Escape Artists
Escape Pod => Episode Comments => Topic started by: Russell Nash on July 03, 2009, 06:17:43 AM
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EP200: All You Zombies (http://escapepod.org/2009/07/02/ep-200-all-you-zombies/)
By Robert A. Heinlein.
Read by Steve Eley.
I was polishing a brandy snifter when the Unmarried Mother came in. I noted the time—10:17 P. M. zone five, or eastern time, November 7th, 1970. Temporal agents always notice time and date; we must.
The Unmarried Mother was a man twenty–five years old, no taller than I am, childish features and a touchy temper. I didn’t like his looks—I never had—but he was a lad I was here to recruit, he was my boy. I gave him my best barkeep’s smile.
Maybe I’m too critical. He wasn’t swish; his nickname came from what he always said when some nosy type asked him his line: “I’m an unmarried mother.” If he felt less than murderous he would add: “at four cents a word. I write confession stories.”
If he felt nasty, he would wait for somebody to make something of it. He had a lethal style of infighting, like a female cop—reason I wanted him. Not the only one.
He had a load on, and his face showed that he despised people more than usual. Silently I poured a double shot of Old Underwear and left the bottle. He drank it, poured another.
(http://escapepod.org/wp-images/podcast-mini4.gif)
Listen to this week’s Escape Pod! (http://media.rawvoice.com/escapepod/media.libsyn.com/media/escapepod/EP200_AllYouZombies.mp3)
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congratulations on four years of great fiction. it's a fun ride and i'm always curious to see what's next.
fantastic choice for episode two hundred, it's one of a few stories that is absolutely, undeniably a scifi plot. i can't imagine it translated into any other genre. (http://forum.escapeartists.net/index.php?topic=1069.msg30761#msg30761)
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congratulations on four years of great fiction. it's been a fun ride and i'm still always curious to see what comes next.
fantastic choice for episode two hundred, it's one of a few stories that absolutely, undeniably have a scifi plot. i can't imagine it translated into another genre. (http://forum.escapeartists.net/index.php?topic=1069.msg30761#msg30761)
A Battle of Wits. I accept. I've never read the story. I'll give it a shot after I listen to the episode.
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Oooh.
I've never read any Heinlein. But this certainly qualifies as one of the best story titles I've ever seen.
Can't wait to give it a listen.
As an aside, I'm totally gonna start a band called All You Zombies.
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I've never read any Heinlein.
Ack! This rates up there with me saying I didn't like Firefly! Sacrilege!
;)
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I've never read any Heinlein.
Ack! This rates up there with me saying I didn't like Firefly! Sacrilege!
;)
Ah but my situation is correctable ;)
(don't stab me)
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Haven't listened yet, but I already have the Hooters song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxlCY4DDrPY) stuck in my head. I wonder if this was the inspiration.
Just checked Wikipedia. Seems one of the band had read the story as a kid, but beyond the title there's no connection.
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I've never read any Heinlein.
Ack! This rates up there with me saying I didn't like Firefly! Sacrilege!
;)
Ah but my situation is correctable ;)
(don't stab me)
I'm giving Freakishly Huge Arms Dude the day off.
::Whacks Talia repeatedly with the chair::
Waiting for the download to finish now. I had a feeling that EP 200 was a Heinlein story. When there was mention of a battle with the estate, he was the first author to pop in my head.
Download, damn you!
Steve's reading + Heinlein's writing = a match made in Mars.
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Outstanding reading! I was concerned that it might not translate well into an audio format. I love this story, and am ecstatic that it will be introduced to the younger members.
I liked the outro. I have introduced my step son to some of the stories I enjoyed as a teen. Hearing him talk about the stuff is one of the few positives in our relationship.
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I love Heinlein -- I prefer his books to his shorts, though -- and this story was complete Heinlein in that it starts out relatively small/simple and blooms into a MUCH larger story. The common aspect of betting for something that runs through a lot of Heinlein fiction that I've read was represented here, though I think that if this was someone's first or second foray into Heinlein s/he might not understand the concept.
Personally I think Heinlein must be rolling over in his grave so frequently these days that he could power an artificial gravity system. You can tell, reading his books, where he readjusts his thinking as to what the future's going to be like every few years or so. Eventually, as with The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, I think he gave up and just slammed all his futures together because he knew that none of them would come true no matter how much he wished for it. I would love to see just about any Heinlein future come to fruition because, as dark as some of the things were in his books, they all had this positive feel to them, like if the main character could just do something, go somewhere, complete a task, that everything would work out better. You see it in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Friday, Time Enough For Love, Job: A Comedy of Justice, and the like. If I wanted any human to be immortal just so he could keep producing great stories, I would want that human to be Heinlein.
So, in short: I liked the story, though not as much as his books.
Not a huge fan of Steve's "big dude" voice, but that's not such a big deal.
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Wow, I've never heard Vicki so flustered.
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bravo, Steve.
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That's what get for not really paying attention to dates in stories. This one snuck up behind me, ripped out my brain, and showed it to me.
Excellent number 200. Who do we get for number 300, Clarke?
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This one snuck up behind me, ripped out my brain, and showed it to me.
is that a concession in the battle of wits you declared? =P
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I've never read any Heinlein.
Ack! This rates up there with me saying I didn't like Firefly! Sacrilege!
;)
Ah but my situation is correctable ;)
(don't stab me)
;D
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Congratulations on the 200th episode!!
All You Zombies: So typically Heinleinian. A combination of brilliance and sexism. So in the future there’s a Whore Corps in Space. I bet it was someone like Heinlein who decided there should be “comfort women.”
I hate Heinlein and enjoy him. Sometimes. He’s one of the first science fiction writers I ever read and certainly the first one whose name I learned because he was the first writer whose politics offended me even when I was so young I had no politics. Interesting story. Except for the part where he made my flesh crawl. Sometimes we don’t treat ourselves as well as we should. We eat the wrong things, drink the wrong things, take the wrong things. But I don’t think many people, given the chance, would seduce and abandon themselves, leaving themselves to growing up in an orphanage, etc. Except in a Heinlein story.
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Unwed Mother (UM) did not know he was seducing herself.
The Recruiter knew what had transpired. This story is more about paradox. He was accepted into the Corps because he had always been accepted into the Corps.
