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Study 088 - No Connection (Patreon)

Published:
2024-04-25 14:00:06
Imported:
2024-04
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Evolved bears rule America, but their dominance is threatened when evolved chimps show up in No Connection by Isaac Asimov!

Special thanks to reader Levi Nunez of Loot the Body! Back the Kickstarter for GHZ #1: Collaborative Storytelling Comes to MOTHERSHIP now!

Check out the work of Edd Cartier!

Next up: An extra credit episode on... BEARS! Facts, defense, movies and lore. Tune in!

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Comments

Ada Terrill

I’m usually just a lurker, but I love the calendar idea so much that I had to come comment while I’m still listening to the episode. I love calendars and I already know this would be my favorite by far!

ESTY

“I’m afraid of aBEARicans” There’s your name for the weird bear feedback episode.

Cole Caron

Turns out anarchy is a viable political system at scale, but mostly for hyper-intelligent bears.

Allison Albright

It's kind of funny that most of the weird bear month stories depict bears as living in more innocent, slightly idealized ways. Similar to humans, but maybe happier even if less sophisticated. It's probably incorrect and just anthropomorphizing on my part, but I do kind of get that vibe about bears, or at least about the idea of bears. If bears could write stories and make podcasts and a bear podcast featured a weird humans month, I wonder what those stories would be like. What would bears use humans to say about bears?

Professor Murder

On Bears in Sci-Fi: I recommend the ttrpg "Bulldogs." It's a farcical sci-fi game which among other PC Alien choices as a species called the Urseminites. They resemble 3-4ft tall teddy bears as they were genetically engineered, possibly as pets or nannies. But they have gone on to be among the most reviled species within setting, due to their propensity for being hard living, violence prone maniacs. Think Rocket Raccoon through the lens of Paranoia. The game is really great at the right table and worth a look.

The Spider Incident

The only other Rafe I know of (and the first time I heard it as a name) is Rafe Ball of Rachel Watches Star Trek fame. I now believe him to be a literal bear.

Jamie Allinson

Shouldn’t this story be called ‘Bears discover communism?’

Jim Cannon

I would not discount technology completely as a key to the conquest of the Americas. The capital city of Mexico had a population of a million people when Hernan Cortes landed on the coast with three ships, five hundred guys, and a couple horses. But the Spanish still took over, and it wasn’t through microbes. It was through taking advantage of an unstable political situation primarily, but it was also because you had a society with gunpowder invading a society with essentially stone age technology (now, cultural complexity here has nothing to do with anything). When the Spanish took Tenotchtitlan, they did it block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and the Mexicans fought as well as they could but against cannon and guns they had no real defenses. Succeeding conquerors did have a head start later on, thanks to Spanish expeditions into the interior of North America. Those guys got whittled down to nothing, but they sneezed on enough people that when the Puritans landed in New England, they found it “empty.” But it started with guns against spears.

Jim Cannon

I would say paleontologists have a little more than “no idea” when it comes to how dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures looked. Over two hundred years of studying them scientifically must count for something! The thing is, science is self-correcting, so when previous generations may have assumed T. rex, say, walked upright, further examination of a more complete skeleton and analysis of the hip and spinal structure indicates it walked with head and tail parallel to the ground. And it had feathers. Even coloring is no longer the mystery it once was, thanks to the amazing fossils coming out of China the last two decades, in which the colors of dinosaurs have been preserved. We know a lot about dinosaurs in fact and every year brings new discoveries and further refinement of our current knowledge. We’re a long way from Willis O’Brian giving T.rex three fingers in King Kong based on limited information.

Jim Cannon

Speaking of bears, and we were, I’m sure everyone is aware of the fact that Northern Europeans were so superstitious about bears that the word “bear” comes from the same word that developed into “brown.” Because saying the true name for bear would summon one, a problem no doubt of more immediate concern in Germany than, say, Greece or Italy where the Indo-European word for the animal remained in use. That word “Arktos” in Greek and “Ursus” in Latin would eventually gave us “Arctic.”

Mooncubus

Weird that this story stars Raph Bear. He's the producer for another podcast I listen to called "Rachel Watches Bear Tracks"

KateSherrod

My mind is blown by how much this story predates modern books like The Dawn of Everything, the early chapters of which (I haven't finished it yet) are all about how Native Americans of various tribes influenced writers like Rousseau by expressing their frank bewilderment at Europeans' fixations on hierarchy and power dynamics and property. Asimov's bear people sound just like Kondiaronk (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondiaronk), who toured Europe and roasted pretty much everything he saw. I wonder if Asimov read some of the accounts of him that the authors of Dawn of Everything relied on?

