EP392: Aftermaths

[eytanz]

EP392: Aftermaths

By Lois McMaster Bujold

Read by Mat Weller

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Link to online version of story
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Listen to this week’s Escape Pod!

[matweller]

My apologies for the late posting of this story. The main computer in Escape Pod Production Studios Northeast failed me on several levels on this production and I was forced to go to the backup. The responsibility is all mine and I hope I didn't inconvenience you too much.

Thanks,
Mat

[JDoug]

I enjoyed this one.

[Mr. Bunny]

I like the story, and have read most of the Vorkosigan stories to my kids. But there were a number of pronunciation issues in the reading. The biggest was Barrayaran. (spelling that from memory, may have it wrong.) The first 'a'  was read so lightly it sounded like "Brayan." Also, I think timorous and vehemence were both mispronounced. That was enough to spoil my enjoyment of a favorite sorry.

Though to be fair, I may be more picky because it was a favorite.

[Litch]

The pronunciation of Barrayar really threw me off. Too bad there isn't someplace online where you could find out how to pronounce it, oh wait, there is!

http://www.dendarii.com/bujold_faq.html#barr-names

Barrayar - BARR-ah-yar

[InfiniteMonkey]

I really enjoyed this. I especially loved the humanity of this story, something that somethings gets lost in space opera. I liked the small-scale representation and reminding of the people behind large events.

I love space opera, but I have a shocking confession - I've never read Bujold. I think I may have found the cult-like devotion of some of her fans a bit off-puting .

Clearly I was wrong, and I need to reconsider my next reading selections.

[matweller]

Unfortunately, I never have either before now, but since reading this I already have her first couple books on my wishlist. I will also re-record with proper pronunciations and update the file this weekend. My apologies to all for whom I diminished this amazingly beautiful story. That's not sarcasm or fishing, it's sincere. This story is amazing and deserves top performance.

[smithmikeg]

I really liked how the world building in this story focused on people, traditions, and culture.  It reminded me of how I felt when I first started studying languages and later did study abroad trips.  Now the travel bug is biting again...

[Windup]

I haven't ready anything else in this series.  Apparently, I'm among the legions of SF fans who haven't heard of this particular author, despite the awards and the evident quality of her work.

However, despite not having any background, I thoroughly enjoyed the story -- the world-building, and the pilot's slightly freaked-out response to the recovery and identification aspects of the mission.  I also loved the description of how the pilot experienced controlling the ship.  It was even more interesting because I listened while working out on Nautulis-like equipment at the gym -- the "oneness with the machine" became rather immediate.

The only way I felt disadvantaged by lack of background was that it took me a while to understand that all the combatants were human -- I thought at first we might be dealing with truly alien customs and traditions. 

[The-Explodey]

After 3 years of listening I've finally got on forums woohoo

I really liked this story
Yup after 3 years of wanting to say something ... I've drawn a blank

[Bdoomed]

^ I like this post a lot.

[psyque]

I enjoyed this story, though I felt a bit like I was missing something by not having read into this universe before.
Is the narrator-protagonist someone from other story/novel? I had a hard time understanding him, save for his desire to pilot his ship over returning to base when his mission was technically over. Not that I really needed to, as the direction of this story seemed to follow not the narrator, but the medic, and her themes of loss, love, family, and grief. I am no stranger to tales of dead soldiers, but this one story manages to capture so many distinct themes and emotions in just a few lines of prose.

Great choice, editors! I look forward to next week's episode.

[Windup]

After 3 years of listening I've finally got on forums woohoo

I really liked this story
Yup after 3 years of wanting to say something ... I've drawn a blank

Reminds me of a story told by a friend who used to do retreats at a monastery.  The monastic order had been silent until sometime in the mid-70's when the rules were relaxed.  My friend was talking to one of the brothers about this and asked, "So, what was it like when you finally got the notice from the Father Abbot lifting the order?  What did you talk about?"

"Oh, nothing," the monk replied.  "I really didn't have anything to say." 

[TheArchivist]

Like a couple of others here, I fall into the Venn diagram section "yes, I've heard of LMB, no I haven't read all her books". Actually, I've read one (Vorkosigan) novel but wasn't massively enamoured of it. This story I did enjoy, a lot. Not a "Wow! I must go out and buy all the others" lot, but I did enjoy it.