The rank issue was nicely handled. The Sergeant was in a unique position of outranking and being outranked by the same person at the same time.
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It's stories like this that remind me why I chose the path of the geeky SF-loving kid in the corner rather than the normal person I could have become. Truly fantastic, can't reccommend it highly enough and worth a wait. Thank you, and kudos.
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This one snuck up behind me, ripped out my brain, and showed it to me.
is that a concession in the battle of wits you declared? =P
Weekends are a little busy for me so I'll work on it on Monday. In your original challenge you said this story couldn't be forced into a Fantasy setting, but I think it would probably work fine there. The technology here is basically magic.
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OK, I finally had a listen and msut admit, interesting as it was, I don't get the "zombies" part.
:/
I mean I guess its a reference to his/her past selves.. I just don't get it. Why would he think of them as zombies? Or it some way of thinking of them as not real people, since he's him, and they aren't, or something.
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First, let me say, this was a really, really great story. I am not the biggest fan of Heinlein in the world - I find him a bit much at times - but he sure knew how to mix complex ideas with an entertaining prose.
I could have done without the casual sexism, but it was very clearly a product of the society at the time it was written. I also think the "I am my own grandpa" jukebox incident was a bit silly, as it basically tipped the hand too early. But overall, a brilliant story, well executed.
OK, I finally had a listen and msut admit, interesting as it was, I don't get the "zombies" part.
:/
I mean I guess its a reference to his/her past selves.. I just don't get it. Why would he think of them as zombies? Or it some way of thinking of them as not real people, since he's him, and they aren't, or something.
It's a reference to everyone else in the world, that isn't him. I think the point is this - he is a closed loop, being his own father and mother (and, once the story is done, also the person who arranged for them to meet). He knows exactly where he came from, and who he is. This gives him a stronger sense of identity than most people have. He thinks of other people as zombies, because he can't be sure that they exist. This is the usual solipsistic view that many people experience sooner or later in their lives, except that most of us also know that we were brought into this world by other people, and therefore we at least have grounds to believe that other people exist. But the flip side of the narrator being his own parents is that he knows for a fact that his existence doesn't depend on anyone elses, and therefore, I think, he has a stronger solipsistic streak than most.
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I love this story; I always have.
I remember reading it, and then realised Red Dwarf referenced this story heavily.
As for the zombie thing; I took that was due to everyone else around him being interchangable. He could bump into someone, and stop whole people from existing, and events happening; to everyone just becomes a rotating nothing mass of people. He is immune to that. So he is a constant if you will; that if he wanted he could have other events intersect. Everything else is meaningless for him.
Anyway.
Awesome.
Thank you.
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In your original challenge you said this story couldn't be forced into a Fantasy setting, but I think it would probably work fine there.
you're gonna want to reread that (http://forum.escapeartists.net/index.php?topic=1069.msg30497#msg30497).
Why would he think of them as zombies?
other people have made strong interpretations but i think it goes even further. the main character isn't strictly human (according to some definitions of 'species'). he is a spontaneously occurring entity that just happens to take on the appearance of the local species. he has no human ancestors or relatives, his dna & characteristics weren't drawn from our gene pool. he is, in a way, separate from our universe entirely since he isn't the result of a causal chain of events. he isn't just a result of a paradox, he is a paradox.
this kind of time travel story is much more interesting than the alternate timeline version of time travel that's become the default.
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In your original challenge you said this story couldn't be forced into a Fantasy setting, but I think it would probably work fine there.
you're gonna want to reread that (http://forum.escapeartists.net/index.php?topic=1069.msg30497#msg30497).
you might be able to cram it into a fantasy setting with spells & magic items but it would be really, really forced.
Fine really, really forced. It was a year ago. Cut me some slack.
This story would actually be "more realistic" as a fantasy piece. We always complain about time paradoxes, and this story was a nesting of time paradoxes inside of time paradoxes.
I give. I don't think I can turn this into a non-Speculative Fiction story. This story is also in no way a realistic SF story.
I guess I need to change my original challenge to be that I can change any SF story with a realistic timeline into a non-SF story.
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Meh. I feel the same way as i did about Nightfall in episode 100, huge hype and a big letdown, as a normal Escape Pod episode i would have thought it was ok, for a special episode like this that was long awaited, it didnt hold up
But to be fair i think Legends in all genres are usually overrated and it is the same with Science Fiction, mediocre to bad stories get high praise because the author is considered a legend, and the author is usually considered a legend because he/she was one of the first well known to write in the genre, when this story came out fifty years ago it might have been special, but not today.
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Fine really, really forced. It was a year ago. Cut me some slack.
awwww, schnookums. big man when he's throwing around an open challenge but doesn't even read the stories he was challenged with and when it's brought up again he can't be bothered to refresh himself.
We always complain about time paradoxes, and this story was a nesting of time paradoxes inside of time paradoxes.
we do? the point of this story is to showcase a paradox, display the strange things that may happen if time travel was actually possible. this is a lot different than an author using the standard alternate-timeline version in a story but not noticing the paradoxes their story generates.
I give. I don't think I can turn this into a non-Speculative Fiction story. This story is also in no way a realistic SF story.
realistic sf? really?
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I give. I don't think I can turn this into a non-Speculative Fiction story. This story is also in no way a realistic SF story.
realistic sf? really?
(Longer argument shortened, because I didn't want to introduce to many variables into the conversation.)
Really, he's his own father and mother.
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I had encountered this story before (though I didn't realise it was a Heinlein story, it was more of a diagram showing how the different timelines and 'people' intersected) so I admit I knew where it was going from early-ish on.
But it didn't have any paradoxes.
For instance, a paradox would have been if, on going back in time, (s)he had killed his original Dad and had then seduced himself/mother and THEN become his Dad through changing the timeline impossibly.
Given the possibility of timetravel and in effect a fully functional woman/man, the events in the story could indeed have happened. And this is the point of the narrator being the focus of all these different events that couldn't have happened any other way .
I loved the idea of other people, who merely have parents and, y'know, live and have no effect on their past at all, would seem so much less as people.
(*whisper* If someone had said 'Heinlein' for episode 200, I'd have been thinking 'Stranger in a Strange Land' so it's probably just as well I didn't have any clues.)