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

Apparently on the TikToks people are asking women whether they'd prefer to be alone in the woods with a bear or a man (or asking men which one they'd prefer for their daughters or what have you). According to a screenshot thread I read (strangely dated next month), women are choosing "bear" without hesitation, while men are asking "well, what kind of bear?" and other questions before making a decision. EDIT: Since I posted this yesterday, I've also seen a viral video that's been making the rounds for about a week: search for "black bear sits on a chair like a human" or words to that effect to realize that IT IS STARTING.

Mark Simmons

What a great theme month this has been! Interesting how so many of these writers depict their smart bears in a similar way - it's as if there's an unspoken consensus about what this character type represents, as distinct from, say, hyperintelligent apes or intellectual dogs. I guess it's sort of a fairytale motif, although one of the most memorable fairytale bears (in "Snow White and Rose Red") disappointingly isn't really a bear.

It's a Ghost.

While reading this story, I was confused what Asimov was exactly trying to say. It felt like a jumble to me. But I also think I struggled to understand its message because it seems to have a pro-communism message, which isn’t usually what I’m anticipating in the stories I read. The part of the story that reads, “The individual Gurrow took whatever job he felt an aptitude for, and such work as was left over and needed to be done was done either in common, or consecutively by each according to an order determined by lot,” is obviously a take on Karl Marx’s “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” so the bears are communists. Which does make sense, since we all know bears equal the USSR/Russia. And the chimpanzees represent colonizers and a capitalistic world driven by a desire for more, more, more for the self, which ultimately leads to destruction of others as well as ourselves, with nuclear war being the ultimate destruction. So communism is good (according to this story), but for it to work you have to be like bears, and Native Americans were perhaps "like bears." And capitalism, and the never-ending desire for more for yourself and a need to have more than others is a destructive path.

Thunk

Taking notes The bears share The bears volunteer The bears are fair The bear doesn't care

Jack Saul

The strange story podcast Drabblecast had a story called Roanoke Nevada, in which aliens arrive on earth and the human assigned to look after them in area 51 realises that these new arrivals are as much a threat to humans as Europeans were to native Americans, and so kills them all. Consequently,I thought this story was going to end with a similar revelation from the bears, who would then go "and hang on a minute, we're bears." and proceed to murder all of the chimpanzees with their powerful claws. On war of the worlds and disease, the Americas may be the wrong analogy for the disease issue in that story. Europeans had long been kept out of the interior of Africa because they were more vulnerable to diseases such as malaria, and had only been able to go there once medicines like quinine were developed. I think it's more likely that Wells was thinking about how the British Empire had been held at bay from conquering a people who were their technological inferiors for so long by the threat of simple microbes.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

Asimov was the writer I gravitated to first as a wee one reaching out for more challenging fare. This story certainly influenced a homebrew DnD world in two major ways: First, there were many intelligent races evolved from animals we might recognize. None of them were humans with animal heads. Their resemblance to the animal they evolved from was about the same as the amount humans resemble chimpanzees. Not all had thumbs. Not all spoke. Second, the races did not have societies that mapped onto different human societies. The goal was to have characters that did things for reasons that made perfect sense to them and no sense whatsoever to the human characters. Asimov, in other words, no matter how heavy-handed he could be always sent my mind racing and encouraged me to create.

Matt Shank

Maybe it's the times we live in or maybe I'm just dumb, but I've found that I often enjoy these very blunt take downs of human society. I think they've effective at pointing out the obvious insanity of the system we've built for ourselves, a topic which baffles me often. Imagine being able to travel to chart the stars, travel to the depths of the ocean, wipe out diseases, and genetically engineer crops so that no one has to go hungry, and instead giving like 25 guys all of the resources and then begging them to let everyone else have some before they jet off into space for a vacation.

Scott McCrate

If you loved the Edd Cartier illustration for the story in Astounding Science Fiction, this YouTube video on Cartier is excellent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq5Hfc6A_tU&t=667s The host Pete Beard has a great series about the history of illustration and many vids on particular artists. Highly recommended. This video (different publisher) regarding an unmade Ray Harryhausen version of War of the Worlds is excellent with some great production illustrations shown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XkRnPVI-qc

Anne Ominous

If someone had asked me 2 months ago if there were enough 'weird bear' stories out there for a month's worth of SSoSS, I would've said no. Color me flabbergasted. I'm equally shocked by the volume of comments this month too! Looks like y'all got degrees in bear fiction! Some of you must be getting paid by the word!

Apollo Sitting Up

I believe the lyrics go “I’m afraid of Abearicans!”

Steve

I call tautology! Explicate means to explain in detail, so you don't have to explicate in more detail.

Ziggy Bartdust

In a world where Bear evolved from Man?!

ChiveOnOCM

Belly rubs… wonderful.