Author Topic: EP344: The Homecoming  (Read 17332 times)

El Barto

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Reply #25 on: May 25, 2012, 09:36:38 PM
I liked this story a lot but one thing stuck in my craw and that was the mom's suddenly magical "moment of clarity" at the perfect moment where she not only recognized her son but told her husband to make up with him.  That wasn't believable at all, though I had no problem believing the son's metamorphasis into a semi-human.



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Reply #26 on: May 29, 2012, 05:09:29 PM
Ugh, I hated this story sooo much.

Resnick does seem to always have the goal of pulling on the heartstrings.  Sometimes he's effective, and makes me feel emotional, but other times I can just see him pulling the strings but I don't really feel the effect.  This time I could just see all the emotional cues but didn't feel a thing.

Neither of the parents felt like real people to me.  The boy did, but he seemed to be on a stage with stage dressing only rather than with other actors.  The dad was a tool but only when he was scripted to be.  His change of heart at the end I found entirely improbable, and even when he was being a jerk it just seemed that he was reading the scripts of every other story where this kind of conflict happens mushed into one.  The mother was very kindly and likeable, to the point that she just felt like she was scripted to be kindly and likeable, and more of a convenient plot device than person.  Worst of all was when the mother suddenly and inexplicably had a lucid moment where she remembers her son and tells husband to act the way that it was entirely obvious the story would make him act by the end by hook or by crook.  If his turning moment had been something not so obviously contrived it would've helped, but her suddenly becoming fully lucid just to slap him into shape was such a clumsy method of doing it that it really made me groan.  I know Resnick can do better.  I've read him do better.  This just struck me as lazy.

I found the chime-voice hard to listen to.  I understand that EP bought this as a Hugo nom and did what they could with it, but it was hard to find a volume where I could understand the words but where the chimes weren't painfully piercing.  Resnick made it so that to do it exactly accurately as the text describes it would be impossible, even the character muses that he shouldn't be able to understand the words at all but somehow does.

The reader did a superb job with the voicework, I hope we see him around the casts in the future.



schizoTypal

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Reply #27 on: May 29, 2012, 06:15:10 PM
I had another thought about the story ... there are a lot of things we're viewing as "negative" that aren't necessarily.

Let's say that the boy is the only genuine character. His parents being just caricatures of what goes on in his own thoughts and feelings of them. If the story is thought of as a one-sided memory of sorts, narrated from the father's angle yet recalled in the son's - it seems a little more sensible. Granted, that takes away from the intended impact emotionally, but also adds a certain psychotic emotional impact that was likely unintended. Similar to the feeling of Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly," which may or may not have even had more than one character at all.



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Reply #28 on: May 29, 2012, 06:31:17 PM
I had another thought about the story ... there are a lot of things we're viewing as "negative" that aren't necessarily.

Let's say that the boy is the only genuine character. His parents being just caricatures of what goes on in his own thoughts and feelings of them. If the story is thought of as a one-sided memory of sorts, narrated from the father's angle yet recalled in the son's - it seems a little more sensible. Granted, that takes away from the intended impact emotionally, but also adds a certain psychotic emotional impact that was likely unintended. Similar to the feeling of Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly," which may or may not have even had more than one character at all.

This feels kind of cheap. By this logic, I could take even the least competently written story and say "well, what if actually this story is happening inside the head of someone who..." And so on. What Makes "A Scanner Darkly" brilliant is not that you can paste an unreliable narrator on top of the story, it's the clues that are already present in the text that point to something weird going on.

This story, by contrast, was just weak.

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schizoTypal

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Reply #29 on: May 29, 2012, 07:12:31 PM
I had another thought about the story ... there are a lot of things we're viewing as "negative" that aren't necessarily.

Let's say that the boy is the only genuine character. His parents being just caricatures of what goes on in his own thoughts and feelings of them. If the story is thought of as a one-sided memory of sorts, narrated from the father's angle yet recalled in the son's - it seems a little more sensible. Granted, that takes away from the intended impact emotionally, but also adds a certain psychotic emotional impact that was likely unintended. Similar to the feeling of Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly," which may or may not have even had more than one character at all.

This feels kind of cheap. By this logic, I could take even the least competently written story and say "well, what if actually this story is happening inside the head of someone who..." And so on. What Makes "A Scanner Darkly" brilliant is not that you can paste an unreliable narrator on top of the story, it's the clues that are already present in the text that point to something weird going on.

This story, by contrast, was just weak.

... I'm going to have to concede to that. Well said.



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Reply #30 on: May 30, 2012, 01:44:56 PM
I had another thought about the story ... there are a lot of things we're viewing as "negative" that aren't necessarily.