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I had encountered this story before (though I didn't realise it was a Heinlein story, it was more of a diagram showing how the different timelines and 'people' intersected) so I admit I knew where it was going from early-ish on.
But it didn't have any paradoxes.
Sure it did. The whole baseline of the story is a paradox - just not the "grandfather paradox". You seem to be assuming that such a t, but that's far from true.
Note that whether or not something is a paradox depends on your assumptions. The grandfather paradox - X goes back in time and prevents his own birth - is only a paradox if you assume a non-branching timeline.
Similarly, depending on your assumptions about the world, this story leads to several paradoxes. The most basic one being the ontological paradox - the closed loop nature of the protagonist. Specifically, it contradicts the second law of thermodynamics (see the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_paradox for any explanation).
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The grandfather paradox - X goes back in time and prevents his own birth - is only a paradox if you assume a non-branching timeline.
Thanks, that's not what I am meaning.
Given the premise, it would be possible for someone, who was a time-traveller, to cause their own events.
In this case, where someone can be a woman and then a man (I was more willing to believe in time-travel that that part, tbh), they can cause events as a woman and a man.
The issue of what 'causes' something could be seen to be a paradox only if you are determined that things have to have causes which happen before the events and, for instance, you can't have closed loops and there must be an 'outside' influence.
With the introduction of time-travel, that isn't a hurdle anymore.
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Wow. I was really excited when I saw the title for ep 200. I've read the story before, and I remembered it being really amazing. But honestly, on the revisit I was surprised to find how forced and contrived it felt, not even beginning to mention the uncomfortable societal undertones. Not the first time that happened with Heinlein; maybe it's just because I read so much RAH in my teens, but most of his stories live in my memory through the eyes of my fifteen-year-old self, and that's a hard thing to live up to.
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The grandfather paradox - X goes back in time and prevents his own birth - is only a paradox if you assume a non-branching timeline.
Thanks, that's not what I am meaning.
Given the premise, it would be possible for someone, who was a time-traveller, to cause their own events.
In this case, where someone can be a woman and then a man (I was more willing to believe in time-travel that that part, tbh), they can cause events as a woman and a man.
The issue of what 'causes' something could be seen to be a paradox only if you are determined that things have to have causes which happen before the events and, for instance, you can't have closed loops and there must be an 'outside' influence.
With the introduction of time-travel, that isn't a hurdle anymore.
The temporal flipping of cause and event isn't the relevant paradox. That could happen if tomorrow I invent a time machine, buy a newspaper, look at the lottery numbers for last week's ticket, go back in time and buy the ticket, come back to the present, and cash the ticket. No pardox, even though the cause (learning the numbers) happens after the outcome (buying the ticket).
To see the paradox, imagine the following story - a time travelling self-aware robot goes back from the year 2011 to July 10th, 2009, where it builds itself, then self-destructs. In the year 2012, an asteroid crashes into the Earth, killing all humans. The time travelling robot never taught anyone the time-travel technology, and humanity didn't survive long enough to invent it.
The question is - where did the time-travelling technology come from? The robot knew it, so it built it into itself. But no-one else knew it, no-one invented it. It only existed as part of a closed loop. For that matter, the same is true of self-aware AI technology in this story. Humanity couldn't have invented it.
Now, note that this story could have happened at any time and any place. A time-travelling robot came into existence on the moon in the year 1132, and existed there until 1212, at which point it went back in time. It didn't even have to build itself, it just shows up and waits 80 years to travel back. It interacts with nothing, and affects nothing. It doesn't even move, and it hovers above the surface of the moon using anti-gravity technology, so it doesn't even displace moon dust. Where did it come from? Why was there a robot in the middle ages?
This is a paradox; it's not that the order of cause and effect is reversed that is the problem. The problem is that the cause and the effect are one and the same. Which is a basic problem in what we think of causality.
This made me realize, by the way, that the story is entirely biologically plausible. Humans can be self-impregnating hermaphrodites, but then, the hero of the story isn't really human. He's a being that was created ex-nihilo, and there's no reason to think that he would share anything of human genetics. It's actually the fact that he looks and acts human that's totally implausible. Of all the things that could just randomly appear out of nothing in the universe, I would think it would be quite unlikely that a human would be one of them. And, if a human was randomly created in this vast universe, it would be an staggeringly massive coincidence if he/she happened to appear on Earth, where all the other humans are.
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...you can't have closed loops and there must be an 'outside' influence.
it's not not really relevant to anyone's point but i want to point out that 'closed loop' is a misnomer for this time traveler.
in order to be a closed loop there has to be a 'where did you come from? where did you go?' element to it. eg, one day you find a manual that explains how to build a time machine and when when you finish building the machine you send the manual back so you can find it. the manual doesn't exist before or after the loop.
Jane has the 'where did you come from?' but still exists after going back to create himself.
But it didn't have any paradoxes.
i think i see where you're coming from. the traditional time paradox can be expressed as: α implies notβ, but notβ implies notα. eg: if i was born then i kill my grandfather but if my grandfather was killed then i can't be born.
certainly nothing in this plot takes that form.
what we have instead is the implication that if there are circumstances that allow something to exist, it can exist. this already qualifies for some broader definitions of paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox) but at a minimum it calls to question why we don't become swamped under the weight of spontaneously created items.
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This made me realize, by the way, that the story is entirely biologically plausible. Humans can be self-impregnating hermaphrodites, but then, the hero of the story isn't really human. He's a being that was created ex-nihilo, and there's no reason to think that he would share anything of human genetics.
i'm never sure how to react when people say they came up with an idea that i've just mentioned in a thread. it happens to me pretty consistently. understandable when it's well back in an old thread but it usually isn't.
i like to think that my ideas are so grand that it takes a little while for it to sink in. =) yeah... gotta be it.
Hmm... Good question, actually - I did read your earlier comment, several hours before I posted the above. I certainly wasn't conciously thinking of it when I posted, but it could well have been that your post put that thought somewhere in my head and I was reminded of it, rather than came up with it on my own.
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This story explains how the Universe could have been created.
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Yay! (that is all)
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Not a big Heinlein guy but I love time travel stories and really liked Ep 200. Had to listen twice to catch everything. Another keeper. Thanks EP!
The outro really hit home also. My wife and I have introduced our kids to good sci-fi and my wife (a science teacher) has got some of her students going on some of the classics and tries to work ideas in to her lesson plans. Great message Steve!
