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Yes, it’s that time again when I’ve been binge-listening to the Podcastle audio fantasy fiction on my podcast feed and have decided to catch up with several months worth of reviews. As previously, my ability to remember what I thought of a story (or even what the story was about) fades the longer ago I listened to it.
422: Golden Chaos by M.K. Hutchins - A vaguely Nordic secondary-world village sits at the edge of a zone of chaos that has been known to provide treasure but also destroys randomly. The protagonist’s expectations of a profitable season and thus the ability to marry his betrothed are destroyed by his brother’s distractability. But in the chaos zone, his brother’s talent for deep focus may be an advantage. Detailed worldbuilding and a subtle and sympathetic portrayal of a non-neurotypical character, though I’m becoming a little uncomfortable with the growing popularity of a sort of “magical neuro-atypicality” trope.
423: The Gold Silkworm by Tony Pi - A tale or sorcerers and magical healers in a fantasy realm woven from Chinese threads. There was a lot of worldbuilding to integrate before the plot started to fall into place.
424: Betty And The Squelchy Saurus by Caroline M. Yoachim - What happens when the truce between children and the monsters under their beds is broken? The story might have been just the product of an overactive imagination...until we get the viewpoint of the monsters. A little bit on the precious side, but with enough threat of horror to cut that a bit. Not really my taste, though.
PodCastle 425: Flash Fiction Extravaganza! Transformations - A trio of short shorts around a theme
“Girl in Blue Dress (1881)” by Sunil Patel - An artist’s model raises questions of identity and individuality.
“Mirabilis” by Shannon Peavey - Alas, I don’t remember this one.
“Portrait of My Wife as a Boat” by Samantha Murray - Uh...I think this one was about a woman who turns into a boat?
426: Sweeter Than Lead by Benjamin C. Kinney - Prophecies keep the empire safe, but the seers pay a deep price, not least that they can never explain themselves. How much of the rules they follow is necessary, and how much tradition? And what are the temptations for one who grows addicted to seeing the future? The story left me a bit meh--plots about true prophecy have a limited number of places they can go.
427: Squalor And Sympathy by Matt Dovey - Part of a growing sub-sub-genre sitting at the intersection of steampunk and the supernatural. How will it warp an industrial society if machines can be run literally on the misery of the workers? I really liked the way the premise was developed without being over-explained. Some of the wrap-up of the plot felt clunky, though.
428: Madame Félidé Elopes by K. A. Teryna translated by Anatoly Belilovsky - I don’t remember this one at all. I may have accidentally marked it read.
429: Wolfy Things by Erin Roberts - A slow inexhorable reveal of the true nature of a wolf hunt. One of those lovely unreliable narrators where the reader/listener stays half a step ahead of the protagonist, though you’re never entirely certain exactly what is going on. If you don’t mind a bit of violence, this makes an excellent listen.
430: Thundergod In Therapy by Effie Seiberg - Another one I don’t remember at all.
PodCastle Miniature 89: Lapis Lazuli by Tania Fordwalker - The knight facing the dragon to rescue the princess learns a lesson about tall poppy syndrome. Well, he would have if he’d survived. Fortunatly, our protagonist is his lowly squire... A bit predictable in the plot, but the nature of the monster (and thus how to defeat it) is a clever twist.
431: La Héron by Charlotte Ashley - A delightfuly twisty tale of forbidden duels and dangerous wagers. A woman arrives in town for the Black Bouts of Caen and picks up a pugnacious nun as her second. But a host of swordsmen from Faerie have arrived for the sport as well and no one is quite what they seem. This started out intriguing, slowed down a bit for the blow-by-blow, then took a sharp turn sideways at the end. Overall I enjoyed it quite a bit.
432: The Beautiful Bird Sits No Longer Singing In The Nest by Kate Lechler - What did the story of Jane Eyre look like from the point of view of the mad woman in the attic? It’s hard to classify this entirely as fantasy unless one takes her hallucinations of witches and transformations as literal. But an incisive picture of what madness looks like from the other side.
PodCastle Miniature 90: How To Survive In Room 105 by T. Jane Berry - Yet one more entry in the category of “humorous hijinks in a grade school classroom full of kids with super powers.” This genre just isn’t for me, I’m afraid. The joke always gets stretched too thin.
433: Telling Stories by Sandra M. Odell - A rather surreal Western involving the courtship of a saguaro cactus and a gila monster, mediated by an older woman with stories to tell and hidden regrets. The moral message of “love is love” felt overly telegraphed, but the details of the world and the creatures in it is well drawn and delightful.
