She is an outspoken feminist, and this story has another strong female lead (yes, Steve chose the first one but, from the outside perspective, you set the order).
It went second because it had a dragon in it.
Personally, I'm not fond of the story "For Fear of Dragons." I agree with those who say the believability is strained, it draws far too heavily on cliche, and the political agenda is awkwardly heavy-handed (although, for the record, I think the political agenda is anti-establishment in general, not anti-Iraq or anti-men). I was given the option of rejecting the story and sending it to be run in Escape Pod, but even though the story's not my cup of prose-form tea, I opted to keep it for PodCastle. I wanted to be very light-handed with turning stories away because while I dont always agree with Steve's taste, he's clearly an awesome editor. In the end, I only rejected two stories from PodCastle and sent them back to Escape Pod (both had female heroines and could be construed as female empowering).
So, I kept this piece. It went early in the line-up because A) it's traditional fantasy, B) Steve picked it, and C) it had a dragon in it. Had the story come into my slush raw, I would have rejected it.
That's not to say anything negative toward Steve or Carrie Vaughn or anyone else who liked it. I just don't particularly. It's a story that split the audience, more or less, the same way it split me and Steve. I just want to be clear about my taste, and how it does or doesn't interact with my politics -- a story about a plucky heroine or spirited girl or what not is emphatically not enough to win me over.
By the by, I crunched some numbers last night, and looking at what we have in stock, we have, depending on what slice of stories you look at (scheduled or not, etc) somewhere between 43 and 55% stories written by and narrated men (oddly, the numbers for narration and writing are dead even, even though we have plenty of men writing as women, and women writing as men, and so on). As a point of contrast, Steve says last time he crunched numbers, only 30% of Escape Pod stories were written by women, and Ann tells me that only two of his last sixteen pieces had female narrators. Again, that's not meant as nasty or upset toward Steve at all; I'm just pointing out that PodCastle's numbers are closer to equal, and so it's going to be hard to convince me we're doing something wrong with our gender skew, since I haven't seen people saying the same of Escape Pod.
Anyhoo, I'm going to drop out of this thread. Friday's piece is female-written and male-narrated, and basically, IMO, awesome. (If it's about anything civil rights related, I suppose it's about ogre empowerment.) We're moving into our "fairy tale" phase for the next three weeks, and this has tended to be a subgenre dominated by women's voices -- although we are running
a two male-written one
s (Jeremiah Tolbert's "The Girl with the Sun in Her Head" and Gord Sellar's "Pahwahke"). On the other side, we'll be looking at modern folktales -- M. K. Hobson's "Hotel Astarte" (which I'm pretty sure Mary mentioned is nominated for some big award this year), and Ben Rosenbaum's "The Ant King." Both are available online, if you like to see text versions before your audio:
http://www.demimonde.com/SFWA/astarte.htmlhttp://www.benjaminrosenbaum.com/biblio.htmlI do appreciate the compliments in the thread, and that these critiques are offered in a spirit of helpfulness and desire to see PodCastle rockin'. But I've had my say, and it's probably best for y'all to be able to discuss without me. You can catch me in private message or at the podcastle email addresses.
See you Friday for "Giant!"