Escape Artists
PodCastle => Episode Comments => Topic started by: Talia on August 16, 2011, 03:07:10 PM
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PodCastle 170: Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died (http://podcastle.org/2011/08/16/podcastle-170-five-ways-jane-austen-never-died)
by Samantha Henderson (http://www.samanthahenderson.com)
Read by Amal El-Mohtar (http://tithenai.livejournal.com)
Originally published in Fortean Bureau
I buck out of the timestream, recover, and bend over, retching air. That’s why you don’t eat for 24 hours before you make a jump, and a purge or two’s not a bad idea, either. I learned that the hard way.
When I can straighten up, I back against the damp plaster wall (the walls at Chawton were always damp, though Edward never believed it) and wait, listening. In the late summer afternoon, heavy with heat, the ticking of the clock in the study sounds loud and portentous as a drumbeat. Scant golden light lies sluggishly against the drapes on the other end of the hallway.
Cassandra is away, visiting our brother and sister and their innumerable brood. My mother is nursing a migraine with her feet up on the best sofa in the parlor.
And Jane is coming up the stairs.
I draw my modified Glock and stand, waiting in the shadows.
Rated R: Contains Some Violence
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I'm sure there's a lot more than five ways. :P
[edit]
...oh, and...
BOOBIES!
[Moderator edited to be only large text, instead of ginormous]
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Really enjoyed the last vignette of the story, who'da thought vampires? That's not to say the rest of the story was any less fantastic. :)
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I suspect it's going to be just me, but...this one fell flat for me. I've never read a single word written by Jane Austen, nor do I know the first thing about her other than that she wrote some books.
So...a lot of this seemed to be references to stuff that I would probably understand if I had read her books or knew anything about her.
And no, I doubt I will be reading any of her books just so I'll retroactively understand this. :)
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yeah, put me in the camp that didn't get this because, while I may have a copy of Pride and Prejudice on my bookshelf, I didn't buy it, nor have a read it. I might at some point, but it's pretty low on a long list that is only getting longer. I'm sure it made sense to an Austin fan, but I am not the target audience for this. Sorry.
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Alas and Alack I must follow on the same path and say that it wasn't particularly great. Each bit was in itself a fun little taste, a bit like using flash fiction as a teaser for a full book. They were well written and each and everyone might make a great story by themselves but having not read any Austin before I have no idea how these were related. So, in short, after long, I think it works fine, its alright as a series of vignettes about this adventurous, faceless lady, but without knowing her from earlier it lacks that wow factor.
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I'm more familiar with Jane Austin's work, I rather hate to admit, through Masterpiece Classics adaptations than through the actual reading of her works, but I do love her characters.
That said, I don't know enough about her life to know what elements were fact and which were fiction. However, I feel as though poor Miss Austin has been dragged through a macabre sort of ringer in these vignettes and it's a bit disturbing to me. Vampires, suicide, child-birth and all...but, it was very well written and the narration was also well done ;D
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I didn't realize that I'd have to read Jane Austen BEFORE listening. Because I just didn't really get it. Sorry.
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I thought the story was a little hard to follow, but I loved the concept. Jane Austen and her Time-Traveling Commandoes! Woo-hoo! I would so travel back in time to rescue Jane from a horrible Victorian-era death. Of course she's probably make some cutting remark about it that would make my stupid male brain spin, but hey, that's why we love her, right?
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I love Ms. El-Mohtar's voice -- such a lovely tone and accent.
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So, Jane Austen is my favorite author (other than Chaim Potok...and Tolkien... ;)) I haven't read too much about her personal life, but there is a lot of speculation about why she died so young so that part is right out of history. I really enjoyed this story, and managed to get completely wrapped up in each of the vignettes despite their relatively short length. The cursed idol story was probably my least favorite, and the time-traveling-assassin one needed a little bit more to orient me and for some reason the sister-as-vampire one was my most favorite.
"To Elizabeth it had appeared that, had her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit or finer success." - Pride and Prejudice
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Eh, I read this in a "Year's Best" anthology and started skimming about halfway through. I may have to give it a listen just for Amal's reading, but in my initial experience with it, I found it to be an interesting experiment that resulted in a confusing and honestly kind of boring story. I applaud the experimentation, but not the actual product.
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Don't think I've ever read any Austen, but I do occasionally find myself living a Jane Austen (with zombie pirates and samurai badgers) lifestyle.
The gag is, I think, that while she was living through interesting times, such as the Napoleonic Wars, and died just as the gothic horror movement was taking off with people like Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein and Polidori writing The Vampyre, she never wrote about any of this interesting stuff, but instead wrote satires of gentry etiquette and upper-middle-class relationships.
