Author Topic: PC354: The Sea of Wives  (Read 5896 times)

Talia

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on: March 12, 2015, 01:43:35 PM
PodCastle 354: The Sea of Wives

by Nathaniel Lee

Read by Graeme Dunlop

Hosted by Kitty Niclaian

A PodCastle Original!

The seas are full of wives, and our nets strain to hold them.  The Greyling is the largest of the fleet, and our catch the greatest.  The wives are the source of our great wealth.

When the wives are pulled up in the steely silver nets, they are poured in a shimmering stream onto the deck.  Vikos and Broun work the crane, and they sit up high in the control booths, rocking and swaying with the motion of the ship.  I couldn’t do that job.  I’m a knife man; I cut the skins away and put them in the holding tanks, wives in one and skins in the other.  It’s very important that the skins be kept separate.  It’s a simple rhythm, once the catch is coming in.  The wives are disoriented, confused, sometimes dead.  It’s a long haul up from the deeps, and some of them drown or smother on the way in.  I throw the dead ones overboard, skin and all.  The skins are no good once they’re dead.

The ones that stay alive, I slit open.  One stroke along the belly.  Two strokes at the forelimbs, two strokes at the rear.  There’s a trick to shucking the skin then, and more than once I’ve seen a new knife-man get it wrong in the unfamiliar wet and the noise of a ship at sea.  There’s squalling and crying, then, and the whole mess has to go to feed the sharks.  I try to slit their throats first, to be merciful.  You can tell right away who’s not fit to be a knife-man by the way they handle a ruined skin.


Rated R. Contains graphic violence.


Listen to this week’s PodCastle!
« Last Edit: March 31, 2015, 01:28:23 PM by Talia »



Father Beast

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Reply #1 on: March 14, 2015, 12:26:16 AM
eh. Selkie Stories Are For Losers.



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Reply #2 on: March 17, 2015, 03:43:09 PM
This was incredibly good.  I've gotten pretty tired of selkie stories (perhaps ironically, Selkie Stories are For Losers was my least favorite) because the myth has misogyny so tied into the root of it that even though the idea of donning/shedding a sealskin to transform is a cool image, it's hard to enjoy them.  I like how this story acknowledged the horrible nature of the myth, rather than making the romance with the selkie into a creepy kidnapping that I'm somehow supposed to relate to, and dialing it way the hell up and making them treat selkies as fish that you sometimes can earn the right to make into your wife-slaves in explicit manner.  This got me really into the story as a counterpoint to the usual selkie myths even before the ending, which dialed it up even further with the reversal.  I also love that she probably saved his life by making him her slave, and how his worldview makes it so that he just goes along with it--he has done things to deserve this fate, and he is only getting what he deserves after all.

Hell yes.



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Reply #3 on: March 18, 2015, 12:11:42 AM
Oh yes, this was really good.  It nailed the misogyny in the selkie story.  I also enjoyed the assumption that any valuable resource will be industrialized and over-exploited.



Dwango

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Reply #4 on: March 18, 2015, 04:04:08 PM
I'm just wondering how women are treated in this society with fake-women being harvested from the sea.  I'm thinking the misogyny goes well beyond the realms of the oceans.  How disgusting and dehumanizing.

Loved the twist ending.  Turn about, fair play, living on the other side, and all.  Didn't like how much he enjoyed it though, wanted to see a bit more remorse.



albionmoonlight

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Reply #5 on: April 01, 2015, 08:01:56 PM
I'm just wondering how women are treated in this society with fake-women being harvested from the sea.  I'm thinking the misogyny goes well beyond the realms of the oceans.  How disgusting and dehumanizing.

Loved the twist ending.  Turn about, fair play, living on the other side, and all.  Didn't like how much he enjoyed it though, wanted to see a bit more remorse.

I don't think that remorse was in his nature.  It's like he says several times.  He just takes his due from the universe.  He does not seem to have the ability to care whether he deserves it--for good or ill.



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Reply #6 on: April 01, 2015, 09:11:48 PM
I'm just wondering how women are treated in this society with fake-women being harvested from the sea.  I'm thinking the misogyny goes well beyond the realms of the oceans.  How disgusting and dehumanizing.

