My story “As Travelers in Sky Boats” is now up at science fiction podcast Escape Pod. You can listen to it, narrated by Ibba Armancas, or read it at the website. Or both!
It’s about clueless cultural anthropologists (in space!), and an island culture not especially enamored with what Star Trek fans might refer to as the Prime Directive.
A sample:
My sister blames the Travelers. Before they came, she says, we were content within the small world we knew. No one wondered what lay beyond the flat blue horizon where ocean met sky, or who journeyed between the stars. Children never complained that there was an easier way to mend fishing nets, that they did not like the taste of seaweed. Men did not abandon responsibilities to pursue the impossible fantasy of becoming Travelers themselves.
One rainy night, when both she and the water leaking through our roof were keeping me awake, I told her that she sounded like a Traveler when she spoke that way. Who was she–or they–to tell me how I should live, what I could know or not know?
If you like listening to stories instead of (or in addition to) reading them, an audio version of my story “Sons of God, Daughters of Men” is now available at Strange, Weird, and Wonderful Magazine (scroll down a little and look on the right-hand side, under “Audio Short Stories”). The text version is also still available here.
I did the narration myself, using my desktop computer with a USB plug-in mic. It was an interesting experience. When I listened to the first take, I noticed that I could hear a distracting popping sound whenever I pronounced the letter “p” (and sometimes the letter “b” and a few others). This is a known phenomenon, caused by puffs of air emitted with aspirated letters hitting the microphone (if you want to do an internet search and learn more, be sure to search for “popping p’s”, not “p-popping”, or you’ll learn about … other things). I was able to eliminate the problem in the final take by holding a jury-rigged microphone filter–made out of an old knee-high nylon stocking stretched over a wire coathanger–between my mouth and the mic. But then it was a bit difficult to also hold the reading copy of the story I’d printed out in the other hand at an angle such that I could see it past the pantyhose-covered coathanger. Eventually, I settled on reading from my laptop while recording on the desktop, my eyes darting from text to mic to recording outputs. A little awkward, but functional.
Makeshift microphone filter
I’m not sure I’m entirely happy with my reading performance, but I’m not a voice actor and I’d never done this before. I think I overcompensate at the beginning for my fear that I might read too quickly, and my pauses between sentences are overly long. It does improve as I get more into the story. If I were doing this again, I might re-record the opening, and splice it into the current draft. But I was also learning how to use the recording software and wasn’t sure I’d figure out how to do that. (Turns out I had to, as I dropped something at one point, and had to cut out the clatter and subsequent gap in narration while I recollected myself.)
I gave this warning when I originally posted about the story being out in the magazine in the spring, but just to reiterate, it’s the least kid-friendly story I’ve ever written (sex with demons!), so probably not appropriate for story time with the young ones.