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I didn't say 'flipping' of cause and effect but rather the order of those events can be different if we have time travel.
I agree with scrapping the 'closed loop' label since it's not as if any (version) of the main character suddenly just appeared like *bing* there is suddenly an abandoned baby or barman or hermaphrodite. In each of the times the character lives he/she is part of the world and is influenced by it.
And again, it's not a paradox for something to be its own influence (if we have time travel).
You might as well say the universe is a paradox, in the absence of an outside cause.
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Great episode ... interesting how many people are not Heilein fans (myself included).
I had already read it, so I caught some funny foreshadowing...
"A guy came into the bar. About my hieght."
"He looks like anyone. Like you or me." (IIRC)
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Although I have not read a Heinlein in some time, this story came as a powerful reminder of why I loved and read so much of his stuff in my early years discovering Science fiction stories. What a phenomenal peice of work.
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That's what get for not really paying attention to dates in stories. This one snuck up behind me, ripped out my brain, and showed it to me.
Excellent number 200. Who do we get for number 300, Clarke?
Well, they are the holy trinity-
Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke.
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That's what get for not really paying attention to dates in stories. This one snuck up behind me, ripped out my brain, and showed it to me.
Excellent number 200. Who do we get for number 300, Clarke?
Well, they are the holy trinity-
Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke.
Must. Have. Bradbury!!!
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I thoroughly enjoyed this. I'd never heard it before. Steve's narration absolutely crackled with excitement while he read this. Great job.
And I'm very glad a rock band stole the title of this story ;D It really is a great title.
EDIT: Ack! Guess it's just a song title, not a band name. SHAME!
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I've heard of this story, but this is the first time I've read/heard it. Interesting story, although I'm curious: why does he call everyone not from his own closed loop a zombie?
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Yargling, go back a page or two, I asked the same question and got a few different answers :)
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Yargling, go back a page or two, I asked the same question and got a few different answers :)
Ahhh, found it - nice explaination, heh.
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Loved this story! I always like time-travel stories, the more convoluted, the better.
Only thing I didn't quite understand, though, was how Jane-as-man got to impregnate Jane-as-woman. Young, female Jane was innocent in this, since she didn't know she'd ever turn out to be a man, but male Jane knew he'd been a woman, remembered - I hope - what he looked like as a woman, since apparently it'd caused her so much grief, so he'd recognise himself wooing himself, right? And it's not like they had a one-night-stand. He had nearly a whole month to come to the right conclusion and not be shocked to be 'that man' when the barman reappeared. And any newspaper could confirm the time-travel.
So, what gives?
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Loved this story! I always like time-travel stories, the more convoluted, the better.
Only thing I didn't quite understand, though, was how Jane-as-man got to impregnate Jane-as-woman. Young, female Jane was innocent in this, since she didn't know she'd ever turn out to be a man, but male Jane knew he'd been a woman, remembered - I hope - what he looked like as a woman, since apparently it'd caused her so much grief, so he'd recognise himself wooing himself, right? And it's not like they had a one-night-stand. He had nearly a whole month to come to the right conclusion and not be shocked to be 'that man' when the barman reappeared. And any newspaper could confirm the time-travel.
So, what gives?
IDK if im understanding your problem right but I think your asking why he didn't know he was wooing his female self. The thing is that he did, in one sentence he even says its unsettling to find out you can't help but woo yourself. So the premise there is that, in fact you can't help it. You have very valid points but that was the idea i believe.
Anyways, I also disliked the whore corps. As I've expressed in previous stories I like the happen-able element to a story. This just seems like it would never happen. Oh and i think we all have our own trinities even if they do share an author or two... or three.
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IDK if im understanding your problem right but I think your asking why he didn't know he was wooing his female self. The thing is that he did, in one sentence he even says its unsettling to find out you can't help but woo yourself. So the premise there is that, in fact you can't help it. You have very valid points but that was the idea i believe.
Ah, I looked up the written text and I can see where I may have gotten the wrong impression. Jane-man is badly shaken by what the barman says, and I thought it was because he only just realised what had been going on, while it's possible he only just realised that he was his own kid and also the younger version of the barman, while the whole 'I'm having a relationship with myself!' issue was already settled. :)
That just makes him a lousy guy, though. I don't believe in 'you can't help yourself' for the long term, and he might've just used a condom to save herself the trouble - unless he decided he LIKED how his life turned out and intentionally impregnated his younger self so she'd suffer the things that made him him. Or maybe was scared of how ELSE things would turn out if he changed something? Aaahh, short stories and their low word-count!
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I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away.
What did this part mean?
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I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away.
What did this part mean?
I've had many different answers to this over the years. My favorite:
We're just a figment of nis imagination. If ne stops concentrating, we cease to exist. This is backed up by the I know I'm real but what about the rest of you zombies line.
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Another question: Am I the only one here who had heard I'm my own Grandpa before this episode?
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Another question: Am I the only one here who had heard I'm my own Grandpa before this episode?
No.
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Only thing I didn't quite understand, though, was how Jane-as-man got to impregnate Jane-as-woman. Young, female Jane was innocent in this, since she didn't know she'd ever turn out to be a man, but male Jane knew he'd been a woman, remembered - I hope - what he looked like as a woman, since apparently it'd caused her so much grief, so he'd recognise himself wooing himself, right? And it's not like they had a one-night-stand. He had nearly a whole month to come to the right conclusion and not be shocked to be 'that man' when the barman reappeared. And any newspaper could confirm the time-travel.
So, what gives?
I don't think I would seduce myself and set up the cycle of unhappiness but if he doesn't seduce himself then he'll never be born. So maybe that was why he did it. He had to choose between a life of suffering and no life at all. He chose life.
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Only thing I didn't quite understand, though, was how Jane-as-man got to impregnate Jane-as-woman. Young, female Jane was innocent in this, since she didn't know she'd ever turn out to be a man, but male Jane knew he'd been a woman, remembered - I hope - what he looked like as a woman, since apparently it'd caused her so much grief, so he'd recognise himself wooing himself, right? And it's not like they had a one-night-stand. He had nearly a whole month to come to the right conclusion and not be shocked to be 'that man' when the barman reappeared. And any newspaper could confirm the time-travel.
