which she's not exactly doing out of the goodness
Speaker 1: of her heart. She is she admits, like, yeah, making
Speaker 1: money from some of that, Like I returned most of them,
Speaker 1: and then some of them I do sell for a profit.
Speaker 1: Layla's father, we learn, was archaeologist, which is very much
Speaker 1: in keeping with the original Moon Night. Yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: original moon Night comic.
Speaker 2: If Layla is on Marline, who is Moonnight's often lover
Speaker 2: and partner. Her father was an archaeologist. Her father was
Speaker 2: innate to the origins of Moonnight, which we also get
Speaker 2: into this episode, so definitely taking from those comacs.
Speaker 1: And apparently her dad taught her the importance of the
Speaker 1: forged documents when smuggling illicit artifacts across borders, and we're
Speaker 1: left to wonder what possibly her dad would think of
Speaker 1: her now. And then we flashed through the desert. Somewhere
Speaker 1: in the desert, Arthur Harrow, guided by the scab arrives
Speaker 1: at a mountain and we understand that this must be
Speaker 1: the tomb of Ahmit. Elsewhere we meet Mark media res
Speaker 1: like he is running into three tough guys, three local
Speaker 1: guys who have just killed some person that has information
Speaker 1: that Mark needs. And they are apparently in some way
Speaker 1: either working for or affiliated with Arthur Harrow, and they
Speaker 1: have knives and they twirl them flashily, and then Mark
Speaker 1: fights them and he seems to have things pretty much
Speaker 1: in hand, but then he seizes reflection in a knife blade,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, he's hurtling through time and
Speaker 1: we understand that he's lost time. Now this is very
Speaker 1: interesting because you'd think, and we have been primed to
Speaker 1: expect that when something like this happens, the Stephen or
Speaker 1: whoever the other person is that is, you know, waiting
Speaker 1: on the bench, will then seize the body. But instead
Speaker 1: Mark has just lost an unknown amount of time. And
Speaker 1: he finds himself in the back of a taxi on
Speaker 1: the way to the airport, and he as he's driving by,
Speaker 1: he sees two of the tough guys that he was
Speaker 1: just fighting on the street and he goes out and
Speaker 1: he goes to fight them again, but then another glance
Speaker 1: at his reflection, and the cycle repeats, and now Mark
Speaker 1: is somewhere else in the city having just murdered one
Speaker 1: of the guys. What do you think is going on here?
Speaker 1: Is because this is interesting, This.
Speaker 2: Is the thing, This is the interesting moment. So when
Speaker 2: it first happens, I think we see Stephen say Mark
Speaker 2: stop doing that or something, and you think, oh, well,
Speaker 2: Stephen's taking the body. But as Mark wakes up and
Speaker 2: he's stabbed this guy killing him, you know, the body
Speaker 2: count here is very high. Mark's like, Stephen, what did
Speaker 2: you do? Steven's like, right, I didn't do that. So
Speaker 2: that I think the implication is here.
Speaker 1: Jake Lockley way.
Speaker 2: Because they are reimagining these characters in ways that we
Speaker 2: haven't seen before. So it could be Jake Lockley. It
Speaker 2: could be, for all we know, Konshu like a more
Speaker 2: he's violently. It could be a character we haven't met yet.
Speaker 2: It could be a reimagining of mister Knight. But obviously
Speaker 2: I think the the immediate answer would be Jake Lockley.
Speaker 2: And if I was Easter air hunting, which I always am,
Speaker 2: I would say Mark waking up in the back of
Speaker 2: a taxi, Jake Lockley.
Speaker 1: As a taxi driver.
Speaker 2: I feel like they won us to think of that. Also,
Speaker 2: a funnyasterg from the opening Forger section, which is only
Speaker 2: for people with hard of hearing or who have captions
Speaker 2: on the forger who is credited as a forger. They
Speaker 2: name her Leagaro, which is this really funny like nineteen
Speaker 2: forties Marvel Egyptian hero who is also called Dyna Man.
Speaker 2: So no, it's not the character, but that was the
Speaker 2: funny st egg. But yeah, I think we're venturing into
Speaker 2: more altars or personalities, or whichever version they decide to do.
Speaker 2: And I think that, though it doesn't really get explored
Speaker 2: much further here, I think a lot of people who
Speaker 2: are watching the show are wondering when we're going to
Speaker 2: see that, because it's such a key part of his personality.
Speaker 2: And this definitely hints that we're on the way there,
Speaker 2: and also that both Mark and Stephen are less comfortable
Speaker 2: with violence than we first thought.
Speaker 1: And then there's a burgeoning alliance kind of a relationship
Speaker 1: at least between the two, if a rocky one, it
Speaker 1: will be interesting to see how they both react to
Speaker 1: the understanding that there are more than them coming back
Speaker 1: three because I don't. I don't think they've grasped that
Speaker 1: quite yet. Although we are left with the with the
Speaker 1: absolutely quite clear fact that there's someone not Stephen, not Mark,
Speaker 1: who is coming through.
Speaker 2: I think you actually touched on something there that's that
Speaker 2: I hadn't necessarily given the show credit for the two
Speaker 2: the two of them being the primary personalities at this
Speaker 2: point as we know, it seemed like a strange choice
Speaker 2: to me. But now that you mentioned that, I guess
Speaker 2: it's given them time to kind of get to know
Speaker 2: each other, build a rapport before potentially there is more conflict.
Speaker 2: So it becomes a situation where it's the two of
Speaker 2: them together understanding whatever is about tappen next in this
Speaker 2: episode and the following three.
Speaker 1: So Mark has just killed one of the tough guys
Speaker 1: that leaves him with one more. Kanshu comes through as
Speaker 1: a voice and is like, torture this guy, but this
Speaker 1: one is really like a kid, like a young kid,
Speaker 1: and a bunch of things happen, and basically the kid,
Speaker 1: uh you know, is being held up by like his
Speaker 1: tie and he cuts the tiny falls to his death.
Speaker 1: Mark argues then with Stephen. He warns Steven, listen, you
Speaker 1: got to stay out of my way. Mark wants to
Speaker 1: ask the other gods for help. Why don't we ask
Speaker 1: the other gods for help? Well, you know, why don't we?
Speaker 1: Why don't we tell them what hero is planning? And
Speaker 1: kan She was like, no, they would, they wouldn't. They
Speaker 1: would just get annoyed. They're tired of me. They don't
Speaker 1: want to listen to me. They if if I'm involved,
Speaker 1: they will just ignore it. But I but actually I
Speaker 1: think I do know a way how we could get
Speaker 1: their attention without you having to go with them. Uh,
Speaker 1: and it's a bad plan, but just let me go.
Speaker 1: So basically, Kanshu causes an eclipse. So immediately the gods
Speaker 1: opened a portal and are like, Mark, come here, you
Speaker 1: need to talk to us, because this is a no no,
Speaker 1: just kind of like displaying to the to humanity that
Speaker 1: we exist. Mark goes to the portal. He finds himself
Speaker 1: inside the Great Pyramid at Giza. Mark meets the avatars
Speaker 1: of the gods. Basically, they're human representatives on Earth who
Speaker 1: the gods will speak through on occasion. One of them
Speaker 1: is Yatsul, who is the representative of hathor goddess of
Speaker 1: music and love and apparently you're left too. We are
Speaker 1: left to surmise an old flame of Kanshu, just like
Speaker 1: left on red after a while.
Speaker 2: Yeah, consh She's like that was a time when Konschu
Speaker 2: used to like my rhythm. He's too upset to like yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The other gods and their representatives include Horace, Isis,
Speaker 1: tefnut Osiris, and Hathor of course, and they take control
Speaker 1: of their avaturus bodies, and they invite Kanschhu to take
Speaker 1: control of Stephen slash Mark and to make his case
Speaker 1: about what's going on and what they should do about
Speaker 1: Ahmed and Arthur Harrow. The gods have long huge to
Speaker 1: a philosophy of non intervention in human affairs, because, as
Speaker 1: they say, the humans to have just moved past them.
Speaker 1: They don't really care about us anymore. So we've kind
Speaker 1: of been, you know, doing things in the background. Kan
Speaker 1: Chu finds this to be weak. A weak course of
Speaker 1: action is like basically cowardly, and he charges Arthur Harrow,
Speaker 1: his former avatar, with attempting to release Omit. Harrow arrives
Speaker 1: through a portal to defend himself. He denies that this
Speaker 1: is what he's doing. Kan Chu then using the Mark
Speaker 1: Spector receiver and Grant body takes a swing at Arthur Harrow,
Speaker 1: He's stopped by one of the gods who's like, listen,
Speaker 1: you can't do that here. There's no violence here. What
Speaker 1: are you doing. Haro then accuses Kanshu of essentially exploiting
Speaker 1: a mentally ill manned Stephen Grant slash Mark Spector, a
Speaker 1: person who is, you know, a quite willing servant, an
Speaker 1: avatar of Kanchu, but also one who is not in
Speaker 1: a place, is not in a place to really give
Speaker 1: their consent to be the avatar of Kanchu. And I
Speaker 1: think Haro, from what we've seen, I think Arthur Harrow
Speaker 1: has something of a point. But of course we don't
Speaker 1: know the whole story yet, but I would say that
Speaker 1: it certainly it looks bad for Kanschhu. He was not
Speaker 1: the most trustworthy of gods. From what we've seen.
Speaker 2: Does Arthur wanna like be killing people minority reports? Yes,
Speaker 2: they can make yes, yes in this moment, in this
Speaker 2: pyramid is the episode? Does he seem like he's making
Speaker 2: lots of good points and legitimately canall Stephen and Mark. Absolutely.
Speaker 2: That's why I came away from this episode. I was
Speaker 2: like one Stephen, Mark not very good at like this
Speaker 2: would have been so easy to just cover up and
Speaker 2: be like, I'm doing fine. This guy's trying to release Alma.
Speaker 2: He has a compass. They were struggling, they were going
Speaker 2: through it, and Harrow came off looking good. So no
Speaker 2: surprise is that the gods were.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, Mark. Mark then admits that to the room,
Speaker 1: to the avatars of the gods, to Kanchu, and to Arthur.
