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However, I have no problems with Eley’s choices in literature on Escape Pod. He’s done a wonderful job of picking a broad range of interesting stories and I think listening to Escape Pod has broadened my view of the science fiction/fantasy genre. For many years I was a hardcore Harry Potter/LOTR type of person and after listening to the sheer varitiy of stories on here, I have grown to like and even seek out more diverse fiction.

On a side note, Escape Pod is one of the first podcasts I’ve subscribed to and I look forward to it every week. Through it, I discovered the podcast novels Earthcore and Ancestor, and I have listened to Pseudopod ever since it was started, broadening my tastes to even include some horror.

I just wanted to say thank you, Mr. Eley for starting this humble little podcast seems like forever ago, because it really has made a difference to me, and don’t stop putting out anything and everything good that comes your way.

You’ve gone and gotten me all choked up again with one of your stories. I’d demand that you cut that out … but I’m really enjoying them too much!

Thanks for bringing this one to us Steve.
On an side note, I am wondering why your “female” voice never bothers me. Seems like it should but somehow, it’s just never a problem for me.

Perhaps it’s that the stories are so good the voice can’t distract me from them or maybe that you’re readings are so well done that it just works.

In either case, I think I’ll try to stop pondering the ingredients and just enjoy cake!

GREEN!

Ahem.

I did enjoy this story, for all the arguing over what genre it belonged in, if the last few minutes were longer and harsher it would have edged into horror.

I’m curious about the subject of donations. Do donations to Escape Pod get shared equally with Pseudopod, or is it the situation that Escape pod is doing quite well donations-wise but Psedopod is struggling (which was the impression from something Mur said in one of her intros)?

As for the story, it touched me. While I can’t say that I cried buckets, it did bring tears to my eyes as some memories from my own past came rushing to the fore. I remember grousing aloud in the car, “Stephen, you said this wouldn’t make me cry!”

I think the appropriate term for stories like this is “poignant.”

After I listened to this story, the first thing I did when I saw my wife was give her a great big hug and a kiss. I don’t want to have any regrets.

As for the sci-fi vs. sci-fi semantic argument in the comments here, well… we get all this for free*. If you land on a story you don’t care for, just hit the stop or the next button on your MP3 player. On the other hand, since the Escape Pod website runs on WordPress and WordPress can generate RSS feeds for each categor. Maybe more categories can be created to sort the stories into their various types (e.g. fantasy, superheros, hard sci-fi, etc..) and then the stories can be separated into those categories for those you only want specific kinds of stories?

* Or at least we’re not required to pay anything, just encouraged to donate.

Lastly, I run phpBB on multiple sites and don’t find it to be “horribly insecure”. Though I’ll grant I don’t get anywhere near as much traffic as Escape Pod. To keep my forums as clean as possible, I find it best to require the user to authenticate their registration via email. This killed the vast majority of the spam bots hitting my forums. Whenever a spammer does sign-up and begin posting; I kill their posts, their account and ban people using that domain from registering for another account. It’s worked really well for me. If that wouldn’t work for Escape Pod; there are also mods out there for phpBB to help deal with the spam problems.

Alex from Germany

Mr. Resnick,
I agree wholeheartedly that a great story is one that gets the reader to connect to someone in the story. Which in part explains the unrealistic humaness of aliens in sci-fi (see story #83). Nevertheless, great character stories aren’t automatically sci-fi anymore than a story that happens to have a ray-gun in it.

My whole point has been categorization (maybe it’s the engineer in me). If I go to a Chinese Restaurant and they serve mostly burgers (tasty burgers, even), after a while I’ll wonder why they call it a Chinese Restuarant (even if they have some great Chop Suey). And if the Chop Suey is really good, I may even muster the courage to ask the proprietor why they don’t have more Chinese Food.

In this case, Steve has mentioned that great Chop Suey is very hard to find. But hopefully, because we asked, someone with great Won Ton will come to the restaurant – you won’t know, if you don’t ask.

Finally, using your description, I’m happy to read (or, in Escape Pod, hear) a really good polemic chock full of ideas or exploring a part of human nature rather than a heart-string tugging story about a chipmunk – that’s my taste, and I’m just letting people know.

1) If you don’t like this week’s story, there is always next week’s story to try.

2) It isn’t Oprah’s Book Club.

You’ll be getting a response to that email soon enough.

Glad you agree, Mr Slic, I stand by the above opinion (even patronising Mr Resnick over there).

Ny own feeling is that if you can make the reader Think, so much the better, and you’ve written a better story for it — but if you can’t make him Feel, can’t make him love or hate or fear or long for something, then all you’ve done is written an essay or a polemic disguised as a science fiction story.

OK, fire away.

(In summary, it came down to: “Good insights, and it’s great to let us know what you want _more_ of, but telling us you want _less_ of stories that other people enjoy… Well, that just ain’t gonna happen.”)

Though Resnick’s stories seem to be less science fiction and more cerebral fantasy (though usually well-written in any event), I really loved this one — it had a vibe that reminded me of the Christopher Reeve-Jane Seymour film “Somewhere in Time,” albeit peripherally.

