Escape Artists
Escape Pod => Episode Comments => Topic started by: Jim on February 02, 2007, 12:17:07 PM
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EP091: The Acid Test (http://www.escapepod.org/2007/02/01/ep091-the-acid-test/)
Rated PG.
By Kay Kenyon.
Read by cunning minx (of Polyamory Weekly (http://polyweekly.libsyn.com/)).
First appeared in Talebones, Winter 2004.
“It’s my husband. He’ll go. He wants to go.”
The alien looked down the hall as though he’d rather be home nursing a beer than dealing with a disgruntled housewife at 4:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon.
“Please.” She tried not to sound desperate. “He’s young and healthy. College degree, business administration.” She thought that last might not help. “With a math minor.”
Rated PG. Contains some sexual innuendo, relationship issues, and unpleasant cheese odors.
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I'm not sure what to say about this one. The story was only so-so. The aliens were kind of incongruent with the relationship plot, even though they were directly related, and there wasn't much of a twist. I think someone said in the contest rules that "a story about a boy and his dog isn't sci-fi even if the boy is from mars and the dog is a balloon."
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I don't know if I liked it or not, but I found the testing annoyingly realistic (I hate it when friends (particlularily women) test your devotion to them). One thing that crossed my mind when I finished is:
What if it were some elaborate plot on the husband's part to get rid of the wife, wouldn't that suck! It would certainly be effective and she would feel as though she were saving him, so she'd have no regrets and be lightyears away. Hubby then would be free to play as much as he wanted.
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I liked this story. I liked that the main character wanted to test the relationship. This made her very flawed, and very human to me, which grounded me in the story. I had a boyfriend who "tested" the relationship by breaking up with me (expecting to have me coming running back) and was surprised when I didn't come back to him.
This kind of "testing" has always been curious to me, because it doesn't actually seem like a "test" at all, but like one partner driving the other away. In this case, the wife seemed to be driving her husband away because she was hurt that his love was not unconditional. Rather than have him leave her, she was going to opt to send him away. I think that many people, worried about losing someone, might choose this course out of fear. Sometimes it's scary to love someone so much.
I don't see a lot of fiction about this and I find it refreshing. I'm always interested in fiction that shows a situation from a different point of view than I've experienced. I would say that I was on the husbands side before, so it was interesting to hear the point of view of the wife.
Putting it in a science fiction story made a difficult and close to home subject easier to take, like water with aspirin. Well done.
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Agreed. I like seeing this all-too-typical relationship test put in a speculative setting. But, in a similar vein to the comments Steve mentioned in today's outro regarding readers' reactions to the "dragon's blood" piece, this one too seemed like a straight plug-n-play piece. Alien trips = breakups. Dragons = cars.
BTW, one thing I really love about your outros, Steve, is the way you color them to fit the subject of the just-finished story. "I'm not sure galactic civilization is ready for... Daikaiju yet". Love it.
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Put me in the unimpressed column. I agree with popepat in that it was a simple substitution story, though there were interesting fringe elements about face recognition and melted pistachio ice cream.
One thing that crossed my mind when I finished is:
What if it were some elaborate plot on the husband's part to get rid of the wife, wouldn't that suck!
Same here, near the very end when she went looking for her boyfriend and found him hiding in the words, I thought "What a neat twist, he tried for the "easy" breakup and went for a sightly more elaborate hoax than having a friend tell her he died - feeding of her nonsensical belief of aliens - and then got caught." Then she goes and does the cliche "take him not me".
Ah well, the flash fiction contest is filling my voracious appetite for good sci-fi.
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:(
Well it had to happen eventually, I guess.
Escape Pod finally ran a story that I can actually say I didn't like.
Still, 90 winners in a row is pretty phenomenal!
For me, this story was just too much "LifeTime TV Channel tries to do Sci-Fi".
It's not that I don't care for relationship stories. EP has run several that have left me near tears (Damn you Mike Resnick) and count as some of my all time favorites from any medium. "The Acid Test" though just left me flat.
I wish I could offer something more constructive. I do agree with the above post that suggested this might have made a better flash fiction piece. Perhaps shorter and more to the point.
Sorry I don't have anything else.
Maybe I should have just left it as "I didn't like this one".
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Well the one thing I got from that story is that I will never, ever, understand women :)
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Interesting -- I guess I'm one of the few who liked this story. I thought the wife setting up her husband was pretty heart-breaking, esepcially toward the end when she realized what she had done. I kinda thought the story would end there, or with the husband running and her to trying to help him. Then she ended up taking his place, which I guess gave her character more of an arc but I'm not sure that bit worked for me). Other than that, I quite enjoyed the story.
