Escape Artists

PseudoPod => Episode Comments => Topic started by: Bdoomed on May 24, 2015, 12:42:00 PM

Title: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: Bdoomed on May 24, 2015, 12:42:00 PM
Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes (http://pseudopod.org/2015/05/16/pseudopod-438-baby-weight/)

by Marie Brennan (http://www.swantower.com/)

“Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics as Employed Against Lycanthropes” was published in RUNNING WITH THE PACK (ed. Ekaterina Sedia), in 2010, and reprinted in MAD SCIENCE CAFE (ed. Deborah J. Ross) in 2013. “The story was directly inspired by a set of online essays written by Michael Briggs, husband of the urban fantasy author Patricia Briggs, in which he attempted to make silver bullets and discovered that it’s insanely hard to do.”

MARIE BRENNAN is an anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for material. She is currently misapplying her professors’ hard work to the Victorian adventure series THE MEMOIRS OF LADY TRENT. She is also the author of the doppelanger duology of WARRIOR AND WITCH, the urban fantasy LIES AND PROPHECY, the ONYX COURT historical fantasy series, and more than forty short stories. More information can be found on her website, Swan Tower (http://www.swantower.com/). The third Memoir of Lady Trent, VOYAGE OF THE BASILISK, was just released in March, 2015.

Your reader this week – Amanda Fitzwater – is a human-suit wearing dragon from Christchurch, New Zealand. She attended the Clarion workshop at UCSD in 2014, and was recently awarded the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best New Talent 2015. She has stories either out now or coming soon in Scigentasy, The Future Fire, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. She twitters at @AJFitzwater

Check out 01 Publishing’s submissions call for WHISPERS FROM THE ABYSS Volume 2 – HERE! (http://01publishing.com/submissions/open-call-whispers-from-the-abyss-vol-2/)


“_Abstract_

This study seeks to establish a hierarchy of efficacy for various antipathetic materials and delivery mechanisms thereof as used in the extermination of lycanthropes. Pre-existing data on this issue consists solely of folkloric narratives and unsubstantiated anecdotes on Internet communities, neither of which are based upon suitable experimental trials. It is hoped that this study will be only the beginning of a proper body of scientific literature, which might be expanded to include hyena men, were-jaguars, and other therianthropes.”

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Listen to this week's Pseudopod. (http://media.libsyn.com/media/pseudopod/Pseudo439_AntipatheticsAgainstLycanthropes.mp3)
Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: Wiggins on May 28, 2015, 02:30:21 AM
I actually found this episode very, very funny and cracked up at several points.  It had a great mix of macabre, fantasy, horror, and aloof academia trying to rationalize it all.  The bit with
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
was hilarious.  Very entertaining, great narration, and a clever twist on the werewolf genre from start to finish.
Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: SpareInch on May 29, 2015, 02:05:59 PM
I found this one very entertaining too. The whole concept appealed mightily to my typically British sense of black humour. I giggled with sick delight all the way through. :D
Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: Thundercrack! on May 30, 2015, 05:48:01 PM
I loved this.

I do disagree a bit with Wiggins's "aloof academia" comment. Academic writing is designed to transmit ideas and data in a clear and unambiguous way, and so dispenses with details that are not salient to the problem at hand. The problem at hand, for this biologist, was to evaluate the various antipathetics, not to delve into the human stories that exist between the lines. A different academic paper, perhaps a psychological one, could look in more detail at some of those human stories. Or maybe the appropriate medium for conveying the information would be non-academic, e.g. journalistic. None of this means that the biologist author is aloof, or inhuman: they are just maintaining academic standards. That they don't write about their feelings in an academic paper is not evidence that they don't have feelings. 

What this piece does really well is to use the academic mode of writing to achieve a very dry, black humour, i.e. that of euphemism and understatement. But it's the author of the story who is being wry here, not the author of the paper.

Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: Chairman Goodchild on May 31, 2015, 01:13:51 PM
I know what the story's trying to do, but the humor in this one really almost went too far into wry dry territory for me.  It was good, tho, and I appreciate it for what it was, even if I felt like I was getting smacked upside the head with a dictionary.  
Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: Unblinking on June 01, 2015, 02:05:07 PM
This was delightful, my favorite in a while.  I do have to read academic papers for work periodically, and I thought it struck a very good balance between the dry and distant writing style and the dark material, striking a balance that I found both compelling and humorous.  For instance, the researcher in one of the trials mentions observing the trial in an SUV with the engine running so that the nose is pointed toward the road and ready to drive away at speed.  If one wants to survive long enough to publish one's research, this is a sensible approach, because the werewolves are obviously dangerous enough to pose a serious risk to anyone in the vicinity, and maybe there have been other researchers before this one who were less cautious and died before publishing.  And I think little details like this dispel the apparent emotionlessness of the researcher.  That distance is part of the academic style, and is meant to keep the paper on point to the research, but the researcher is clearly terrified at that point, and has a lot of empathy for the people they're dealing with.

Because of the style, there were a lot of parts that really shouldn't have been funny that kind of ended up being that way.  For me, the way that the hunter was described as continuing to shoot with an expression of extreme grief was one of those, and then I felt guilty for laughing--his grief wasn't funny, his death wasn't funny, but the distant observation of extreme grief was very oddly juxtaposed and out of place and if it had been reviewed by a publisher I think that part probably would've been edited out.  To me that was a part that showed the empathy in the researcher--they didn't just want to document that the guy died in a suicidal fashion, but that he was not confused or stunned by fright but was knowingly taking this act as his own way of mourning, and that mention in the text was acknowledgment of that mourning that technically had no bearing on the efficacy of the weapon and so didn't properly deserve to be in the paper, but I thought it enhanced it as a story.