434: The Ghost Years by Nghi Vo - Set amidst a war between China and Viet Nam in some alternate and lightly fantastic timeline, the story is primarily about memory and storytelling and how people exist only so far as we create them in our stories. Atmospheric and melancholy.
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What if Persephone had been an eager bride...and Hades was a woman?
That's the basic premise of this mythic re-telling of the "abduction" of Persephone as a same-sex romance. Persephone flees Olympus to escape Zeus's tyranny and sexual advances (and starting with a major grudge against him for having raped her childhood crush, one of Demeter's nymphs, and turned her into a bush). A passing encounter with the aloof, brooding, and therefore enticing Hades, Queen of Death at Persephone's Olympian coming-out makes her fixate on Hades as her best refuge.
The premise of this story was intriguing and enticing--as enticing as that first encounter with Hades. But the story didn't live up to my hopes for it. The overall plot was meandering and episodic, like a series of isolated D&D encounters with various persons, places, and creatures of the underworld. (In fact, it made me wonder whether it had originally been written as a serial without a fixed outline.) All of the adversaries, difficulties, and crises seem to be overcome too easily (though with a fair amount of angst in the build-up) with nothing more than earnest goodwill, empathy, and a bit of belated clear communication. The final climax, when Zeus has forced Demeter into blackmailing Persephone into returning from the underworld, is so quickly and easily resolved (with un-foreshadowed powers) that it felt like a cheat.
Persephone's romantic desire for Hades never quite escapes the sense of being a schoolgirl crush, with large quantities of gushing devotion, sighing, and longing glances that remain unconsummated for the majority of the story for no clearly articulated reason, other than to draw out what is meant to be the erotic tension. The problem is, while I kept getting told (over and over, at repetitive length) about how much Persephone loved Hades (and, eventually, how much Hades loved her back), I never really felt it.
I encountered this story in audio format through the podcast The Way of the Buffalo. It's hard to tell how much the format affected my reception of the story. The narrator tended to emphasize the "breathless, gushy" tone of the text, which may have fixed that aspect more firmly in my mind. On the other hand, I suspect if I'd been reading, I would have done a lot of skimming from around the halfway point.
I really wanted to like this story a lot more than I did.
Audio Reviews: lots of Podcastle stories
Jul. 8th, 2016 08:18 amI’m skipping the two “Miniatures” because I really don’t remember them well.
410: The Saint of the Sidewalks by Kat Howard
A piece of inventive urban folklore about how new gods come into being, and the relationship between them and their worshippers. That isn’t nearly a good enough description of the vivid gritty realism of this fantasy. A woman invokes the Saint of the Sidewalks and is answered by achieving a burdensome divinity. Strongly recommended.
411: Hands of Burnished Bronze by Rebecca Schwarz
Something very roughly in the King Midas vein, where a king commands his wizard to perform a terrible deed that then returns to haunt him and destroy his victory.
412: For Honor, For Waste by Setsu Uzume
This one is starting to fade in my memory. Once, every cycle of time, one life, one talent is sacrificed to a god-like figure in return for the city’s luck and prosperity. This time, three comrades and warriors are set into competition for the right to be the sacrifice. Can they trust each other enough to do what is truly best for the city? Some intricate characterization and adventure, though most of the plot twists were telegraphed.
413: This is Not a Wardrobe Door by A. Merc Rustad
There seems to be something of a fashion for meta-fiction about portal fiction. This is one of those stories exploring the hidden supernatural mechanics behind secret portals, imaginary childhood friends, and the desperate need to reclaim a sense of belonging that might never have been real in the first place. Haunting and incisive.
414: The Men from Narrow Houses by A. C. Wise
It’s been a while since I listened to this one, but the excerpt on the website brings it all back, so it must have been memorable. The story begins with a repetitive oral-storytelling style that suggests deep mythologies and traditions, but with a contemporary-feeling setting. It’s one of those stories that does a long, slow pulling back to reveal more and more of what’s really happening. In the end, memories get rearranged (or correctly arranged) and things aren’t at all what they seemed at first. Creepy, but not scary.
415: Responsibility Descending by G. Scott Huggins
This is a continuation of the characters and setting of a previous story, involving vast sea-going empires ruled by dragon and human partners, and most especially a story of one of their human-dragon hybrid offspring who has grown up in ignorance of her heritage. The previous story was an interesting mystery of the “discovering your origins” type, with a lot of ambitious worldbuilding. This second story, to my mind, falters and flounders a bit. Too much time is spent having the protagonist explore and come to grips with her new home and culture. There is an awkwardly inserted duel-for-the-sake-of-justice that seems little more than an excuse for an extended training montage and consequent aerial battle.