Speaker 1: Harrow's like, listen, uh, I'm going through it a little
Speaker 1: bit and I need help. For sure, I would like
Speaker 1: some help. And that was I felt that that was
Speaker 1: a big step for Mark to take. But he also says, listen,
Speaker 1: that doesn't change the fact that Arthur Harrow wants to
Speaker 1: go on a killing spring. He wants to kill a
Speaker 1: lot of people, and he wants to release Omit to
Speaker 1: do that. He wants to just commit genocide on a
Speaker 1: global scale. And then the gods are likenh we go
Speaker 1: with Harrow and the matters closed. That's it, We're shutting
Speaker 1: it down. They leave, but then Yatzil hangs around clearly
Speaker 1: has some sort of warm feeling for Mark, and she
Speaker 1: points Mark to a clue by which he might find
Speaker 1: Omit's tumb without the scareub the Sarcophagus of Senfu, which
Speaker 1: apparently has recently hit the black market. Leyla and Mark reunite.
Speaker 1: You get a feeling from these scenes that clearly they
Speaker 1: were actually in love. At one point, and Mark tells
Speaker 1: her that he's listen, I'm sorry for hiding how much
Speaker 1: I was struggling from you, and they come to an
Speaker 1: uneasy piece. They then arrive at the home of Mogart,
Speaker 1: the antiquities dealer on the banks of the Nile, where
Speaker 1: they are going to find sin Foo's sarcophagus. Leaylan and
Speaker 1: Mark are posing as this kind of like married couple
Speaker 1: who just want to study this sarcophagus for a second.
Speaker 1: Mogart is like, why are you so interested in sin
Speaker 1: foo sarcophagus? And Mark's like, ADDI yeah, don't worry about it.
Speaker 2: Mark does another bad job, but covering up, He's like.
Speaker 1: Very bad, very very bad Mark. Then, of course, of
Speaker 1: course Mark doesn't know anything about Egyptology, right, and Laylan
Speaker 1: knows some stuff, but not as much as this third
Speaker 1: person who is waiting in the wings, Stephen Grant. And
Speaker 1: Mark is like, I know that I need to let
Speaker 1: Stephen out so he can read these higher glyphs so
Speaker 1: we can understand how to find om It's tomb. But
Speaker 1: I really don't want to do it, but fuck okay,
Speaker 1: I'll do it. Stephen then talks Mark through the puzzle
Speaker 1: and the sarcophagus. Before they can learn anything, Mogart interrupts
Speaker 1: and takes Mark prisoner. Then Harrow interrupts, offering Mogart the
Speaker 1: Scarab in exchange for Layla and Mark, who's surely like
Speaker 1: he's gonna kill soon after. Harrow then vows Wow's Mogart
Speaker 1: with a small display of its power. Mark dons the
Speaker 1: suit and then we get the big fight and it
Speaker 1: is an action packed episode Moonnight and Laylah versus Harrow's
Speaker 1: people and and Mogart's people. Laila we see can really
Speaker 1: handle herself.
Speaker 2: And they are killing people. They killing people.
Speaker 1: They're flat out dropping people to the ground. And we
Speaker 1: also get a great uh We get a great front
Speaker 1: row view seat of how powerful the Moonnight suit is
Speaker 1: and Kanshu's blessing is because he is stopping bullets with
Speaker 1: his cape. He is taking damage that is not killing him.
Speaker 2: Ice comic book Moon Cape, you know, he jumps off
Speaker 2: and you see, it's in the Crescent Moon, and it's
Speaker 2: all very common. This is actually very superhero episode in
Speaker 2: the way.
Speaker 1: That really we get to see how how deadly Moonnight
Speaker 1: is with those moon orangs, possibly crafted by Clint Barton
Speaker 1: in the past. Stephen Grant watching all of this from
Speaker 1: somewhere else, you know, inside the consciousness of Mark is
Speaker 1: appalled and the violence. Yeah, he's appalled at the violence
Speaker 1: that Specter is unleashing. And he manages to seize control
Speaker 1: of the body, and all of a sudden, the suit
Speaker 1: morphs into the Mister Knight variety. He immediately gets impaled
Speaker 1: by a spear and he's like, okay, you know what, Mark,
Speaker 1: you take it? Yeah, I got about you take it.
Speaker 1: And so Mark is just like back in the body
Speaker 1: and is immediately like double speared by by some of
Speaker 1: Morgart's men. Meanwhile, Layla is at the Sarcophagus and she's
Speaker 1: fighting one of Margo's henche's, and we watch as Layla
Speaker 1: takes off her necklace, which we think is just like
Speaker 1: a stylish and striking statement piece, but no, it's actually
Speaker 1: like a double edged like dagger, too dagger than street.
Speaker 1: She straight up murders a sorry back and then runs
Speaker 1: to Mark's rescue, but gets the wind knocked out of
Speaker 1: her by Margot and Mark needing to run to her rescue,
Speaker 1: then like just basically snaps all the spears out of
Speaker 1: his body, which is a really impressive display of healing factor.
Speaker 1: He then kills Margot with a moon orang. Layla grabs
Speaker 1: the whatever was in Sanfu's tomb, which we've later learned
Speaker 1: as a map, and they and they go off to
Speaker 1: find out. In the car, Laila and Mark are talking
Speaker 1: about what Harrow had said about Mark and all the
Speaker 1: things he had revealed about how Mark was mentally ill
Speaker 1: and how he's struggling, although they don't quite you know,
Speaker 1: name it as anything. And she's upset that. She's like,
Speaker 1: you know, every time I find out something about you,
Speaker 1: it's like you're a whole new other person. It's like
Speaker 1: I don't know you at all. And Mark, kind of
Speaker 1: surprisingly but also refreshingly, he's like, you're right, you don't
Speaker 1: know me. Now. Don't let Harrow, you know, get in
Speaker 1: between us. Don't let him poison us against each other,
Speaker 1: because we need to stay strong right now. And after
Speaker 1: a while they arrive at a place in the desert
Speaker 1: where they can read this map, which turns out to
Speaker 1: be a star map. They have to call Stephen again
Speaker 1: because he's the only one that can put all these
Speaker 1: pieces together in the way that they need to go together.
Speaker 1: Mark is annoyed again, but he knows it's right. Stephen
Speaker 1: takes over, and what I think is one of the
Speaker 1: best single moments of acting, like in a Disney plus
Speaker 1: Marvel show, is Oscar Isaac looking into his reflection as
Speaker 1: Mark Spector and then wordlessly transforming into Stephen Grant with
Speaker 1: just like a relaxation of his face. It was really
Speaker 1: really cool. Stephen then swings into action. He's really excited
Speaker 1: by all this. He assembles the map while man explaining
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptian navigation techniques. But apparently, here's the thing. The
Speaker 1: map was created thousands of years ago. The stars have
Speaker 1: moved since then, so they need to know the actual
Speaker 1: date of when this map was created in order for
Speaker 1: them to figure out where Amus tomb is. Kanshu comes
Speaker 1: back Conch. She's like, oh, you know what, I remember
Speaker 1: the night that this was created. Really well, give me
Speaker 1: a hand, Stephen, do do what I do. Let's turn
Speaker 1: the stars back to the positions they were thousands of
Speaker 1: years ago on the night this map was created. So
Speaker 1: they do so, and people all around the world, we
Speaker 1: would assume, although we only see people in Egypt, but
Speaker 1: we would assume all around the world people would see
Speaker 1: the sky just warping with trails of stars as the
Speaker 1: sky gets rewound back centuries and centuries and centuries and centuries.
Speaker 1: And of course we understand that the gods had already
Speaker 1: warned Kanshu about the eclipse, and so they as as
Speaker 1: soon as they get wind of this, which is quite quickly,
Speaker 1: they are going to lock Kanchu up. Yeah, and Kanhu's like,
Speaker 1: listen when that happens, Mark, I need you to free me.
Speaker 1: So okay, They're gonna lock me up, and then I
Speaker 1: need you to free me. The god's an imprisoned Conshu
Speaker 1: in a que country statue. They just like suck his energy.
Speaker 1: It was there already there are and and his energy
Speaker 1: goes into it. Stephen collapses or Mark or whoever he
Speaker 1: is in that moment, Jake Blockley who knows, and the
Speaker 1: gods avatars show Harrow the Conshu statue and Haro's like, hey,
Speaker 1: can I be alone to just kind of like talk
Speaker 1: shit to this. He can hear me in there, right,
Speaker 1: and they're like, yeah, we think so He's like, all right,
Speaker 1: let's just give me a little privacy so I can
Speaker 1: talk shit to this to Kanchu Haro, it's quite clear
Speaker 1: from the things he says now carries a lot of
Speaker 1: animosity and probably rightly so, from his time as Conchu's avatar.
Speaker 1: And then he essentially says, listen, what I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: with AMA's help, I e Mass murder on a global scale.
Speaker 1: It's really it's really your fault. It's your fault, one
Speaker 1: hundred percent, your fault for the way that you treated
Speaker 1: me as your avatar and for the things I had
Speaker 1: to do as your avatar. And we are onto episode
Speaker 1: four next week. Your thoughts on this on this episode, Rosie.
Speaker 2: There's lots of stuff to dig into here. I mean,
Speaker 2: this introduces us. One of the things I think is
Speaker 2: really interesting is this introduces us to like the Egyptian gods.
Speaker 2: And obviously they are real gods from real history, but
Speaker 2: in Marvel, those gods all exist. So it's like the
Speaker 2: Heliopolitans is what they call them. That's basically like a
Speaker 2: god supergroup. So I thought that was really interesting. A
Speaker 2: lot of connections to Thor. That's where Isis and Osiris
Speaker 2: all debuted in nineteen seventy five Store two three nine. Like,
Speaker 2: I thought that was really interesting because I wonder if
Speaker 2: we're gonna ever get to the space of having like
Speaker 2: an ancient Egyptian as guardian kind of space in the
Speaker 2: Marvel universe. We know that they mentioned are the members
Speaker 2: in Black Panther, you know they mentioned bast so I
Speaker 2: thought that was really cool. I like anything that's like
Speaker 2: cosmic or mythological. I think the Jake Lockley was it him?
Speaker 2: Was it not? Is there another altar coming through? That's
Speaker 2: the big theory piece. I also think that this is
Speaker 2: a really big episode for Leila, who is definitely like
Speaker 2: huge one of our favorite characters. May Klamaui is just
Speaker 2: so great. She has this real evy from the Mummy energy.
Speaker 2: She's very like cheeky, and she turns up in Egypt
Speaker 2: to help Mark even though he's mad, disrespectful, he wanted
Speaker 2: to get divorce. He didn't tell her. He has like
Speaker 2: a secondary personality like Steven's kind of winning creepy to her,
Speaker 2: but she was just there. She was like, pow, I
Speaker 2: don't care I'm going to Egypt. I'm gonna help you
Speaker 2: out and in this so we really learn in this
Speaker 2: episode that they're definitely leaning into the scarlet scarab thing.