So, what gives?
I don't think I would seduce myself and set up the cycle of unhappiness but if he doesn't seduce himself then he'll never be born. So maybe that was why he did it. He had to choose between a life of suffering and no life at all. He chose life.
While that's true.. how did it all start? The circle loops...
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I don't believe that he knew all the details when he went back and seduced herself.
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Am I the only one here who had heard I'm my own Grandpa before this episode?
http://www.youtube.com/v/ZdFPDjtX2Q4
for those who haven't
I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away.
What did this part mean?
as mentioned, the generally accepted reading is one of solipsism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism).
i'm not a fan of that philosophy tho, i prefer to believe that the hangover remedy made him knurd (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_Discworld_concepts#Knurd) and see that he is the only true agent of free will. all of us are subject to the cause-effect determinism that created us (zombies) but he exists simply because he created himself.
but that reading really isn't supported by the text or timeperiod it was written in.
And again, it's not a paradox for something to be its own influence (if we have time travel).
You might as well say the universe is a paradox, in the absence of an outside cause.
perhapse you see the paradox that if time traveling self-replicating entities can spontaneously create themselves then every one of those entities should exist? giant amoeba cyborgs with integrated timenets would be around, they just need one of their number to jump back after splitting to seed the species. vampires with the mystic ability to warp time? one of them warps back to give that first bite.
and we still know very little about our universe, even those who like to pretend otherwise. our big bang model has been around for less than a hundred years and is almost certainly wrong. like those early philosophers that decided this is a flat earth under a spherical sky because that's what it looks like, at the moment it looks everything that exists is part of some vast explosion but if we're in the corona some sort of universe sized super nova then it's hardly surprising that we can't see beyond it.
the very concept of universe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe) (all of space and time) may actually be a paradox, as meaningless as the sentence that calls itself is untrue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_refuting_ideas#Directly_self-denying_statements).
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I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away.
What did this part mean?
I've had many different answers to this over the years. My favorite:
We're just a figment of nis imagination. If ne stops concentrating, we cease to exist. This is backed up by the I know I'm real but what about the rest of you zombies line.
It sounds very much like a schizophrenic (or a sufferer of some other mental condition) whose world changes when he takes some kind of medicine to control his condition. This world only exists in his warped head.
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I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away.
What did this part mean?
I've had many different answers to this over the years. My favorite:
We're just a figment of nis imagination. If ne stops concentrating, we cease to exist. This is backed up by the I know I'm real but what about the rest of you zombies line.
It sounds very much like a schizophrenic (or a sufferer of some other mental condition) whose world changes when he takes some kind of medicine to control his condition. This world only exists in his warped head.
And therefor might not be a time travel story at all.
This is one of the reasons I absolutely love this story. For as short as it is, there is so much meaning that can be added, discussed and argued.
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That's what get for not really paying attention to dates in stories. This one snuck up behind me, ripped out my brain, and showed it to me.
Excellent number 200. Who do we get for number 300, Clarke?
Well, they are the holy trinity-
Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke.
Must. Have. Bradbury!!!
I somehow doubt that Mr. Bradbury would approve one of his stories for podcasting. He's kind of infamously technophobic, so I doubt the medium would appeal to him.
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I somehow doubt that Mr. Bradbury would approve one of his stories for podcasting. He's kind of infamously technophobic, so I doubt the medium would appeal to him.
It's not so much technology as the internet that he doesn't like. From this article (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/us/20ventura.html) (NYTimes):
The Internet? Don’t get him started. “The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.
“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’
“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”
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I love Bradbury, but all his best stories belong on Podcastle, not Escape Pod. But yeah, I doubt if he'd ever give permission for his stories to appear on any Escape Artist podcast.
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If you ever want to torment yourself, go listen to Bradbuy's reading of Fahrenheit 451. It was painful.
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I loved this story and found it well worth the wait. I went through a Heinlein phase back in the 90's, but never read this story. I had to spend some time explaining my understanding of the story to Osaka afterward though because she had trouble with the exact stuff that I didn't; the giant paradox of the whole thing, but specifically how it got started.
We also had some questions about why everyone else was a zombie, and we came to the theory that the protag always exists because he lives in a continuous loop, never starting, never ending; in a way this makes him immortaRL. however everyone he encounterS who is not him is someone who will eventually die, therefore they are the walking dead, and therefore zombies. It's not a perfect theory (for one it assumes his use of the word zombie then fits with the way the word is used now), but it helps me sleep at night.
As to the outro; speaking only for myself and Osaka, we like The Steve Eley show. All of the other hosts do great jobs, but my wife is always happy when she hears Mr. Eley's voice at the start of an episode.
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Okay, Time for the big review....
First, a big pile of kudos to mr. Eley for saving the day with the fact that a time warp and paradox had caused the unseemly delay of episode #200. I was getting depressed waiting for it and thought it would never come out. Then I heard the intro explaining it. All Is Forgiven, Steve!!
I read this story when I was about 15, and it kept catching me off guard. The hermaphrodite with the sorry childhood story was quite enough to hook me, but it kept hitting me with more. Admittedly, I saw it coming that he was the father, but then it blindsided me with him being the kid, too. I was still reeling when the old agent looks at his old cesarean scars.
Call me a fool, but I was 15. Give me a break. It was one of those stories that haunts you for years after you forgot the title, or occasionally, the author. Kind of like "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov.
I was hoping for a Heinlein for #200, but I wasn't sure what would do it. I thought maybe "Life Line", or "Let There Be Light", or even "and He Built a Crooked House", but none of those seemed quite right. As soon as I saw the title when it time-warped onto the site, it all came rushing back, and I knew it was a good call.
After all this time, even with knowing what was happening, it was still a great read. I still got chills when he said we all went away when he took headache powder. I was again struck, like I was long ago, by the image of a single person all alone in the night, with no idea what causes all the rest of us.
and so on to my hope for a Clarke story for episode #300, which will be in what? September 2011? I don't know which one will be good. the Nine Billion Names of God is just too short (maybe a flash piece), and while The Sentinel seems obvious, something doesn't seem right.
One thing for sure - No Bradbury. I have never read anything of his that doesn't tie up a good story idea in lousy prose. Fahrenheit 451 wasn't just painful to listen to, it was painful to read.
