Its a very funny and original story indeed. What bothers me is the idea of actually “improving” the canines intelligence. Or rather adjust it to fit the human society. I find it remiss and distasteful. But hey this is just fictional, right. Ill hold back my complains till the near future.

now i’m not so sure.

runs off to read h2g2 once more

However despite loving it, I did find it a bit long. I thought the ending where they finally catch the People’s Court dragged out too long with, I think, three action scenes taking place befor they got the the court room. At that point I was ready for the conclusion and the action scene seemed to be slowing the plot down.

And somewhere near in the last third there was an oddity with the sound – something like an irregular thumping in the background.

As someone who has two cats and a dog, I really wanted to protest about the comment at the end, re dog people vs. cat people.

Personally, I always say I don’t extraterrestrials for alien intelligence- I have two races with that at home

need more lighter stories like this…sometimes it seems we have had a run of “message stories”. So this was great

i also disagree with the idea that dogs are inherently honest. my dog lies to me all the time, they’re just not very good at it.

Best comment ever

F@$k, F@!k. That was a fun story.

I’m sure the voice work had something to do with it, but I think I agree with Bryce @ 66 re. liking this better than the Hugo nominees. This is one I’ll force friends and family members to listen to.

my dog can be extremely intelligent, when she wishes to be that is, and I feel like if she had the opportunity to be on a police force and run down bad guys, she would leap at the chance.

while my sister disliked the “mistreatment” of animals in this podcast, i loved the whole thing. the way the story was presented was different and enjoyable, and the reading was exciting and made you feel like you were in the interrogation room.

well done.

as a side note, i do somewhat disagree with the assertion that dog and cat people are mutually exclusive. i like both, because i grew up with both.

as to why so many writers like cats, i suspect it’s because they can be largely left to their own devices, and when they do want attention are usually content to sit on your chest and be vibrate while you pet them. dogs by contrast actually tend to want you to do things with them. things which usually involve getting up from the computer and going outside.

i also disagree with the idea that dogs are inherently honest. my dog lies to me all the time, they’re just not very good at it.

So now that I have your attention with that header, you may wonder what those three words have in common. Every time Steve’s character said, “Fuck”, two mental images came to my mind. The first one, the most likely one intended by the Author was of the smiling face a dog gets when he’s happy. The second one was related to me by my 8th grade Algebra teacher in parochial school. She was in a class and a nun was substituting for the math teacher. The subject was factorials written as 14! or 17!. The nun, whenever reciting the numbers made them sound bright and cheerful when she read them “14!” with a happy chipper smile and a lilting upnote on the “teen”.

Of course now, every time I look at my dog, I can almost hear Steve’s voice saying ‘Can we go for a walk now? I really want to sniff that spot on the corner again…it smelled really good last time.’

GAH!

Still…Loved it!

How amusing would it be to discover that the interviewer was a capped cat?

GIGO

I really really really like this story.

Steve, you dog, what a great read.

I loved the idea of The People’s Justice and the skull caps on the dogs. I didn’t get exactly who or what the female character was supposed to be and the author lost me when she didn’t congratulate Bull on his impending offspring. Up until that point she was treating Bull as almost human.

Steve, your reading was spot-on, as usual! Great job!

Weaknesses:
*although the tone and use of language was skillful, the basic plot was less than original in some ways; People’s Court twist saved it
*the way the guy they saved (his name escapes me) just got put into adult foster care and forgotten about was also troublesome. Realistic perhaps, but you’d think Goldie’s bond to him would have mattered
*who is the interviewer? A mainframe? Certaintly there were suggestions of machine origin but it wasn’t clear…she sounded a little human sometimes, but there were also indications otherwise
*hmm, I may have misheard , but logical error: how could you have the death penalty for so many crimes but at the same time it’s suspended by the Supreme Court? I think they said that rape, child abuse, murder and a few other things were capital crimes, and then that capital punishment wasn’t allowed….
*production issue: especially near the end, the sound was very pasted-together feeling, as if you were talking past each other. I think that’s probably because you ran out of time, however, so no big. That said, I (and some other readers also) have appreciated your attempts to innovate technically, either with effects or with cooperative storytelling. Do more like this!

Sum up: Particularly interested in how the story focused on the views of cops…and the Peoples Court notion was also interesting, making points about the ways media can distort the truth not to miscarry justice but to get a “good” and resolved story, and how folks assist them with this…simpleminded thinking, etc. Very reality TV.
Cybernetic ethics with animals (can they give consent to the initial capping, and can they, if controlled, do so later?) also interesting.
Good incorporation of social commentary and humor into an sf story, really interesting stuff around the edges.

Other than that, really enjoyed it!
Great!

I like the social commentary in this story, which was there, but not overbearing. It also had some great tech involved.

I also like the reading of this story. It had a great straight (wo)man with a very good reading by Steve Eley of a dog which made me think at times that he should rad more dog stories just so we can hear that voice.

So, therefore, my nitpick is that dog’s POV seem often to be locked in the present. They forgive you almost instantly if you seem really, really sorry. It’s one of the appeals of a dog is that they get distracted easily because they can only see the moment in front of them. By giving a dog a memory bank and so on I get a distinct feeling that what the exact charm of a dog is often goes down the drain. (I say this after knowing quite a few labs, a mixed breed and a poodle.) But that is a nitpick.