Speaker 2: If you actually watch the trailers, there's a photo of
Speaker 2: Layla and her dad and next to it is a
Speaker 2: scarlet piece of cloth with a scarab onnet. So I
Speaker 2: really think we're getting that Marlene mixed with this potential
Speaker 2: connection that she may have to the Scarab. I'm I'm
Speaker 2: really interested to see where things go, because this is
Speaker 2: another show like Hawkeye Wear. For example, Anton Mogart, who
Speaker 2: you mentioned, is this in this is this kind of
Speaker 2: art dealer, black market dodgy guy. He's been to madrapor
Speaker 2: with Leila. That's a big drop. In the comics, he
Speaker 2: is a Moonnight villain. He debuted in Moonnight number three
Speaker 2: and he was called Midnight Man Midnight Man, And so
Speaker 2: did he really die in this episode or are we
Speaker 2: going to see him come back again and kind of
Speaker 2: be a more primary antagonist. It looked like he didn't
Speaker 2: do very well, but in the comics he gets like
Speaker 2: disfigured and then comes back as a kind of masked
Speaker 2: hero who works alongside the Number one Missing character from
Speaker 2: this series likely a good thing. Ral Bushman, who is
Speaker 2: like a was Moonnight's partner on the Fateful Trip where
Speaker 2: he gained his powers. That's a very problematic character, so
Speaker 2: if they reimagined, it would have to be kind of
Speaker 2: like a Umbaku Star reimagining, where you take a character
Speaker 2: that has really problematic elements and make something really special.
Speaker 2: The fact that Mogart was there makes me think that
Speaker 2: we might have some kind of Bushman illusion or situation
Speaker 2: as we go forward, because also in this episode, Harrow
Speaker 2: hints at what happened to Laila's dad on this archaeological quest,
Speaker 2: and we also know that in Moonnight's origin, as you've
Speaker 2: mentioned before, he was part of a kind of terrible
Speaker 2: tragedy in the desert, and we know that in this
Speaker 2: show Mark Spector was accused of murdering an archaeologist. So
Speaker 2: I think we can put together some clears that there's
Speaker 2: going to be a tragic situation going on, and.
Speaker 1: We should mention that the actor Gaspard Uliel, who played
Speaker 1: Anton Morgart, passed away this January in a skiing accident.
Speaker 1: The mage poor name drop was interesting because clearly, you
Speaker 1: know Madrapoor is a city of a vast illegal interests,
Speaker 1: so it would make sense that stolen antiquities moved through there,
Speaker 1: and of course it's a place that has strong ties
Speaker 1: to the X Men.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the wildest thing to me. Like every time
Speaker 2: they say, I know they established it, Sharon Carr, powerbroker,
Speaker 2: that's probably where they're going. But I always think of
Speaker 2: the X Men of Wolverine, of Patch. You know, it's
Speaker 2: so exciting every time I hear them say it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so just just for people who don't know, in uh,
Speaker 1: I think it's supposed to In like early nineties, late eighties,
Speaker 1: Wolverine got his own solo series. And how this guy
Speaker 1: managed to be in the X Men and then do
Speaker 1: all the adventures he did on his own while traveling
Speaker 1: like coast to coast and internationally, I don't know. But
Speaker 1: this guy was a very busy guy, and he spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time living in Madopoor under this persona
Speaker 1: of Patch who is this kind of Rapscallion bar Denizen
Speaker 1: later club owner who rubbed elbows with pirates and various gangsters,
Speaker 1: but was a good guy. And you know, honestly, most
Speaker 1: of Wolverine is set there. So whenever magicpoor comes up,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, oh gosh, here comes the x Menter.
Speaker 2: And we in Falcon and the Winter Soldier. They even
Speaker 2: had the Princess Bar, which is where Patch would always
Speaker 2: hang out, So like they want us to make those connections.
Speaker 2: And I also saw put a really cool note that
Speaker 2: I wouldn't really have thought of, which is like post
Speaker 2: Shang Chi, Jai Ling is running the ten Ring and
Speaker 2: that's obviously going to be deeply connected to Madripal. Now
Speaker 2: that Sharon Kaw and Leila, I'm like, yeah, probably, But
Speaker 2: Jai Ling and Leila, I'm like, I would like to
Speaker 2: see that, Like that's a relationship I want to know about. Like,
Speaker 2: so I think they this is an episode where it
Speaker 2: seems like it's just this action packmom superhero, but it
Speaker 2: seems like they're they're spreading a lot of seeds that
Speaker 2: could kind of sprout into different things, whether they're in
Speaker 2: this show or in The Great or MCU.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. And I can't help but notice that
Speaker 1: the episode starts with Mark Spector losing time, passing out,
Speaker 1: losing time, waking up in a different place, not knowing
Speaker 1: how he got there. We can only assume that someone
Speaker 1: else was in control of the body, but not Stephen,
Speaker 1: because Steven's not talking about it, and Steven doesn't seem
Speaker 1: to know what happened either. And here at the end
Speaker 1: of this we have Stephen, who was in control at
Speaker 1: the time, passing out after Conshou's energy is trapped in
Speaker 1: the statue. I wonder, when Mark slash Stephen wake up
Speaker 1: where we are? Like where we are? Is that a
Speaker 1: moment when Jake or whoever the other personality is comes through.
Speaker 1: But I think I would expect that we're going to
Speaker 1: a new kind of place in the next episode.
Speaker 2: I think so too, especially if you think about how
Speaker 2: prominent the museum was in the first episode, and then
Speaker 2: in the second episode, has Stephen got closer to Mark,
Speaker 2: the museum was suddenly he was fired, he suddenly couldn't
Speaker 2: be there anymore. And in this episode when he's embracing Mark,
Speaker 2: he's in Egypt. So the idea of another altar, another personality,
Speaker 2: another side of himself coming out, it makes sense that
Speaker 2: that would potentially lead us to a different space.
Speaker 1: And it's also interesting to me, and who knows if
Speaker 1: this means anything, but when this unknown personality came through,
Speaker 1: it was when to your point one, it kind of
Speaker 1: hints that maybe certainly Mark is maybe less has less
Speaker 1: of an affinity for violence than we were expecting, which
Speaker 1: would And it was also moments where it seemed like
Speaker 1: the body of Steven slash Mark was in its most
Speaker 1: perilous state, which would kind of it suggests maybe that
Speaker 1: whoever the other personality is, that they are somehow letting
Speaker 1: Stephen and Mark run around and do things until like
Speaker 1: there's an emergency and they need to take control. So
Speaker 1: it would suggest that whoever that other personality is, they
Speaker 1: are moving pieces around in a more direct way than
Speaker 1: either Stephen or Mark and have more of a full
Speaker 1: picture maybe than Steven or Mark.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it definitely there is a hint here, and for
Speaker 2: the beginning, I thought from the beginning, I thought it
Speaker 2: was quntrue, but we know that that's not the case now.
Speaker 2: And also something else interesting to think about is like
Speaker 2: who is keeping them alive? Who is giving them the power?
Speaker 2: If Konshu has been trapped in the comics, Mark being
Speaker 2: separated from Konshu usually leads to him losing his powers
Speaker 2: or having to regain them in a different way by
Speaker 2: meeting the priests of Konshu by gaining an artifact. So
Speaker 2: I think that the idea that there may be more
Speaker 2: puppet master alter or a different person who is more
Speaker 2: in control and is allowing them to kind of have
Speaker 2: their fun where they can until it becomes dangerous would
Speaker 2: make a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: When we're back, we'll be discussing fantasy and science fiction
Speaker 1: and interviewing the great author Nicola Griffith. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: air lock. This podcast is coming out on Friday, April fifteenth,
Speaker 1: and it is the same day that the latest Fantastic
Speaker 1: Beasts movie is releasing in theaters. We won't be covering
Speaker 1: that just because you know, I have covered a lot
Speaker 1: of JK Rowling content over the course of my career,
Speaker 1: and I've enjoyed it. But I just don't think that
Speaker 1: I can I can possibly give her money anymore or
Speaker 1: take part in any kind of situation that would potentially
Speaker 1: give her money, particularly with the kind of climate in
Speaker 1: society right now towards trans people and the increasing peril
Speaker 1: and aggressive language that the lgbt q AI community writ
Speaker 1: large is being faced with. So we wanted to take
Speaker 1: this opportunity to just talk about other authors, other creatives
Speaker 1: in the sci fi fantasy space, with a focus on
Speaker 1: queer creators, creators of color, just like a more diverse
Speaker 1: set of sci fi and fantasy creators. That's what we
Speaker 1: I wanted to do. So with that, gosh, do you
Speaker 1: have any thoughts on the New Fantastic Beast movie and JK.
Speaker 1: Rowling in general and this whole situation that we find
Speaker 1: ourselves in.
Speaker 2: Yes, I do have. I do have thoughts about it.
Speaker 2: I am exactly on the same page as you. You know,
Speaker 2: this is something that was a large part of my childhood.
Speaker 2: I am the age that I was in school and
Speaker 2: was basically analogous ages to the kids in the books.
Speaker 2: It was a book series that meant a lot to me.
Speaker 2: I worked in a bookshop so I would be able
Speaker 2: to go to the opening nights when I was still
Speaker 2: not legally even old enough to really work. It was
Speaker 2: something that meant a lot to me. But it's something
Speaker 2: that I now can no longer enjoy. It's something I
Speaker 2: used to cover. It's part of what my knowledge base
Speaker 2: is the same as you. That was part of my career,
Speaker 2: and there's just you know what, there's better stories out
Speaker 2: there told by people who aren't actively harming communities that
Speaker 2: I love and care about, and we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about them, and it's going to be amazing, and I
Speaker 2: feel incredibly lucky to share this space with you, someone
Speaker 2: who cares about this stuff and understands exactly why we're
Speaker 2: folks on something else.
Speaker 1: I just think it's terribly alarming, right, it's alarming. This
Speaker 1: is not to say that it was not dangerous and
Speaker 1: potentially toxic, harmful rhetoric previously, but I think like the
Speaker 1: events of like the last six months even just make
Speaker 1: it feel much more pressing and uh and something that
Speaker 1: kind of like actively needs to be pushed back against.
Speaker 2: I think the situation is that the reason that it's
Speaker 2: always been so dangerous is that having prominent figures with
Speaker 2: huge followings who are seen as respectable or liberal or
Speaker 2: whatever else saying these things are why these legislations can
Speaker 2: be brought in. It's why they have the support, it's
Speaker 2: why people know these terminologies. It's so it has an
Speaker 2: active effect that is negative and dangerous and sometimes fatal.
