lunes, 28 de julio de 2008

Family Values is up at Escape Pod!

Check it out

This is what a couple listeners had to say:

I am glad I get to be the first to comment. What a treat! Be on the lookout for Sara Genge. She is building quite the name for herself. I can see why. This was a fantastic story. Great worldbuiling! Glad to hear it narrated by Alasdair Stuart, He really did it justice
Bookman 12pt

It’s nice that such a short story can still satisfy. The author has a fantastic imagination. A jellyfish alien sex and political intrigue story is a first for me (although I know that there are fetish websites for almost anything)!
kevin.e.a.

Of course, someone caught the blooper (note to self: someone always catches the blooper, the reader is quite right in suggesting authors should not throw around random numbers unless they know what the heck they're talking about).

I enjoyed the story in general, but there's a technical niggle that annoys me:

The teacher transferred (more than) 10,000,000 zettajoules of energy to the senator. To put that into proportion, the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated had a fireball 9Km across and a mushroom cloud seven times higher than Mount Everest. It was 2,500 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

It released one forty-billionth as much energy as was transferred between these two beings. (...)

wintermute.

Of course, I could argue that you don't really know what scale this world is in, that it doesn't even have to be in our same Universe, and that it's satire anyway, so the answer to anything is likely to be 42. However, he got it right. I threw a number around and I missed. This amuses me for some reason... I have fun being wrong.

Scroll down that comment thread for this:

I did like the irony of casual and ostensibly anonymous sex saving a politician from a political gaffe. But the story itself was weak soup. Those zettajoules might have been better spent on character development and an emotional arc that didn't feel like a deleted scene from some intergalactic version of "The West Wing."
Schreiber.

Yes! The West Wing was there. I'm glad someone got it.
And I totally did move on to write another alien tentacle sex story, as shreiber suggested further down in the thread. Be on the lookout for "Prayers for an Egg" a rather more serious take on the subject which will soon be published in Asimov's.

2 comentarios:

Christie Skipper Ritchotte dijo...

Ahahaha, you're awesome. I'll have to remember your equanimity with reader niggles when my stories go up.

P.S. Went to Escape Pod. Still love this story. Love it! :)

Artemisin dijo...

Glad you liked it. :) I'll be on the lookout for yours.

It's not really equanimity when they're right... The blooper was fairly obvious and someone was going to catch it sooner or later. I'm grateful that the person who caught it was so nice about pointing it out. And his advice is good: NEVER through around numbers you know nothing about. That's now high on my list of things to watch out for during revisions, right next to "cut useless words" and "watch that spelling".

I love that comment thread: it's an exercise in exo-narcissism and the closest I'll ever get to going to my own funeral. It's incredible how many little things that I didn't think made it into the story were evident to the readers. That story was a huge in-joke between me and myself, but it seems a lot of it is fairly obvious to readers too. I was watching too much West Wing at the time so, yeah, that was in there. There were also a couple political sex scandals in the air...