in good morning hello listeners you are welcome to changes the show on sustainability here on this slightly cooler tuesday morning her a we're out of the heat wave for a little bit i am your contributing producer justin under and in the studio today we have me and we have emily or hello and patrick siebold and do you know dear listeners what that means it is time for librarians on the radio and i realize that i don't have the actual theme jingle it cleared up right here so let's all sing yeah let's say ok actually we will forgo singing it is good but it's time for librarians on the radio go librarians go here so it is summertime like i said the heat wave is it has broken but the living is it easy or is this a time to get in a car or on a bike or on a boat and you know whatever and hit the open road to get away from it all on today's show we are going to be talking about road trips and some of the things that we can do  librarians to make them better and you know just how people can deal with with the fun of road tripping around ok so before we get into things and really patrick when is the last time you one of you went on a world problems and hindsight but i was rotary down in mexico in a van twit of and and it broke down so in the mill the night in the desert soul i handed over the keys to the first family the pick me up and i wound up writing the rest away down t transmissible highway in the back of a boat that is kind of awesome yet no good story emily do you have anything to top this well i don't know if i can top that but the one that's at the forefront of my mind because it's also the most recent for counting buses as road trips and i'd also involves a breakdown so i was on a bus in cambodia a ride that was supposed to take five hours at about the fifteen hour mark  i find after about five breakdowns of the bus i finally decided to abandon my backpack and the bus and hopped in a minivan with about twenty other locals and finished the rest of my journey wh broke down but i got to drive from winnipeg to to mt rushmore to denver to visit some friends in kansas city where i totally broke my pesky tarion ways because of kansas city barbecue so there we go so i you left behind a backpack i left behind you know ideals of sustaining yeah standing animal life and so there we go yes ok well that's awesome so first up on the show today we have jason couplers interview with alexander r y alexander roy is he's the author of a book called driver which is about kind of road tripping taken a little bit more seriously than i have ever done so yeah let's get jason on here so today on n the cheapest hotel i could find so alex the reasons why i wanted you on the show today is our july show is all about road trips and your book for me in particular is one that i recommend a lot to reluctant world and really you chronicle a very extreme road trip can you tell us about the book and that road trip in particular she went growing up i was a fan of them i've always loved cars and my favorite movie w and i dreamt of driving cross country as fast as i could and you know when i finally got that was old enough to have a car nigel cross country in three days then i got down to like just a little bit above two days and eventually i went on to enter various underground rallies and just a street racing and eventually broke the cross country driving record and the book really document my love of cars as a kid all the way through breaking a cross country record very cool and you know the thing about your book and the thing that appeals to not just reluctant readers but any and it's mostly males that are recommended too is that it's got a little bit of everything i mean it's got sort of the deal eagle factor right and it scott carson is caught technology and it's not just you jumping in your car and racing from new york to l a but all the planning i think is interesting and then some family history some historical racing information too and then the find so fascinating so could you talk a little bit maybe about the planning to begin with sure well you know the this is the thing is almost every guy sure that i've met and anywhere in the world shares a love of the same things growing up machines missions planning you know getting the job done p part of a team and you know when i went to my book tour you know i really expected i don't know what i expected never been a book tour in my life but i didn't expect to see so many people from the military from law enforcement from technology coming to meet me i expect to kind of like bookish people to show up and i heard almost exactly the same thing that you heard which was these are people who if they have to read read things only for work and almost every one of them said to me that they couldn't believe they actually read my book and that they loved it and the second question was whether i wrote it myself because they couldn't figure out how i had the time given how much time i was spending working on my car right  and the book itself is really i mean i think maybe half of it has to do actually with underground racing or illegal you know cannonball or gumball type races the other half is about really about the motivation and all the planning required you know when you look at the news and you hear that there's been a street racing accident and you think you know that you know some some poor kid got killed or a bystander got killed you think they're going to spend the next you know years of their lives you know you know regretting that they killed someone or dealing with injuries and i'm amazed that driver education is so terrible because this book really describes we spent years planning to do something it was only going to take thirty thirty one hours right you know thousands of hours of research and planning was done to be in the car for one hour and that's really you know i think it's a lesson for life