Let's say that the boy is the only genuine character. His parents being just caricatures of what goes on in his own thoughts and feelings of them. If the story is thought of as a one-sided memory of sorts, narrated from the father's angle yet recalled in the son's - it seems a little more sensible. Granted, that takes away from the intended impact emotionally, but also adds a certain psychotic emotional impact that was likely unintended. Similar to the feeling of Philip K. Dick's "A Scanner Darkly," which may or may not have even had more than one character at all.

This feels kind of cheap. By this logic, I could take even the least competently written story and say "well, what if actually this story is happening inside the head of someone who..." And so on. What Makes "A Scanner Darkly" brilliant is not that you can paste an unreliable narrator on top of the story, it's the clues that are already present in the text that point to something weird going on.

This story, by contrast, was just weak.

Yes, what Electric Paladin said. 

I tend to love unreliable narrator stories because of the clash between what is said to have happened and what did happen to give me a puzzle to solve.  But I never got the impression that this was one of them, which means that if it was one, it did it very badly.  And if it was unreliable, I'd be hard-pressed to accept it being from the boy's point of view.

(I do love A Scanner Darkly, fantastic, and one of the few PKDick movie adaptations that was actually pretty faithful to its source)



Myrealana

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Reply #31 on: June 05, 2012, 02:12:50 PM
Personally, I found the jingling of Philip's voice to be just a little distracting, to say the least. I was entirely nonplussed by the story itself, unfortunately. I felt like the whole alien world, Philip's appearance, and anything else remotely sci-fi in nature were added in as an afterthought for no purpose other than to appeal to a sci-fi audience. I wanted something that could have only happened in the world this story was told in, and got nothing of the sort.

The story itself has been told, and retold, and retold millions of times over. While that doesn't automatically make a new telling without merit, this definitely doesn't strike me as anything to write home about. And I'm one to write home about a great story.

The emotional tugs seemed to be the center of the story, and also had a very manufactured feeling to them.

I suppose in the end, I can see the appeal, and I'm not who it appeals to.
I agree 100% - especially with the idea that the scifi elements of the story were non-essential to the story itself. It would have been the same story if the son had gotten tattooed and pierced in order to join some remote African tribe.

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Reply #32 on: June 05, 2012, 04:15:22 PM
I liked this story a lot but one thing stuck in my craw and that was the mom's suddenly magical "moment of clarity" at the perfect moment where she not only recognized her son but told her husband to make up with him.  That wasn't believable at all, though I had no problem believing the son's metamorphasis into a semi-human.

Now, I had a different reaction. I was pretty bored with the story up to that point, because it was nothing new to me. I even rolled my eyes when the son starting telling the "bedtime story" because it was so cliched and so obvious. And the funny thing is, I knew to a degree that the story was setting me up for a moment with the mother would "come back". I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.

And yet, I still fell for it, because I am a SUCKER, DAMMIT!

Overall, this was okay, but it didn't blow my mind like the Cartographer wasps story. And I liked the chimes. felt it added flavor to an otherwise predictable story.

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eytanz

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Reply #33 on: June 09, 2012, 11:59:17 AM
I rather liked this story. It's not Resnick at his best but it's not at his worst, either. I guess I had calibrated my expectations to Resnick's writing - I wasn't expecting three dimensional characters, because he never really provides those - what he does provide is two dimensional characters who are engaged in a well crafted emotional upheaval.

But I do agree with this comment from El Barto:

I liked this story a lot but one thing stuck in my craw and that was the mom's suddenly magical "moment of clarity" at the perfect moment where she not only recognized her son but told her husband to make up with him.  That wasn't believable at all, though I had no problem believing the son's metamorphasis into a semi-human.

I felt tihis was a cop out; while everything before it struck me as internally consistent, this felt very much like an authorial insertion, as if he felt that his story had not developed in a way that would naturally lead to a moment of sufficient redemption for the father (which I would agree with), and he was not willing to just end the story without one. That's a real shame. This would have been a much better story if it was a tragedy.



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Reply #34 on: June 09, 2012, 06:59:10 PM
I might agree if I didn't work with the elderly and see them pop into random moments of lucidity all the time. It was convenient to be sure, but hardly unbelievably or unreasonably so.



eytanz

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Reply #35 on: June 09, 2012, 07:08:50 PM
I might agree if I didn't work with the elderly and see them pop into random moments of lucidity all the time. It was convenient to be sure, but hardly unbelievably or unreasonably so.

I didn't say it was impossible, just that it felt out of place in the story. And this wasn't a random moment of lucidity - it was a very, very specifically timed moment of lucidity that lasted just long enough to impart the necessary message.