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All You Zombies was like one of those falling domino setups. Once you see what's going on you have a pretty good idea of how it will end, but it's still fun to see it through. Even more so if you could get the last domino to knock down the first domino. One a' them Escher-Goldberg devices.
One thing for sure - No Bradbury. I have never read anything of his that doesn't tie up a good story idea in lousy prose. Fahrenheit 451 wasn't just painful to listen to, it was painful to read.
Bradbury doesn't write prose, he writes poetry disguised as prose. I'm thinking more of his short story collections. I hardly remember the plots, but I do remember the moods in stories I haven't read for 30 years.
Another question: Am I the only one here who had heard I'm my own Grandpa before this episode?
At least three of us have heard it.
The finale/chorus/whatever of that song (listen to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYlJH81dSiw&feature=fvst , at about 2:03) was an earworm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm) for a few hours after hearing the episode.
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I've been on a Heinlein kick lately (and I didn't figure out until this episode that it's pronounced "hein-LINE," I always thought it was pronounced "hein-LEN"), so this was a pretty cool episode--even if, as Steve mentioned, part of me kept going "well that makes no sense!"
And yes, at the end I was thinking of "I'm my own grandpaw" too.
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We also had some questions about why everyone else was a zombie, and we came to the theory that the protag always exists because he lives in a continuous loop, never starting, never ending; in a way this makes him immortaRL. however everyone he encounterS who is not him is someone who will eventually die, therefore they are the walking dead, and therefore zombies. It's not a perfect theory (for one it assumes his use of the word zombie then fits with the way the word is used now), but it helps me sleep at night.
What did the word mean back then? It was definitely in common use, although I can only assume the going context was voodoo-style and not Romero-style. Fun fact: The word never appears in Night of the Living Dead, and only once in Dawn of the Dead (1978), toward the end of the movie. (If I'm searching correctly.) Could that indicate the word hadn't commonly come to signify the walking man-eating dead yet? Can somebody who remembers 1978 fill us in? :)
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Pretty much the term meant voodoo style zombie. Which for those not in the know, the primary concept is "mindless servant". Zombies took orders from their masters, and otherwise just stood there.
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Yes, Ocicat has it right - "zombie" at that point would have been a reference to voodoo derived zombies, but by then (actually, I'd say by the 50's for the general populace) had generally come to mean a slave under mental control of the master or a being without free will (there are loads of "zombie slaves under my mental control" in 30's and 40's movies that don't have a touch of voodoo in them). "Thralls" would probably be an equivalent nowadays. All of this probably arose through the use of zombies in "weird menace" pulps in the 20's/30's. There's one or two writers who specialized in Caribbean/south seas native threats, but names escape me at the moment (one's the guy who did "Lukundoo" and "Fishhead").
Yeah, they're "ghouls" in NOTLD, which is in itself a oddity as ghouls, as popularly conceived to that point (if not actually conceived so in the original Arabic), would have been living beings who feed on dead flesh, not the opposite.
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I read an article recently discussing the results of a particular virus (or something similar) that had caused extensive DOS attacks. The article said there were over 100,000 "zombies" involved, meaning computers being controlled by an outside source.
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Good choice for a 209th...err 200th episode. This showcases forward thinking which good scifi does. Being written in '58 Heinlein displayed truly progressive attitudes to gender identity issues. Talk of hermaphrodites and sex change operation would have been unheard of in the 50's, but this story took taboo issues and addressed them without preaching.
Overall a good story, made better by Steve reading it.
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As I haven't read many Heinlein shorts, this one was a nice find. I agree with Steve's right/left brain observation. Quite a coup for a podcast, given the potential issues in getting this work licensed - thanks for sticking it out and getting it done!
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Pretty much the term meant voodoo style zombie. Which for those not in the know, the primary concept is "mindless servant". Zombies took orders from their masters, and otherwise just stood there.
Well that blows my theory out of the water then.
So then does he feel that no one else except for him has free will? If anything he has no free will since his life is predetermined because it's already happened an infinite number of times, and will continue to do so forever with out end or change.
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Listening to Robyn Hitchcock's "The Man Who Invented Himself" reminds me of this story. Only a few lines are really reminiscent of the story (along with the title, obviously) but those lines are really reminiscent ...
He came bursting out of nowhere
Like a spear into the sky
And he cast his light on everything
It was like he'd never die
And he landed right on target
But the target rolled away
And it left him pointing nowhere
You could hear the children say
"He's the fella
The man who invented himself
He's the fella
The man who invented himself"
When you need her love so badly
But she's trying to relax
You can't work it with your fingers
So you try it with an axe
And he taps you on the shoulder
"Looking out for number one
Is like drilling for a rainbow
Or an iceberg in the sun"
He's the fella
The man who invented himself
He's the fella
The man who invented himself
Nobody knows where he's from
Nobody knows where he's gone and gone and gone
But he's not here
When you're waiting for your baby
To get back from the moon
And throw her arms around you
In a very quiet lagoon
Well, that loneliness is nothing
Just imagine how he feels
He's the only person in the world
Who still believes he's real
He's the fella
The man who invented himself
(etc. repeats)
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Ahhh, one of my all time favorites! Funny, I always took it as being about Jesus Christ...
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Ahhh, one of my all time favorites! Funny, I always took it as being about Jesus Christ...
Most of Hitchcock's songs aren't really "about" anything. The best example of this is "Unsettled" (from Globe of Frogs), with lyrics that are truly nonsensical.
Which reminds me ... do policemen sing?
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All music guide once described the refrain of "Do Policemen Sing?" as being like a hail of blows, which is exactly right....
Oh yeah. "Unsettled" is Hitchock at his dada/word salad best ("Ram impatient swallow on patrol...") but some of the songs do have themes you can tease out. "Acid Bird" may be the most beautiful song ever written about LSD and what it reveals about organic life all on summer's day and I've always felt "Bass" was quite wonderful in how it plays all it's fishy games and then leaves the reality for the very last line.
A great creator...