So, the pilot-narrator that psyque had a hard time understanding... I recognized a relatively common SF trope done well. The ships are controlled through a neural interface by surgically enhanced pilots, which is bound to have some psychological effect on them. Here we see it as part of the world-building, a low-key background presence. We may reasonably expect to find him hard to understand, but since he actually wasn't the protagonist that's not a problem. As a foil to the medic's attitudes, an observer through whom we see her, he worked well. That said, he was a tiny bit quick to leap to the "lesbian necrophiliac" assumption. I'd realised who that final body was before then. But that's a very minor quibble.

The medic's motivations - her extreme care and reverence for her subjects, emphasised by what we don't know at first but clearly also part of her character - and her actions were just right, beautifully portrayed.

The examination of culture, people and traditions was good too. I'm not as immersed in that scene as smithmikeg so it didn't have quite the same resonance, but it's always good to see done well. Some of the best fan-fic I've seen was written by people for whom that's their thing, and in a minor-characters spin-off like I get the impression this was (though as I said, I don't know the universe) it works really well. I did get a slight feel of author-does-fanfic-of-own-work, in fact, but that's not in any way a complaint or criticism. What I mean is that it felt like an exploration of a tiny little corner of no importance to the great story arc - wonderful detail for those whose devotion to the whole may be mistaken for "cult-like", an interesting and very enjoyable stand-alone for the rest of us (assuming it's done well, which this absolutely was).

[albionmoonlight]

I liked this story.  Due to the nature of short audio fiction, a lot of what EA runs is plot-driven.  I enjoy that because it really helps to keep my attention during the rides to and from work.  So, based on that expectation, I started out by expecting this story to take a plot-driven turn--would the Med Tech be an enemy spy?  Would the ship be attacked?

Once I realized what this story was--an exploration of humanity--I stopped expecting the Klingons to show up and could meet it on its own terms.  And, on those terms, it's great.

[flintknapper]

A good story set an interesting and detailed science fiction universe. However, I had read stories by the author before and I am admittedly a fan.... so perhaps I am a bit bias.

I also actually thought the narration was fine. The pronunciation did not both me a bit. I guess I had not give much thought to it before. The critics regarding the pronunciation are probably right.  It just didn't turn me off from the story.

[kongstad]

I liked the narration.

I've only heard the vorkosigan books as audiobooks from audible, with Grover Gardner as the narrator, so having another narrator was a change. I had to adjust to the different pronunciation of the names, but that was it. in a way it worked well to have a different voice narrate the pilot.

I also found the story very good. in a lot of scifi the focus is on the action or the tech. here we have the flipside. And not only as a "war is bad" message, but as an intimate process of picking up the human debris, naming the dead, and lovingly wash them down and make them presentable again.

I know that finding her daughter was the pay-off of the story, but somehow it cheapened her dedication just a tad. Did she act the way she did because all people are deserving of dignity in death, or were the bodies stand-ins for her missing daughter. On the other hand, perhaps most altruism is based on the fact that we have close and loving personal relationships, and when we act kindly against strangers we are following the patterns we have established in thes intimate relationships?

[Thunderscreech]

While listening, I found myself asking 'Why is SHE doing all the cleaning and body prep?' then realized that every task has to have some point where the rubber meets the road.  If not her, then it would have been someone else.  I don't know quite how to communicate this clearly, but the idea of this person and job closing the loop for both these people and the task their body recovery entailed resonated with me.  The people who perform these tasks are basically the final punctuation of life sentences.  The pilot's transformation seems to be the realization of this.  It goes from 'waste of time' to 'vital task in service of that which makes us human'.

[Lionman]

I've not heard stories set in this universe before, but it sounds like it's rich in detail, which makes it all the better.

While pondering this story after listening to it, it struck me as one of those situations where they've paired up the Sergeant with the newly minted officer, in order to temper the freshly filled brain with the experienced wisdom of age.  Our Med Tech was there more than just to pull in, clean up and identify bodies, but to help this new officer and pilot understand why it was done.  Hoping to instill the truth of being in the Military: You practice, plan and prepare, and pray you never have to use one wit of skill you've honed.  Because you are a warrior, does not mean you long for war.