416: Braid of Days and Wake of Nights by E. Lily Yu
A story of mortality and the desperate rage against death, told with a magical-realist atmosphere involving unicorns and the many different New York Cities that coexist. In the end, despite the fantastic trappings, it’s a story of human relationships and conflicts, brought into sharp focus by one character’s impending death. Whether it’s uplifting or depressing will probably depend on the listener’s own relationship to mortality.
417: Archibald Defeats the Churlish Shark-Gods by Benjamin Blattberg
Don’t recall listening to this one.
418: James and Peter Fishing by Anaea Lay
If, as I did, you find yourself expecting some sort of apostolic reference, you too may find yourself charmed by the slow reveal of exactly who James and Peter are, and why they are fishing together. To say more would be to spoil the surprise. I found this story of the meaning of life to be charmingly philosophical (or perhaps philosophically charming) in the way it reveals layer after layer of the characters’ backstories and motivations. It did seem to go on perhaps a smidge longer than I might have had patience for in a non-audio format.
419: Giants at the End of the World by Leena Likitalo
Huh. Must have somehow hit “mark as played” because I don’t remember this one at all.
420: The Bee Tamer’s Final Performance by Aidan Doyle
This was a completely bonkers piece of hallucinatory nightmare masquerading as a tale of resistance. The imagery kept starting out about 37-degrees aslant from reality, then snicked into place in a configuration even more removed. I doubt I would ever have finished it on the page. Which isn’t to say it isn’t a good story. It’s just...really really strange, and leans more on imagery than plot. Do not read or listen if you have phobias about clowns or bees: contains bee-filled clowns.
421: Hatyasin by Rati Mehrotra
A dark and violent tale of occupation, oppression, and being driven to the breaking point. Also of loyalty, bargains, and love. There’s some rich world-building in a small space, with names that evoke India and ancient alien presences that evoke a touch of Lovecraft. The tone ranges from sisterly squabbling to heroic battle. This story was darker than I usually like, but I was drawn in. The protagonist was far more sympathetic than her actions might suggest.
One of the things about reading (or listening) in genre is that one inevitably evaluates works against genre expectations. A story can be a striking work of polished prose...and yet leave you feeling as if you’ve been tricked into consuming it under false pretenses.
I consumed “The Husband Stitch” via a fantasy venue, therefore I spent the entire story waiting for fantastic elements. On its surface, it’s the sexual biography of a young woman in a nebulous and under-sketched American-50s-tv soft-patriarchal society, beginning with her enthusiastic first sexual experience, tracing through her adventurously satisfying erotic life with the man who then becomes her husband, and following her through the birth, growth, and eventual adulthood of her son. The story strays from her sexual itinerary only in occasional digressions into modern folklore (I’d say “urban legends” but not all of them are strictly urban) of the cautionary-tale sort, and one episode after her son begins school where she ventures out of the home sphere to take a nude drawing class, is erotically attracted to the female model, and has the experience ruined for her when she feels compelled to relate it to her husband who immediately turns it into a prurient “can I join in” fantasy.
Oh, but there’s one other thread running through the story. The protagonist wears a green ribbon tied around her neck, and in a succession of incidents, it becomes clear that the intact state of this ribbon stands in allegorically for issues of consent, bodily autonomy, and independent self-hood. Via the episode with the nude drawing class, and a later school-parent activity episode, we learn that all women in the world of this story have a ribbon tied about some portion of their anatomy that is never removed, even if the location is inconvenient. There’s essentially no subtlety about this allegory, nor is there much subtlety about how the presence of this forbidden item--explicitly never explained to any of the men in her life--becomes the Bluebeard’s Room of the story. The woman’s husband is drawn again and again to torment her with the threat of forcibly untying the ribbon, simply because it is the one aspect of her life to which he has not been granted access.
And, being Bluebeard’s Room, the reader inevitably knows that the ribbon should by rights be the focus of the story’s climax. Unfortunately, the climax--and the only indication of any sort of fantastic element--is the sort of sudden “surprise twist” so favored by urban folklore--a sort of “and there, embedded in the car door, was a HOOK!” (Not entirely surprisingly, in both the female-forbidden Bluebeard's Room, and the male-forbidden green ribbon, it is always the woman who is at risk from violating the prohibition.)
