Escape Artists
PseudoPod => Episode Comments => Topic started by: Bdoomed on September 25, 2015, 05:22:51 PM
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Pseudopod 457: Escape From Kroo Bay (http://pseudopod.org/2015/09/25/pseudopod-457-escape-from-kroo-bay/)
by Byron Barton
“Escape From Kroo Bay” is original to PSEUDOPOD.
BYRON BARTON received a PhD from the University of Vermont and currently lives and works in Aruba. His serialized novel, “Heat,” can be read at 31 Shots.com (http://www.31shots.com/heat-part-1/)
Your narrator — Elan Ressel, last read “Set Down This (http://pseudopod.org/2010/06/04/pseudopod-197-set-down-this/)” for us in 2010! .
“Kossi glanced at the dead body sprawled across the bus stop floor. One ragged leg was draped over a weathered wooden bench while the torso was splayed in a half-twist over pitted concrete. Old newspapers and candy wrappers partially covered the corpse like a loose patchwork quilt. If not for the slack in the man’s jaws and dark goo pooling in his worn denim shirt, the corpse might simply be a passed out drunk.
Dead bodies on the street weren’t common in Freetown, but they weren’t particularly unusual, either. Kossi shuttered, thinking back to the civil war, when the RUF had temporarily taken the city and left behind enough stiffs and severed limbs to fill a dozen mass graves. Ebola hadn’t left nearly as many bodies behind, but the panic was the same. At least they could see the rebels. At least they could hide or beg or buy their way out of trouble. Ebola was invisible, and as indiscriminate as a child soldier jacked up on brown-brown.”
Be sure to check out our Fourth Annual Flash Fiction Contest! (http://forum.escapeartists.net/index.php?topic=8576.msg141049#msg141049)
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Listen to this week's Pseudopod. (http://media.libsyn.com/media/pseudopod/Pseudo457_EscapeFromKrooBay.mp3)
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I'm going to echo something Alasdair said in the show comments to say how much I like that the motivations and ideologies of the people are left a mystery; because we don't get to hear their manifesto, we get to concentrate all the more closely on the more subtle horror of being a desperate, poor guy who finds out he let himself be turned into a bioweapon. Horrifying stuff.
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I typically despise anti heroes.
This story made me like one. Very well done.
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I don't have much to say about the story, other than I liked being in the protagonist's head - he was a very well layered character. I just wanted to say that I LOVED the reader, though - his voices were fantastic.
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Scary, plausible. The scariest part isn't necessarily the obvious horror in the possibility that this might work, but more in the reason for its effectiveness--When starvation/poverty of your family is on the line, a promise to an end of that state is an overwhelming incentive to do just about anything. Note that these poor operatives don't even have any way of verifying that their families get the payout--they are taking this action without knowing if it even has the one basic effect they have been promised is assured, they might be leaving their families starving and also orphaned.
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Thought about this while getting my flu shot today...
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Fun fact, fact fans - if you survive ebola and you are male, the only lingering side effect is intermittent testicular inflammation! Oh, and also, you might still be able to pass the disease on to your sex partners. The World Health Organization recommends using condoms for the rest of your life until the phenomenon has been studied further.
Also, this story was amazing.
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Well, THAT was just a ray of sunshine, wasn't it?
I'm not usually a fan of stories that just . . . stop. But with this one, I think it worked perfectly.
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I also really liked the story. While listening to it, I was thinking about commenting about how this story could be wrongly misinterpreted by xenophobes, but Alisdair actually discussed it afterwards, too. That's really an unfair advantage he has with his comments before we can comment it here :P