Click here to play this episode. Gweek is Boing Boing’s podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff.
Joshua Glenn, a Boston-based writer, publisher, and semiotician. He is co-author of Significant Objects, published by Fantagraphics this month, and Unbored, the kids’ field guide to serious fun coming from Bloomsbury this fall. He edits the website HiLobrow, which as HiLoBooks is now publishing classics — by Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others — from what he calls science fiction’s Radium Age.
In this episode:
Significant Objects. A book that “collects the results of a literary experiment in which a best-selling or popular author wrote a short fictional prose story about an object on eBay, raising its value; the profit from the object’s sale then went to charity.”
Joshua Glenn’s science fiction picks for kids. “Science fiction frees our imagination from an enchantment, cast upon it by everyday life, which would encourage us to believe that the way things are is natural, permanent, and inevitable. Much of the media to which kids are exposed blunts their critical reasoning skills; but science fiction gives those skills a good workout. Matthew Looney’s Invasion of the Earth.” Heinlein’s Red Planet (1949), Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams’s Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine (1958), John Christopher’s Tripods Trilogy (1967-68), Jack Kirby’s Kamandi (1972-78), Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978), Monica Hughes’ Isis Trilogy (1980-82).
Creepy Presents Richard Corben. “Horror comics visionary and coloring pioneer Richard Corben has been a voice of creativity and change for over four decades. For the first time ever, Corben’s legendary Creepy and Eerie short stories and cover illustrations are being collected into one deluxe hardcover.”
Dal Tokyo. Gary Panter began imagining Dal Tokyo, a future Mars that is terraformed by Texan and Japanese workers, as far back as 1972.