you should never do anything that you to be completely professional about it when cross country and i think two hundred seventy one hours and he did this in a series of motorcycles and then cars and back then you know met car manufacturers there was no speed limit and there was no interstate system so car manufacturers would lend new cars to decided you know that speed limit of fifty five just come in and you know there was always an anti war protests and marches against the government to kind of strike out make a political state and the statement was we have this amazing highway system the interstate system why can't we drive faster than fifty five if we are a good driver so try to organize this illegal race called the cannonball run and through the seventy's a few dozen drivers eventually more than i think sixty or seventy teams went from new york or connecticut all the way to los angeles and the times cross country dropped eventually dropped down to thirty two hours and fifty one minutes on the last cannonball and seventy nine right after that races went underground it was an illegal completely secret race in the eighty's called the u s express and so i learned all this hour around two thousand and three when i went to mccall the gum ball three thousand which is kind of a tribute to those old races but it's don't races we're races in name and structure but they were not sanctioned they were not legal you know the participants were aware of what they were doing and there was a gentlemen's agreement that they would keep times the police didn't like this and in one thousand nine hundred three the f b i actually intervened and warned the participants in the u s express race that if they do this again they're all going to be arrested before the next race starts the gumball three thousand is very different right unlike the where they would she would pay i think you know a few hundred dollars a donation to a charity and there's no entry fee and there's no hotels and there's a party never pays goes dutch right on the gumball three thousand the you pay today something on the order of one hundred thousand dollars to enter yes and it's five days and you stop every day once or twice as large the dinner that's a party and what you have and i think i enjoyed it when i did it but you really had here are people who want to pretend that they've done in the illegal race right who are paying to go on an expensive road trip with other people who want to protect and that's on this race and out of a hundred cars or sixty cars maybe three or four people are serious people with racing experience who treated like a rich rate and i guess i was as close as one might come to being one of those people when i did ten years come right and is the how is the bull run different than the gum ball just america is i mean i culturally the bull run has attracted i think a superior quality of person than the gum ball for a little run is much cheaper and you can draw a direct and inverse correlation between the level of the entry fee and the kind of person the quality of the character the people that go right the kind of person who can crash a porsche turbo and replace it within hours with no hesitation price is generally a a kind of a not a hoax but you know the celebrities who show up on the gum ball if they do show up at all usually show up for an hour or two at the party and maybe drive one leg of the event in my in my i observed of the celebrities i observed on i've done four gumballs i observed only three or four actually get in a car and do the whole event mostly they show up at the start line of the finish line and for the party that's it guys they'd probably he probably he'd have to leave because they beat him up right off and honestly alex i want to believe that housefull hof did the whole race like i can't my world view would be changed if you told me that the hof didn't do the entire race i mean i'd put money on that he didn't you know you know i mean if someone should if he showed up in the knight rider car and drove himself to the whole thing yeah that would be i'd be cool with that but that's it and one more current question  about so called celebrities do you think the jackass guys did it where were you there to know i wasn't there but i know people who were there of course they had it easy because they were in a limo or a jag they were asleep half the time and had four guys taking turns right when we go when i go and when the serious teams go i don't even know if there are any more serious teams when the serious teams go it's two guys no drinking no smoking we treat it like a professional endurance race for us it's like we carry right all our own supported equipment we carry any tools i need there is no one to help and it's deadly serious and we get to a hotel we are straight to bed right next morning we're up at five thirty and we are in the car waiting to leave other guys are asleep told ten or eleven  and if they're it's you know it's difficult stuff if you if you try to chairs and you say guys but i know that one of your co pilot's was a woman a former girlfriend is all right so there are you know there are serious women drivers too well my girlfriend that year amanda kinsley didn't drive but she will have to be a hotel concierge at a ritz carlton and i thought that would be an excellent copilot to bring because we're going to north africa if you need  women who go on this who actually drive but occasionally there are there are and you have people jodi kitt plays a model she's a professional race car driver and she's a really terrific person i really enjoyed meeting her coal now what about tax how is the tech team just over the years and talk again a little bit about the tech you used on that transcontinental record breaking run so back in the seventy's you know radar detectors were invented so if people were going to enter the