From the Podosphere: November ‘07 podcasts

Before I talk about November’s batch of stories in Escape Pod, I want to put in good word for host, editor, and publisher, Stephen Eley. Eley’s introductions, his reflections and observations, philosophical musings, and snippets about his life, make for engaging listening, and the warmth and intelligence of his intros (and outros) give Escape Pod a personal stamp, enhancing each stories content greatly.

In Mike Resnick’s “Me and my Shadow,” read by Stephen Eley, William Jordan is one of the erased—a man convicted of crimes he cannot remember because his memories and personality have been deleted. This high tech solution for dealing with criminals has, as you might imagine, its flaws. Jordan knows he’s an Erasure and invests a lot of energy trying to find out who he was before being reprogrammed to be fit for society. But the information he tries to uncover is “classified.” His questions about his past escalate one day when he hears a truck backfire and instinctively ducks, thinking it’s gunshot. Concluding that he has some familiarity with guns, or of dodging bullets, Jordan enters dangerous waters. He kills a prospective mugger and begins talking to an inner voice, which he comes to realize is his former self.

Resnick is always good at questioning the nature of reality, of making us think about memory, perception, the boundaries between fantasy and reality. While not on a par with “Barnaby in Exile” or “Down Memory Lane,” Resnick’s light touch makes this an easy, engaging listen, peppered with flashes of humor and dark deeds.

I had two difficulties with Cory Doctorow’s “Other People’s Money”: the extremely fast reading in Amanda Fitzwater’s rich, New Zealand accent, and, well, the story itself, if you can call it that. “Other People’s Money” reads like a speculative essay about the world of business in the future, the recyclable nature of technology and brand names, and some message about big money bad, small money good. It involves a VC—I was well into the story before I realized “VC” stands for “venture capitalist”—and an artist, who appears to be smarter and wiser than the businessman. Riddled with incomprehensible jargon, abbreviations, and unwieldy sentences, it lacked a dramatic arc as well as any sense of the characters as real people. I’ve liked some of Doctorow’s work in the past, and I can see why Forbes ran the print version (appealing, perhaps, to the financiers who comprise that magazine’s audience). It probably works better as text, but for me, it failed as an audio story. As for Amanda’s reading, it was lovely to hear a New Zealand accent, and I didn’t mind having to concentrate to pick up some of her words, but it made for a challenging listen—which may also be because she read so quickly. Being a Scot, I get offended when American audiences want subtitles on Scottish films, and I’m certainly not suggesting that Escape Pod should avoid using voices from across the globe, but I think a firmer editorial hand is needed to oversee how the voices are presented.

Extreme Safaris takes their clients to unsanctioned or dangerous worlds, and Bryer risks losing his licence when he takes three women on a hunting trip, and one of them shoots one of the sentient natives. But her reasons for shooting the native are not all they appear, and her actions have much wider consequences. On the surface “Sparks in a Cold War,” read by Stephen Eley, is a simple, Golden-Age-type SF story with astronauts in peril, laser guns, rampaging aliens, and treacherous environments. But this being by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, the story is not all it appears, either. Told that one of the aliens is the equivalent of “a suicide bomber,” we’re talking about contemporary fears and politics here—which is not to say the story is a diatribe or preachy in any way. You can easily choose to ignore the subtext and enjoy it for the ripping yarn it is.

I’m a big fan of period fiction and stories styled in the manner of the past two centuries. And so it was with great pleasure that I listened to Ann Leckie’s “Hesperia and Glory,” read by Frank Key. Shades of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne haunt the tale, which takes the form of a letter by a war veteran who is housing two rather odd tenants. One of them, Atkins, who his fellow tenant, Stark, says is mad, or perhaps “neuraesthenic,” claims to be on the run from a battle in his homeland of Hesperia, on Mars. And the gateway home is a well in the narrator’s cellar. The well doesn’t exist, apparently, but can we really be certain? The writing is terrific, capturing the period flavor brilliantly, and asks some big questions about how we make our own world. Seek this one out; you won’t regret it.

There is a nice bit of synchronicity in that Robert Silverberg’s tale about people receiving a newspaper containing news from the future was first published in 1973, the year I joined the local newspaper to train as a journalist. Like the people in “What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper” (read by Stephen Eley), I can imagine how exciting it would be to know what’s going to happen next week, especially the results of horse races, stock market reports, and other avenues of making easy money. Except, of course, there is a price to pay. One woman, for example, reads about the death of her sister the week before it happens. How the newspaper dated 1 December comes into these people’s lives in late November is never explained, but they seem all too ready to accept the paper as genuine—after some feeble debate about other possibilities, including the likelihood of it being a hoax. This is the element that lets “What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper” down, notwithstanding the unsettling finale.

Themes of sexuality, gender, what gives us our sense of identity, and what happens when the societal boundaries are transgressed are fertile ground for horror fiction such as “Finding Allison” by Glenn Krish. Set up as an examination of the loss of a relationship and the emotional train crash which results, what we think we’re hearing starts to bend out of shape, playing with our expectations. Two people already living on the edge, the man tries to make sense of the world after Alison’s departure, 12 months ago, and his drug-addicted friend, a woman who understands more than we realize, helps him embrace the strange and inevitable change that gives the tale its effective twist. Presented with a good reading by Alasdair Stuart.