Speaker 2: And I absolutely agree with you, it's it's it's time
Speaker 2: to push back on it, and it's time to celebrate
Speaker 2: other stuff that lifts people up and and open spaces
Speaker 2: for people and changes people's lives in a positive way
Speaker 2: rather than a dangerous one.
Speaker 1: In the realm of books. I love that turns out
Speaker 1: that the author was a shithead. Enders Game. Enders Game
Speaker 1: is like one of was one of the things I
Speaker 1: was thinking about. That is a friend's older brother like
Speaker 1: recommended it to me, and it like crushed me. Like
Speaker 1: I was sobbing at the end of that book. And
Speaker 1: then it became quite clear like in not recent years,
Speaker 1: but I would say in the last like eight years
Speaker 1: or so, that Orson Scott Card had some really terrible views,
Speaker 1: particularly on the issues of homosexuality and LGBTQAI issues, and
Speaker 1: it just, man, I just had to drop that. I
Speaker 1: just had to drop that series that not not interact
Speaker 1: with any Orson Scott Card content anymore. And I gotta
Speaker 1: say you, I love Enders Game. I think it's a
Speaker 1: great book still because none of that toxic ideas that
Speaker 1: he has are you know, it's been a number of
Speaker 1: years since I read it, but it seemed present in
Speaker 1: the book at the time.
Speaker 2: I will say, just he calls if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 2: like the aliens in that are.
Speaker 1: Called the buggers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, buggers. Bugger is like slang for gay sex in England,
Speaker 2: so he really he built well, it's the same mine.
Speaker 2: Mine was like, this is so funny because you don't
Speaker 2: really think of him as like a sci fi author.
Speaker 2: But one of the first books that I ever really
Speaker 2: remember that was like deep when this was when I
Speaker 2: was a little little kid, when I was deep into
Speaker 2: that felt that you were really going into space is
Speaker 2: Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, which is the sequel
Speaker 2: to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Rodahl, who it
Speaker 2: turns out, is like a massive anti semi But like
Speaker 2: when I was a kid, I remember that book. He
Speaker 2: goes up in the elevator right with his family and
Speaker 2: they go on the US they end up on a
Speaker 2: space station, and that was one of the first interactions
Speaker 2: I had with sci fi. But again, you learn these
Speaker 2: things and then you're like, well, let me find someone else.
Speaker 2: And luckily there are like a ton of amazing creators
Speaker 2: who are who are doing the opposite, who are using
Speaker 2: doing the thing that people have always done with sci fi,
Speaker 2: which is and fantasy, which is to make analogous stories
Speaker 2: about real wild depression and find like the important way
Speaker 2: to kind of talk about it.
Speaker 1: My personal philosophy is when things like this occur, and
Speaker 1: particularly with particular UH focus on on Jk's work in
Speaker 1: the Harry Potter series, which which is again a story
Speaker 1: series of series of books that I really love and
Speaker 1: UH and through which I found a community of like
Speaker 1: minded people whose company and relationships I still enjoy. My
Speaker 1: personal philosophy is like, Okay, no more money, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna support this. I'm not going to be buying the
Speaker 1: legacy of Hogwarts game, I'm not gonna be covering the stuff.
Speaker 1: But when it comes to like what happens? Can I
Speaker 1: reread the books that one is more, I kind of
Speaker 1: feel like seizing these works from their author is like
Speaker 1: a kind of like a revolution For me. It feels
Speaker 1: like a revolutionary act of like, fuck you, you don't
Speaker 1: own this anymore, in the sense that like the people
Speaker 1: whose lives were touched by this and who found other
Speaker 1: connections through these stories, they should not now have to
Speaker 1: vacate this space because it turns out are bad. What
Speaker 1: should happen is they should then seize this space from
Speaker 1: you and continue in their cultural relationships, the bonds that
Speaker 1: they have with the communities they've created, and they should
Speaker 1: just like seize this story from me. So that's like
Speaker 1: how I feel about it when it comes like, you know,
Speaker 1: there are chapters still in Harry Potter that I like
Speaker 1: to read, but I just will never give her money anymore.
Speaker 1: I just can't.
Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of like power in that,
Speaker 2: and a lot also a lot of those conversations, Like
Speaker 2: there's an amazing non binary cartoonist that we were talking about,
Speaker 2: Maya Cababe who made Harry Potter fansy and called Harry
Speaker 2: Potter and the problematic author that was all about that
Speaker 2: kind of journey, and I think it's really important to
Speaker 2: have those conversations and to kind of talk about what
Speaker 2: it means like to separate that from the eyes. I mean,
Speaker 2: I personally don't get any joy out of rereading them anymore,
Speaker 2: but I used to. There was there was chapters in
Speaker 2: Harry Potter that that was the only way I could
Speaker 2: go to sleep as a kid, was to read the
Speaker 2: chapter where he's on the night bus and he's got
Speaker 2: the hot chocolate and the hot water bottle. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: he's on his way. You know, that was And it's
Speaker 2: it's sad to lose those things, but that's the power
Speaker 2: of the singular author. Right, Yeah, that's power of it.
Speaker 1: Let's move on to just what we're reading and any
Speaker 1: kind of stories, authors, wonderful tales, creators that we want
Speaker 1: to lift up right now. Do you have any recommendations?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I talk a lot. There's a there's a brilliant
Speaker 2: book that I read a lot of YA books that
Speaker 2: which I guess comes from that legacy of these books
Speaker 2: that we're talking about that we really enjoy. There's a
Speaker 2: book I read that I sort of haven't forgotten about
Speaker 2: that I've reread a couple of times called Cemetry Boys
Speaker 2: by A Thomas's trans author trans lead character, and it
Speaker 2: is just so wonderful. It's about a boy called Yadril
Speaker 2: who wants to become a Bruha and tries to summon
Speaker 2: a spirit to prove it, but ends up freeing a
Speaker 2: different spirit and then it becomes this kind of really
Speaker 2: dynamic exploration of love and friendship and legacy. And I
Speaker 2: just that book is so wonderful and it's very much
Speaker 2: to me like the kind of power of when somebody
Speaker 2: gets to tell a story that represents who they are
Speaker 2: but is also just absolutely unburdened and it's just allowed
Speaker 2: to be completely free and adventurous and fantastical. I think
Speaker 2: that's kind of the power ironically that actually a lot
Speaker 2: of Harry Potter and stuff was missing because Harry Potter
Speaker 2: is like it takes from a lot of different stories,
Speaker 2: but those stories were often the same stories being told
Speaker 2: by the same people. So symmetry boys is I always
Speaker 2: tell everyone just go and buy that book. It's it's
Speaker 2: so good.
Speaker 1: One book that I read recently that I just absolutely
Speaker 1: love is The Space Between Worlds by Makaia Johnson. I
Speaker 1: think it's her debut novel, and it is a really
Speaker 1: wonderful here's that word again, multiverse story, high concept in
Speaker 1: which people from let's just call it like Earth one
Speaker 1: travel to various closely related dimensions in order to see, Oh,
Speaker 1: of there are there any technology that they've developed that
Speaker 1: that can help us deal with the ecological disaster that
Speaker 1: our current planet is under, or you know, help us
Speaker 1: you know, grow food more efficiently, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. There
Speaker 1: anything we can learn from these other worlds in glean
Speaker 1: and bring back to our world. All through that, there
Speaker 1: is the idea there is you know, You're left to
Speaker 1: wonder as you read the early parts of this story, like, okay,
Speaker 1: but is it happening in reverse? Are there are there
Speaker 1: people from the other Earth coming to it? And so
Speaker 1: all of those questions are things that get answered. It's
Speaker 1: a really amazing story about about class, about race. It
Speaker 1: is a wonderful sci fi tale, really like heartbreakingly told.
Speaker 1: Just a really good, really good book, really surprising, and
Speaker 1: a great multiverse story that unfolds in a way that
Speaker 1: you're not expecting.
Speaker 2: One of my favorite things that I always talk about
Speaker 2: when people ask about like what's like a good queer
Speaker 2: comic or what's like a good story that kind of
Speaker 2: focused on different kinds of people. Tillie Walden, who is
Speaker 2: like one of our greatest living cartoonists and who is
Speaker 2: painfully talented for someone in the early twenties, made this
Speaker 2: unbelievable hundreds of pages long web comic called on Sunbeam,
Speaker 2: which you can also buy in a beautiful bound edition,
Speaker 2: but they never took down the free web comic, which
Speaker 2: I love, and it is the most sprawling, strange, beautifully
Speaker 2: illustrated story about these kids on this spaceship and this
Speaker 2: kind of ongoing journey that's about them and about the
Speaker 2: journeys they're going on in their relationships, but it's also
Speaker 2: about the journey of growing up. But it's also just
Speaker 2: a really cool, weird, quiet space story. But there are
Speaker 2: elements of magical school fantasy to it. The spaceship kind
Speaker 2: of grows and shifts and it's so wondrous and when
Speaker 2: you read it you don't really realize till the end.
Speaker 2: But there is a very specific focus on a certain
Speaker 2: kind of character, and there is a very specific decentering
Speaker 2: of like the usual male heroic protagonist. And it's one
Speaker 2: of the most sort of subtly radical books that I've
Speaker 2: read in a long time. And it's also Tilly's art
Speaker 2: is so beautiful and intricate, Like this is one of
Speaker 2: those comics where you can really go back and just
Speaker 2: read it a million times and you always notice something different.
Speaker 1: Next. This is specifically why we're going to have our
Speaker 1: guest in our next segment.
Speaker 2: Come on.
Speaker 1: But Nicola Griffith's hild Yeah talked about in various places
Speaker 1: from twenty thirteen. Nicola is a wonderful writer, queer writer,
Speaker 1: disabled writer who writes really empathically and wonderfully in just
Speaker 1: like ways that are completely evocative. There are scenes in
Speaker 1: Hill that I think about all the time. I reread
Speaker 1: all the time because they're just about you know, like
Speaker 1: I came to like, I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: comic books in sci fi and fantasy, because like there's
Speaker 1: this feeling of like outsider news, like you're looking for
Speaker 1: you're looking for a place where your own personal strangeness
Speaker 1: and the way you don't fit, like the piece about
Speaker 1: you that maybe don't fit. You're looking for the way
Speaker 1: that world where they do kind of fit.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: And this is like page one of hild describing the
Speaker 1: character hill To, who at this point as a three
Speaker 1: year old girl, she liked time at the edges of things,
Speaker 1: the edges of the crowd, the edge of the pool,
Speaker 1: the edge of the wood were almost pass but none
Speaker 1: quite belonged. And that's basically the entire book is how
Speaker 1: this character who is a woman in a world where
Speaker 1: women are not viewed as having any kind of power,
Speaker 1: and their work is seen as somehow lesser work. There's
Speaker 1: a great, really evocative, very small moment where like a
Speaker 1: certain warrior who is having a dalliance with one of
Speaker 1: the women characters, offers to help her, you know, bring
Speaker 1: some of the washing in. But as long as it's
Speaker 1: night and no one will see that he is helping
Speaker 1: her with like women's work, you know, in exchange for
Speaker 1: them hanging out longer. Like there's all these little moments
Speaker 1: that bring you into the power of the people like
Speaker 1: who are overlooked, And it's just like a really really
Speaker 1: really really amazing book, really really amazing books. That's like
Speaker 1: there's some great plot turns, really hard like pounding like
Speaker 1: suspense and action, but all these also these really like
Speaker 1: internal quiet moments about noticing the way people interact, Noticing
Speaker 1: the way people treat the main character, Notice how they
Speaker 1: treat each other, Notice how they act when they're anxious.
