From the Podosphere: October ‘07 podcasts

In “Immortal Sin” by Jennifer Pelland (read by Stephen Eley), a man murders a girl who refuses to marry him. His Catholicism suggests that if he repents, he can avoid being damned and going to Hell—except the priest to whom he confesses won’t absolve him because he must first be truly repentant. And since he can’t be (because God will know he’s lying, you see), he decides to try to become immortal and avoid having to die in the first place. Initially, I disliked this story, but the ending was so effective that I changed my mind about it. Essentially, I couldn’t suspend disbelief in the central science fictional element: that the protagonist would help to develop the science of creative genetic longevity so he himself could live forever. Any developing science (particularly one as complex at this) would probably take more than his lifetime to come close to being implemented. So we’re expected to believe that this is a quick fix. Implausible even by the wackiest science fiction standards. It would have made for a more plausible story if the science already existed, and it wouldn’t have changed the ending. However, the story is written with an ironic tone throughout. Not funny, mind you—and I questioned whether it was meant to be funny or not—but it’s the irony itself which makes the ending particularly effective.

Alan Moore’s Watchmen comics, which posit a world of realistic superheroes with all the foibles of regular humans, should have effectively killed off the superhero genre. For better or worse, it didn’t. And since the ’80s, when Watchmen was published, there has been a slew of clones, including, it must be said, Union Dues. Union Dues is a superhero series running in Escape Pod which shows its superhero team, The Union, working for the government, opening shopping malls, having their own cash cow comic books, and, sometimes, fighting the bad guys. “Union Dues: Send in the Clowns” by Jeffrey R. DeRego (read by Dani Cutler) features the body-armoured Jenny Chrome and her falling out with her bosses. The writing is crisp and workmanlike, and, while it didn’t do much for me, if you like superhero stories, you’ll probably enjoy this one. Suspending disbelief in a world which has real superheroes is all well and good, but I wondered how plausible it would be that they would have their own comic books in that world. After all, we don’t have comic books in our world featuring firemen, emergency hospital staff, or doctors working in war zones.

In “Results” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (read by Heather Welliver), a young woman in near-future New York anxiously awaits the results of a genetic compatibility test to determine what sort of child she and her partner will have. The test, if the results suggest a less than perfect child from the union, mean they can legally separate, have expensive in vitro modifications, or chose infertility (making her infertile, rather than the man, unsurprisingly).

“Results” is not only about scientific predeterminism but also the class divide. In Rusch’s scenario, the economically disadvantaged have relationships and bear children the old-fashioned way, while her middle class protagonists can chose whether to play genetic Russian roulette or not.

Ultimately, the protagonist’s introductory words, that her life is about “Choices. And results,” prove to be ironic and foreshadow an ending that makes complete dramatic sense. Her parents, her father in particular, advocate traditional values and feel she should not allow science to play a part in decisions about her life. She herself seems ambivalent on the matter, but at the end, the element of choice is effectively removed.

The science in this story is handled lightly. The author assumes that her audience knows enough about current developments in genetic modification and the human genome project that such fundamentals do not need to be explicitly outlined. And even if you know nothing about these subjects, Rusch explains the necessary science simply enough to make it easy to comprehend without injuring the impetus of her tale. The likelihood that the child will be intelligent, artistic, or athletic are set out in percentages. The prediction? The child will be “average,” and therein lies the rub. The woman’s partner doesn’t want “average.”

It’s a dark, morally ambiguous, cautionary tale. Finely written and smoothly narrated. Highly recommended.

In “The Sweet, Sad Love Song of Fred and Wilma” by Nick Dichario and Mike Resnick (read by Stephen Eley) Mr. (very average) Frederick Bannister goes to what he thinks is a technical conference on behalf of his organisation and ends up at a Flintstones convention. If that isn’t weird enough, he falls in love, and even has sex of sorts, with the robot maid who cleans his hotel room. But, as always happens in romance stories, there’s a fly in the ointment—a “real” woman, who we discover is a hooker in the employ of Fred’s agency. It’s an odd, slightly disturbing tale which didn’t really work for me. I am a big Resnick fan, but this does nothing for his reputation. Stripped of its science fictional trappings, this is a deeply conventional story, with flashes of wit but no real substance. I did quite like the robot voice reading love poetry, though.

