Jumping back to an older podcast, I just recently (finally) watched the first season of "True Detective,' in which The King in Yellow and Carcosa are referenced by the serial killer that Matthew McConnaughy and Woody Harrelson's detectives pursue over the years. Looking up some reviews of the show, I ran across an interesting fan theory, which makes sense: McConnaughy's detective obsessively gathers information on the killings, even for years after he leaves the police department. You can see "The King in Yellow" and "Carcosa" written on the walls of the storage locker where he is storing his investigative archives, and he briefs Harrelson on what he found in-depth - yet, at no point does he mention the book that is source of the allusions, or Robert Chambers or Ambrose Bierce - all information that could be easily found with a Google search of the terms (and we see over the course of several episodes that McConnaughy's detective is Internet-literate). The fan theory is that the series takes place in a world where Chambers never wrote the book, and is actually in in the same universe as Chamber's collection of stories, and the killer (I won't go into too much detail to avoid spoilers) is yet another individual who read the play and went mad. Thought this was interesting. Maybe a retrospective look at the series, which certainly has its weird aspects (particularly in the last episode) would make a good Elder Sign podcast. I haven't posted in while, but have been listening and enjoying the Wolfe and Elder Sign podcasts - will try to start posting more often.

The 1950s SF movie "Red Planet Mars" (based on a play) also revolves around whether the Incarnation would have occurred on Mars (thought in the that era possibly to be habitable), and the effects that radio communication about that between Earth and Mars have on our society - although there is a twist in the plot.

