Ned Beauman is the author of 'Venomous Lumpsucker', a biting satire which examines the environmental and social consequences of capitalism run amok, and the dangerous absurdities that can result from using free-market mechanisms to solve the environmental problems we face today. We talk about the political and economic choices and mechanisms that determine which species are preserved and which species go extinct - hence 'necropolitics'. We talk about calibrating our economic and environmental values, about the importance of pragmatism and efficacy, about taking responsibility or fooling our selves and passing the buck to future generations. We also talk about what’s working, what’s going better than expected and having hope for the future.

Ned Beauman's Website

Venomous Lumpsucker : Beauman, Ned: Amazon.ca: Books

Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman | Goodreads

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Marty speaks with biochemist and astrobiologist William Bains on the topic of Dark Ecology, as a final chapter to our 4 previous episodes on this topic with Chris Beckett (Ep 56), Julius Csotonyi (Ep 57-58) and Adrian Tchaikovsky (Ep 59). Dr. Bains is the author of “The Cosmic Zoo: Complex Life on Many Worlds”, and has earned degrees from the universities of Oxford, Warwick and Stanford, and has held positions at the University of Bath, MIT, Imperial College London, and in addition to founding a number of biotech start-up companies is now a senior research fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University in the UK. William is exactly the kind of person we love to speak with on this show as his expertise really expands and deepens some of ideas we’ve been talking about in contemporary science fiction. Some of his recent papers carry titles like "Prospects for detecting signs of life on exoplanets in the JWST era" and "Astrobiological implications of the stability and reactivity of peptide nucleic acid (PNA) in concentrated sulfuric acid". So that’s the kind of thing we discuss in the following conversation. In addition to expanding on the details of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s worldbuilding in Shroud, we talk about the WOW signal in astronomy, the incoming 3I/ATLAS extrasolar object, and new experiments in high throughput chemistry and biochemistry.

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Marty speaks to Nicholas Keating Casborro about the hard-scrabble, dystopian world portrayed in his book 'Vitalerium: Descent into the Void'. This is a far future space opera where faster than light travel is made possible by the exotic substance that serves as the title of the book, where humans have spread across multiple planets, where the politics are cynical, street life is vicious, human life disposable, and corruption endemic. This episode is lighter on the science and heavier on the fiction; we discuss some of the technology essential to this world, but our focus is on the world-building, politics, religion and characters Nick has created in the Vitalerium universe.

https://atmospherepress.com/books/vitalerium-descent-into-the-void-by-nicholas-keating-casbarro/

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