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Escape Pod Reviews
Following up on Tuesday's post, here are the write-ups for Escape Pod. I'm clearing out the backlog still available on the main podcast feed, not listening to the beginning as I did with PodCastle.
- No. 138. "In the Late December" by Greg van Eekhout (read by Stephen Eley). "Santa Claus vs. the Heat Death of the Universe." It's better as a story about entropy than as a story about Santa or Christmas; and an unfortunate turn of phrase near the end trivializes the story unnecessarily. Eley's Santa sounded a bit silly, but I think most of us have a bad Kringle impression inside of us.
- No. 139. "Acephalous Dreams" by Neal Asher (read by Stephen Eley). A straightforward tale of genetic transmission of species data, except for the graphic murder and rape tacked on. Setting aside those aspects, it's a kind of run-of-the-mill scifi story that I don't really care about. Bringing those aspects back into consideration, I hate the story.
The depiction of rape was both graphic and exploitative. The portrayals in the story of both the rape and its survivor were portrayed in the story were instinctively troubling, though I don't have the theory in hand to easily explain why. And both the attacker and the survivor seemed to be portrayed as part of an analogue to the Roman Catholic Church, reinforcing stereotypes already too prevalent in American culture. - No. 140. "Astromonkeys!" by Tony Frazier (read by Norm Sherman). I think it's normal for anyone involved in any sort of performing to think about alternative performances. "What if they'd done that?" "I'd've done this?" Etc. But a while ago, I noticed that sometimes I'd think these thoughts as part of a normal creative experience and sometimes I'd think them because what I was watching was so bad that I had to calm myself by visiting an alternate universe where it was good. The latter happened with this story. I couldn't make any sense of Sherman's performance; every attempt at humor fell flat. I turned off the podcast before the framing device had even finished.
- No. 141. "The Color of a Brontosaurus" by Paul E. Martens (read by Stephen Eley). Man obsessed with time travel is not very observant. The story itself was long-winded and overly telegraphed, and the potshots at scientists were overly simplistic and unfunny.
When performing a story, it's important to pay attention to narration that describes dialogue. You're going to have to perform that dialogue, and if you don't adequately match what the narrator's description of it, you get a great big fail. So if, for example, the narration takes a great deal of time explaining that a certain character's pronunciation of a singel word is layered in multiple meanings, then I need hear something approaching that in the performance. Eley fails this test very early on in the story, and does so in his higher-pitched female-character voice that doesn't have a great range of nonverbal communication.
The performance of the protagonist's wife grated even without the infidelity to the text, and the other characters weren't presented all that well either. This podcast was where I became wary of Eley as a reader, and between the performance and the text, I should've saved myself time by skipping this one early on. - No. 142. "Artifice and Intelligence" by Tim Pratt (read by Stephen Eley). Racists and spirits and ghosts, AI! The humor in this story left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Eley's performance continued to grate on me. All in all, not a good experience.
- No. 143. "Flaming Marshmallow and Other Deaths" by Camille Alexa (read by Dani Cutler). A teen hopes that her predicted method of death will be wicked cool. The text verged a bit over the top sometimes, but I don't read a lot of YA stuff, so it could just be me. Regardless, Cutler did a pretty good job grounding everything in the narrator's worldview. At first I thought the ending was a bit off, but in the context of the setting it's written for, it fits better.
- No. 144. "Friction" by Will McIntosh (read by Stephen Eley). An immortalish scholar learns an important life lesson, while willfully ignoring more important life lessons. I really liked this story, particularly the detail given to the protagonist, a species of possibly robot that is theoretically immortal, but that eventually "wears down," succumbing to friction that ultimately wears them completely away.
I'm always a little leery of characters that are presented like this, self-congratulating over the things they learned while oblivious to the things they didn't. I felt the irony clearly in this story, but reading episode feedback, I'm not certain that others did. The protagonist is a privileged bastard, and he stays that way throughout. Yes, he "learns" from a "lesser creature," but he never reconsiders his stance on that "lesser creature." Literally, in this case. I find that admonishing others to recognize that we stand on the backs of others are not as helpful as actually trying to get off them.
This is the second podcast where I really loved Eley's performance (I'll talk about the first later). Many of the things that I don't like about his readings—overenunciation, bluntness, and occasional peculiar inflections— worked in favor of the narrative voice of the protagonist. The other main character had a sound that was pleasantly distinct (and it was not a woman). - No. 145. "Instead of a Loving Heart" by Jeremiah Tolbert (read by Jared Axelrod). Human-turned-robot assists mad scientist in madness. I liked this story, but I thought the denouement didn't fit with the protagonist's story from the rest of the story. Axelrod's performance of the narrator was excellent, but the scientist was a bit too cartoony for my taste. I understand where the choice comes from—he is, in fact, a mad scientist with a mountain lair building death rays and turning people into robots. But the story took its time detailing the ffects of such cruelty run rampant, and I felt that theme didn't jibe well with the voice.
And although the protagonist didn't speak very often, Axelrod did violate the rule of performance I mentioned with regard to "The Color of a Brontosaurus." The main character is a robot, and the fact that he speaks in a monotone is both stressed in the text and important to the character. And yet, in the next line of dialogue, Axelrod had some exaggerated changes in pitch. True, the dialogue was altered to sound more synthesized, but monotone doesn't mean "roboty," it means "unvaried in pitch." - No. 146. "Edward Bear and the Very Long Walk" by Ken Scholes (read by Stephen Eley). Gnar! Couldn't listen to it.
- No. 147 "Pressure" by Jeff Carlson (read by "Graydancer"). The Incredible Mr. Limpet needs more Prozac pumped into the water supply. There was some nice hard stuff about bioengineering and the ocean ecosystem, but the emotional story was the real draw. Carlson's reading was understated, but I think I liked the story more because of it. It brought the real, palpable depression of the narrator to the forefront so well that some of the text seemed redundant.
- No. 170. "Pervert" by Charles Coleman Finlay (read by Stephen Eley). A man struggles with his heterosexuality in a society in which the concept doesn't exist. In this world, there are "homosexuals and hydrosexuals," but the protagonist is neither, and he doesn't know what he is, other than doomed by the proscriptions against any interaction between genders at all.
This is the last Eley performance in this batch of reviews, but it's the first one I heard. And you'll probably be surprised to hear that it completely blew me away. One of my criteria for a really great performance is that it provides something that I wouldn't have thought to add to the story had I read it on my own. Eley does that here. His performance fills the narrator not only with fear, confusion and sadness (which I would have expected), but also with an egotism fueled by his alienation. - No. 171. "Fenneman's Mouth" by Andy Duncan (read by Jared Axelrod). A man who recreates memorable scenes that never were spends a whole lot of time obsessing over his creations and his ex. I wasn't very impressed with the story. If I'd had it on paper, I probably would have exercised some judicious paragraph-skipping, but there's no good way to do that with a podcast. I liked the exploration of how we create memory in an age of digital imagining (though it's really not much different than the ages before), but there was too little of that, and too much of just about everything else.