One of the things about literature is that it's not bound to realism. That means we can have people undergo body changes that allow them to live on alien worlds where the plants solve mathematical problems and there are giant glow-in-the-dark creatures. It also means that just because something is possible, doesn't mean that it needs to happen. The events in a story, especially an emotionally driven tale like this, should serve the emotional core of the story, and this moment of lucidity, timed as it was, did not do that.



matweller

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Reply #36 on: June 11, 2012, 04:40:43 PM
I might agree if I didn't work with the elderly and see them pop into random moments of lucidity all the time. It was convenient to be sure, but hardly unbelievably or unreasonably so.

I didn't say it was impossible, just that it felt out of place in the story. And this wasn't a random moment of lucidity - it was a very, very specifically timed moment of lucidity that lasted just long enough to impart the necessary message.

One of the things about literature is that it's not bound to realism. That means we can have people undergo body changes that allow them to live on alien worlds where the plants solve mathematical problems and there are giant glow-in-the-dark creatures. It also means that just because something is possible, doesn't mean that it needs to happen. The events in a story, especially an emotionally driven tale like this, should serve the emotional core of the story, and this moment of lucidity, timed as it was, did not do that.
I thought the argument was that it did do that, just that it did it in an all-too-convenient manner. But you're arguing here whether it's convenient or realistic, it should have been avoided to fit your mental image of what a story should be. You're going to be disappointed with art 90% of the time if that's the frame of reference for your judgement. And that's okay, but it's only going to lead to madness if you expect everyone to walk that path with you.

My point was that I don't disagree. It was a cheesy moment that feels like it was intended to be a tearjerker and if it was nothing more than an element inserted to hammer a reaction from you despite having no precedent in reality, then it would probably sour me on the experience too. However, since I have seen similar things happen at seemingly opportune/highly coincidental moments, it has precedent for me -- and I make no claim that anybody else should feel the same -- and therefore I don't automatically dismiss it as just so much drivel. I don't have the single-tear reaction the made-for-tv-movie writer might hope for with such a device, but neither is it enough for me to lose all enjoyment of what is otherwise a beautiful story.



eytanz

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Reply #37 on: June 11, 2012, 04:54:02 PM
I might agree if I didn't work with the elderly and see them pop into random moments of lucidity all the time. It was convenient to be sure, but hardly unbelievably or unreasonably so.

I didn't say it was impossible, just that it felt out of place in the story. And this wasn't a random moment of lucidity - it was a very, very specifically timed moment of lucidity that lasted just long enough to impart the necessary message.

One of the things about literature is that it's not bound to realism. That means we can have people undergo body changes that allow them to live on alien worlds where the plants solve mathematical problems and there are giant glow-in-the-dark creatures. It also means that just because something is possible, doesn't mean that it needs to happen. The events in a story, especially an emotionally driven tale like this, should serve the emotional core of the story, and this moment of lucidity, timed as it was, did not do that.
I thought the argument was that it did do that, just that it did it in an all-too-convenient manner. But you're arguing here whether it's convenient or realistic, it should have been avoided to fit your mental image of what a story should be. You're going to be disappointed with art 90% of the time if that's the frame of reference for your judgement. And that's okay, but it's only going to lead to madness if you expect everyone to walk that path with you.

What? I'm saying no such thing. I'm saying that in my opinion of the story the moment of revelation and the subsequent ending did diminished from the impact of what preceded it in the story.

I'm not asking for the story to fit in with some arbitrary different story in my mind. The narrator repeatedly stated that there's no chance that his wife will have a moment of complete lucidity, and the story for most of its length was really excellent in letting us know that he really wishes he could reconcile with his son but his stubbornness makes him unable to do so. I'm saying that I think this would have been a better story if it had kept both these premises - which it had firmly established - until the end. And I am saying that, realistic or not, the moment of clarity was not handled as well as the rest of the story was written.

Quote
My point was that I don't disagree. It was a cheesy moment that feels like it was intended to be a tearjerker and if it was nothing more than an element inserted to hammer a reaction from you despite having no precedent in reality, then it would probably sour me on the experience too. However, since I have seen similar things happen at seemingly opportune/highly coincidental moments, it has precedent for me -- and I make no claim that anybody else should feel the same -- and therefore I don't automatically dismiss it as just so much drivel. I don't have the single-tear reaction the made-for-tv-movie writer might hope for with such a device, but neither is it enough for me to lose all enjoyment of what is otherwise a beautiful story.

You are really twisting my words (and El Barto's words that I quoted). Show me where I said it made me lose all enjoyment of the story, or where I argued that it soured me on the experience, or where I dismissed it as drivel. I said it was a weak ending to a strong story.



