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Study 086 - The Command (Patreon)

Published:
2024-04-11 16:50:13
Imported:
2024-04
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Hyper-intelligent bear Johnny Black takes on a mad scientist in The Command by L. Sprague de Camp! It's Weird Bear Month!

Special thanks to our reader, Hazel Holmes of the I'm Funnier Than You podcast!

And here is some Advice for Time Traveling to Medieval Europe from Premodernist.

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Comments

REO Jackwagon

Intelligent bears? Let's gooooo!

Ratchbox

I love weird bear month!

Prince Prawn

I hope one of your readers is a good bearitone.

Corey Wittig

Has anyone else been thinking of Grizzly Man the Werner Herzog documentary? On my mind constantly this month for some reason.

Sanjay Mathew

DeCamp's 'Citadels of Mystery' was my first introduction (as a ten year old) to the pseudoscience fringe of the Weird. It looked at the actual engineering and history (as understood as of the uns) behind sites like Nan Madol, Stonehenge and the like but in each chapter DeCamp wrote about the pseudohistoric/scientific buzz around these sites. Thats where I first learned about Lemuria, theosophy etc

Ketus

Moar bears for BearApril!? Uh Beapril? APBEARIL? I dunno but, this story was cool as all hell- we got to witness a bear go into hand to hand combat after taking a bullet to the dome only to win flawlessly. But also to finish off the last guy with a Rifle!? Geez! Bet if there were one more criminal left Johnny would've somehow managed to use dynamite on the poor fella.

Jeremiah Armistead

You know “April is un-bear-able” is my favorite month so far , I’m just not to certain where we can go from here there’s just so few bear stories in strange stories and weird fiction - But it reminds me there is a video game about a bear that is a scientific experiment that uses tiki magic Crash bandicoot

ESTY

+ FAKE EPISODE! + You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time… Unless you have a special gas. Well! Adjust my glasses and call me Johnny, because your gas ain’t working on me! I suspected once you ran out of Lovecraft content that you might pad a couple things in for content but c’mon! If anyone listens to any sound clip from this episode out of context— you can hear how absurd this sham really is. And then: bear-pawed sound editing saves the day? Tsk tsk To so vainly dismiss the intelligence of your audience and the community that it has fostered with such thinly veiled fakery is deplorable. Horror Daddies are cruising for a cursing.

Runninghead

No spoilers here but, despite having spent 10 years drawing the same monotone bear character for a living 😴 when it comes to Strange Stories I don't care about anything else- I just love them bears!! Please, please lets have either more bears next April or literally any other animal. These animal stories seem to be inherently engaging and the way you guys discuss them is just beautiful. Thank you! Bears!!! 🧸🐻🐻‍❄️🐼

Alan Ricks

In the top 3 greatest stories you have ever covered. Dat Bear Wallop!

Alan Ricks

You touched on De Camp’s overall career but he is more well known for his fantasy than his science fiction output. In fact in Sword and Sorcery circles he is alternatively praised and perhaps a bit scorned (alongside his colleague Lin Carter) for editing, “finishing”, and creating pastiches of Robert Howard’s works in a VERY similar fashion as August Derleth did for Lovecraft. There has been much written on this exploitation/preservation controversy over the years that can be found online if you look for it. What is inarguable is that without de Camp and Derleth, REH and Lovecraft might have become minor forgotten authors in the decades after their passings. Another term coined by de Camp is “Heroic Fantasy” which you sometimes will hear instead of S&S. He thought S&S sounded garish and Heroic Fantasy would appeal to a larger audience. De Camp’s 1976 book “Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy” was an early formative cataloging of the authors that we know today to make up the foundations of the entire Fantasy genre. Something that came to me, in Dungeons and Dragons werebears are the most well known good aligned lycanthrope, whilst their more famous cousins the werewolves are chaotic evil. Johnny certainly acts a heroic character in this story by saving everyone. Gygax was influenced by de Camp, as you can find several of de Camp’s works recommended on Appendix N. Perhaps the idea of the “good aligned” bear with a thinking human mind in AD&D took some inspiration from this story.

Beanz

I only have 1 brilliant insight to add: This was my first sighting of Chekov's bear.