cannibal run they would install a fuel cell a c b radio a police scanner and then when the first great architecture developed by cincinnati microwave called escort was released late sevent s they would install that and maybe they'd bring binoculars and that was it into the eighty's scanners improved radar detectors improved and but there weren't any major changes until you know the discovery channel we showed up and we had all these things and everybody else had nothing or maybe they had a radar detector but we were really really serious about this and by virtue of buying the basic items that people  use thirty years we came out far in front of the other teams right three years later when cross country to break the record we added a whole nother universe of technology so we had night vision cameras to displays thermal camera on the dash we had an air to ground radio we had a spotter plane flying over the interstate looking for police and radioing locations back to us in the car we had police lights sirens break like kill switch or we're running like kill switch the front of the car was covered in radar absorbent coating an anti laser film placed over the headlights headlight then we went across that since then and it's been almost ten years there's another level of technology and that is ways previously that was trapster these peer to peer police location apps although i actually believe that one could go across faster and i was proven correct because just two years ago chap another team of allegedly went faster than we did and they want to we want to cross the thirty one hours and these guys went across and just under twenty nine now alex i got to c finally produced footage of their spotter plane shooting video of them in a red ferrari and interstate so we went across we brought a camera crew and we had a dozen or more witnesses because you really have to have a level of ever of this kind and in two thousand and thirteen i think ed bone and david black went across and they claim a time twenty eight fifty and which is i think approaching the theoretical limit of what can be done in terms of cross country time they did not shoot any video right have g p s proven they have other items so i my gut my gut tells me they probably did we'll never really know and you went as far as to  idea of the day you know the only way to prove one hundred percent that you've gone is to have video right because you can't fake that to be i mean you could do it cos it would cost so much money why why bother i can't even imagine why i would bother the g p s with tracks can be fake it's very difficult but it can be done right last this past year on april first i put on a hoax yeah about where i claim to have gone to yeah i got twenty six twenty eight face all the g p s all the pictures so we had the same level of evidence as at bowling and he thought we had done it right and then we confessed and  know i like it and i've spoken to him and i think you know after you meet someone you know whether it's telling the truth among people who've done such things there's you know when i meet ed to me this is a guy who did that and so the other thing i want to ask you about is the moth tell us about the moth what is it you've got some great stories and you're involved in an oral history project and podcasting well the you know i'm talking to librarians on the radio it's funny the mosque was what i was doing before i got in a car and so driving around fast like this the moth is its storytelling series which was born in savannah georgia from a group of writers led by an author named george green and when they had no money they were young they would sit on his porch and tell stories to each other and by gaslight and that the moths would come and eat their clothes two years later when he became a successful author he began the organization which invites people off the street random anyone to come and tell true stories you know four to twelve minutes a length on the theme of the evening which could be love betrayal sex money death money whatever and  know five and ten story tellers and anyone can show up and tell a story and that grew into the bigger shows where stories are curated and storytellers are chosen in advance so now these stories events take place in new york and l a and number of other american cities london dublin and i go to many shows i can i was at one time the chairman of the board right now i'm just a fan it is and i've owned nightclubs of been involved in the shop business it is by far the most fun thing one can do just to meet interesting people it's you might walk in and meet the most famous person you saw in a movie and have a normal conversation with them that would never happen  starbucks write them very cool well if you're ever wrote this way maybe we'll have to host one of those events because it sounds like an excellent library program well put you in touch with them for sure is listening go ok so that was jason cutler interviewing writer and outlaw racer alexander roy now i know there must be some of our listeners here that are thinking that sort of that kind of racing across the continent it might be kind of the opposite of sustainability but yeah but if they made a library and storytelling connections in there and really heading out into the wild yonder that's that's kind of like a cultural sustainability or am i reaching wild blue yonder yeah yeah exactly and all of their and they mention the mothman the moth is awesome the moth is awesome and you know i can put out an offer that might ease people's minds a little bit you know i have to do my due diligence says the electronic resource librarian and say that if you want to fix up your jalopy and recycle that automobile instead of tossing it out you can do that with online resources the library has things like small engine repair auto repair reference under vehicle safety and inspection