[chemistryguy]

I know that finding her daughter was the pay-off of the story, but somehow it cheapened her dedication just a tad. Did she act the way she did because all people are deserving of dignity in death, or were the bodies stand-ins for her missing daughter. On the other hand, perhaps most altruism is based on the fact that we have close and loving personal relationships, and when we act kindly against strangers we are following the patterns we have established in thes intimate relationships?

This was something she'd been doing a long time.  I got the impression that she was going to treat her daughter no differently than anyone else.  She took the time to learn Barrayaran tradition, and waxed fondly about it.

[Devoted135]

Add me to the list of people who has never heard of this author or her work. I take it she has a rabid fan base? I'll definitely be checking her out now!

There was something beautiful and poignant about watching the pilot gradually move from blatant disregard for the human cost of war to respect and appreciation for the value of the medic's ministrations. The medic herself seemed perfectly suited for her job; both very capable and also supremely compassionate toward her subjects, regardless of which side they came from. Thanks for this great story!

[silber]

 What a fantastic story.  I couldn't help but tear up at that last line.  "the good face pain but they great, they embrace it."  I'll absolutely be going to find more from this author.

[benjaminjb]

It's funny to me that this story takes a tried and true formula--the callow soldier who learns about life and death from the grizzled (or frayed) veteran--and makes only a few twists--they aren't in the trenches during the war, they're cleaning up the remains after; the grizzled veteran is a humane medic--and manages to make the formula interesting with just those few twists.

From my time volunteering at library book sales (that one time), I guess I always put Bujold's Vorkosigan stories in the same category as David Weber's Honor Harrington--quick, guess which is an Honor Harrington book and which is a Miles Vorkosigan book:

1) Shards of Honor
2) Flag in Exile
3) Echoes of Honor
4) Brothers in Arms

But after hearing this story, I'm more interested in Vorkosigan and Bujold more generally.

(Answers: MV 1, 4; HH 2, 3)

[CryptoMe]

I have been quite the fan of Bujold since I started going through my library's audiobook collection. Her publishers seem to have been one of the early adopters of download loans, and there wasn't much else to choose from. I had never heard of her before, but quickly got into all of her books, because the characters are so well written.

But this story resonated with me for a completely different reason. My mother passed away suddenly the day before I listened to this story. The calm and serenity of the story was exactly what I needed and it was a great comfort to think that at this moment some stranger was preparing my mother for burial, hopefully with a similar amount of care and respect.

P.S. Thank you so much Matt for fixing the Barrayar pronunciation issues. I will download the updated file and re-listen.

[matweller]

I didn't yet, and I apologize. Life has been pretty non-stop lately, and when you combine that with a switch to DSL which now makes my computer miserable to use it takes a major force of will to record. It'll happen, but not today.

[Russ Jenkins]

I've been moved to enter the forum for the first time after years of listening (as someone else said too).
I loved this story, it kept tripping me up. I kept thinking "Oh yes this is a predictable story of the caring doctor winning over the cynical captain. NO wait it's a predicatable story of a seemingly caring doctor being secretly crazy. NO wait its..." and so on.
It ended up being quite moving and very memorable, and not so predictable after all.

[SF.Fangirl]

Long time LMB fan.  I read this short story (which appears at the end of Shards of Honor) several times already.  It's a stand-alone because none of the characters reappear. I was happy to listen to it again.  Enjoyed it even if it was not new to me.

I'm pretty sure that "Barrayar" and  "Barrayarian" were the only misprounounciations.  Long ago I had several of the Vorkosigan books on tape (possibly even this story), but since cassette tapes have gone the way of the dinosaur I got rid of them several years ago and haven't listened lately.

My friend spent a couple of weeks at the start of OEF/OIF preparing bodies and uniforms for burial.  It's psychologically traumatic work.  At least several of her co-workers of the time ended up with some PTSD symptoms with seeing bodies, wounds and trying to make the soldiers look like they had when alive for the families.  I think this story captures their experience.

