Marooned! On Mars With Matt And Hilary

Shout out to our great listeners, especially when they email us, and when they email us, their emails are always thoughtful and stimulating, and Hilary almost always responds to them and Matt almost always reads them but doesn’t respond to them because he is, in fact, shy, but also, more importantly, lazy, other than the whole “producing and editing the show” thing. We kick this episode off with a convo about despair and hope, but the upshot is the gift of reading these novels in community with each other and our amazing listeners (you, the reader of this). “War of the Asuras” is a phantasmagoric chapter about The Long War—basically, what if World War I—trench warfare, mustard gas, etc.—was fought in Asia instead of Europe, and what if it (almost) never ended? The depiction of the war collapses the distinction between the bardo and reality, between metaphor and realism, and exposes the insanity at the heart of modern warfare. Matt and Hilary ponder over the nature of the space the characters find themselves i