Indeed, it was impressive…

I suspect much of this is going to move over into the next weeks thread after Steve’s intro this morning, but I wanted to add my two-pence to this conversation, so be prepared for a long one.

Mr Resnick over here is determined for us to take a mode average view of science fiction “SF is whatever most people say it is”, and in this he’s got a fair argument. However, as an SF junkie I have to say I have a permanent itch, that this sort of material doesn’t come anywhere near scratching.

I’m going to try to explain here what it takes to scratch my personal itch, and see if others agree with me, because I have to say Steve I can see I’m not the only one desperate for you to post less of this sort of stuff. So what follows is my own intensely personal description of what hits my SF button.

SF isn’t rayguns, spaceships, time machines or any such device – I would place “I Am Legend” firmly in the SF bracket even ‘tho it’s a story about Vampires. What it takes in order to scratch my SF itch is a story that proposes an idea and then does it’s best to explore that idea, in such a way that the act of exploring that idea is as important as any other part of the story.

Three perfect examples of this sort of SF that have very little “spaceship” content are the two Hugo And Nebula winning novels by Ursula Le Guin – “The Dispossessed” and “The Left Hand Of Darkness” and the short story “If all men were brothers would you let one marry your sister” by Sturgeon. In these cases the ideas the authors have chosen to address are political and gender based, not in any way about science. The key to these stories is the use of the fantastic and completely imagined in order to allow the author to fully explore and flesh out the idea around which the story revolves.

For me, if science fiction doesn’t attempt to explore ideas, in my view fulfilling its job as the ultimate Enlightenment literature… Well I don’t care for it and wouldn’t go out of my way for it.

I mention this because a lot of people above are rattling on with the old “SF must have space and science” dinosaur argument, and I’ve never held with that. Space Opera has always been viewed in the perjorative because it is a science fiction setting without the ideas game. The main reason I cannot stand by Resnick on this is that for me SF mostly ends in ’75 – the year Star Wars came along and turned SF to Space Opera.

Fantasy, Magic Realism and Space Opera are all of one to me, because the author has a get out when it comes to playing with the ideas. To me this story here in no way forms SF because Resnick has made the fantastic element integral to the tone, and refuses to explain it away with a rational argument.

I find it really depressing that this element in SF seems to have been mostly abandoned in the modern SF world, and it is because of this that I mostly bury myself in books like the SF masterworks range, ignoring the crap that I consider so inferior to the original product.

So yeah, Steve, I think it’s fair to say there are a good proportion of us who don’t follow with Fantasy in any way, and I hope it’s clear from the description I’ve given here that it is almost impossible for fantasy to do what SF can do – otherwise it turns into something like Niven’s The Magic Goes Away series. I hope Resnick stops lording it over those of us who disagree with him with his publishing figures, and I really support hiving off the fantasy – it fundamentally does not do it for me – but then nor does Star Wars or Dune (Not SF, sorry guys you’re WRONG).

Cheers!

Then there is ORYX AND CRAKE by Margaret Atwood shelved with the literary novels, but, if that book had been written by someone else as a first novel, everyone would call it Science Fiction.

Sure, “Travels With My Cats” is Fantasy, in the purest sense, but there is no reason why it can be in a Science Fiction magazine.

That said, it seems to me, there is a lot more “Fantasy” in the “Science Fiction” sections of bookstores than there was 15 or 25 years ago. Or is my memory failing?

But that’s subjectivism for you. Like another reader, I found “Bartleby in Exile” far more to my liking, and did not really enjoy this. It came across as a really well-written monologue about a midlife crisis. But “in my opinion” it didn’t satisfy my craving for some solid science fiction. I think this is why I lost interest midway through. This brings me to my point.

Note the emphasis on “my opinion”. The problem with this discussion is all of you are trying to assign an absolute to a relativity. The definition of science fiction is, and always will be, a matter of personal subjectivism, best defined by the individual reader and at the expense of some imagined, ideal mutual consensus. I don’t care if ten readers on Escape Pod think this story *isn’t* science fiction, or the Hugo Committee thinks it *is* — and gave it an award after such a decision. I don’t find an argument that “ray guns and aliens” are obsolete as a definition of science fiction any more logical than one stating that some authors’ tendencies to fuse genres together IS science fiction. It’s all subjective. You’ll never write a story at at any point in time, past, present, or future, that satisfies everyone’s definition of science fiction. And the authors that try usually produce the classic “horse designed by a committee”.

Mr. Resnick, and the Hugo folks, think this is science fiction. They’re pleased with the story and very satisfied. They’re 100% right, and 100% wrong. Big deal. Not everyone will agree with their opinion, but that’s wonderful. Subjectivism is present, insuring that this fiction we’re all fortunate enough to enjoy (and craft) will continue to grow and evolve as everyone brings their different definitions of “horse” to the table.

Alas, no. Sam Moskowitz used to argue that the Golden Age of science fiction was 1939. Barry Malzberg sets it at 1955. Others put it at 1971.

They’re all wrong. For what you’re after, the golden age of science fiction is thirteen.