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I know I'm late posting but kudos for posting this story - one of the few featuring a genetic human anomaly as the main character. I am lucky enough to have performed with and shared the stage with many genetic human anomalies, or freaks. While I would not call the main character in this story a freak, as he is not a performer, he is certainly presented as an interesting and realistic psychological portrait of someone who is really and physically different from the ten fingered, ten toed, uh one genitalled typical blueprint for humanity. The Dr.'s blaze attittude about changing the character's gender is an unfortunate reality for many genetically a-typical people, who often are not consulted before being subjected to such surgeries in order to "fix" them. Sometimes it works out fine... but sometimes it doesn't. For those interested in the stories of those with medical anomalies, I recommend visiting Elizabeth Andersen's site phreeque dot com.
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My science fiction group in Second Life listened to this a couple of weeks ago ... a lot of interesting discussion about the meaning of the last lines :)
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It's great to see Heinlein here! I've never read anything by him, so this was my first exposure. I've been meaning to remedy that, so I have a copy of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" on my shelf but haven't gotten to it yet.
Interesting story, though time paradoxes tend to get under my skin. At least in this case it was entirely intentional and had lanterns hung all over it, which is much better than just an accidental.
I expect this was very controversial in its day with the transgender character, which is cool in and of itself. Is it possible for one person to be fertile with both her male and female sex organs? I guess I don't know enough about hermaphrodites to know for sure, but it seemed unlikely.
What got under my skin more than the time paradox was the genetics. Mating through inbreeding is more likely to cause birth defects, yes? So the moment he had a baby, every version of him would meet infinite potential for birth defects in the human genome, due to his infinite unbranching family tree. And what of the genetic mutations that over many generations lead to evolution? Why does he end up being the same person with each iteration?
Interesting that what appears to be a fairly well-rounded cast of 4 is all just a cast of one with the same guy in different guises. That alone makes the story worth a listen.
I don't really like the title, though, just based on digressive philosophy that has nothing to do with the rest of the story. I like a title that foreshadows the actual story.
For those who mentioned disliking the Whore Corps, and I agree with you, that was a pretty common trope back in the 50s. At a library liquidation sale last year I bought a "Best of F&SF" book which anthologized a bunch of stories that ran in F&SF in its early years. Most of them were just downright terrible, whether because of their datedness or just bad writing, these days. One was particularly good called Gorilla Suit that I'd highly recommend as humor reading for anyone who can find it. Anyway, there was a story in there, by, I think, C.S. Lewis which was centered around a similar Whore Corps. The assumption seemed to be that it made sense for only men to be astronauts and women would only be worthy for space travel as sexual entertainment. Which goes to show how views of gender have changed over the years, yes? Anyway, as if the basic premise of the Lewis story weren't offensive enough to current views, the women who end up being sent up there were all "undesirable" by the astronauts, one being very old and thin as a rail and the other being overweight. And that was really the whole point and plot of the story, how annoying these women were. All You Zombies at least did not make that the entire point, it used it as part of the setting.
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For those who mentioned disliking the Whore Corps, and I agree with you, that was a pretty common trope back in the 50s. At a library liquidation sale last year I bought a "Best of F&SF" book which anthologized a bunch of stories that ran in F&SF in its early years. Most of them were just downright terrible, whether because of their datedness or just bad writing, these days. One was particularly good called Gorilla Suit that I'd highly recommend as humor reading for anyone who can find it. Anyway, there was a story in there, by, I think, C.S. Lewis which was centered around a similar Whore Corps. The assumption seemed to be that it made sense for only men to be astronauts and women would only be worthy for space travel as sexual entertainment.
How very Christian in outlook. ::) Of course, Narnia had a similarly misogynist aspect, dialed back a bit for the kiddies, natch.
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A) As far as I know, C.S. Lewis didn't do many short stories, and a "Whore Brigade" seems like a violently unlikely topic for a Lewis story.
B) The closest you get to misogyny in "Narnia" is the semi-infamous "Problem of Susan," which in my opinion is as much a problem of interpretation as a textual issue. Given that his point was not "Women suck" but "Becoming too focused on the world and worldly things leads one away from the spiritual life," I don't think an accusation of misogyny has much of a leg to stand on. Feel free to criticize his theological arguments for present the occasional false dilemma or overreach of logic, but let's keep unwarranted personal attacks on dead people to a minimum, hm?
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A) As far as I know, C.S. Lewis didn't do many short stories, and a "Whore Brigade" seems like a violently unlikely topic for a Lewis story.
B) The closest you get to misogyny in "Narnia" is the semi-infamous "Problem of Susan," which in my opinion is as much a problem of interpretation as a textual issue. Given that his point was not "Women suck" but "Becoming too focused on the world and worldly things leads one away from the spiritual life," I don't think an accusation of misogyny has much of a leg to stand on. Feel free to criticize his theological arguments for present the occasional false dilemma or overreach of logic, but let's keep unwarranted personal attacks on dead people to a minimum, hm?
On the other hand, there is "That Hideous Strength", where the female lead discovers that, because she of her presumption in becoming a female academic rather than a housewife, she had literally driven her husband to a deal with the devil. This is not a sub-text, it is explained quite explicitly in the text.
Note that I agree with you that the word "misogyny" is incorrectly applied here - Lewis does exhibit a non-trivial amount of sexism, but his views about women were not founded on hate, but rather on a belief that men and women have different roles to play in society. It is important to differentiate hate and other types of prejudice, if only because the most effective ways of ending one may not work for all.
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"Misogyny" is probably the wrong word, yeah, but there's more to the problem of women in Narnia (http://truepenny.livejournal.com/50287.html) than just "the problem of Susan." Girls could be okay, but adult women don't tend to come off very well.
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"C.S. Lewis had old-fashioned and, by our standards, sexist views on women," is not a statement I would take any offense at. Calling him a misogynist annoys me, especially in a sort of breezy "well naturally" sort of way.
EDIT upon reading the linked LJ entry.
- I don't see much there that isn't partially due to the reading given the books by the reader in question. Lucy always struck me as quite a strong character; she's almost the protagonist of the Narnia series, in a way that bland Peter never managed. However, that LJ post dismisses Lucy as just being "worshiped' because of C.S. Lewis' supposed Madonna/whore subtext. *shrug* If you're looking to interpret it that way, then sure, that sort of thing is in there; as I said, I wouldn't argue that Lewis has quite archaic viewpoints on the whole man/woman thing. I just think it's better to absorb that sort of thing in context; as that essay points out, the female characters in the Narnia books are hardly two-dimensional (or not more so than the rest of the characters), and the Jill Pole/Eustace Scrubb dynamic is downright modern in their supportive friendship of one another. I don't think he depersonalizes women particularly, and you have to dig a bit to find stuff to object to (though there is indeed some merit to those criticisms). It's not like, say, Lovecraft's pretty blatant race-hatred or Frank Miller's issues with prostitutes or Dave Sims' frankly scary approach to the whole concept of gender. Dismissing Lewis' female characters takes some willful blindness, to my mind.