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And the moral of the story is be happy with the love you receive or be kidnapped and probed my bearded aliens.
I like it.
O and the story itself wasnt so bad either. I liked it all in all. It gave the reality of the subject of love another dimension. Almost literally.
Thumbs up n all that.
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I hate saying this, because I really appreciate the emphasis on more sci-fi lately, but I really didn't like this story. Everyone was way too dispassionate given the events occurring. When heroine finds out she's been tricked, and her husband is getting taken away, the result is akin to finding out her store is out of milk.
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I liked the story but once again I know that I will never understand why people are willing to test their loves.
I felt no fault on the mans part because as far as he knew the "trip" would never even be possabile so why would he give serious thought to it.
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What if it were some elaborate plot on the husband's part to get rid of the wife, wouldn't that suck!
This wouldn't suck, this man would be my hero. *calls wife* Honey, you know I really want to go on an alien ship to other worlds..
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I just found this one to be a bit of a retread.
Test love
realize mistake
take place
end
I knew where it was going as soon as the husband decided to go and I don't like trying to guess the story. I like to wait and have it come to me. The fact, that I couldn't avoid seeing the ending coming, makes it even more annoying
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I really liked the story.
I have read many accounts of the CE III kind from many books
One can say this ET friendly story.
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She reminded me of my ex-girlfriend. ::shudder::
Anyway - I found the ending to be a little predictable, and frankly - I had no sympathy for the woman, either. She forced the issue. Did she stop to consider that maybe, if he were really that cavalier about going, he would have worked as hard as she did to find them?
To spread blame equally - he was pretty much stupid for saying he would go, especially when he was so skeptical of alien life existing on earth.
I was also a little confused about the timeline. He escaped almost immediately with all that explanation of how wrong it was? I don't know.
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Aliens You Will Meet (http://aliensyouwillmeet.libsyn.com/), huh?
Why, that sounds like an excelent podcast.
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I knew where it was going as soon as the husband decided to go
I disliked it for almost the opposite reason. I'd been quite involved the story while it was being set up; I liked the test device and the way it built towards its crisis point. Then the crisis was resolved with the husband finding that he didn't actually like what he'd wished for. And then the story kept on going. And for no reason I could fathom the wife suddenly decided to go in his place.
I'm sure it was meant to convey the wife's deep, self-sacrificing love for her husband -- or maybe her deep guilt at engineering the test -- but I got none of that from the build-up or the resolution. It seemed out of character and not at all satisfying for this listener.
Maybe I missed something.
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Then the crisis was resolved with the husband finding that he didn't actually like what he'd wished for. And then the story kept on going. And for no reason I could fathom the wife suddenly decided to go in his place.
That is exactly what got me. I have no idea why she went, given that he had, to all intents and purposes, passed the test.
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I've loved pretty much every story from escape pod; but not this one. I didn't hate it, on any level; but while listening to my MP3 player, if I have to cut listening story, i'll pick up from where I left off every time. With this one I couldn't be bothered and moved on to another podcast. I finished it 3 days later, but it just didn't feel like it was satisfying as a story to me. Some of the ideas were good; but I just didn't like this one overall, for no good reason though.
Maybe it was the same as the reasons above, the end felt out of character and an unnatural twist (take the end of the usual suspects; without the last 5-10 minutes the movie works pretty well, with it it is just awesome; that twist was natural, and it felt good).
Maybe its because I always hate girls who test the relationship seing if it will fail, and end up being the cause of the failure; and that gave the story a negative spin in my mind.
Who knows.
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I actually liked this one. I thought the details about the aliens and how they tried to make their ship hospitable were weird and interesting. Also, I thought the sacrafice she makes at the end was dramatic. I didn't feel sympathy towards her, but I don't think I was supposed to.
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I feel a little strange making my first comment about any of the stories be a negative one, since, like contra, I have liked far more stories put out by Escape Pod than I didn't like. I also usually prefer to assert what I love instead of go on about what I don't like, but I have to admit, I did not like this story at all.
There are a couple of bright spots I can point to: the aliens not getting things quite right was one of them (the down shrug was great) and that moment when the guy stands in the backyard staring at the birds was choice, too.