Speaker 1: It's a lot about noticing, which is what I love
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's so much detail. Nikolas an amazing I love
Speaker 2: that book so much. And Nikolas another amazing book coming
Speaker 2: out called Spear, which is kind of this queer authorian
Speaker 2: me imagining, and it's not out yet, so I won't
Speaker 2: get too deep into details, but it definitely comes from
Speaker 2: that same space of the edges, Like we're on the edges,
Speaker 2: and the journey is to find the other people who
Speaker 2: are our family, who are also on the edges, to
Speaker 2: find that community. And I think that's such a powerful
Speaker 2: thing kind of about all of these books and what
Speaker 2: we look for. Strek is going to be like one
Speaker 2: of the most This is one of the books I
Speaker 2: think about the most that I've read recently, which is
Speaker 2: called Pet by a quakm Ezi, and it is like,
Speaker 2: this is like the kind of transgressive fiction that I
Speaker 2: feel like doesn't often get published, but this did. And
Speaker 2: it is a kid's book, but it's also an adults book,
Speaker 2: and it is set in a futuristic world where where
Speaker 2: monsters don't exist, but then a monster escapes out of
Speaker 2: an artist's canvas and suddenly this young black trans girl
Speaker 2: who is the protagonist begins to question whether or not
Speaker 2: these monsters do exist, and whether or not what the
Speaker 2: society has done by kind of shunning them. And it's
Speaker 2: really analogous to all this incredibly deep stuff. And as
Speaker 2: you read it as an adult, I feel like there's
Speaker 2: so many terrifying, emotionally wrought layers to it. But it
Speaker 2: also imagines a world where, in you know, the beginning,
Speaker 2: a black trans girl is safe, and in that way,
Speaker 2: it's this incredibly utopian. It's that use of radical imagination
Speaker 2: that we will talk about a lot like to make
Speaker 2: a better world, you have to imagine it. And I
Speaker 2: feel like in a way, Hill does that in a
Speaker 2: historical way where it rewrites history and broadens the scope
Speaker 2: of who was involved, which is just true because the
Speaker 2: people didn't not exist, they were just written out. And
Speaker 2: Pet does it in a way where it helps us
Speaker 2: to imagine like a future. And I just that book
Speaker 2: I think about so much. I feel like it's one
Speaker 2: of those books where in years to come it will
Speaker 2: become a kind of you know, I always think about
Speaker 2: very different book, but Neil Gaiman Stardust, that's a book
Speaker 2: where you could give it to a kid and you
Speaker 2: could give it to an adult, and two people would
Speaker 2: read it in totally different ways. And Pet really feels
Speaker 2: like a great contemporary version of one of those kind
Speaker 2: of timeless, ageless stories.
Speaker 1: And then my last wreck, I'm going to go nonfiction.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of heroin things going on right
Speaker 1: now in the news, and it can be like difficult
Speaker 1: to like process everything. Susan Sontag, the essayist, philosopher, writer, novelist, thinker,
Speaker 1: wrote a really moving and wise and powerful book called
Speaker 1: Regarding the Pain of Others. It's really like a long essay,
Speaker 1: and it's about how in modern life. It's kind of
Speaker 1: a companion to her essay on photography, just like about
Speaker 1: what it means to like regard images that have been
Speaker 1: mass produced and moved from different places. And it's a
Speaker 1: companion in that it posits that in the modern world,
Speaker 1: like it's never been easier for us to see and
Speaker 1: engage with images that depict other people suffering, other people's pain,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And so like, how do we deal with that?
Speaker 1: How do we sit with that?
Speaker 3: What do we do?
Speaker 1: What does it mean if you can't quote unquote do anything,
Speaker 1: is it enough to just look at it and think
Speaker 1: about it and feel something about it? I found it
Speaker 1: very moving and very wise. And it's a book that
Speaker 1: I think about a lot all the time still.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to end with We've talked about, you know,
Speaker 2: the Boy Wizard, the Boy who Lived. It's something we
Speaker 2: talk about a lot. It's an overarching story of our time.
Speaker 2: But I have read a book that comes out in
Speaker 2: May called The Marvelers by Donnielle Clayton, and it feels
Speaker 2: like it could be and it should be that next
Speaker 2: kind of cultural phenomenon book. Oh wow, it's a global
Speaker 2: reimagining of the magical story, like magical school story. It's
Speaker 2: about a girl called Ella who goes to this Arkanam
Speaker 2: training academy for Marvelers and she is a conjurer at
Speaker 2: this school in the sky. But she's the first ever
Speaker 2: conjurer to attend, and that means that she is the
Speaker 2: target for people who don't trust her, who are suspicious
Speaker 2: of it. And it is this kind of it's so
Speaker 2: magical and it gives you that feeling of walking through
Speaker 2: the halls, those magical, cozy feelings you want. But it's
Speaker 2: also a book that deals with racial integration, it deals
Speaker 2: with generational trauma. But all the while is it feels
Speaker 2: like this huge moment for fantasy. Kids from all around
Speaker 2: the world study at these schools. You know, there's different
Speaker 2: notions of what it is to be magical and to
Speaker 2: be from a different place that feels just miles away
Speaker 2: from the stereotypes of old And I think it could
Speaker 2: be a big moment for people like us who love
Speaker 2: these books, and hopefully for kids who love these books.
Speaker 2: I feel like The Marvelers could be that.
Speaker 1: Book out May third really excited for that. Up next
Speaker 1: to our discussion with the author Nicola Griffith. Welcome to
Speaker 1: the Hive Mind, where we explore topic and more detail
Speaker 1: with the help of expert guests. This week we're absolutely
Speaker 1: thrilled to have Nicola Griffith, the award winning author of
Speaker 1: So Lucky, Hilled, the Odd, and other books, and of
Speaker 1: course the upcoming novel Spear, which is available April nineteenth.
Speaker 2: Hella, Nikola, thank you so much.
Speaker 3: Hi, it's great to be here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you so much for joining us and taking
Speaker 2: the time. We're both really big fans of your stories
Speaker 2: and we're so stoked to talk to you. Something that
Speaker 2: we often do when we talk to people on here
Speaker 2: is like, what was your origin story with fantasy, with
Speaker 2: sci fi, with kind of stories that made you want
Speaker 2: to write stories?
Speaker 3: Wow, That's a bit like saying, why are you who
Speaker 3: you are? Panic? Okay. Basically, my first introduction to story was,
Speaker 3: like I'm guessing, like most people, my mum telling me
Speaker 3: stories at bedtime, and she would make up stories and
Speaker 3: then she would read me kids' books, that is, kids'
Speaker 3: versions of myths, Greek myths and legends, and so my
Speaker 3: first introduction to story was obviously all made up. I
Speaker 3: think most kids they like things that are completely not real. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but they can't really tell me. Everything is new to
Speaker 3: a child, right, you're three. You've never seen a bunny before,
Speaker 3: so you don't know a bunny can't talk, so talking rabbit,
Speaker 3: it's like, that's perfectly normal. But I never is some
Speaker 3: part of me. I don't think I ever let go
Speaker 3: of that. I feel that way also about nature. I
Speaker 3: felt the same kind of thrill going for a walk
Speaker 3: under the trees that I do getting lost in a story.
Speaker 3: It's the same kind of journey for me. It's a
Speaker 3: getting lost, finding my own way and discovering things about
Speaker 3: me in this other place, whether it's a story or
Speaker 3: an actual geographic location. And to me, story writing stories
Speaker 3: is really the very best way to capture both those things,
Speaker 3: and I think it's probably why almost everything I write
Speaker 3: has a lot of nature in it. I hope that
Speaker 3: makes sense. I hope I'm answering the question because I.
Speaker 2: Love that and that it was like listening to a
Speaker 2: wonderful story. We're both just, like.
Speaker 1: Nikola, a big fan of your stories, as Rosie said,
Speaker 1: particularly Ammonite, which is your first novel. I believe about
Speaker 1: it's sci fi colony, a sci fi story about all
Speaker 1: women's colony in Space and Hild, which I found randomly
Speaker 1: in a bookstore under one of the you know, the
Speaker 1: suggestions from the from the workers at the bookstore, and
Speaker 1: I just happened to pick it up and I loved it.
Speaker 1: I think one of the things that I love about
Speaker 1: your writing is how how you bring the reader into
Speaker 1: the way characters notice things, in particular the way characters
Speaker 1: who aren't close to power are in power notice things
Speaker 1: that the people in power don't. I think in particular,
Speaker 1: there's a scene in Hild where where hilled Is has
Speaker 1: noticed that Edwin, the king is nervous about something is
Speaker 1: having a lot of meetings, but she can't quite unpack what.
Speaker 1: And then she asks one of his guesses, guesses, one
Speaker 1: of his warrior companions, so what's going on in the meetings?
Speaker 1: And the warrior companion is like, I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: boring old men talking about stuff. So she's like, okay,
Speaker 1: let me get this guy some food, men off and
Speaker 1: open up when they when they're when they're not hungry anymore,
Speaker 1: and then she just talks to him about different things
Speaker 1: that perhaps he's noticed, and then she's able to kind
Speaker 1: of through this unwind what it is that is gnawing
Speaker 1: at the king, and then she's able to in a
Speaker 1: in a very power powerful way, use that information in
Speaker 1: a way that's a little manipulative but also is very
Speaker 1: smart in the way that she's getting the thing that
Speaker 1: she wants, but also getting the king the thing that
Speaker 1: he wants. How much do you think about that when
Speaker 1: you're when you're writing It's it's just something I love
Speaker 1: about the way you write.