standards things that are really pricey to buy on your own yeah and like you can get whole exploded charts of engines and you know these and like it's amazing what you can access and wiring diagrams of and i'm talking like i know anything about you and me both ok but now emily we are going to come to the thing that some stuff that i know you know about because we are coming into  for us today on our road trip episode well you know when i thought about road trips what better to listen to while your eyes and hands are occupied like when driving on a road trip then audio books so  what i wanted to talk about today is just offer a few recommendations for you and by recommendations i mean things that i have downloaded it's my personal audio book shelf so all of the ones i'm going to mention are available through our audio book blender at the world is harper lee's ghost set a watchmen which is the sequel to or the first draft of depending on who you're talking to to kill a mockingbird which is that pulitzer prize winning high school english class classic of race issues in the south during the depression and i don't know about you guys but i haven't read that since high school which was a long time ago and while i remember the character names like skeleton atticus and boo radley and the general premise which is that a black man gets accused of raping a white woman i want to refresh my memory of the original with ghost set of watchman being in the media for slightly controversial reasons that being that some say lee was in declining better so i was reminded of the original and i found out that the audiobook version or one of them is narrated by the actress to basic and i don't know the idea of languishing with an iced tea while listening to her relaxed southern drawl it just seen really appealing for the summer months so we've actually got a clip of that said get you all relaxed and just to set you up what this is is scout talking about how her father or the lawyer atticus isn't comfortable with her shooting a certain type of bird that when he gave us our air rifles atticus wouldn't teach us to shoot uncle jack instructed us in the rudiments there of he said atticus wasn't interested in guns atticus said to jim one day i'd rather you shot it ten cans in the back yard but i know you'll go after birds shoot all the bluejays you want if you can hit em but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird that was the only time i ever heard atticus say it was a sin to do something and i asked miss ma the about it your father's right she said mocking birds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy they don't eat up people's gardens don't nest in corn cribs they don't do one thing but saying important in audiobooks yes she really sets the tone the authentic tone of that and i notice you didn't not off but she does speak softly slowly and but that can be depending on what you're going for that can be pretty relaxing so yeah what that was was introducing the metaphorical basis of the title obviously and probably not the best one not the best but audiobook to take it to have read to you at you know at two in the morning it's like  when you're on the road driving across featureless prairie thing in the middle of the night maybe not yeah ok but i know you have other ones that we can talk about here yes so one that does kind of keep you on your toes and energized is one by the comedian tina fey so her autobiography is called bossypants and it's pants wedding we funny of her life must far from growing up a theater nerd in suburban philadelphia to her struggles as an up and coming comedian in a male dominated field and for the unfamiliar tina had a successful career on saturday night live and went on to write movies like mean girls and create and star in the t v show thirty rock so in her memoir she touches on gender inequality the craft of comedy motherhood body image in the media and she does it in a way that's uniquely her own and imaginative and actually sensitive to multiple viewpoints even  no nonsense once and she never compromises that in her work or in the telling of her life so to demonstrate her sassiness here is a clip of tina responding to one of her critics on the internet from t m c dot com posted by kevin two fourteen on nov ninth two thousand and eight at eleven thirty eight am tina fey cheated anyone who has ever seen an old picture of her can see she has had one hundred percent plastic surgery her whole face is different she was ugly then and she is ugly now she only wished she could ever be as beautiful as sarah pailin dear kevin two fourteen what can i say you have an amazing guy i guess i have caught up in the whole hollywood thing i thought i could change one hundred percent of my facial features bluster i've had my lips thinned and i've had a treatment called grandma's where to fishing wires a run through my job lined and used to gather the skin until it looks like a fancy pillow i've had sebaceous implants a small balls of wrestle and placed in random locations to give the appearance of youthful neck acne i don't have botox unfortunately i'm allergic instead i have monthly injections of brahma die alone a farm strength rat poison this keeps my face in a constant state of irritation and paralysis which of course is indistinguishable from sexual excitement my face is longer and thinner than it was twenty years ago and while some might say that this is a natural effect of weight loss and aging you and i know the truth i pay a woman to sit on the side of my head twice a week and there we go yes i said the chuckling there yes i am staying awake to listen to that on the road well yeah she did a really good job of keeping me awake on a road trip to oregon not long ago she was a really good companion and part of the reason why this works so well as an audiobook is that you know obviously narrates