I'm just getting caught up on the podcast after a hectic winter, and La Befana is one of my favorite of Wolfe's many Christmas stories - a lighter one than several. I would love to see a small-press publisher do a collection of them all, perhaps with a different illustrator for each story - I would certainly buy a copy of A WOLFE CHRISTMAS. Like Michael, I too thought of the Frazetta painting on NatLamp and like Stephen, I thought of the Bradbury story while listening to the podcast before reading the notes. The great SF and mystery editor and author Anthony Boucher, who was like Wolfe also a practicing Catholic, wrote a short story ("The Star Dummy", which appeared in the Fall 1952 issue of "Worlds of If") where the Incarnation also happened on an alien planet from whence a koala-like ET arrived. As the alien and the human narrator, Paul, become friends, he learns the aliens have similar beliefs, and even similar prayers: ("Yes, I do believe in God in a way—if less devoutly than Paul, or at least than Paul being devout. Many do on our Earth; not all, but many. There was once a man, or possibly more than a man. We argue about that. His name was Hraz, and some call him the Oiled One.” Marcia smiled and Tarvish added, “It refers to a ceremony of honor. I am not quite a follower of Hraz, and yet when I pray—as I did, Paul, shortly before you found me—it is in words that Hraz taught us: "Lifegiver over us, there is blessing in the word that means you. We pray that in time we will live here under your rule as others now live with you there; but in the meantime feed our bodies, for we need that here and now. We are in debt to you for everything, but your love will not hold us accountable for this debt; and so we too should deal with others, holding no man to strict balances of account. Do not let us meet temptations stronger than we can bear; but let us prevail and be free of evil." Boucher's story "The Complete Werewolf" would be a good addition to The Elder Sign, BTW. But the question of why the Messiah on Zozz's planet would be a Jewish human rather than one of his species is interesting and one I wondered about when I first read the story. It could simply be, as Wolfe suggested in his introduction, that as Jesus said to the Samaritan woman at the well, "Salvation comes from the Jews" (John 4:22), and that salvation for other planets must wait until Jewish settlers arrive...which would certainly indicate an important or primary place for humanity in the cosmos. (Although there could certainly be a non-human Moses and non-human Jews on other worlds, as Harlan Ellison and Avram Davidson suggested in a story in the anthology "Wandering Stars"). Brother Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit brother, the head of the Vatican Observatory, and a self-confessed science fiction nerd, has discussed the issue of whether each planet would require their own messiah on several occasions, while admitting it's all just interesting speculation, God will work how He wants to work: New Zealand Catholic: If an alien life is discovered, do they have to be redeemed or is our redemption applicable to them? Br. Guy: The redemption of Jesus is universal. That is a fundamental statement. The best example we can use is what happens when Christians first encountered non-Christians whether it was in the bogs of Ireland or in the new world. Redemption already applied to them, but the fullness of a relationship with God comes to us through the sacraments, through the knowledge of actually what this God is like through the great things that the Church can give us. Will that be the same with an alien race? I . . . Don’t . . . Know. But, if you tell me that we should not talk to them about religion, you are not treating them seriously because religion is one of the important things about us. And if you think we are not going to talk about religion, you don’t know what it means to be intelligent. Inevitably, it will happen. Will we find that they’ve already experienced the Second Person in their own way? That will be fascinating to find out. But if they have intellect and if they have free will, if they are free to make decisions, then sure as shooting, they’ll probably going to need some form of redemption. Whether it has already arrived there or not, I don’t know. But it’s not like they are condemned until we show up. Br. Guy also brings up that curious phrase Jesus used in John 10:16: Br. Guy: There’s an English poet, Alice Meynell, who wrote a poem in 1918, Christ in the Universe. And I think it is a brilliant summary of the joy that some day, in some infinite time in the future, maybe even in heaven, we can compare notes and show to the rest of the universe what the Second Person was like when he was here on earth. And that represents probably the most common answer that people expect, which is: There’s one second person but the Incarnation occurs . . . maybe the Word of God who is from the beginning is spoken in different languages, in different places, in different times. There’s even a hint of that in the story of the Good Shepherd where in John’s Gospel version, Jesus ends by saying “I have other sheep” [that do not belong to this fold. John 10:16]. Most scholars assume he is talking about the Gentiles. That’s probably right. But merely listening to that phrase reminds us that we are not the only ones that God is in a relationship with. https://www.nzcatholic.org.nz/2016/10/18/popes-star-man-jesus-aliens-faith/ The other issue the podcast got me thinking about is the issue of slavery, or bondage, as an aspect of colonization in human history. While we normally consider that indigenous people have been frequently enslaved by the colonialists, the costs and effort to transport the colonists themselves across an ocean to a new frontier often requires that they be held in some sort of thrall, lest they take off to the hinterlands, away from the control of the colonial authorities, and thus wasting the investment in the transport and the need for their labor. Either you are already in slavery or servitudeb or prisoner status, as Africans were brought to America or the Irish to the Barbados under Cromwell or criminals were sent to Australia, or you agree to place yourself into debt bondage as many early colonists had to to travel to the New World. The other option is to be a member of a strictly structured military unit, religious group (like the Pilgrims, fleeing the secular society of Amsterdam), or other political group that can exercise control over its members. Should Earth ever reach the point where we send colonists to other inhabitable worlds, or worlds in need of terraforming to fit our needs, it seems likely based on our history that one or several of the above systems will be required, even if it would just be "if you don't work, you don't eat (or get to breathe oxygen"). In the latter stages of colonization, when the need for economic growth and possible political claims to the land, there could be less of a requirement for social control on colonists. But is slavery, or some form of servitude, a requirement for the early stages of colonization?