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Reply #38 on: June 12, 2012, 12:54:13 AM
Looking at the positives, I really liked the Bradbury feel in parts of this story. The talking flower concept was beautiful/haunting and would love Mike to explore this further.

I actually liked the effect of Phillip's voice. If he were narrating the whole text it would have been off-putting. As it was, especially early on when it was a little more sparse, it gave the experience life.

The narration was excellent.

Most of my sentiments would be an echo of what has been generally said throughout. It was enjoyable though, as has been mentioned, perhaps we would be less critical if this wasn't a Hugo story...





Myrealana

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Reply #39 on: June 12, 2012, 02:19:32 PM
I might agree if I didn't work with the elderly and see them pop into random moments of lucidity all the time. It was convenient to be sure, but hardly unbelievably or unreasonably so.

I didn't say it was impossible, just that it felt out of place in the story. And this wasn't a random moment of lucidity - it was a very, very specifically timed moment of lucidity that lasted just long enough to impart the necessary message.

One of the things about literature is that it's not bound to realism. That means we can have people undergo body changes that allow them to live on alien worlds where the plants solve mathematical problems and there are giant glow-in-the-dark creatures. It also means that just because something is possible, doesn't mean that it needs to happen. The events in a story, especially an emotionally driven tale like this, should serve the emotional core of the story, and this moment of lucidity, timed as it was, did not do that.
I agree with you here. I saw it coming from a mile away, and it was so short, convenient and well-timed that I didn't find it believable.

I wanted her do something to bring the two of them together, but I wanted it to feel more organic. As it was, it arrived without warning and was over so fast it didn't seem real.

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CryptoMe

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Reply #40 on: June 18, 2012, 03:36:37 PM
This was definitely a "meh" for me. Predictable and dull for many of the reasons that have already been pointed out. And it didn't touch my emotional strings at all. I don't think my reaction is because of the bar being set high for a Hugo nominee, I just think this story was uninspiring in general.

By the way, I agree with hronir that the sound effects for Philip's voice were well done. At the beginning, they are fairly infrequent, giving you time to get used to them. By the end, the chimes just seemed like a natural part of Philip's voice and you barely notice them, like an accent that your ear has become attuned to.



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Reply #41 on: July 12, 2012, 05:40:29 PM
First off, please please please get the narrator to do more stories.  What a great voice!  And I loved the effect that was put on Philip's voice, it gave a very well-worn story that push towards sci-fi.  

At first, I went down the "estranged trans-gender child" route as well, until we got more detail about Philip. The details of the other world and the reasons why he went through the procedure gave it enough of a sci-fi feel to escape that analogy for me.  I cannot word why properly, but I relate to the "changing to see other worlds" decision more than changing my gender to more closely match with my self-identification.  

Edited to add:
I really liked this story, and I suggested to my wife that she give it a listen.  She did, and hated it.  She couldn't really explain why other than "The father was a complete asshole. He wouldn't change his mind that quickly.  Not after 10 years."  She then went on to point things out that I didn't see as implausible, and some things that I didn't think were in the story at all.  Much like Electric Paladin, she comes from a very abusive childhood, so it was VERY interesting to see his response, and how closely it matched hers. 
« Last Edit: July 12, 2012, 05:43:18 PM by Gamercow »

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moshezadka

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Reply #42 on: July 23, 2012, 03:13:23 PM
Two months after I moved from Israel to the Bay area, my parents came to visit me. My dad said that as much as he misses me, he sees how much happier I am here, and that I should stay. I can't help thinking that's why I cried at the end of the story...



hardware

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Reply #43 on: August 07, 2012, 03:44:31 PM
This one wasn't for me at all, but then again, I'd never been a big Resnick fan. The combination of flat characters and strong emotional manipulation makes his story the SF worlds equivalent  of Oscar bait. But if I'm going to cry for a character, (s)he better earn it, and then (s)he better be complex and feel real. Resnicks characters so seldom does. Resnick is the Nicholas Spark of SF, and while he has his place and deserves his spot in the light of all the people who seems to love his stories , I can not for my life see why this would be up for an award.



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Reply #44 on: January 16, 2013, 03:52:42 PM
I wasn't really moved by this one, and I'm glad to see that The Paper Menagerie beat this one out for the Hugo, as that a far more effective use of both spec fic and the "call your mother" emotional tug.

I found that there was no transition in this story. The father is awful and then he is not (or at least less). An arc is more pleasing than two lines joined by a sharp angle.

The narration was excellent. I really liked the production touch of the chimes on top of the son's voice; it added just enough to subtly convey otherness without being distracting (car speakers on commute). I could also tell that there was some vocal distinction under there as well, lending more depth to the overall presentation.

All cat stories start with this statement: “My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...”