the book herself and that clip is a perfect example of the benefit of hearing the author's only voice her own story because really if you had somebody else playing the first person that would be a little bit awkward neil gaiman's is another author who has recorded several of his own audio books that work really well but it's especially successful with me s it's kind of hard for someone else to tell your own life story yeah i'm sure well especially with someone like tina fey who is an actress right she's an actor she knows how to tell a story well and a comedian on top of that that's a huge mention is also a memoir and it's also narrated by an actor and that is not my father's son by the scottish actor alan cumming and while he does sprinkle in plenty of dry british wit the general tone is not nearly as light hearted as phase the focus of his memoir is on allen's relationship with this is strange father who was physically and emotionally abusive so coming was prompted to reconnect with his father after he agreed to go on the british show who do you think you are which you haven't heard of that it's a documentary that traces genie logical roots of celebrities and through it old wounds are reopened and family secrets revealed it's really heart wrenching and honest senate times kind of difficult to listen to because he's really briefly recounting some traumatic experiences so the clip i've got is alan's dad dragging him into a shed to forcibly shave his head with a rusty shearers after is that decided he hadn't responded to his command to get a haircut quickly enough and he's about ten or twelve years old here i should put out there now that this could be triggering for people so it is a pretty explicit account of violence to a child so ok it is about a minute and a half i believe he threw me up on top of the workbench he was being you know not just shouting you couldn't understand what he was saying but i knew i had to do remember looking up at it as he scrambled in a drawer behind me so my head was propelled forward by his hand the other one wielding a rusty pair of clippers that he used on the sheep we had in the field in front of our house they were blunt and dirty and it cut my skin but my father shaved my head with them holding me down like an animal i was hysterical now i says derek as he was but i knew he enjoyed hearing me scream and it would be over quicker if i was quiet and limp but i was so hear i was in pain and shock and i still hadn't had a drink of water and i thought i was going to pass i with trying to catch my breath all i could do was wait for the end of eventually it was over push my head one way then the other in order to inspect his back of my head was gone yeah intense intense stuff yeah and you know it's impossible to imagine something so personal being read by anyone else and the audio format i think really adds to the intimacy of being privy to that kind of personal sensitive account so that book if you're interested in it the format kind of jumps from flashbacks to present day and again it's called not my father crowd in on your beat here yeah when i when i was when you told me you were doing audio books for the beeps and boops here i thought of probably my favorite thing my favorite book to take on a road trip and stuff is the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy the classic and the classic work from the eighty's by douglas adams and as you said we have we have the audio book in our in our overdrive system so one of these things yes so i'm just going to play a bit here and again we've got the british narrator it's a stephen fry is narrating this so this is the audio book version of the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy if i asked you where the hell we one of the space ships of the vote going to construct a fleet set off this is obviously some strange usage of the word safe that i wasn't previously aware of how did we get here he asked shivering slightly we hitched a lift said ford excuse me said arthur are you trying to tell me that we just stuck out our thumbs and some green bug eyed monsters stuck his head out and said from the the book version of the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy and this i wanted to bring up because emily we when we have the audio books like that's a single narrator they're reading it here if you want to just talk of the just mention what other what are other options are sure well that is like you said a single actor reading the book version of that but sometimes you might run across audio books that are read by they called in full cast recordings so they have different actors different voiceover actors reading the different characters from the book now the unique thing about this which i just found kind of a new is that the book version was not the original of the story so it actually started out as a radio drama that started out as audio totally did it's one of those things that they made it in the they at the b b c radio phonic workshop and stuff and it was this big cool project it was douglas adams  first thing and so we have a little bit of the radio drama version here of that exact same scene that we just had just to kind of give our listeners the difference between yeah drama version and the flashing large computer screens the old mattress is yeah so there we go i love i love that that i am a sucker for sound effects and yet the lights going on there that is something that you didn't know you were missing until you heard it exactly although i have to say stephen fry is amazing he also does he also does the harry potter movie and it is it is so good like i'm not a harry potter fan you know being a hobbit talking guy but i listened my colleague forced me to listen to stephen fry and it is so good we just as a side note you can't be a fan of tolkien and harry potter will you think you can yeah i was one of