Outro – S2 E1
Stranger in a strange land.
Hello survivors! And welcome back to the apocalypse. How was your time off? Did you miss us?
I’m pleased to say that the show has been growing very well since we last talked. We are over 20,000 downloads and we are approaching about 1,000 downloads a week.
That tells me a couple things.
One is that more people are finding the show. I have not been doing any paid advertising for the show. All I’ve done is drop a couple updates in social media. So this growth is all organic. Meaning people are finding the show without me having to push it.
So, that begs the question if I’m not pushing the show, how are people finding it organically? My guess would be it’s a combination of things. It’s what we would call a ‘virtuous cycle’. The more people download and listen, the more it gets recommended, both algorithmically in the podcasts apps and also by word of mouth.
So – thank you, for recommending the show, we appreciate it. Thank you for Liking it and thank you for writing a review if you have. Anything you can do to help pay it forward helps us all survive.
The second thing growth tells us is that the show is of a high enough quality and is compelling enough to have people recommend it. Which is great. If the quality is good, if we’re adding value, there is more pull from the marketplace.
I have an ask for those of you listening to this. With the growth of the show audience starting to climb up that hockey-stick curve and going exponential, does anyone have a great advertiser we could work with? Acast is putting ads in, but I could also read ad copy for the right company if you know a company or product that would be appropriate and ad value to our tribe here.
I’ll just leave that out there and see if the universe responds!
It’s also an Evergreen show. What I mean by that is you can start listening to season one today and get the same experience as those of us who started listening in January. That being said, new content keeps those customers who start listening coming back.
And that’s what Season 2 is all about.
We’re taking that universe and those characters we developed in Season 1 and building on them. Like I said my intention is to do 5 seasons of the show. Each season will target 20 episodes. My schedule is to drop an episode every 2 weeks.
The last season took us about 7 months. So, if we can continue with that fortnightly cadence that takes us out to March of 2022 to finish Season 2. Buckle up! Here we go!
We’ve got 36 members in our After the Apocalypse Facebook group – you can find it at “OldManApocalypse” https://www.facebook.com/groups/oldmanapocalypse.
The book manuscript from season one is done. I may go back and do some minor rewrites, just to make everything a bit more contiguous. I’m waiting on my book cover art. I’m not in a hurry, but if any of you have any publishing connections for this sort of stuff that you’d like to share, feel free.
When I make progress on that front, I’ll let you know. Join the Facebook group and watch for it.
…
While we were on our August break, I read a book called Astounding. The full title is “Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction” which pretty much sums up what the book was about.
It was an interesting read for me because I am a science fiction fan. It talks about how John W. Campbell nurtured these writers and how they then progressed into their careers. For example, it talks about how Campbell gave Asimov the idea for the laws of robotics.
Basically, they would bring a manuscript to Campbell and he would say “No, not that, write about this instead,” and that’s where we got a lot of our classic science fiction from. Like the Foundation series.
These guys didn’t think they were writing science fiction per se. They thought they were inventing the future. Campbell ended up taking credit for imagining the A-bomb before it was reality.
They also had a very specific view of how the world worked. They believed hard science was the solution to every problem. They were smart guys but filled with hubris and lack of self—awareness.
Those stories they wrote were about ideal supermen who could figure stuff out and beat the odds through their use of science and an independently minded drive. Their worlds were chauvinistic.
One of the things that they were very concerned about was that mankind could invent the weapons technology of self-destruction but was not developed enough to control it. They saw things like politics and psychology as weaknesses because they were not hard science.
That’s were you start to get stories, like the foundation series, where they replace the soft cultural things with mathematical models of psychohistory and mathematical sociology.
Science fiction in their hands became a sandbox to play with these ideas, and in this way science fiction became more than action stories. It became a modeling tool to think about and debate the future.
That was what the golden age of science fiction was all about.
Unfortunately, they began to believe their own tales and it bled over into the real world. First Campbell and Hubbard tried to rewrite psychology as a science. Unsurprisingly, this approach, captured in Dianetics, was rejected by the establishment.
After he was rejected by the real scientists Hubbard turned Dianetics into a religion, which we now know as Scientology. Hubbard was a real piece of work, but I’ll leave it at that and let you make your own judgments.
I’m currently about to crack open Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land that chronicles the adventures of a human raised on Mars discovering Earth culture. Apparently it was very popular with the 60’s counter culture. We’ll see how it ages.
That title, Stranger in a Strange Land is a quote from the bible. Or more specifically the King James bible created 1604-1611 in England from Exodus. The King James bible leans heavily on the Tyndale translation from a hundred years earlier, which was an improvement over the original Wycliffe bible from the 1300’s, where the same passage would have read “A comeling in an alien land”- which isn’t so easy on the tongue.
Anyhow, if you’re a fan of the golden age of science fiction it might be worth a read for you. That age and those works influence everything from Star Wars to After the Apocalypse.
What did you think of our first episode? Started right in with some action. I always like to start with some good action. Set the pace.
Feel free to send me feedback. Love any suggestions or critiques. I’m a student of this effort and always learning.
So far the most common feedback I get is “Don’t you dare kill off the dog!” I get it. I love dogs too. I’m warming my foot on my border collie Ollie as we speak. But, yah know the apocalypse is a dangerous place…
Even though our show is making progress, we are still running at a deficit. It would help greatly if you could go to the Patreon site and become a patron. We don’t want to see Bill get hurt now, do we?
Kidding! No hate mail please!
That’s it for me. Shoot me a note and say ‘hi’.
Looking forward to Season two.
And, above all else, keep surviving.
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