Thanks for the podcast, which was enjoyable and thought-provoking as always. I think this might have been the first Wolfe story I read, back when it originally appeared in Analog in 1973 - I was a regular reader of Analof, F&SF, and Worlds of If back then. A lot of the political jokes and historical references went over my 15 year old head, but I remember enjoying it. One of the gags that you probably noticed but didn't have time to comment on is that the journal "All New and Logical, Original Games" to which the narrator is writing is, of course, an acronym for ANALOG. Analog was one of the most "hard SF" pro-technology magazines of the era, especially under John W, Campbell, and would have seemed a good fit for Wolfe, who combined literary skill with a professional knowledge of technology and engineering. But I don't think he actually had many more stories in there - I will have to check the ISFDB to see if he published anything else there. The podcast's comments on the current debate between globalism and protectionism, internationalism and nationalism is spot on. I was curious as to who "Lansbury" was meant to be, and suspect it was George Lansbury, the head of the Labour Party in the 1930s. Lansbury was strongly pacifist and opposed British rearmament in the face of the developing German threat (and in fact advocated for unilateral disarmament for all nations), so it was cheeky of Wolfe to make him the narrator's avid wargaming colleague. Re stephenfrug's comments above, I agree that it always a little disconcerting to see references to Hitler in pop culture, and alternative world stories in particular, that don't reference his antisemitism and the Shoah - but such references would have felt out of place in this story, which has a lighter humorous tone for all its darker humor references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fritz Leiber dealt with this in an interesting alt-history short story, "Catch That Zepellin!" I have a hard time considering Truman's escalation of WWII into our first (and I hope last) nuclear war as a war crime. My father was a young sailor on one of the Navy ships that were preparing for an invasion of the Japanese mainland, after the Navy and Marines had already suffered heart-breaking casualties in the earlier campaigns against Japanese-held territory, and no one expected amphibious and airborne landings in Japan, as well as naval and aircraft attacks, to involve anything less than massive loss of U.S. military personnel and both the military and civilian personnel of Japan. Arguably, it is likely that my dad would have been killed in the planned attack, and so neither I, nor my sisters, nor my children would ever have been born. I appear to owe my existence to the atom bomb.

I haven't read anything by Mieville before this, but I want to find this story now - I love stories about secret societies and cabals,the whackier the better - like G.K. Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday". Concerning "wild streets", they do exist in real life, sort of, or at least they did. In the days before Google Maps and Yahoo Maps and Apple Maps and Map Quest and Waze, we had to rely on commercially published street maps, with Thomas Brothers mapbooks for particular cities being a common sight inside cars. To protect against rival map-publishers copying their maps, publishers such as Thomas Brothers would insert non-existent streets in their maps, which they could use as evidence if another publisher pirated their works, These were usually short sections of streets, perhaps a block long, or alleyways. I found an article that mentioned the tactic here: https://laist.com/2018/06/22/thomas_guide_maps_the_rise_and_fall.php "There were also smaller companies that sometimes tried to copy Thomas Bros. Maps' cartography. So Thomas Guides put in fake streets or towns, so they could catch copycats. ""There were a lot of counterfeit operations out there... making smaller maps using our data," said Todd Nathanson, grandson of Warren Wilson, former president and CEO of Thomas Bros. Maps. "And we would put fake streets of people's [employees] kids' names...pets' names...in little cul-de-sacs, and that was one way we would be able to keep the copyright." I found a list of some of these notional streets in an article in an underground newspaper when I lived in Los Angeles in the 1990s, and when I was working in the area, would occasionally look to see what was actually in the area where the street was supposed to be, wondering what I would do if I actually DID find one of the fictitious streets on the map and what kind of people - or things - might be living on it.

brouwpieter, re cities as living (malevolent) entities, have you read Fritz Leiber's "Our Lady of Darkness" (earlier serialized as "The Pale Brown Thing"?) One of my favorite of his novels. "Franz Westin", an aging fantasy and science fiction writer (obviously patterned on Leiber himself, and even living in the same apartment on Geary Street in San Francisco) acquires a copy of "Megapolisomancy", written by a sorceror who used the power and mass of large cities as a way to predict the future and destroy his enemies. Very spooky and atmospheric, and San Francisco luminaries such as Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and Clark Ashton Smith play a part. Leiber pioneered the use of urban settings in modern horror and suggested that the massed power of downtrodden humanity and huge structures could create their own supernatural horrors, including "Smoke Ghost" (set in Chicago) and "The Black Gondolier (set in Venice, California). Either would make a great podcast subject.

@G.L. McDorman I had to deal with a lot of people who suffered from mental delusions, some quite severe, on my old job. Oddly, I never heard from anyone who claimed to be living in a different year in the future or past (although one man claimed to be a time traveler from the future). Temporal delusions, if that is what Hildred is suffering, would seem to be very rare.