those guys everybody was reading it so i was like oh i'm too cool again i encourage you to go check out our audio book collection you know you can get lots of them for free yeah the library go check it out library ok and so you probably our listeners book and what is your book and my book is china in maysville zx book the iron council or actually it's not the iron council it's just iron council so how about i do my one sentence blurb about mine and then we can get into fighting over our issues here that's good iron council is a book it's set in kind of a steam punkish fantasy sort of world it's about the crew of this train who are building this rail line kind this manifest destiny thing they're building this a rail line across the continent and then they go rogue and they take they steal the train and they go off into the wastes while the city behind them is going through a revolution and so yet people want the iron council the people who made the revolt on the train they want them to come back to the city to lead the revolt in the city so that is iron council what is it seventy about seventy in typical neal stephenson fashion  to just a big info dump of a novel so much information it's a very conventional scythe email it starts the first line is the moon blew up with no warning and no apparent reason so it's a conventional idea but stevenson does really neat things with it the earth has about two years before the hard rain and the biblical fire there's going to destroy everything on earth so what to do well of course they go to space but there's no idealizing space here it's a hard unfriendly place and it kills a lot of people but then that's just one of three books this book happens in three phases and i don't want to give away the last phase because stephenson does a really good job of building up the tension  a book kind of like a road trip you want somewhere interesting to go what kind of settings that are interesting destinations so what does seven eves have for destinations and settings in there that well the destination is well the immediate destination is the near earth orbit because everything on the planet is going to get fried so you have to get out there and really in terms of getting there stephenson does it so well it's all the orbital mechanics and like propellant limitations  learn about all this stuff like it's rare inside the it that you actually learn stuff but stephenson actually uses it science fact of today to describe it so it's so it's actually pretty neat and then you know what the intention is to get further because near  orbit turns out to be kind of dangerous with all these moon fragments floating around so how to do that well maybe capture an icy comet perhaps who so and then getting there there's all this talk of delta v and puji and whatever that is an a destination so it's there's a big part of the book that takes place in the city of new crops on which is kind of a hellish place it's it's hot they're in they're at war with this unseen enemy and they're like these kind of magical incursions coming in and yeah and good people are angry about are angry about everything and it's well i don't know it's kind of like if you've seen do the right thing the heat and how it builds up to you know social unrest kind of thin that's what's happening in the city and so the rest of the book there's it starts off chasing they're chasing they're chasing this man who used to make golems the so if you know so it create create beings out of the earth and  think of as materials themselves is so there's this chase thing so that it starts off with them trying to find the find judah lowe who will come who will be able to come back and save the city when the people find him he's like no i am going to find the iron council because they took the train a rogue and they are the ones who can save us and so then we get these flashbacks to how he became a goalie messed in the swamps with these alien kind of spike walking creatures that teach him how to sing sing life into into muck and stuff and then it flashes back to that with the train when the train goes rogue and it's like and they're like digging tunnels through the mountain side and they're going through the smoke scape the smoke scapes into things where they're like geysers that turn people to see that the smoke if that touches you it turns you to stone and things and they're going through these chaos waste and so it's like it's all of this yeah ritually imagined crazily fantastic stuff and it's a world that you can probably much like near earth orbit you probably don't want to actually be there but it is asinine ating to read about all these weird thing going on there so those are our kind of settings there so for seventy five what about the plot what's kind of pulling you along well the plot in the first of the three books is the obvious tension in the timeline you know the earth is literally ticking down so how you know there's tension is palpable how we can achieve this you know it's not some big arc that humanity creates rather it's just this explosion of these tiny little cylinders under sent up in popular with people with real it with no idea what's going to happen next they just kind of are going to huddle in this near earth orbit and hopefully come up with something better and great so that's that's the first part the second you know really i mean the title is seven eve so what after these you know fifteen hundred people that get sent up there there's also the human element there's rebellion  unlike the are in council it's a less probably overtly political novel i would say but there's also a real strong feminism component in it because the seventy s are the people are going to found the next generation of is a bit more scattered the it's not quite like and he may feel it totally as choose the whole train metaphor in how it's how the book is created it