Speaker 3: Most of those scenes. I remember that particular scene very
Speaker 3: well because I remember thinking, Okay, she needs to get
Speaker 3: him something to eat, Like, what the fuck did they eat?
Speaker 3: Then I had to okay, right, hair, they ate hairs, right,
Speaker 3: let's look pie and hair and but so yes, I
Speaker 3: do remember that scene really well. And she was very young,
Speaker 3: as I fool, so I was discovering it kind of
Speaker 3: with Hilt. I knew she needed a moment where she
Speaker 3: had to bring everything she had learnt together in this one,
Speaker 3: like she had to behave like a seer, as though
Speaker 3: she had magic, but of course she doesn't, because it's
Speaker 3: not a fantasy booky, even though it reads a bit
Speaker 3: like that, she had to make other people think that
Speaker 3: she was magic, and she had this prophetic gift. And
Speaker 3: so before I wrote that scene, did I know exactly
Speaker 3: how she was going to do that? No, I really
Speaker 3: had no clue. I just had a feeling. I just
Speaker 3: knew what the place felt like and how she felt,
Speaker 3: and what it might be like to be surrounded by
Speaker 3: all these yesses with swords and spears and she's got
Speaker 3: nothing except well, now by this time she has her
Speaker 3: little sex. Actually not that little bit. So I suppose
Speaker 3: it's a bit like saying, how where does inspiration come from?
Speaker 3: I don't really know. It comes from a lot of
Speaker 3: work and putting clues together. Basically, you're seeing in this
Speaker 3: book through hilld my process as a writer, which is
Speaker 3: part serendipity, part smart, part research, and part just trusting
Speaker 3: that it will be there when you step off the
Speaker 3: edge that you're building your bridge. As you walk, there's
Speaker 3: this chasm and you're heading towards it, and you just
Speaker 3: have to have faith that there'll be something there when
Speaker 3: you get there.
Speaker 2: That's really interesting and it kind of that kind of
Speaker 2: talk speaks to one of the things I really wanted
Speaker 2: to know, how did you kind of discover Hill? Because
Speaker 2: I'm from England, I've been to Whitby a lot. I
Speaker 2: was a goth when I was a teenager. I loved Dracula.
Speaker 4: It was really.
Speaker 2: Important place to me. But I'd never heard of I'd
Speaker 2: never heard of hilld I'd never heard of this story.
Speaker 2: How did you discover her? And then what made you
Speaker 2: want to tell the story of hild and bring it
Speaker 2: to a wider audience.
Speaker 3: I discovered her the day I discovered Whitby. I'd been
Speaker 3: living in Hull. I don't know if you ever spent
Speaker 3: any time in Hull, very depressed, quite depressing city in
Speaker 3: the northeast of England, where at the time when I
Speaker 3: was living the unemployment rate was twenty five percent. Wow.
Speaker 3: And it literally smelled because the drains were all falling.
Speaker 3: I mean, it was just a terrible place to live.
Speaker 3: And I'd been having a bit of a hard time.
Speaker 3: So one weekend I escaped and went up the coast
Speaker 3: and went to Whitby. And I'd heard obviously, I'd read Dracula,
Speaker 3: I'd heard of Whitby, so I was expecting all the steps.
Speaker 3: I was expecting the abbey. What I really was not
Speaker 3: expecting was what happened when I got to the abbey,
Speaker 3: which is back in the day. It's changed now there's
Speaker 3: much more control about who can go in, But back
Speaker 3: in the day you just kind of walked through it
Speaker 3: and there was this stone threshold and I remember crossing
Speaker 3: that threshold and it was like history just came fisting
Speaker 3: up through me, and I was just it just turned
Speaker 3: me inside out like a sock. Suddenly. It's like, I
Speaker 3: don't know, if you're familiar with there's a kind of
Speaker 3: New Age theory that some parts of the earth that
Speaker 3: the layer between the world and the other world is
Speaker 3: very thin. I think Whitby is if you buy into that,
Speaker 3: is one of those thin places. There's a real sense
Speaker 3: of imminence and otherness there. And so I just walked
Speaker 3: into it and it was like it was like sticking
Speaker 3: my head into a perfectly ordinary wardrobe and finding I
Speaker 3: was in Narnia. It was just I was blown away,
Speaker 3: and so I had to I had to know what
Speaker 3: is this place? Who built this place, where does it
Speaker 3: come from, why here, what's it about? What does it mean?
Speaker 3: And so I went to the little tourist place attached
Speaker 3: to the abbey, which is much bigger now amazing, but
Speaker 3: then it was just like a tatty little place next door,
Speaker 3: and they had a few little brochures, and I read
Speaker 3: that the abbey had been founded fourteen hundred years ago
Speaker 3: by this woman called Hill, And I knew a bit
Speaker 3: about history at this point, and I thought, well, fourteen
Speaker 3: hundred years ago, that was the quote Dark Ages. So
Speaker 3: how come a woman in the Dark Ages, when Mike
Speaker 3: was right and women supposedly were just chattel and had
Speaker 3: no power, how could she possibly have created this amazing
Speaker 3: place and done such things and still be known today,
Speaker 3: well partially known today. And so I went to try
Speaker 3: to find a book about her, and there wasn't a
Speaker 3: book about her. There's no scholarly monograph, there's no TV series,
Speaker 3: there's no cartoon, there's not even a racy romance novel.
Speaker 3: There was nothing, ringing silence. The only thing I could
Speaker 3: find was Venerable Beads, History of the English Church and People,
Speaker 3: and that has less than five pages about her, and
Speaker 3: most of that is really typical Saints stories that could
Speaker 3: apply to anybody, so that it's not real information. And
Speaker 3: there was there was no information. So now by this
Speaker 3: time I'm on fire with curiosity. So I researched that
Speaker 3: book on and off for I would say, fifteen years,
Speaker 3: because I went to Whitby in the eighties and it
Speaker 3: was in the back of my mind all that time.
Speaker 3: And then gradually, sometime in the nineties, I started picking
Speaker 3: up history books and actually reading and working my way
Speaker 3: back through notions of history. So I started with old
Speaker 3: fashioned mid twentieth century history, and by the time I'd
Speaker 3: finished researching, although toupy Frank, I'm still not finished researching.
Speaker 3: I'm going to be researching this for the rest of
Speaker 3: my life. By the time I got to the point
Speaker 3: where I was ready to write the book, shall I say,
Speaker 3: the first book, I was talking to the people doing
Speaker 3: the research before it was published in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 3: early career researchers. They were discovering blogs and so you
Speaker 3: could you could just go online and find these people
Speaker 3: and what they were doing and talk to them in
Speaker 3: the comments. And they didn't know who I was. They
Speaker 3: didn't know whether I was amazingly famous or nobody or
Speaker 3: a lunatic, and so they were very cautious at first,
Speaker 3: so I would have to elicit information from them. They
Speaker 3: didn't like risking stuff. They didn't like to say something
Speaker 3: unless they could give you ten footnotes, and so I
Speaker 3: remember one time I was trying to find out what
Speaker 3: the Anglos Saxon's thought about dogs, what was their attitude
Speaker 3: to dogs, and there was like, we know nothing about dogs.
Speaker 3: I said, okay, so if Hill had a Pekinese, and
Speaker 3: they're like, she wouldn't have had a Pekinese, that's just no.
Speaker 3: And I said, well there, you see, you do know something.
Speaker 3: So what kind of dog might she have had? So
Speaker 3: and then we went from there. But oh, it was
Speaker 3: like blood from a stone at first, getting this information
Speaker 3: from these people. So anyway, that's how it began, that's
Speaker 3: how I really needed to do it. And like I say,
Speaker 3: there was just no information. So I researched everything. I
Speaker 3: researched flora and fauna and building techniques and textile production
Speaker 3: and agriculture and the weather. Everything. Everything was different then.
Speaker 3: And I decided I was just build the seventh century.
Speaker 3: I was going to build the whole goddamn century, and
Speaker 3: then I was going to put Hilp in it and
Speaker 3: see how she behaved, what happened, How on earth she
Speaker 3: could have done this? And the only way to do
Speaker 3: that was by making her a child so I could
Speaker 3: discover along with her. But that that wasn't a deliberate choice.
Speaker 3: What happened was I got basically got drunk one day
Speaker 3: and I thought, oh, you know, screw this, It's my
Speaker 3: birthday tomorrow. I cannot go another year without starting this
Speaker 3: goddamn book. I thought, right, I'm going to start, and
Speaker 3: I had no idea what's going to just I'm going
Speaker 3: to write a paragraph, and so I began and there
Speaker 3: she was. She was, this three year old girl under
Speaker 3: a tree, and I thought, holy shit, that that's the
Speaker 3: key to everything. And then I was off. So, yeah,
Speaker 3: a mix of hard work, guessing, and alcohol, I suppose
Speaker 3: how I did that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it sounds as if, and guessing from from the
Speaker 1: content of your other works, that this that the process
Speaker 1: of creating Hilt was very different than than what you've
Speaker 1: done previously or even since, with some of your more
Speaker 1: personal kind of works in different genres. Would you say
Speaker 1: that is that the case?
Speaker 3: They're all different, and yet they're all the same. I
Speaker 3: rarely write a book without some part of it having
Speaker 3: grown in my writer's brain, in my back brain, some
Speaker 3: little factoid that's stuck to another one and is sort
Speaker 3: of mutating in there, And then a few years later,
Speaker 3: this this thing springs out full blown. So in that sense,
Speaker 3: the process is the same. But almost every single thing
Speaker 3: I write is trying to answer a question, so so Emmonite.
Speaker 3: For example, my first book, the question I was trying
Speaker 3: to ask, trying to answer, was a question I saw
Speaker 3: being asked all the time in science fiction and not
Speaker 3: answered satisfactorily, not giving me the answer I wanted, which is, basically,
Speaker 3: are women human? I mean, because most science fiction books,
Speaker 3: if you had a world only of women, they behaved
Speaker 3: like half a thing, they didn't behave like whole human beings.
Speaker 3: And I thought, you know, no, I don't buy that
Speaker 3: answer at all, So I'm going to have to figure
Speaker 3: this out. So I wrote EMM and I basically to
Speaker 3: answer that question slower ever, came from a different kind
Speaker 3: of question, a much more personal question actually about who
Speaker 3: are you when you have nothing left? Is there such
Speaker 3: a thing as an essential self? And then the three
Speaker 3: out books those came from a dream. I had this
Speaker 3: dream that there was this woman, completely naked, sprawled on
Speaker 3: the carpet of an absolutely empty apartment, but sprawled in
Speaker 3: a really you know, like a lion on the velt,
Speaker 3: actually not afraid of anything, sprawled and it was absolutely
Speaker 3: empty apartment. I mean there weren't even light fixtures, it
Speaker 3: was that empty. And I was thinking, well, that's odd
Speaker 3: in my dream. And then the next thing I know,
Speaker 3: this woman wakes, is woken up by a gun to
Speaker 3: her head, and instead of going or freaking out even
Speaker 3: she just sits right up with a big flashlight and
Speaker 3: breaks the guy's neck boom like that, split second, no hesitation,
Speaker 3: and I going, whoa, well, who was who's that?