In the end, this story just didn’t work for me as a fantasy story. I felt cheated and misled. Which is a problem, because as a piece of allegorical prose, it’s masterfully written, although not particularly original. I particularly appreciated the conceit of the story narrator inserting performance instructions to a person reading the story aloud, which worked especially well in audio format. But I felt like I’d been tricked into consuming a piece of ordinary literary erotica (not a genre I have any specific interest in) under the promise that it was a fantasy story.
#402 Opals and Clay by Nino Cipri (read by The Word Whore)
Magical engineering, cultures in conflict with colonialist themes, questions of the morality of exploiting (and of loving) magico-mechanically created beings. The tragedy of trying to save loved ones when you have no power to save yourself. The world-building is beautiful and striking. The story is the sort of sharply tragic fantasy that makes me wonder whether I’m hopelessly out of step with the times. Like several others in this set of reviews, nice writing, but I can’t exactly say I “enjoyed” it.
#403 Send in the Ninjas by Michelle Ann King (read by Christiana Ellis)
Reading the first couple of paragraphs on the website, I recognize having listened to this, but don’t remember anything else about it. Sorry, I guess that’s my review.
#404 Territory by Julie Steinbacher (read by Maura McHugh and Kim Rogers)
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this one. Two young women in love try a desperate magic to be together in the face of hostile society and uncomprehending family. They fail…maybe. Or… The reader gets jerked around emotionally quite a bit. Content warning for themes (although not necessarily the substance) of suicide and queer tragedy. It may be a good story, but I didn’t enjoy it.
#405 Beat Softly , My Wings of Steel by Beth Cato (ready by Elizabeth Green)
I want to come up with some subgenre label ending in “punk” to describe this setting, but I’m not sure the right one exists. Bio-mechanical horses with transferrable souls linked psychically to rider-warriors in a massive Classical-age-ish feeling conflict. A mechanic caught within a doomed city desperately tries to revive one steed so that she and her loved ones can escape. The problem is the nature of the soul she’s installed in the waiting body. I was caught up in the what-happens-next although I spent most of the story dreading impending tragedy. (It…um…well, that would be a spoiler.) Intriguing concepts, though not the flavor of story I generally enjoy.
(#406 was covered by itself two weeks ago)
#407 The Cellar Dweller by Maria Dahvana Headley (read by Tina Connolly)
A spooky story that relies very strongly on painting with the sound of language, both phonologically and with deliberately repetitive formulas. This is a story that should only be listened to, not read, even if you have to read it aloud to yourself. The theme evokes “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, in implying the maintenance of an abnormally and artificially pretty/pleasant world by means of the required sacrifice of innocent imperfect beings. But what looks like sacrifice can be seen differently from within. The story has a bit of a circular structure, setting up contexts that are understood differently when we return to them and return again. Whether the ending is horror or triumph depends on where your sympathies lie. The story originally appeared in print in Nightmare in 2015, and if I’d listened to it a bit earlier, it might have been among my Hugo nominations.
#408 Tumbleweeds and Little Girls by Jeff Bowles (read by Julie Hoverson)
A whimsical Western fantasy about war between sentient tumbleweeds and other prairie creatures, with an army of little girls supplying the martial talent. I liked the whimsy, although from an ecological point of view, I thought the little girls were fighting on the wrong side. The narration was utterly delightful. Not a very deep story and I don’t know that I would have read it in print form.
I spent a lot of time in my car today because I was invited to participate in a student writing conference at San Jose City College, and then I'd pledged to put in some time at work afterward (even though I had an approved day off for the conference as "volunteer time"), and that was back up from San Jose to Berkeley in peak afternoon rush hour. So about 4 hours total on the roads today. It gave me a chance to get caught up with stories on Podcastle.org, and I liked one enough to give it a special shout-out: The Little Dog Ohori by Anatoly Belilovsky.
It's a story about a strong woman in war time, about family bonds, about heroism and death, about the convoluted ethnic politics of Soviet Russia…and in the end, I'm not at all certain that I'd consider it a fantasy story. But I loved it. I loved it despite not really being a fan of military stories. I loved it despite it not being the fantasy story I expected. And I loved it for the twist at the end that is utterly lovely, especially in the way it forces you to figure out what the twist is and then work back through the consequences. And I can't say anything more about that without spoiling it.
The story starts out with a woman who is an expert sharpshooter in the Russian army in WWII, lying wounded on a frozen river bank, summoning in her mind the "little dog Ohori", a figure from legend who brings loved ones together. (I suppose this counts as a fantasy element if you consider Ohori to be real.) The story then cuts to her dying on a hospital bed, watched over by a man who loves her and by an army doctor, who discuss her life. And…well, just listen until the end.