Overall, though, I found myself picking and picking at the story for logical fallacies (at first it sounds like you have to be really observant to pick out aliens, but who would fail to notice some of the things the main character notices? So, he doesn't believe in aliens, but he's packing his bags anyway? Zuh?) and going completely into crit mode (this point of view is unsatisfying, if the story is about his journey, why are we in her head? -- to which the answer is, near as I can tell, so we can have dramatic sacrifice at the end. Or, how come you got to tell me how big and great and special their love is but you can't provide even a single example of such within the story?) combined with cringing before the end (please, not the self-sacrificing twu wuv, please, no, no, -- blech).
Ultimately, I think the major flaw of the story, the thing that allows me to pick and pick and pick, is that it doesn't move fast enough. It's way too long and too much of the prose is explanation, not in the moment feeling, action, reaction.
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Alright, this has got to stop.
I adore this forum, and I like this story, but I’m starting to see a problem emerge in this thread. People are taking the main characters actions to be “something that women do” rather than “something that people do”. I find this to be a disturbing trend.
Although I agree that women do “test the relationship”, I feel obligated to point out that men do this too. We could argue all day if men or women do this more, there is no way to really prove that particular point. As a person who has dated men and women, I can confidently argue that in my experience, both genders are equally guilty of this kind of behavior.
I don’t think the author’s intention was to point out that “testing the relationship” was something that women do; I think the point was to show how tragic such an action was.
It’s often troubling that so often the actions of men are seen as relating to all people, where the actions of women are somehow always related back to their gender. What worries me the most is the audience reaction to this story, a reaction which seems to stereotype the character of women.
If I have misinterpreted your comments, I apologize, but it is important to me, as a woman and a science fiction author, to make this point.
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Ok. Sorry if my post came over as if only girls do it; I didn't mean that, however I only know of girls doing it from personal experiance (and thus draw my opinions from it), I've never had a relationship like that with a guy, and I have never paid attention enough to guys in a relationship to notice it. I just means I hate it when people do it, and then wonder why their relationship fails. Its themselves the cause it to fail and not the other person.
And I agree that was the authors intend; I just couldn't engage in the story because I dislike the action that started it.
so yeah; sorry if I came over as saying only women do it; I was just coming from experiance.
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I also don´t want my first post to be negative... but I didn´t like this one. As mentioned, it was simple subsititution and I find that dealing with these kinds of human failings/relationship issues works best in other forms of fiction. For me, sticking it in a scifi story trivializes it to a large extent. It´s an old plot line and adding a few aliens does´t make it fresh. You have to work harder than that.
My biggest bone of contention was the idea that he had passed the test. He hadn´t. Not at all. He came back, not out of love for her, but of fear from something else. To then turn your lead character into a ditzhead who didn´t recognise that is to regress to a plot progression tactic that is unflattering and unfulfilling.
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My biggest bone of contention was the idea that he had passed the test. He hadn´t. Not at all. He came back, not out of love for her, but of fear from something else. To then turn your lead character into a ditzhead who didn´t recognise that is to regress to a plot progression tactic that is unflattering and unfulfilling.
No, i think she knew, but as she explained before, she was feeling very guilty around it, and him coming back was all she wanted, she didn't care at that point if he passed or not.
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Good story, I liked it. Real Sci Fi!
The story of two morally corrupt people claiming to love each other, when in fact they dont.
You dont have to "test" love. Love does not leave for intellectual stimuli.
Her act at the end was guilt driven not love driven.
I didn't hear anything I didn't like, and the reader was good too!
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Not sure about the story, but I loved hearing Minx doing something completely different to Poly Weekly.
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It was "okay". I would not call it SF though, in spite of the trappings of the alien spacecraft. The one-way trip could just as easily have been a 17th century sea voyage involving indentured servitude or something.
If anything, it reminded me of an O'Henry story.
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I enjoyed this story and found it very creepy. I had a heart to heart with my partner and we solemnly agreed never to sign each other up for alien abduction without discussing it with each other first.
Although as I was leaving the room she said "Although I might ask them to do for a trial run first."
Bloody hell.
This was a cool story. Almost something I would expect to see on Psuedopod for the way she blithely signs him up for the trip. And what a test!!
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I didn't care for this one. Mostly because I just never gave a crap about the protagonist. Relationship "tests" like that one drive me nuts. But I'm of a stubbornheaded mindset that if I perceived my significant other manipulating me with such a test, there would be at the very least harsh words and much distrust as a result.
I realize that people actually do that, but I really prefer to be able to root for the protagonist and if you have the protagonist do this, then at that point the consequences are on her head.
And, Anarkey made some good points, particularly:
-If she's really that much in love, I want it SHOWN to me, not TOLD
-The sacrifice at the end was groanworthy.