Speaker 2: And how come she.
Speaker 3: Could do that? What would make it possible? What kind
Speaker 3: of person could do that? And so the three out
Speaker 3: books were all about answering that question. How she got
Speaker 3: to be that person in that place at that time. So, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's always a question. Hill was like, how did this
Speaker 3: abby be like this? How could he'll do what she did?
Speaker 3: I think. I think the only book I've ever written
Speaker 3: that is not about answering a question but more about
Speaker 3: just getting stuff out because it needed to be out
Speaker 3: was So Lucky, my book about the woman diagnosed with
Speaker 3: their mess.
Speaker 1: And it's not.
Speaker 3: Autobiographical in the sense the character is not really very
Speaker 3: much like me, although I did give her an English
Speaker 3: accent because I was going to be doing the audio
Speaker 3: narration and I just couldn't. Actually in that sense, she's likely.
Speaker 3: But that book has always made me slightly uncomfortable because
Speaker 3: it's not my usual thing. And also it doesn't do
Speaker 3: what every other book I've ever done does, which is
Speaker 3: to basically center what most people would consider the other
Speaker 3: because in So Lucky, it's the only book about the
Speaker 3: difference of the character about her being disabled. Or my
Speaker 3: other books, you've got disabled people, you've got queer people,
Speaker 3: you've got women, et cetera, and it doesn't matter, it
Speaker 3: doesn't make any difference to the character them. It's all
Speaker 3: her blue eyes rather than green eyes. It's a nothing,
Speaker 3: Whereas So Lucky was very much that the difference was
Speaker 3: a something.
Speaker 2: It was the thing with Spear, you kind of you
Speaker 2: definitely continue that former version, which is every kind of
Speaker 2: character and involved in a kind of this, in this
Speaker 2: case an epic kind of reimagining of Arthurian law. So
Speaker 2: what's what's that question that Spear is answering?
Speaker 3: How do I retake Camelot for real people? Because the
Speaker 3: matter of Britain, the whole Arthurian cycle, it's essentially a
Speaker 3: national origin story, and so it's got this nativist, supremacist
Speaker 3: manifest destiny creme baked in and and I thought, you know,
Speaker 3: I love that legend. I love this notion of Camelot.
Speaker 3: I don't I don't care about it being a specific
Speaker 3: time or a specific place for me. Camelot's all about
Speaker 3: the dream mm hmm. It's about the the fight for
Speaker 3: justice and equity. And so I needed to find a
Speaker 3: way to write that but still make it our theory.
Speaker 3: And so that's how I did Spirit. That's why I
Speaker 3: wrote Spear, and also because it seemed like a really
Speaker 3: nifty idea. Honestly, to be honest, I really thought it
Speaker 3: was going to be a short story. I thought it
Speaker 3: would take me two weeks. I set the Hill sequel aside.
Speaker 3: I thought, okay, I'll get this done in two weeks,
Speaker 3: get back to Meanwood, and this thing just rowed out.
Speaker 3: I mean it just I can't tell you. After I
Speaker 3: wrote Spear and then I went back to Memewood, I
Speaker 3: wrote more in the first year of the pandemic in
Speaker 3: one year than I have ever written. I wrote two
Speaker 3: hundred thousand words. Wow, I think they were all good words.
Speaker 3: I wrote Spear, and I wrote a lot of Meme.
Speaker 3: I finished Meanwood, which is a very large book, and
Speaker 3: I just it just I was just really fired up.
Speaker 3: And the pandemic meant that I didn't have to stop
Speaker 3: to do things like even go to the doctor because
Speaker 3: no one was going to that. I didn't have to
Speaker 3: go out for dinner with anyone. I didn't have to
Speaker 3: go to conferences. I just got to stay at home
Speaker 3: and live in this early medieval world and it was wonderful. So, yeah,
Speaker 3: Spear was a confluence of all the things I love,
Speaker 3: all the things I love about Hilt, but also then
Speaker 3: completely free a lot of Hilt's exterior stresses. I mean,
Speaker 3: Parite is not. She doesn't have to worry about taking
Speaker 3: care of anybody. Really, She's young and free and makes
Speaker 3: the most of it. And I loved that. It felt
Speaker 3: really good.
Speaker 1: You wrote a New York Times up ed in twenty
Speaker 1: eighteen about your role as a queer writer with disabilities
Speaker 1: and how that influences your work and how important it
Speaker 1: is to be a representative for other people in the
Speaker 1: space who are looking for stories. Has anything changed since.
Speaker 3: That time, Oh, it's been amazing. Yeah, it is changing
Speaker 3: a lot. I'm really I'm thrilled. Actually, I've seen just
Speaker 3: I would say in the last five years and absolute
Speaker 3: explosion of disability literature. It's incredible, particularly in first of all,
Speaker 3: in the YA space, lots of YA cripplet, and now
Speaker 3: in the science fiction and fantasy space, there's an awful
Speaker 3: lot of literature about disabled characters with disabled characters. Should
Speaker 3: I say so, it's incredible. I'm still seeing a lot
Speaker 3: of resistance in more mainstream literary presses. What they want
Speaker 3: if you're disabled and you've got a disabled character, they
Speaker 3: want the book to be about the character's disability struggles.
Speaker 3: They don't want to just see them going whoo, you know,
Speaker 3: and whacking someone's head off with the sword. No, they
Speaker 3: want they want authenticity and their notion. Because they are
Speaker 3: ableists and most of us are honestly ablest, they think
Speaker 3: that the authentic experience is suffering.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I've seen the same thing with literature, especially memoir from
Speaker 3: immigrants and refugees, that all people want is their trauma story.
Speaker 3: Give us your drama. They don't want to know about
Speaker 3: the success and the joy and any of that stuff.
Speaker 3: So I'm still seeing that resistance, and also I'm seeing
Speaker 3: I would like to see more changes. Should I put
Speaker 3: it in criticism, I would rather see more people with
Speaker 3: disabilities reviewing fiction with disabled characters as opposed to non
Speaker 3: disabled people. I mean, I get so tired of seeing
Speaker 3: these books by non disabled people about disabled characters who
Speaker 3: kill themselves yep, and calling it wonderful and authentic. And
Speaker 3: I'm thinking, ah, well, I shouldn't say what I'm thinking.
Speaker 3: It's unprinciple. I would have to be considerably bleaped. But
Speaker 3: I'm not happy. I mean, I remember having a conversation
Speaker 3: with a writer who'd been sent one of these books
Speaker 3: to review, I think for the Washington Post, might be
Speaker 3: in the New York Times. She's like, I'm having a
Speaker 3: really hard time with it. So we talked about it,
Speaker 3: and I said, you need to say it. You need
Speaker 3: to say why it's wrong, why it's bad. And that
Speaker 3: was very difficult for her because her stance to reviewing
Speaker 3: is always lift up the writer. And I said this,
Speaker 3: you cannot lift her up for this, lift her up
Speaker 3: for every single thing in the book. Accept this. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and she did, and I was so pleased. So I
Speaker 3: was really grateful and glad. But that's what we need.
Speaker 3: We need more of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree, it's actually really shocking. I'm disabled, and
Speaker 2: that same trope of the honorable sacrifice. There was a
Speaker 2: YA book when I was a young kid, and I
Speaker 2: had a lot of community within the disability activism movement,
Speaker 2: but there was a book that would be given around
Speaker 2: and it was a YA book written by a man
Speaker 2: who had a son who had cerebral palsy. And at
Speaker 2: the end that the son gets set on fire and
Speaker 2: he dies, and the book is told from his perspective,
Speaker 2: and the perspective is he is glad that he's dying
Speaker 2: because it will be like good for his family. And
Speaker 2: that was a book that they legitimately gave to disabled kids,
Speaker 2: to people I know who had cerebral palsy like and
Speaker 2: that is still going on twenty years later, and and
Speaker 2: it kind of blows my mind.
Speaker 3: Look how long it took for queer lit to change
Speaker 3: from the lesbian giving it up so her bisexual clirll
Speaker 3: friend could have a normal life. I mean, really, that
Speaker 3: went on for eighty years. So in this sense, I
Speaker 3: think Cripplet is doing relatively well. It has a long
Speaker 3: way to go, but it's following many of the same
Speaker 3: paths I think. Has queer lit died. Yeah, So there
Speaker 3: is hope. There's hope it's coming. I just wish it
Speaker 3: would hurry up and get here a bit quicker.
Speaker 1: What are you reading now? What if for our listeners
Speaker 1: maybe thinking, oh, that sounds I've been waiting for a
Speaker 1: story like this. This is something I'd like to read.
Speaker 3: Well right now, I haven't been reading a lot of stories.
Speaker 3: Let me see, I've been reading a lot of nonfiction
Speaker 3: about small, tedious things in early medieval times. I love
Speaker 3: to hear it because I know, well, for example, I mean,
Speaker 3: this is actually more about Spear than Hilp. But I
Speaker 3: just read a really good book, and it's from two
Speaker 3: thousand and eight, all about our fury and literature and
Speaker 3: all the tropes that have been used, and how it's so.
Speaker 3: It's there's a whole set of different articles, so each
Speaker 3: article takes a different stance, but it's fascinating to see
Speaker 3: how much really serious scholarship has gone into the whole
Speaker 3: are a legend? I really wish I'm actually I say,
Speaker 3: I'm really glad I hadn't read that book before I
Speaker 3: wrote Spear, Otherwise I might say, well, were you not
Speaker 3: taking it? But let me see what have I read
Speaker 3: in the particularly the queer and fantasy space in the
Speaker 3: last year or two. It's I read Alex Harrow for
Speaker 3: the first time last year, so I read her novella
Speaker 3: A Spindle Splintered, and she's got a new one coming out,
Speaker 3: I think in a couple of months, called The Mirror Mended,
Speaker 3: and that it's really great. It is another kind of retelling,
Speaker 3: and so I want to get back to this notion
Speaker 3: of retelling in a minute. Also Samantha Shannon, who wrote
Speaker 3: The Priory of the Orange Tree. Yes, I'm drawing a
Speaker 3: bit of a blank. What I tend to do when
Speaker 3: I'm in writing mode is I read nonfiction and then
Speaker 3: I reread old favorites and poetry. I read poets. So
Speaker 3: I've basically subscribed to Poetry Magazine and just read that
Speaker 3: every month, you know, I read a couple of those
Speaker 3: and then go to sleep.