[luka datas]

not sure about the conclusion. I don't know if morticians are necessarily deeper of more noble than anyone else. Also. claiming that great people embrace pain is a little misleading.
great people do GREAT things.
I hope that the author has chosen this morbid topic for the sole purpose of selling a story too, because the only people I know who dwell on death and linger on it to the extent that this story does are manic depressives.
Manic depression is pretty rife nowadays so I'm not being critical of people with bipolar syndrome or such like... just pointing out a common trait.

Or was it an anti-war story?
if it was it lost a lot of it's effect by glamourising the cosmetician's terrible lot, in it's conclusion, for me.
Well read and written though. 3 and a half stars.

[Unblinking]

This story was very well written, very emotional.  I liked it.  While I found the medic weird, I do not mean that in a derogatory way.  I would like to have her as a friend, both because compassion is an important trait to have around you, and because it's good to have someone with such an attitude toward life and death so that even if you can't adopt their attitude you can at least be reminded of it.

Her treatment of the dead reminded me a great deal of the events in the TV series Six Feet Under.  Before I watched that series, I thought it was weird that anyone ever wanted to watch that series at all.  But what I found the most remarkable about it was the respect the morticians treat toward the dead, and each of their emotional reactions to death at different stages in their lives.  It's a situation that's hard to understand from the outside, because it's a rare profession where you must do the best to fulfill your customers wishes but at the time that you fulfill their wishes they are not able to tell you what they want. 

I first came across LMB a few years ago when I heard she was doing a reading at a local library--she lives in the Twin Cities MN area here.  She read something from what was at that time the upcoming Vorkosigan novel.  It was good enough, and she reads well.  For an excuse to say hi to her I bought one of the novels on the rack and had her sign it.  One of the questions in the Q&A session had been which novel one should start with in the series.  Her answer was that there is no particular one novel, they aren't all written in chronological order and generally you can pick up any one as the first.  But that if you wanted to start chronologically in Miles's life, "Young Miles" is the one to go with.  So I bought that one, and slogged through about 100 pages before giving up at the plot that seemed more about random events and luck than any actual character or plot, and I just wasn't interested.  I'm not saying I'll never try another Vorkosigan, but I wasn't impressed with that one, and my reading shelf is overfilled enough that I'm not likely to pick one up any time soon.

I hope that the author has chosen this morbid topic for the sole purpose of selling a story too, because the only people I know who dwell on death and linger on it to the extent that this story does are manic depressives.

I don't find that to be the case at all.  Most people I know try to avoid thinking about death entirely, not sure if that's a trait of American society in general or age group, or what.  But I've known quite a few people who are on comfortable terms with death, not that they are indifferent to it but that they can accept it more readily than others.  Often this is because they are in an occupation that goes hand in hand with death (such as an emergency room staff member or an active military member) or because that person has reasons to not expect to live much longer (terminal cancer patients or the very elderly).  On the contrary to what you said, I've found these people's mental state to be more stable than people who try to avoid thinking about death entirely, and it's very refreshing to me to hear those people talk about death as just something that is going to happen rather than a terror-inducing event that we should live in constant anxiety about.  We are all going to die someday, if you can come to terms with that early on you can live a happier life, I believe.  I think that's why there are so many movies and other stories about terminal cancer patients living their last years/months to the fullest.

EP392: Aftermaths

By Lois McMaster Bujold

Read by Mat Weller

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Link to online version of story
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Listen to this week’s Escape Pod!

When someone has a chance, can they put an excerpt in that first post?  I find it very hand when visiting the forums so I can remind myself what the story was about before diving into comments.

[l33tminion]

the pilot-narrator that psyque had a hard time understanding... [...] We may reasonably expect to find him hard to understand, but since he actually wasn't the protagonist that's not a problem. As a foil to the medic's attitudes, an observer through whom we see her, he worked well. That said, he was a tiny bit quick to leap to the "lesbian necrophiliac" assumption.

I think it was set up pretty well that the nature of the job (and the calm of the medic) was getting to the pilot a bit.  The conclusion he jumps to is crazy, but it didn't seem out of character for him to panic a bit at that moment.  Once he takes a moment to calm down, he comes to the correct conclusion on his own.

[PotatoKnight]

Oh man, this story. 

