Escape Artists
PodCastle => Episode Comments => Topic started by: Ocicat on August 28, 2018, 05:46:11 PM
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PodCastle 537: To the Moon (http://podcastle.org/2018/08/28/podcastle-537-to-the-moon/)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DlsDU98XsAEkl_w.jpg)
Rated PG-13, for inhumanity and painful truths.
Originally published in Fireside (https://firesidefiction.com/issue1/chapter/to-the-moon/).
(http://escapepod.org/wp-images/podcast-mini4.gif) Listen to this week’s PodCastle! (http://media.rawvoice.com/podcastle/s/media.libsyn.com/media/podcastle/PC537_ToTheMoon.mp3)
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This gave me a sharp kick in the white, liberal, middle-aged ass. Damn. Thanks for posting this complicated tale.
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This reminded me a lot of contacts I had to recent immigrants, including refugees from wars or political oppression and economic refugees. I've had political refugees confess to me after a year of friendship that they falsified their claims (which has no impact on friendship), but I've also visited Syrian war refugees who know they can't return home for years, even after the war is over. Assad has lists of dissidents and even before the civil war there had been oppression against opposition.
It's a complex topic, and I think the story dealt with it right. Well, the "we don't want you on the moon" metaphor was a bit heavy handed, but the rest was great. I except nothing less from Liu of course.
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This made me tear up, as Liu stories invariably do. The allegory used in the storytelling, real strife told as a fairy tale, I loved that so much. It grieves me that only the "right" stories will be accepted.
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There’s no truth. If I were put into such a desparate situation, would I BS a sad, sad story to pull at the heart-strings of my legal aid? I don’t know (as I’ve lived in Canada since I was born). It makes me wonder how much of what my grandmother told me about fleeing Estonia at the end of WW2 was embellished (the possibility that my ancestors might have played the Nazis & Red Army against each other is a WHOLE OTHER ball of wax [do I have collaborators among my deceased kin?]).
This episode was messy & effective story-telling. Nice.
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“Go home, Sally. All asylum applicants lie, and you don’t want to examine their stories too closely. Even if some horrible things did happen to them, they have to compete with the stories told by economic immigrants who want to avoid deportation by lying. So they embellish their stories with more terrible details, sculpt them in ways they think we want, and we believe them because their stories confirm for us how orderly, how safe, and how much better we are than the rest of the world. They assure us that we’re still exceptional.”
Brutal. Excellent work by Ken Liu, as always.
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I'm catching up on the channel. It's been several months (?) after this was aired. Yep, this episode is still messy and poignant. Nice.