I also quite liked that the framing of the story made it clear that this could be our world.  Werewolves are apparently not widely considered plausible in this world, enough so that the scientific community won't even bother peer reviewing a paper based on the subject, forcing the researcher to find non-traditional publishing methods (like a podcast) to make their research not be wasted effort.  I also appreciated that it went out of its way to point out that the standards for human trials were not met.  For one, getting approval would've been certainly impossible if no one believes in this, and also I'm not sure how one would possibly conduct a "hunting monsters in the wild" study without putting people at risk. 

I wish more stories would mix science and fantasy like this story does.  There's nothing about fantasy that repels science.  On the contrary, if fantastical things proved observable and repeatable, then science would be all over them to understand their characteristics.
Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: Unblinking on June 01, 2015, 02:13:23 PM
I wonder if the researcher has considered some variant of a silver flechette gun, since bladed weapons appear to be somewhat effect but inadvisable due to the lethality of hand to hand combat.
Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: Sgarre1 on June 02, 2015, 01:32:10 PM
Those who enjoyed the stylistic conceit of this piece may look forward to our end of summer FLASH ON THE BORDERLANDS episode entitled "Official Reports" - I had originally pegged this for that collection but it was too long to justify as flash - rest assured, more dry and academic/official phraseology is coming in a couple of months!
Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: Unblinking on June 03, 2015, 02:03:13 PM
Quote from: Sgarre1 on June 02, 2015, 01:32:10 PM
Those who enjoyed the stylistic conceit of this piece may look forward to our end of summer FLASH ON THE BORDERLANDS episode entitled "Official Reports" - I had originally pegged this for that collection but it was too long to justify as flash - rest assured, more dry and academic/official phraseology is coming in a couple of months!

Great!  Sounds like it might be right up my alley.  :)

My love for the form also stems partly from my general love for epistolary format.  I like it when a story is formatted in a way that it would make sense for it to be formatted if it had really happened--letters, journal entries, official reports, etc. 
Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: Wiggins on June 06, 2015, 10:21:34 PM
Quote from: Thundercrack! on May 30, 2015, 05:48:01 PM
I do disagree a bit with Wiggins's "aloof academia" comment. Academic writing is designed to transmit ideas and data in a clear and unambiguous way, and so dispenses with details that are not salient to the problem at hand. The problem at hand, for this biologist, was to evaluate the various antipathetics, not to delve into the human stories that exist between the lines. A different academic paper, perhaps a psychological one, could look in more detail at some of those human stories. Or maybe the appropriate medium for conveying the information would be non-academic, e.g. journalistic. None of this means that the biologist author is aloof, or inhuman: they are just maintaining academic standards. That they don't write about their feelings in an academic paper is not evidence that they don't have feelings. 

Well, as someone who has worked in academia/tertiary education for about ~15 years, I can testify that, even give the parameters you mentioned, this came off as pretty aloof even compared to some of the dissertations and articles I've had to read; of course this adds greatly to the humour.  YMMV.
Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: TrishEM on June 29, 2015, 04:14:18 AM
Quote from: Sgarre1 on June 02, 2015, 01:32:10 PM
Those who enjoyed the stylistic conceit of this piece may look forward to our end of summer FLASH ON THE BORDERLANDS episode entitled "Official Reports" - I had originally pegged this for that collection but it was too long to justify as flash - rest assured, more dry and academic/official phraseology is coming in a couple of months!

Ooh, I'm looking forward to it!
Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: Scattercat on August 21, 2015, 10:36:26 PM
I just wanted to drop in and say that I enjoyed this immensely, that I have forwarded it to all of the members of my former Hunter: The Vigil game, that now I want to play Hunter: The Vigil again, and that I am also now very much looking forward to the flash episode with more like this one.
Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: Unblinking on August 25, 2015, 02:52:54 PM
Quote from: Scattercat on August 21, 2015, 10:36:26 PM
I just wanted to drop in and say that I enjoyed this immensely, that I have forwarded it to all of the members of my former Hunter: The Vigil game, that now I want to play Hunter: The Vigil again, and that I am also now very much looking forward to the flash episode with more like this one.

What flash episode with more like this one?  Or is that just something you know about because you're staff? :)
Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: Sgarre1 on August 25, 2015, 04:07:11 PM
Up above

Quote
Those who enjoyed the stylistic conceit of this piece may look forward to our end of summer FLASH ON THE BORDERLANDS episode entitled "Official Reports" - I had originally pegged this for that collection but it was too long to justify as flash - rest assured, more dry and academic/official phraseology is coming in a couple of months!
Title: Re: Pseudopod 439: Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics ...
Post by: Unblinking on September 03, 2015, 02:23:06 PM
Quote from: Sgarre1 on August 25, 2015, 04:07:11 PM
Up above

Quote
Those who enjoyed the stylistic conceit of this piece may look forward to our end of summer FLASH ON THE BORDERLANDS episode entitled "Official Reports" - I had originally pegged this for that collection but it was too long to justify as flash - rest assured, more dry and academic/official phraseology is coming in a couple of months!

Ah!  Thank you.