In the late 90s I entered Jr. High. I read constantly and loved SF media-Star Trek DS9, the (then-current) Outer Limits, Star Wars. I'd read some Asimov and such when I was younger but hadn't really been exposed to literary SF, my SF reading largely limited to tie-in novels. 

We had a reading class that year in addition to our English class. Many of the class periods were spent in silent sustained reading and a big part of the grade was just number of pages read and logged during the quarter.  There was some analysis and such taught but the class was more about getting folks to read than much of the critical thinking that drives a lit class.  Given tha reading was my recreational activity of choice anyway, this was a pretty good deal (the page requirements were something like 750 for the first quarter, 1000 for the other two. I easily cleared 10k on the year.)

My reading teacher recognized my enthusiasm and (albeit unsophisticated) SF interests. He brought in a bag of books from his own collection of paperbacks and had me pick one. SF to me still kinda meant spaceships and laserguns and I was drawn to one with an odd-looking ship giving off what looked like lightning. It was Shards of Honor, the book that has this story as a coda. 

I can't link the cover since this is my first post but...well, you should google it. It's a bit...embarrassing. But something about it clicked, and I'm glad it did. 

I loved the book and I suppose that makes sense since the first section is essentially Star Trek fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off (a female Federation captain and a male Klingon captain facing a mutiny get stuck on a planet together and fall in love.) But this story had something compelling beyond the space battle and political machinations, it had absolutely compelling characters. I became a member of the Bujold fan listerv (on which I--I'm sure unconvincingly-- pretended to be a 20-something librarian with a cat in Portland instead of a 14-year old student in Boise, which as a 20-something lawyer with a cat in Seattle I retroactively find hilarious)

I barely noted this little story at the end at the time. It is narratively irrelevant--I don't believe any of the characters have any connection to the main plot (possibly one of the corpses appears alive? I don't think so.) But I was hooked overall and devoured whatever else of the series I could put my hands on over the next few years. I still appreciated them mostly as pew pew stories with characters I loved deeply. 

I reread them a couple of years back and I would argue this story, a seeming afterthought, is more important to the series than anything that happens in the rest of the book--thematically, if not narratively. These books LOOK like they are about space battles and mysteries and romances. They look like the kind of books that the pilot narrator wanted to be a character in (notice his disapointment at missing the war) And yeah, they exist on that level--some more than others. I think the pilot represents Bujold's readers--I suspect at least initially predominantly male audiences drawn to military SF. The other character serves to pull both him and the reader toward the real theme of the series: motherhood. In all its miriad SF forms. 

This theme is stronger in some parts of the series than others but it pops up constantly. Ethan of Athos concerns a man from an all-male world picking up key new gene lines. He's surprised to find that just anybody can have a baby other places--what about all the labor costs? The woman accompanying him bemusedly states that that is treated as "women's work" and never makes it onto accounting ledgers. The Cetagandan Empire is the boogeyman in many of the early stories and is apparently your classic expansionist bad guy empire. In Cetaganda, we learn that the empire essentially exists to protect and serve an ongoing genetic heritage managed by women. Managing a genetic heritage is really another way of saying motherhood. Bioengineering runs throughout the series, and the most important piece of tech in story after story is the Uterine Replicator-- a technological mother. 

And then there are stories like this one. Stories--often wrenching ones, to my adult eyes--about the actual experiences of mothers. As others have mentioned on this thread the question of where to begin with Buiold is a tricky one. The later books are unquestionably better-written, but part of the joy of the series is watching the history unfold, and later books do call back to events in earlier ones. If you like this story, though, I recommend the novella The Mountains of Mourning. I believe it was available online at one point, not sure if it is now. It was reprinted with a frame narration in Borders of Infinity. I also highly recommend Barrayar and Komarr. Both have mothers in very difficult situations as narrators and both went way up in my estimation when I read them as an adult. 

A big thank you to EP for doing this story and helping me re-experience and deepen my appreciation. 

[hardware]

Like most people here, I really enjoyed this story as a little meditation on death and dignity. Also, I agreee with the one who kind of suggested that the twist with the daughter wasn't actually necessary, and almost detracted from the strength on it. But only almost.