44 Contained vrs. resolved stories with Simon Roy

Posted on February 17, 2014 by dan

LISTEN to the podcast

It’s Simon Roy again, telling us about his new project with Ed Brisson, the Field, out now!

The Field is a story shrouded in mystery, but I do have it from a reliable authority that it also has bikers

Layouts (or “visual script” if you’re me)

Also Star Trek in Hell

Take a premise that you like and are comfortable with and try and make it not that.

Stories that are contained but not overly resolved

The Nausicaa manga (do I mention this is EVERY podcast I do?)

Simon Roy vows to “replace” Hayao Miyazaki

And then we just sort of start talking about cannibalism. Like you do.

Magical cannibalism FTW!

The One

The Chrestomanci Universe 

Marvin Harris’s Cannibals and Kings

Jared Diamond on cannibalism

Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade

Kuru (the cannibal prion disease)

Kuru-resistance

“Human…cannibalism…adaptation” types Simon into Google

 

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  • Peter Queckenstedt

    Peter Watts does an admirable job of coming up with a plausible explanation for vampires in his sci fi novel ‘Blindsight’. He posits them as an extinct subspecies of human with psychopathic and cannibalistic traits that died out as the rest of humanity developed inherent defenses against them. Similar to how Neanderthal DNA is stored within out genome, the future world Watts depicts has found this ‘vampire’ code within human DNA. The species is resurrected for its natural savant skillsets and provided with drug therapies to suppress its less desirable traits (the nasty grand mal seizures induced by seeing right angles being a good example of how Watts explains away vampire lore believably).

    • dan

      An excellent example from an excellent book! In fact sociopathology does display the signs of frequency-dependent selection (http://alglenn1.people.ua.edu/uploads/1/4/1/8/14182546/glenn_avb_2011.pdf). And I believe Watts wrote it before we knew for certain that we had interbred with other hominins, so good for him for predicting that. I don’t think anyone has yet found a correlation between sociopathy and prionic resistance, but it’s only a matter of time 🙂

      Also, have you seen the hilarious powerpoint presentation Watts made about vampires? http://alglenn1.people.ua.edu/uploads/1/4/1/8/14182546/glenn_avb_2011.pdf

    • bensendaniel

      I am sure I responded to this, but something seems to be wrong with Disqus. If this is the first response you’ve seen, I’m sorry for the 2-month delay. 🙁

      I very much enjoyed the vampires in Blindsight (see his hilarious powerpoint presentation on the subject: http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm). I hope he does more with the idea.

      • Peter Queckenstedt

        The sequel to Blindsight is coming out soon! It’s called Echopraxia.

        I really enjoy how consistent your articles and podcasts are. Thanks for posting!