Jim Cannon

L. Sprague deCamp : Robert E. Howard :: August Derleth : H. P. Lovecraft

Ben A

Just came here to note that, for anyone interested in reading a fun (and informative) guide to living in medieval England (since it came up briefly at the top of the show), check out Ian Mortimer's The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England. Disease is only one of your many worries; the law and individual rights of the time might get you killed quicker than any infection. (And another volume that's a little less detailed but equally informative is Wyllie, Acton, & Goldblatt's The Time Travelers Handbook.) Also, loved the show and the choices this month. Looking forward to the pure strangeness of next week's horror tale.

Matt Baldwin

Johnny had more than the bear necessities required to save humanity. I’ll see myself out.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

Perhaps my first experience of uplift was unconscious? As a child, I had a picture book of Smokey Bear's origin story. I remember the fire. The firefighters. The firefighters finding a bear cub half-way up a burnt tree. And I knew about the hat wearing, shovel holding Smokey who told folks that they could prevent forest fires. The connection between those two was never made clear. But at some level might I have understood that the firefighters passed the bear cub on to scientists who used chemicals to uplift that li'l fella? Why not?

Michael Cunliffe

An intelligent bear saves a man’s job… Is this story a prequel to Paddington?

Oleh R

Pretty sure Patton Oswalt has had a bit in a special about how when men get older they suddenly develop a fascination with WW2. Chad admitted to watching hours of YouTube history content. I think he’s in his old man era. Next up? Keeping the tv unreasonably loud and complaining about contemporary fashion… Great episode, you’re on a roll!

Ziggy Bartdust

I see the theme of this month, Last story was a touching story about bears making fire, this story was about a bear Smoking some would be world conquering dweeb as he steped out of his car

Dave Parfitt

Take it from me, A Real Scientist: if you want to know how much antimatter is in a banana, you simple need to count the number of na's in the word. So, regular banana? No problem. Banananana? Watch out!

Eldritch Golem (JPM)

I am beyond thrilled that my comments about Terry Bisson's "Bears Discover Fire" has led to Weird Bear Month as well as Chris and Chad finally covering L. Sprague de Camp. Thank you both so much! Incidentally what you said about de Camp writing stories in order to critique other writer's work is true and is perhaps best embodied in another of my favorite de Camp tales: "A Gun for a Dinosaur" (1956). Unfortunately, unlike "The Command," this is not a story about a dinosaur that learns how to use a gun. Rather it's about a time-traveling big hunter named Reginald Rivers. If that premise sounds familiar it's because this story was de Camp's response to Ray Bradbury's classic "A Sound of Thunder" (1952) as de Camp was sure that Bradbury's understanding of time travel was wrong. Funny enough, Brian W. Aldiss was also sure that Bradbury and de Camp were both wrong, not about time-travel about how a dinosaur safari would play out for the human hunters and so he wrote the story "Poor Little Warrior!" (1958) in response. Decades later David Drake would write several stories in homage to this sub-genre which were later collected in the book Dinosaurs & a Dirigible (2014). So... any chance I can sell you guys on a Dinosaur Safari Month???

Joel Cuthbert

May have been discussed already, but another Bear story that was wild is Jeff Vandermeer’s The Third Bear.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

Sometimes you're just folding laundry and then your podcast choice gives you bear snipers. Amazing. Also amazing: Apparently de Camp and his wife Catherine rewrote this for "younger readers" as a story called "The Bear Who Saved the World" in the 1970s! I haven't been able to find out if they made it less traumatizing for children re: ice-cream scoops.

Anne Ominous

I really appreciate the bio work you two do on these authors. It always provides some great context for the era or their work. Nothing in deCamps bio prepared me for murder bear though!

Podcast by Night

Hey guys! First time commentor, long time listener. In reading some of these comments about the command, I understand why the story struck me as having a very pulpy feel. I’m fascinated by the idea that it highly intelligent, nonverbal animal could be the hero of an adventure story of good science versus evil science. But if you look closely, both sciences are mad. I mean, only a mad scientist would think to create a smart animal à la Dr. Moreau. but matter still is world domination thank you guys so much love love love the show.