I'm listening to these podcasts out of order, so I will jump back to this one. As usual, great job. My take on the world-building aspects of this unusual future is that it is, after all, told from the viewpoint of an insane man, and is itself suspect in terms of its reality. Even the timeframe, set in the near future from the time it is written, is as suspect as the other details Hildred relates. I haven't read the other stories in the volume, but my understanding is that the political setting and future setting for the 1st story is not carried through to the others. Oddly enough, while writing this there was a commercial on TV for a company that restores people's reputations - it sounds like they will search the internet to remove offensive statements and promote positive stories about the client, and suppress negative search results. So becoming a Restorer of Reputations could be a thing now. I understand there are references to the King in Yellow in the 1st season of the HBO series "True Detective", I'm going to have to watch that.

@G.L. McDorman A good companion read for "The Veldt" would be Bradbury's 1953 short story "The Murderer", about a man living in an automated house that continually cajoles and bosses him around, who decides to "murder" his home. An amazingly prescient view of the technosphere we live in, with omnipresent piped-in Muzak, TV screens everywhere, nonstop calls on one's wrist-phone, providing one's location to the computer in one's car. As the protagonist explains to the prison psychiatrist: "The telephone's such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demands you call someone who doesn't want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn't any time of my own. When it wasn't the telephone it was the television, the radio, the phonograph. ... When it wasn't music, it was interoffice communications, and my horror chamber of a radio wristwatch on which my friends and my wife phoned every five minutes. ... "When I'm in the field with my radio car there's no moment when I'm not in touch. In touch! There's a slimy phrase. Touch, hell. Gripped! Pawed, rather. Mauled and massaged and pounded by FM voices. You can't leave your car without checking in: 'Have stopped to visit gas-station men's room.' 'Okay, Brock, step on it!'"

I had always assumed that the house (through error or tampering) was beginning to create corporeal lions, like tulpas, feeding off the aggressive energy and thoughts of the children. The technical "how" is not addressed by Bradbury, but he was never a "hard" science fiction writer. (Although it's interesting that Bradbury had a better track record than many of the hard sf writers in predicting technological and cultural change - just in Fahrenheit 451, he predicted walkman-like earbud music players, big screen TVs, what sounds a lot like MTV music videos, and the rise of political "cancel culture".) It's not often thought of as such, but "The Veldt" is a haunted house story for the technological age. If I were to edit an anthology of great haunted house stories, I would include it. It was adapted, not too badly, as one of the episodes of Jack Smight's 1968 film "The Illustrated Man" with Rod Steiger and Claire Bloome.

I enjoyed the podcast, as always. I don't see the story as a stand-in for the Holcaust. The Shoah, and the other holocausts of the last century (Armenian, Cambodian, Ukrainian) were targeted at specific groups, whether racial- or class-based. They were deliberate and calculated attempts at the destruction of another group. The horror of Jackson's story comes from the randomness, the arbitrary nature of the Lottery. I haven't heard it suggested in the literature as among the sources, but written not long after World War II, the draft lottery itself, which was grew more extensive as the WWII went on (about 10 million WWII soldiers were draftees, I'm not sure how many of those were killed or maimed in combat) may have been among the factors in Jackson's mind, particularly as she looked at her young sons. The military draft lottery, which seemed increasingly unfair and class-based during the Vietnam War years, probably also made the story feel more current when it was being taught in high schools in the 1960s. But I agree that Jackson was looking at the persistence of rituals and traditions long after they had outlived their use and purpose. The sense of betrayal at the end, as the lottery "winner"'s own husband and family turns against her, probably had something to do with Stanley Hyman's repeated infidelities. There was a feeling of estrangement by urban Americans from rural America that the very urban Jackson felt, as well as the anti-semitism the family experienced. That provided grist for a lot of suspense and horror, from "Deliverance" to "The Dunwich Horror" to "Straw Dogs" to T.E.D. Klein's "The Ceremony" and much more that I'm sure I have forgotten. Maybe the reason remote small towns are such a good location for horror is that we aren't really sure what is going on there. As Sherlock Holmes said, “They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside." "The Lottery" was probably an influence on Peter Schaffer when he wrote the script for "The Wicker Man" in the 1970s, with its story of old pagan fertlity rituals persisting into the present day (and requiring a blood sacrifice), and possibly on the lesser-known "Eye of the Devil" with a similar storyline. Encyclopedia Brittanica made a short film adaptation of the Jackson story in 1969, which I remember watching in English class in middle school. It was more effective by being made with a cast of unknown small-town locals and a docudrama feel. It's worth a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVuFwLE5fo8&t=272s