doesn't start at one point and follow the line out it's a novel that really circles around itself a lot and so you start off trying to find the goal of mest there and then you go back to the city and you learn about the revolution and the political elements and the things that are going on there and then you jump back in time to how the goal of this became the goal jump forward in time to this a revolt and then you jump even further forward and is like so good on linear and apply a very non linear kind of stuff and and by the end and ok i will spoil a little bit of it here by the end when the train is coming back to the city and that city has completely is like collapsing in on itself politically and things they've they've been assassination plots and like all these crime things going on so really does th circular kind of thing which is interesting and really i feel like it actually brings the road trip metaphor even a bit more more into play because you know you've got to come home again it's like you can you can light out for the territories but at some point yeah that becomes your home or you have to come back to a home and things and so yeah so plot wise i think it's a little bit less straightforward although since you won't tell us what the what happens in your is too but the thing is is that it doesn't romanticize right enter his movements and stuff it doesn't it it's like everything is being co opted and yeah being used against itself and everyone thinks that they're doing the right thing but not necessarily everyone is and ok we are actually running low on time so let's let's hit characters ok quick question do you want to spend time with the characters in your book if you were trapped in a in or if you were trapped in a car with them or in a tiny little cylinder shot into space when you want to be with your character well that's an interesting question because the people like astronauts and i was thinking of this as i was reading the book you know so maybe a lot of them i would actually want to hang out with because there's so focused or soul science e d or so singular in there i mean only a couple of them in short you know there's there's a celebrity kind of scientist in there sean probes who's ruse really kind of visionary kind of a play on the whole yawn musk thing i think i might you know i would hang out with him the other ones are  kind of hard not to stephenson doesn't do a good job of characterization he does and there's also a few there's more characters that i really would not like to hang out with their item real they're really villains well actually yeah there's one but you know that's a tough question it's spec you know i've always thought i've wanted to go to space but this made me kind of think twice of both because it seems really in a hospital and all right well in iron council there are the main characters cutter cutter is one of the guys who you follow and he's the one who's kind of driving the search for judah and he's kind of trying to bring him back to the city he's trying but then he's like the city can't handle you and stuff so the main characters in this book yes i would totally want to hang out with a lot of the secondary characters are a lot well that's kind of where the political element of me feels the stuff it's like wow they are incendiary firebrands and stuff ok but we are running low on time so i think that's that's going to be so emily you know we have been you have not read either of these books i have not you know and i haven't actually read either of these authors while i don't have any preconceptions with that said i have to admit hearing the elements of the iron council justin's book did have a bit of a head start for me and can cry i have personal favorite isn't towards things like golems and trains and apocalyptic wastelands and so you know you had a head start in that way that's funny you did a really intriguing job patrick you know so adding it up with the moon exploding i am definitely intrigued by that and you justin it was really close though and you know i i also appreciate i had to say the little jab of asking whether the political agenda gets in the way the story that you know that definitely  now that he is done with it it was an e book actually follow that digital rights management and if i may for those listeners who are interested in something similar and you weird as the martian  popular this year and if you want kind of an extension or expansion of that this would be the book for you it's you it's funny you mention that that's on my audiobook lists of things to listen to next apparently the narration is pretty amazing oh isn't  all right and with that we are done with librarians on the radio today thank you so much patrick and emily for being here thank you listeners now we also did have a an interview with john comment about kayaking the coast we did not quite have enough time to fit it into the episode today we will be having it on our website that is at v i r l dot b c dot ca you'll be able to find it there on librarians on the radio thank you so much for listening if you want to get in touch with us you can send an e mail to librarians on the radio at v i r l dot b c dot ca if you have something you want to talk about book wise or otherwise and with that i believe it is the end oh our show thank you so much strange how did we get it if then what's the point it's out of date now i'm doing the field research for the new revised edition of the guide so for instance i would have to include a revision pointing out that since the bogans have made so much money being professionally because they like the company but mostly because of their noise the vogels which is exactly the sort of thing you need to know if you're an impoverished hitchhiker trying to see the marvels of the galaxy far less than thirty out arion dollars a day and that's my job fun isn't it