Loved the twist ending.  Turn about, fair play, living on the other side, and all.  Didn't like how much he enjoyed it though, wanted to see a bit more remorse.

I don't think that remorse was in his nature.  It's like he says several times.  He just takes his due from the universe.  He does not seem to have the ability to care whether he deserves it--for good or ill.

That was how I saw it too.  I don't think he even particularly likes being a knife-man, but it's a job that puts food on the table and he's skilled enough at it to have done okay.  For me I thought that was appropriate in that a lot of the misogyny I see in day-to-day life is a casual reflexive misogyny, it's just part of what a person has always done without self-examination.  In this case the tables get turned, and he's put in the reverse role and, well, although his situation is clearly different  he's still got a crap job to do to make his way in the world--he had to do the work to make a living before, and now he has to do a different work to make a different living now.  He's rather fatalist by nature--just kind of accepting the fact that the universe is going to crap on his head, that its going to crap on most everyone's heads, and that is just the way of things.



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Reply #7 on: April 05, 2015, 11:35:31 PM
I loved the concept of this-- in a (seemingly 19th century-ish) society that has discovered selkies, of course they're going to find a way to mechanize the fishing of them and that's going to lead to over-fishing! It's the kind of thing where I've never thought of it, but it makes perfect sense. This was one of those stories that left me really wondering what the rest of this world was like-- is this an all-male society, so they need to get wives from the sea? Or do they have non-selkie women, and the men with selkie wives are more like guys in our society who marry mail-order brides because "American women aren't submissive enough" or whatever sexist reasoning they give? Is this a generally super sexist society (as Dwango surmised), or are these guys the worst of the worst, sexism-wise, and so can't find a wife except by fishing for her? Do the selkie wives have children with the men? So many questions, and I really like a story that gets me thinking like this.



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Reply #8 on: April 10, 2015, 04:14:48 PM
This was really good, though depressing on many levels. Apart from the terrible treatment of women/selkies, it didn't seem like anyone had a particularly good life. It's sad to think about going through each day with the level of detachment the narrator seemed to feel.



FireTurtle

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Reply #9 on: April 12, 2015, 05:39:53 PM
I loved the concept of this-- in a (seemingly 19th century-ish) society that has discovered selkies, of course they're going to find a way to mechanize the fishing of them and that's going to lead to over-fishing! It's the kind of thing where I've never thought of it, but it makes perfect sense. This was one of those stories that left me really wondering what the rest of this world was like-- is this an all-male society, so they need to get wives from the sea? Or do they have non-selkie women, and the men with selkie wives are more like guys in our society who marry mail-order brides because "American women aren't submissive enough" or whatever sexist reasoning they give? Is this a generally super sexist society (as Dwango surmised), or are these guys the worst of the worst, sexism-wise, and so can't find a wife except by fishing for her? Do the selkie wives have children with the men? So many questions, and I really like a story that gets me thinking like this.

I too suffered from the same amount of questioning. And also about reproduction in this weird world. Do these two species reproduce? Do the girl children go to live in the sea and the boys stay on land? How does this work? While I was admittedly distracted by these technical issues, I did enjoy the story as a twist on an old myth. For me, it pretty much stopped there, as there didn't seem to be much depth here, just a sort of vignette.

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
Ursula K. LeGuin


shanehalbach

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Reply #10 on: April 15, 2015, 07:07:54 PM
I do believe at the end he wonders about being caught in a net himself next season. Am I remembering correctly?

Was I the only one who wondered about the implications of that? If caught, would they strip off his skin and find a wife underneath? And then if *that* skin were cut off, would he be a seal again? Is it a cycle?

Is it furs all the way down??


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Reply #11 on: April 16, 2015, 04:51:47 PM
I do believe at the end he wonders about being caught in a net himself next season. Am I remembering correctly?

Was I the only one who wondered about the implications of that? If caught, would they strip off his skin and find a wife underneath? And then if *that* skin were cut off, would he be a seal again? Is it a cycle?

Is it furs all the way down??

Good questions!  I suspect there are only two skins--the removable one, and the one that's covering up all your blood and muscles and stuff.  So if he got caught and skinned, I think he'd be dead.  But I don't actually know that.



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Reply #12 on: April 20, 2015, 03:47:44 AM
Me, I like to think he'd make someone a good wife someday.