(And we should probably either go start our own thread or end the derail at this point, honestly. :-P)
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You're right that we should probably end the tangent, so I'll just say this in closing:
- I don't see much there that isn't partially due to the reading given the books by the reader in question.
Which is true of *every* reading, to a lesser or greater extent. But when you have a cluster of people looking at the books and agreeing that they don't think adult women come off very well (girls do better), then I think the reading gains force.
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A) As far as I know, C.S. Lewis didn't do many short stories, and a "Whore Brigade" seems like a violently unlikely topic for a Lewis story.
I still have the collection on my bookshelf. It's possible that I mixed up the authors. I know C.S. Lewis was in it, and I thought that was his story but I'm not 100% certain until I go look.
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It was indeed C.S. Lewis who wrote the Whore Corps story I'm thinking of. I was rather surprised by it at the time, so I wrote up the following post on the Writers of the Future forum to talk about it:
Not to mention the totally different view of the sexes. The first story, by C.S. Lewis called "Ministering Angels" is about a crew of astronauts (all men) on Mars, and the new "Aphrodisio-therapy" approved by the government is to send women there to have sex with them as a form of stress relief. It turns out the only two women that are willing to go are an overweight prostitute who's lost all her customers, and a female professor (about 70 years old) who is one of the main advocates of the new aphrodisio-therapy, who can't stop talking in a blustery academic way for even two seconds. Half the crew ends up having a mutiny and fleeing the station, leaving the rest to live with the two women indefinitely (which the ones left behind clearly view as a terrible fate).
And, on a semi-tangent, another story illustrated how much writing styles have changed. For instance the general advice given that you should avoid using "said" synonyms, and using -ly adverbs. A 2-page span in a single story included all of the following:
"whispered inadequately"
"said enthusiastically"
"rolled his eyes lickerishly"
"complained" (instead of said)
"bellowed" (instead of said)
"began" (instead of said)
"chattered" (instead of said)
"protested" (instead of said)
"nodded" (instead of said)
"smiled" (instead of said)
"he said diffidently"
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And, on a semi-tangent, another story illustrated how much writing styles have changed. For instance the general advice given that you should avoid using "said" synonyms, and using -ly adverbs. A 2-page span in a single story included all of the following:
I believe it was Elmore Leonard who once wrote something about how if you need more than said then you need to rewrite. And I find that my writing is stronger for NOT using synonyms or alternate words in dialog tags.
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I still contend that most of these "rules" are ways that the author codified for themselves the type of writing they liked to to read, or the type of effect they enjoyed reading and would like to create themselves, but are not themselves indicative of bad writing. Using nothing but "said" is great if you're trying to get that terse, no-time-for-anything-but-business feel of Leonard and (some) noir in particular, and the overuse of adverbs is a tendency of all new writers (or, I've found, prose writers coming out of stage play writing who don't have parenthetical actor directions at their disposal any longer) so it's a great thing to have in the back of your head to watch out for, but I just can't find myself considering generalized breaking of these "rules" as poor writing. I note that a lot of the specific grammatic "rules" seem to come from mass-audience authors who view their work primarily as entertainment product (and so have worked out the best blueprint to create that product), which is fine and indicates an authority derived from high sales figures, but I'd hate to think that new writers took them as canon law or something and limited their experimentations in "effect via language" to what's been proven to sell.
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Yeah I don't think any such "guidelines" should be taken too literally as rules.
But I do know editors who have specifically griped about things like that, so it will affect your ability to sell at least at certain markets. Some variations from said are not a big deal. "whispered" and "shouted" in particular are a little easier to justify, because they are distinct and important differentiations.
But in the case of that F&SF story it was so extreme that to my current reading sensibilities it really detracted from the story.
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But I do know editors who have specifically griped about things like that, so it will affect your ability to sell at least at certain markets.
'Tis true, and one of the insolvable conundrums of being a new writer - when is the writing "wrong" and when is it just not to the editor's taste? A conundrum because it takes thick skin to accept all the rejections and believe in your work by continuing to push on, but not so thick that one can't accept the need for occasional correction. The sheer pressure of it is why anyone seriously attempting to write deserves a round of applause and an objective beta reader.
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But I do know editors who have specifically griped about things like that, so it will affect your ability to sell at least at certain markets.
'Tis true, and one of the insolvable conundrums of being a new writer - when is the writing "wrong" and when is it just not to the editor's taste? A conundrum because it takes thick skin to accept all the rejections and believe in your work by continuing to push on, but not so thick that one can't accept the need for occasional correction. The sheer pressure of it is why anyone seriously attempting to write deserves a round of applause and an objective beta reader.
Moderation is the key to all things. Editors (heck, all of us) notice things that are excessive, I am partial to noticing gerunds and unnecessary verb modifiers. I use said synonyms more often in Union Dues stories than in others because I am writing for the audio medium and i know that while a reader can tell who says what when by virtue of the location of quotation marks and tabs, in audio those visual cues aren't, well, visible. Also, the UD stories are first person so I have to find a way to clarify who says what when. I use more physical stuff, "Megaton stuffed a sandwich past his lips. Kindred waved at the cameras." stuck between dialogue snatches.
In the other stuff I write, it's less "Ralph Bakshi Rotoscopes Spasmodic Gandalf" and more conventional.
But, I still do it in things I expect people to read and not hear, and even still, I do it in moderation.
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Yeah, moderation is key. I've broken all the "rules" from time to time, but I do so only after careful consider and asking myself "Will this help or hurt the story". I've even written a single 2nd person story, even though I tend to dislike those myself, because I thought of an idea that I felt would actually be enhanced by 2nd instead of just adding an annoying "Look at me!" factor that 2nd usually accomplishes.
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Second person topic split to The Writing Forum (http://forum.escapeartists.net/index.php?topic=3500.0) (seemed the appropriate place). Carry on :)