The other nitpick I have is that often dogs have a sense of sympathy or sadness. They cock their ears with a “why?” look on their face or even have a sense of sympathy. I’d love to hear Steve Eley’s dog voice with those tones to it as well. The almost childish quality in that forlorn expression that dogs get. But maybe for a dog, as his reading suggested wouldn’t remember the emotions that well and be focused on pleasing for the moment. “Give me a biscuit–aren’t you going to?”

Last Nitpick. There has to be authors who own dogs. There are dog books out there by the thousands. This is not an excuse for Steve Eley to give up on writing and trying to publish his own fiction. Do it more Mr. Eley! Be selfish once in a blue moon. So you should also have the same desire, no matter what worldly pet you choose. If you would still like to make that excuse, then I’ll make a list of authors and other artist-types who own dogs! Who else will worship Invisible Pink Unicorns without a pen and mind such as yours? But this is nothing to do with the story itself…

Beyond that is was a funny and interesting story with a really good format for podcasting.

I found the story very engaging. It rolled right along, never losing its pacing, and soon found myself immersed in the world Sully-dog had created.

Narration aside, the story itself was definitely high quality. A lazy writer might have chosen to just make the dog thing a gimmick without adding any other real substance to the story, but here we had plenty of substance. I loved the “multi-layered-ness” of the whole thing — we had the dogs on one level, the bio-upgrade technology on another, the speculative vision of a media-borne vigilante justice system on another, and plenty of interesting social commentary along for the ride. Very well done!

This story shook my ears. I like that.

This story made me feel really good, so good I almost forgot my nitpick about dogs being colour blind, nits make me sad, gotta pick nits even if it does make me feel a bit like a Bad Boy again for not focusing on how great the story is /

My favorite part was when Bull did a double take after realizing that Goldie may have more rights than any run of the mill dog (smell of haunches notwithstanding), that really smelt just right.

First time I’ve gotten emotional over an EP story.

As the owner of a goofy Golden Retriever, we often joke that she knows only one word: “Hi!”

Great story, excellent reading.

I only wish we had someone there with a video camera to capture your performance.

But I actually really liked this story by the time it was done.

Yeah, I think it was the earnest Fuck!ing that did it.

The point is, there’s something weird about the sound quality of this episode compared to the quality of episode 50. It sounds like there’s a little reverb, or something to that effect, but it doesn’t sound as clean.

On the other hand, I think you’ve gotten a lot better at inflection, and I dig it.

The only problem was Terry Stringer: could he have thought of a better pun?

Loved Steve’s dog voice. Every time that dog said “Fuck” I cracked up. That joke didn’t have any right to be so hilarious.

Top marks also on the story theme and the way the plot worked out.

Thank you all for the wonderful comments. They are excessive, but my ego knows no bounds, so I’ll gather them in glady. And I’m indebted to Steve for making me look good with such a terrific reading. This is such a wonderful community.

If this story doesn’t hook my wife into EP, I don’t know what will.

I’m curious… what sort of dog did everyone imagine Bull to be? I figure from the name, he’s probably meant to be a bulldog, but I kept seeing him as a German Shepherd. What do the rest of you guys think?

Great job on the reading too. Not only did you manage to capture the spirit of a dog perfectly, you made me laugh out loud with your statements about Goldie.

Thanks for entertaining me so thoroughly! I appreciate that I can get such high-quality fiction for free.

Sincerely,
Vinny Bove,
Fan of sci-fi, dogs, and things that are free

Great story, regardless.

:Eric

Thank you Mr. Sullivan for throwing us this treat! It really made me think.

As for the language. It was rated R. We all know what that means up front. So what’s the problem?

Sometimes the guilty will got off on technicalities, but I’m convinced that the system must be set up to err on the side of caution. A murderer acquitted is preferable to an innocent convicted.

Thanks to DNA evidence more and more wrongful convictions are being uncovered. The tragedy of how these people’s lives have been taken away from them is so great.

If you really prefer a harder justice system that errs on the side of convictions, ask yourself this question: How would you feel to be the one wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life?

I think the profanity fit the story perfectly. If you’ve hung around with cops, you’d know that this story featured much LESS profanity than is normal. The dog’s naive use of it was actually rather endearing–like a kid testing out a naughty word to see if he can get away with it.

Also, I’m pretty sure that when my neighbor’s dog spends an hour monotonously going, “BARK! BARK! BARK!,” that “F–K! F–K! FUCK!” is probably a reasonable translation.

It’s stories like these that make up for the awful Cory Doctorow stories this podcast occasionally subjects me to.

I want to buy Bull a hamburger. And an ACLU frisbee.

Yes they were corrupt, however is not the regular court? look at OJ Simpson, or Rihard Ramirez (the night stalker), who is still today sitting on the death row. and even in the regular court, where they have all the evidence that Steve found, innocent people are still punished, so is the People’s court really that corrupt?

I tire of the “Scorched planet / Mad Max Theme”

Randy

I also thought the similes were much worse than the F-bomb. The constant profanity was sort of endearing because it showed that A. Bull liked the new way to express himself and was adapting to it and B. Lori thought of Bull as a partner, enough to let him grow and learn despite the occasional faux-paw (which she probably found hilarious anyways).

Sorry Steve, I guess you’d need Chris Rock reading this to make the cussing truly hilarious

Um, no. You mean plausible dog dialogue. Having conversed with several dogs, let me assure you that realistic dog dialogue does not include actual words.