Starship Fonzie

Well, hello out there, everybody, I'm going to record this anyway. Uh, I have blown my soundboard. So, I am forced to record this by speaking directly into a -- condenser microphone. That's why the sound quality is so poor, I apologize for that. But... on with the show. [Intro: Alice Anything by Testa Rosa] Greetings, all my fellow Milwookies, homo-sapiens, and all other sentient lifeforms of the Planet Earth. This is Starship Fonzie, the official podcast of the Milwaukee Science Fiction and Fantasy League. I’m your host, Eric J. Hildeman, and we’re going to let you know what’s going on in the world of sci fi in Milwaukee, and in the SFF world generally. This podcast is being pre-recorded live from the island city-state of Pabu, where Omega is trying to figure out what’s wrong with the trigger-hand of her recently redeemed friend, Crosshair. Actually, it's coming to you from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or as the rest of the world knows it, that strange place where you get a seemi...

There's nothing quite like a great new sci fi series, and Three Body Problem, based on the Hugo-Award-winning novel by Liu Cixin, is one of the best to be found out there. The show was created, in part, by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who are best known for creating HBO's Game of Thrones. As such, they brought some key actors from Game of Thrones along with them to this project: Liam Cunningham, who played Davos Seaworth (the Onion Knight), and John Bradley (sometimes John Bradley West), who played Jon Snow's timid friend, Samwell Tarley. The plot originates with the Cultural Revolution in China under Mao Tsedong in the mid 1970's. A young woman named Ye Wenjie, a brilliant physicist, witnesses her parents being presented before an angry mob for the "crime" of espousing scientific ideas which run afoul of the official Chinese Party line. For example, her father taught students about the Big Bang theory at university, which (they say) strongly implies the exis...