Speaker 1: Speaking of rereading things that you love, I'm often drawn
Speaker 1: to some scenes in Hill just because that, you know,
Speaker 1: they're so evocative, and one that I go back to
Speaker 1: again and again is the moment when Edwin King asks
Speaker 1: Hill to it gives her a challenge. She has to carry,
Speaker 1: you know, and she has to pour a cup for
Speaker 1: the King while carrying this extremely heavy torque armband that
Speaker 1: he has given her, and she finds a very inventive
Speaker 1: way to carry this out, surprising everyone. And it's a
Speaker 1: big moment. And there's other big moments like this, And
Speaker 1: when I'm reading them, all was thinking, God, for a
Speaker 1: child to be there and bluff the king to the
Speaker 1: point that the king is saying, Okay, well, we're going
Speaker 1: to do this thing that you're telling us to do,
Speaker 1: but if you're wrong, I'm going to feed you to
Speaker 1: my dogs. What is it like to write these scenes
Speaker 1: where you're just putting this child into these into these
Speaker 1: positions of great, great peril because I'm always so much
Speaker 1: more nervous than she is.
Speaker 3: Well, that's That's the thing about kids, is that I
Speaker 3: suppose part of me is trying to hild as say,
Speaker 3: a seven year old with the heavy and the talk,
Speaker 3: the armoring, trying to write her the way I would
Speaker 3: like to have been, you know, as a kid. I
Speaker 3: mean I was one of those I was always in fights.
Speaker 3: I like to climb trees, you know, I was. I
Speaker 3: wanted to live a big life. I wanted to do
Speaker 3: amazing things, and to me Hill there is that opportunity
Speaker 3: to do that, and so I didn't have a lot
Speaker 3: of fear as a seven year old, and so I
Speaker 3: give hild the kind of fear and caution I had
Speaker 3: as a seven year ol, which is she kind of
Speaker 3: knows that she's in great danger, but it doesn't freak
Speaker 3: her out. You know, she doesn't have a thundering heart,
Speaker 3: and she doesn't get sweaty. She's not part of her
Speaker 3: Her body doesn't really believe it. Her mind does because
Speaker 3: everyone tells her. But really, deep down, she knows she's immortal,
Speaker 3: like all kids do. We all think.
Speaker 2: So she's she's like that.
Speaker 3: But but then when I write the scene where someone
Speaker 3: threatens her that way, it gives me a shiver. I go,
Speaker 3: I can't I can't wait for someone else to read it,
Speaker 3: you know, I there are there. I love those moments
Speaker 3: in work going. I have playlists and I tend to
Speaker 3: type in rhythm and then something like happens and that
Speaker 3: girl and I always imagine the music swelling. It never does,
Speaker 3: because it's never that way. But yeah, it feels like that.
Speaker 3: It feels like this huge, amazing moment. I love writing.
Speaker 3: It's such a It's the best job I've ever had
Speaker 3: in my life, and I expect to have it till
Speaker 3: I dropped dead, which hopefully won't be for a really
Speaker 3: long time because I'm having too much fun and I
Speaker 3: have too much, too much to write.
Speaker 1: Speaking of can what if anything? Can you tell us
Speaker 1: of mean Wood?
Speaker 3: It's long. It is about thirty percent longer than Hill.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, it's wow wow wow long.
Speaker 3: And it starts almost immediately. Let me see when how
Speaker 3: many maybe four months after the end of Hill, and
Speaker 3: then it goes for four years and talk about endless
Speaker 3: regime change. Yeah wow. So she lends a lot about war.
Speaker 3: She has some very difficult times, but also she has
Speaker 3: these amazing joyous moments, and the book does end with
Speaker 3: a great sense of excitement and discovery and adventure. So
Speaker 3: that's pretty much all I'm going to say.
Speaker 1: We can't wait, We can't wait for it. Thank you
Speaker 1: Nicola for joining us. It's been wonderful to talk to you.
Speaker 3: It's been my pleasure. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much to Nicola Griffith for coming on the
Speaker 1: show up next nerd Out. In Today's nerd Out, where
Speaker 1: you tell us what you love and why, Dave aka
Speaker 1: mister Fire to his students, pitches us on the Illuminatus trilogy.
Speaker 4: Hello Nerds, I'm coming to you today to talk about
Speaker 4: one of my favorite forms of nerdery, which is books,
Speaker 4: specifically the Illuminatus trilogy, written by Robert Anton Wilson and
Speaker 4: Robert Shay. Wilson and Shay were editors for Playboy. Specifically,
Speaker 4: they were dealing with letters to the magazine. Apparently some
Speaker 4: people really were reading it for the articles, and many
Speaker 4: of the letters that they received were about conspiracy theories.
Speaker 4: And the two of these guys decided between them that
Speaker 4: they were going to ask the question not which of
Speaker 4: these conspiracy theories are true, but rather what if all
Speaker 4: of them are true? And these books, this trilogy is
Speaker 4: conceived as a sort of journey through what if every
Speaker 4: single one of these conspiracies were true? What if not
Speaker 4: only someone other than who we think killed John F. Kennedy,
Speaker 4: What if a bunch of people killed John F. Kennedy altogether?
Speaker 4: What if John Dillinger is still alive? What if Adam
Speaker 4: Weishaupt killed George Washington and replaced him in order to
Speaker 4: bring the Bavarian Illuminati into power in the United States
Speaker 4: and either spread or stop the spread of cannabis being
Speaker 4: grown by George Washingrington and Thomas Jefferson. What if the
Speaker 4: MC five were spreading secrets with their song Kick Out
Speaker 4: the Jams. All of these things, all of these conspiracy
Speaker 4: theories are treated as completely real in these novels. The
Speaker 4: three books that make up the Illuminatus trilogy, The Eye
Speaker 4: in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan all kind
Speaker 4: of work together, spinning this wild, drug fueled narrative building
Speaker 4: towards a gigantic music festival that has the names of
Speaker 4: hundreds of made up bands, some of which are now
Speaker 4: real bands. They all together craft a story of talking
Speaker 4: dolphins and an Atlantis that's real, built with Lovecraftian monsters.
Speaker 4: Novels from Pension and Vonnegut are referenced. This is the
Speaker 4: kind of stuff that will blow your mind and probably
Speaker 4: heard it more than just a little. These books are
Speaker 4: extremely important to some of our favorite writers and TV writers.
Speaker 4: Damon Lindelof, You'll see elements of this in Lost in Fringe.
Speaker 4: You see this from Chris Carter in The X Files.
Speaker 4: Alan Moore has called Robert Anton Wilson an inspiration. We
Speaker 4: see this also from people like Grant Morrison, and now
Speaker 4: with the rise of what may be the Illuminati in
Speaker 4: our new doctor Strange trailer. We know that this may
Speaker 4: be the origin of that term coming back into the
Speaker 4: narrative once again. So check out these books. They're great.
Speaker 4: You will absolutely love them.
Speaker 1: Thanks Dave for submitting. If you want to be featured,
Speaker 1: send your nerd out pitch to x Ray at cricket
Speaker 1: dot com instructions or in the show notes. Big thank
Speaker 1: you to Dave for his nerd out and of course
Speaker 1: Nikola Griffith for joining us, and of course for the
Speaker 1: great Rosie Knight for co hosting this podcast today. It's
Speaker 1: been a wonderful day of discussions that I hope are
Speaker 1: meaningful to some people. Rosie, it is plug time. What
Speaker 1: are we plug in?
Speaker 2: It's me. You can find me.
Speaker 5: I'm back after two seconds. You can find me Rosie
Speaker 5: marks on Instagram. I recently visited a very incredible community
Speaker 5: cinema called Vidiots that's being built in in La I've
Speaker 5: got a little fundraiser running through my Instagram, so feel
Speaker 5: free to go there and learn a.
Speaker 2: Little bit more. I'll have a big feature coming up
Speaker 2: about them at Nerdict. It's a really incredible space that's
Speaker 2: going to be a video store where you can actually
Speaker 2: rent DVDs and blu rays, as well as a community
Speaker 2: cinema that will have a space for local people to
Speaker 2: screen films, to speak to talk to know each other,
Speaker 2: and it will have a huge, beautiful screen to screen movies.
Speaker 2: Vidiots is continuing like this unbelievable legacy of female owned
Speaker 2: female helm video store in Santa Monica that's been there
Speaker 2: since the eighties, So just generally good stuff. So go
Speaker 2: check out Vidiots. Support them. They're in the support mode
Speaker 2: at the moment because they're still building the new location.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's that's my big pluck it. It was
Speaker 2: very cool.
Speaker 1: I'm really excited for videots, and it seems like it's
Speaker 1: such a really wonderful project to get behind and that
Speaker 1: already has like a lot of really wonderful people supporting it.
Speaker 1: That's a cool one. Check out our videos on the
Speaker 1: Uncultured YouTube channel. Catch the next episode April twenty second,
Speaker 1: when we'll be revisiting WandaVision and anticipation. This is gonna
Speaker 1: be really fun. I'm excited to rewatch WandaVision and I'm
Speaker 1: excited to talk about it because the Multiverse of Madness
Speaker 1: is coming, folks. Doctor Stranger in the multiverseit of Madness,
Speaker 1: which I think we both expect to see a lot
Speaker 1: of the repercussions of the events of WandaVision in that movie.
Speaker 1: Be sure to send out your nerd out submissions to
Speaker 1: x raycrookd dot com instructures during the show notes and
Speaker 1: don't forget we love the five star ratings, folks. We
Speaker 1: love them, We absolutely love them. We thrive on them.
Speaker 1: Please send us the five star ratings. If you're thinking
Speaker 1: about like a four, don't even think about it. Give
Speaker 1: us a five. We need the five.
Speaker 2: Baby.
Speaker 1: X ray Vision is a Crooked Media production. The show
Speaker 1: is produced by Chris Lord and rub In. The show
Speaker 1: is executive produced by myself and Sandys Rhard are editing
Speaker 1: in sound design, news by Vascilla's Fatopoulos, Dellan Villanueva and
Speaker 1: Matta Group provide video production support, and Alex Rella for
Speaker 1: handle social media. Thank you Brian Vasquez for theme music.
Speaker 2: Bye