I know this isn't much of a review other than, "I liked it". I have a hard time reviewing short fiction, since short stories tend to rely so much on a concentrated twist that it would be a shame to spoil.
This format means that a variety of consumption patterns are available: episodic versus binge, text versus audio. I chose the audio form as I have more time in my schedule for audio than text, and I listened each week as the episodes came out, so my experience was strung out over 13+ weeks. (This means my comments about repetitiveness were not due to having binge-listened.)
The basic story involves the intersecting lives of the Duke and Duchess Tremontaine (grandparents of one of the protagonists of Swordspoint, who features in a birth announcement at the beginning of the story), the Balaam family who control the chocolate trade from an overseas Not!America (that very definitely has not been colonized by Not!Europeans), a collection of self-satisfied university students on the cusp of their examinations, the turnip farmer and mathematical genius Micah who falls into a chance to develop and use her talents further, and a certain forger named Tess the Hand. We have economic plots, political plots, cultural clashes, university politics, several tempestuous love affairs, and a dark secret from the past involving murder.
OK, enough dithering over the preliminaries. I…liked Tremontaine, but I didn’t love it. Not the way I hoped to love it. I loved individual characters, especially Micah, the mathematical genius. (I've seen other reviewers use the word "savant" for Micah, but for me that is too evocative of the word that typically precedes "savant" in popular use. Micah is clearly on the autistic spectrum but I see no reason to imply that her genius is because of that, rather than in addition to that.)
I loved the way the Duchess Tremontaine seized the world by the throat to get what she wanted from it. I loved the contrast of the various parts of the city and how they interacted. I loved the politics and culture around the chocolate trade. I loved the diversity of characters in all the ways that the word “diversity” is currently being used. I loved the way that same-sex relationships are normalized within the world of Riverside.
Despite the variety of authors, I never felt tripped up by transitions in style or inconsistencies in characterization. (Although it took me a while to figure out that it was the characters, not the authors who were confused about Micah’s gender.)
Moving on to the negative side, I didn’t much care for the repetitiveness of the exposition. I felt like I was being told the same background information over and over again. I was amused by Ixkaab Balaam’s smug attitude of, “No you are the uncivilized savages" but, again, it got repetitive.
While I loved the normalization of same-sex relations, I felt that only ones between men were truly "normalized". It felt to me as if Riverside has a clear expectation that men will have sexual and romantic relationships with other men as a casual matter of course, but I didn't get that same sense of expectation about the women. Ixkaab and Tess's romance is, in some ways, treated as a personal quirk, rather than with a sense of "but of course women are going to have affairs with women all the time." When you look at reader response to the Riverside novels, and especially the response of the interactive fans who create art and fan-fiction, it's clear that the centering of m/m relationships is a major draw. And I expect that this aspect of the setting will be viewed differently by readers for whom that is true. This isn't in any way a flaw--I'm delighted to have a f/f relationship as part of the central story--it's just an observation.
I like the idea of having very individual character voices acted in the audio version, but the actual presentation of some of the characters grated on me in ways that might not have happened if I’d been reading it as text. And as much as I found a number of the characters quite striking, none of them really fastened on to my reader’s heart.
So in summary, I found the innovative format intriguing and may choose to consume the next season in text form the first time to do a compare-and-contrast. (Yes, I will be consuming the next season. I did like it that much.) The story is complex and layered, if sometimes a bit predictable. (I saw the "twist" coming several episodes in advance, and the survival of certain characters into Swordspoint can be considered a bit of a spoiler for the possible resolutions of this prequel.) I do wish I’d loved it a bit more, though. I wanted to.
Galactic Suburbia has now moved higher on my listening priority list. Lots of very incisive and insightful feminist discussion on books and issues. Still a lot of non-book media, but more book discussions than I'd heard in my original sampling. So I think I may simply have gotten a non-representative selection in my first introduction to the show.
Another thing I listened to on the drive up was the LibriVox.org audiobook of Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, which is touted by many as the first "science fiction novel". I'll be posting a review of it at a future date, but since this is all about literary community and resources, I'd like to promote LibriVox as a fine organization and excellent source of out-of-copyright audio books. The readers are all volunteer, with variable recording situations and variable talents, but there's a solid baseline quality and the site is free (but donations are encouraged).
My standard bedtime audio is from this site, especially Karen Savage's recordings of Jane Austen novels. I also accomplished my goal of working through the unabridged text of Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo via the LibriVox recording (and a cross-country road trip). If you like audiobooks, enjoy classics, and are on a limited budget, definitely check them out.