Daphne Du Maurier's short stories "Don't Look Now" (adapted into a moody film by Nicholas Roeg in the 1970s) and "The Birds" (adapted by Hitchcock in the 1960s) would both be worthwhile.

Yeah, I think you're right on Conscience. The first half was a novella published in a magazine, expanded out for novel publication with the second half.

Glenn, I know you don't have time to do a complete review of evolving attitudes to slavery in a short podcast, but as you touched on St. Augustine's writings on slavery, I thought his letters (the "Divjak letters") on his parish's "direct action" release of slaves who had been taken by Galician slavetraders, discovered in the 1970s, gave an interesting perspective on his views as it applied to the actuality of the slave trade in the late Roman Republic. I saw this paper recently which went into more depth on it, would be interested in hearing your views: https://www.classics.upenn.edu/sites/www.classics.upenn.edu/files/ElmStudPatrist_ART2015_475.pdf

I thought of the Reichenbach Falls as well. "• You didn't mention how FUNNY the episodes of "March"'s diary, right after VRT takes over, are. All of a sudden we get lines like "Without the boy I don’t know what I’d do. He has done everything, most of the work, for the entire trip." — effusive appreciation after a diaryfull of a very limited amount of it. Which, once you know that VRT is suddenly writing, is really funny." I thought that was funny as well. I was trained in and did a fair amount of casework in forensic linguistic profiling, and you consistently see that as a feature in texts and narratives written as false "poison pen" letters directed against the actual author, in an attempt to gain sympathy for them as a victim and/or to redirect suspicions of guilt away from them. It's controversial, but it's been noted as a feature in the "ransom note" that the Ramsey family urged the police to look for in their home after the JonBenet Ramsey killing. A supposed "foreign" group of conspirators is blaming her father in the letter for the purported kidnapping, but keep talking about what a really smart man he is and what a great and successful businessman.

I think it was quite common for SF writers to try to make as much money out of an idea as possible by publishing a series of connected novellas (and 3 seem to be about the right length to make up a paperback original when collected) in the SF magazines and then bundle them together as a paperback (although this was not the actual origin of the book Fifth Head, of course). Some books that originated in this way (off the top of my head): A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.; A Case of Conscience by James Blish; The Tactics of Mistake by Gordon Dickson; The Burning and The Immortals, both by James Gunn; Some Will Not Die by Algis Budrys; Operation Chaos by Poul Anderson - I'm sure there are many others.

Yeah, I agree, Stephen. I threw out the above idea while spitballing possible scenarios, but I think VRT is the actual author and it was composed (and seized by the authorities) while he was in prison.

I wonder if Machen changed the pronunciation of his pen name over time, as the more Germanic pronunciation seems natural to Anglo-Saxon ears. After the beginning of WWI, there was a nationwide revulsion to things Germanic in the United Kingdom and America, and he may have changed the pronunciation. (I was unaware of the extent of the anti-German movement after WWI until I watched Ken Burns' documentary series on Prohibition recently. The teaching of German was banned in many American schools, German textbooks were publicly burned, and in one particularly horrifying detail, dachshunds were chased and stoned to death in the streets by anti-German mobs.

I would be totally down for a WolfeCon.

Henceforth, "Frug's Hypothesis".