Author Topic: EP165: Those Eyes  (Read 40844 times)

incandenza

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Reply #75 on: July 22, 2008, 03:01:51 PM
Wow, Steve - you even sounded like David Brin there.

-though to be honest that could just be because the voice of the narrator is extremely didactic and self-important



wakela

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Reply #76 on: July 23, 2008, 12:10:13 AM
Wow, Steve - you even sounded like David Brin there.

-though to be honest that could just be because the voice of the narrator is extremely didactic and self-important

I got the feeling that Brin was engaging in a little self-mockery in this story. 
I hate to be the guy who bemoans the State of Things These Days, but I think this story was written in a time when you could mock your own point of view.  These Days it seems that Things are so divisive that a writer wouldn't want people misinterpreting his opinion.  "I knew it!  David Brin does believe in aliens.  Look how he made fun of that skeptic."



Atara

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Reply #77 on: August 02, 2008, 05:38:02 PM
From the outtro: "belief sponge." Great term!




ScottC

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Reply #78 on: August 05, 2008, 05:48:51 PM
I thought that the story could be a comment on colonialism.  The 'fairies' are the colonizers who give the natives some nice beads and alcohol and religion in exchange for valuable resources.  The colonizers convince themselves that this is an equitable arrangement when in fact they have infantilized the native population to be docile .

But when the natives start having ideas of their own or start thinking that maybe they should have a say on what happens to their resources, the colonizers are shocked, shocked at how ungrateful the natives.



milo

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Reply #79 on: August 07, 2008, 01:30:35 AM
The distortion in Anna Eley's reading of the alien voice made it nearly impossible to listen to. I tried to listen in the car, both over the car's sound system and using headphones. Her voice was unable to compete with the road noise. I finally made it through the episode at home in a quiet room with a Bose music system. While I usually enjoy voices enhanced by sound effects, this one did not work for me.

I'm afraid I didn't much care for the story, either. Both of the points of view just seemed silly and pretentious.



Rail16

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Reply #80 on: August 11, 2008, 06:05:51 PM
i wish that i could have listened to this story, but the 'alien' voice was too annoying and difficult to understand at times.  after the 3rd time hearing it speak i moved on to another podcast, mentally noting to mark this one as not new when i get home.



netwiz

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Reply #81 on: August 30, 2008, 08:52:08 PM
This seemed to me more of a dialectic than a story I'd listen to for fun. Dialectic has its place, but it's not why I listen to Escape Pod.



Unblinking

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Reply #82 on: March 26, 2010, 05:14:28 PM
Not bad.  A bit more idea driven than my usual tastes of plot-driven, but the idea was interesting enough to keep me listening.  Steve was a good choice for the narrator since he has a polished voice for radio (unlike me, who has a face for radio).  Anna's parts I found quite hard to understand, not because of her voice itself, but the spec sound fx there were just too much--I could understand her, but I found myself thinking more about how weird she sounded than about what she was saying.

I liked the idea of creatures being beaten back by skepticism.  If this concept were explained to the announcer in some form, could he learn to believe?  If I'm a skeptic, and I KNOW that these creatures exist, but the strength of their existence depends on people believing them to exist, then can it really be proven that they exist at all?  The trouble is, the skeptic's view is based on the assumption that facts are facts regardless if they are observed.  You can't have proof if the facts change whenever you're not looking!  And that's why the story was interesting to me.  :)