In “Doghead” by Craig A. Strickland, read by Steve Anderson, an anxious computer programmer knocks down a dog with her car one evening on her way home. Against a backdrop where violent teenagers seem to lurk in every shadow, and after a recent discovery where she finds her two male bosses are not what they first appeared, hit-and-run feels like her only option. She fears she’s killed the dog but is afraid to go back to check. When she gets back home, she discovers the decapitated dog’s head on the front of her car—and its yellow eyes are looking at her. The twist ending isn’t entirely unexpected, and of itself it’s not the best part of the story, but the protagonist’s personal journey to it is, and her inner state, her fears and hopes are convincingly portrayed. The ending, unfortunately, had a touch of shaggy dog about it.

Even in flash fiction, where concision is key, there should be more than a tall tale you can tell your friends. But “Why I Hate Cake” by Paul Mannering, read by Alasdair Stuart, is nothing more than just that: an apocryphal story, or urban myth. Well enough written, but the ending was predictable and not nearly nasty enough.

The businessman in Richard E. Dansky’s “Connecting Door” (read by George Hrab) spends a sleepless night in a hotel room beset by noisy neighbors who bang on doors and windows, have arguments, use foul language, and speak in audible whispers—and that’s not the worst of it, either. Reception informs him that the room next door is unoccupied. While this was not entirely unexpected, it did create a nice frisson, and I genuinely felt the tension building as the man goes through his own personal torments, and the story draws to its inevitable, and quietly horrific, conclusion. I wasn’t keen on the authorial voice tying up loose ends at the end, though. It was unnecessary, as the tale worked well up to where it should have concluded.

Some listeners complained about the excessive use of “fuck” in the story, and the podcast host, Alasdair Stuart, contends that “Connecting Door” probably has the highest frequency of the word in the entire podosphere. But we’re talking ghosts or demonic presences here, so why be polite? Personally, I felt the forceful language only added to the disturbing, unsettling quality of the tale. Neighbors from Hell, indeed.

Patrick Samphire’s “The Western Front,” read by Paul Jenkins, takes place in the trenches of Ypres in 1917 and is written in the form of diaries and letters by Lieutenant Richard Stark to his wife. One of Stark’s men, Bird, keeps disappearing from the trenches during the night and sliding back in like a snake. Richard is repulsed by Bird and suspects him of being a traitor, but the truth about Bird is more complex. It’s unusual for a horror story to have a supernatural device as the positive element, but in a tale which captures the brutality and absurdity of war, it’s clear that there can be no terrors worse. The otherworldly would almost come as a relief, if only to demonstrate there is more to a soldier’s life than blood-soaked mud, rendered flesh, and mental torture.

This is the first story I’ve heard this year that I’d consider a masterpiece. It’s rare for a story to move me to tears, but this one did. The writing is perfect, capturing the period and expressing the torments of war brilliantly. The resolution, offering hope through an act of courage, is apposite. With all the wars going on in the world right now, this tale serves as a reminder of what it means to be human in the face of global irrationality, avarice, and power mongering. If “From the Western Front” doesn’t make the cut for the Best of the Year anthologies, Bram Stoker award, or whatever else is out there awarding the cream of the crop, frankly, I’ll be amazed.

“Faith in Sips and Bites” by Michael Chant, read by Ben Phillips, is a powerful Southern Gothic. Presented as a letter, written by a member of the congregation of the Church of Mark XVII—Pentacostalists who handle snakes and sip arsenic as proof of their faith. But during a service, a stranger dressed not in black, as is most often the case in Gothic tales, but all in white, comes into their midst. He allows himself to be bitten by two diamondbacks, drinks all the poison the believers have for their service, and is unharmed. His immunity forces them to challenge their beliefs and leads them to take even greater risks with the snakes and poison. The male narrator is ill as he composes the letter and describes going into The Big White when he first fell unconscious and then a second episode where he enters the terrifying world he calls The Big Black. We don’t know whether he’s going to live or die as a result of taking more poison, but we do know that by the time his letter is finished, he’ll either be dead, or his aspirations will be fulfilled—which leads us to an unresolved but chilling ending.

Ben Phillips’s reading as a semiliterate Southern man is thoroughly believable.

In “Rite of Atonement” by Melinda Selmys (reading and music by W. Ralph Waters), a woman undergoes extreme body modification over a period of years, becoming effectively nonhuman; her animal form even has wings. Also, her skin is tattooed, the inked images symbolizing and bearing the sins of her community. For its short length, “Rite of Atonement” packs a punch. Prolonged torture, details of the modifications, and the effects upon the woman are described in great detail, creating a visceral effect, and enabling us to empathize with her pain. As a reworking of the passion of Christ in a science-fantasy setting, it works well. However, while the background music is good, it’s somewhat distracting at times. Like with movie soundtracks, music and effects in podcasts are best used sparingly.