“The Keeper” by Ken Goldman (read by Alasdair Stuart) is a serial killer story with Hallowe’en angle, naturally, given it’s been published at the end of October. The story itself has some of the usual tropes, including the “the monster’s dead – oh, no he’s not” so beloved of the genre. I hate that one, personally; it’s such a cliché. The keeper takes his latest victim, Shelby, to the lighthouse where he does the usual serial-killer type things — binding her to a chair, locking in a room and starving her. There appears to be no sexual motivation, though, and there are no graphic depictions of torture, elements which further differentate this from the usual fare. The story structure is unusual, in that it’s topped and tailed with the killer’s point of view, but the main body is from Shelby’s. What saves this from being run-of-the mill is two things: the compelling strangeness of the killer’s motivation and its execution (no pun intended), and the terrific writing. The writing style is both punchy and lyrical, quite a difficult thing to pull off in the raw end of the horror genre. I’d recommend this one and I’m keen to hear or read more of Ken Goldman’s work.

Whether the title of the flash piece by John Hayes, “Hunan Fare” (read by Ben Phillips with musical production by Toby Chappell), has anything to do with the Chinese province of the same name or the belief of those who reside there that people are rewarded after death for their sufferings is open to speculation. The story has a hallucinatory quality, blurring the boundary between what appears to be the real world and the disturbing dreams of the protagonist. Seeming to involve a hanging, cowgirls, bug eating, and death by a gunshot to the head, I found the effects and music a bit heavy-handed and too loud in parts, and I didn’t understand what was going on or what the title was about. But there was an unsettling quality to “Hunan Fare” which made it work on some level. Maybe Louis L’Amour interpreted by David Lynch?

In “The Heart of Tu’a Halaita” by Tara Kolden (read by K. J. Johnson):

“There are two things my people say about the tree god. The first is that no one who steals from him goes unpunished.”

And the arrogant missionary, Reverend Heglund, soon discovers the truth of this warning, given him by a member of the native tribe he is trying to convert to Christianity. The prose, with its long, sinewy sentences, suits the piece admirably. It’s a historical gothic fiction of the sort that might once have appeared in Weird Tales in its heyday. But the central theme about cultural imperialism and the destruction of native cultures is contemporary and apposite. Heglund’s determination to win the natives over to his side results in him putting himself at risk when he confronts the mystical tree which sit at the core of the story like a lion patiently stalking its prey.

There are shades of Little Shop of Horrors in “How to Grow a Man-Eating Plant” by Michael A. Arnzen. Flash fiction works such as this are well suited to the podcast format, being short and punchy and an easy listen. Arnzen’s little piece manages to be both creepy and funny. It’s a gardening guide setting out all you need to know about growing a man-eating plant. The plant itself is much less disturbing than the offstage gardener. There’s also something fairly disturbing, too, about Sheila Unwin’s all-too-convincing reading.

“Fever” by David Malki is one of the most effective chillers I’ve heard recently in Pseudopod. As with the best M. R. James ghost story, the horrors are suggested rather than explicitly described, leaving the listener to fill in the blanks and experience that childlike frisson which shapes monsters from the shadows in the corners of your bedroom at night.

Little Emma is suffering an unnamed illness, perhaps a simple fever or perhaps something more, which leads her to psychotherapy. Outside the hot bedroom in her “burning” house, she sees her friends playing in the snow and longs to be with them. Whether these friends are imaginary or actual presences is never made clear. But their true nature becomes apparent when they kill Emma’s petulant teenage sister, Julie, and when her parents forbid her to go outside, locking her in the house.

Like the “monsters of the id” in Forbidden Planet, Emma’s imaginary friends act out her inner desires in extremely dark and unpleasant ways. There’s a lovely thematic image which appears twice: weaving tears into ice crystals and collecting them to make into snowballs. These help listeners empathize with little Emma while at the same time we are repelled by the horrors she (or should we say “her friends”?) inflict on her family. Malki effectively captures the darker ego state of childhood while contrasting it with the simpler desire for personal freedom we’re all heir to. The writing is as crisp as the wintry territory it describes. And, like the best art and music, it knows that what’s omitted is every bit as important as what’s included. And Dani Cutler’s light, almost girlish, reading voice suits the tone of the piece admirably.

Also recommended:
While I will focus on more-or-less monthly output from the podosphere from a few key broadcasts, I’ll occasionally recommend podcasts I’ve found elsewhere. This month, I highly recommend Neil Gaiman’s “How to Talk to Girls at Parties.” It’s a punk era coming-of-age story filled with Gaiman’s usual mix of dry, urbane wit, and outré magic. As teenage boys need to learn, girls are not from another planet, but there are always exceptions. Not only do you get the full text of the story, with lovely pencil illustrations, but an audio version read by the author himself. Brilliant stuff.