I was mostly listening to see whether there was any plot connection between the stories - was it the statuette that caused the vampirism, which caused her sister's feelings of guilt about the miscarriage? Was it the international intrigue that made her the focus of dimension-hopping assassins? I'd like to think so, but I've not found the hidden clues yet.
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A good story but for me, it kinda sailed right past coz what I know of Jane Austen Powers could fit in a thimble. I therefore felt I missed the point(s) of the story.
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So here I was, all ready to hit the "skip" button. And then you said "Mermaid's Tea Party (http://forum.escapeartists.net/index.php?topic=3401.0)". And you followed that up with "Amal El-Mothar (http://forum.escapeartists.net/index.php?topic=4777.0)". A curse upon your households for enticing me to listen to Austen-inspired tales.
Generally a fun series of vingettes. 3 and 5 will probably tickle the fancy of Austen fans more exclusively. 2 was for Escape Pod. 1 and 4 are for PseudoPod. You had me hooked at The Call of Cthulhu (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Call_of_Cthulhu).
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. You now make Austen crawl at the edges of my consciousness. But I cannot stare into the abyss of Austen's work, as I shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
ia ia Jane'Austen f'tagn
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Fenrix, you forgot to work 'gibbering' into your Lovecraft. :)
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Has Alan Moore ever written anything about Jane Austen? Something about her secretly founding MI-6 or paling around with HG Wells?
..because he must be punished if he has.
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Has Alan Moore ever written anything about Jane Austen? Something about her secretly founding MI-6 or paling around with HG Wells?
..because he must be punished if he has.
Never pick a fight with a warlock!
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Why not? What's he gonna do, destroy another precious childhood memory? Go ahead! I've got plenty!
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Nitpick of the Week...
Shanghai wasn't opened to Western ships until a good 25 years after Jane Austen died.
However she died.... ;)
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Nitpick of the Week...
Shanghai wasn't opened to Western ships until a good 25 years after Jane Austen died.
However she died.... ;)
Aha! But in this reality, it was!
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And I'm with Dave, I love Austen. I say that without threat to neither my sexuality or my geekhood. She's very funny.
I did find #3 a bit puzzling; did I miss any SF/Fantasy element in that?
Yeah, the story probably plays better if you're an Austen fan, but I don't think that's completely the problem with it. I just wanted a little more there there, if you know what I mean....
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I have to say that I rarely engage with stories of the "Five X" vignettes type. I think I like them better (which is not to say well) in print, where I can take in each vignette separately; but in audio, where I need more of a through-line to keep me engaged, I just find myself drifting in and out. Separately, any one of these might well have entertained me, but taken together they were pretty forgettable.
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I only listened because I absolutely loved the Mermaid tea party. I liked the first story, the second one was ok and I got bored with the third one. I think maybe you either need to be an Austen fan or at least read her work to understand or appreciate the stories. If we were graphing this one out I'd be in the 'didn't get it' quadrant.
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Hmm. I did read three Austen novels, watched a few of the movie adaptions and know a little bit about her life (but not very much). At least I got that some of the stories (especially the vampire one) imitated her style quite strongly. And obviously, they toyed with her relationship to her family members, especially Cassandra. On the whole, however, there weren't enough allusions for me to recognize to find the vignettes terribly clever - which may of course be my lack of detailed knowledge. They seemed sort of random.
I have to add though that stories that play with some other work (or, in this case, biographical facts) are not my favourites and need to be better than stand-alone stories to impress me. I never read "Pride and Prejudice with zombies" as the first thing I thought when I saw it was: "Oh, well, someone's slapping some parody shock value on a very popular book for easy publicity." Maybe unfair, but you'd have to really convince me that it is worth picking up.
That said, the stories were okay to listen to. The vampire one worked best for me, perhaps because it created the society feeling I associate with Austen most strongly. The "Mermaid's tea party" impressed me a lot more though.
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I don't think you need to have read Jane Austen to understand any of the stories. But I think it might be required to appreciate the author whom Samantha Henderson clearly loves.
God, that sounds really pretentious; let try to explain.
Austen is one of the those people like Van Gogh or Marilyn Monroe or James Dean or all the 27 year old rock stars who did themselves in (one way or another) whose fans felt they died much too soon and did not live up the fame and potential they should have; I think that's what really fuels this story.
(Full Disclosure: I think that five good novels - according to some though clearly not all readers in English - which are beloved of readers and critics and have been highly influential IS living up to your potential, but that Austen should lived longer and have been more feted than she was).
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Nitpick of the Week...
Shanghai wasn't opened to Western ships until a good 25 years after Jane Austen died.
However she died.... ;)
Aha! But in this reality, it was!
Yes, that was it. Of course. Very, um, subtle of me. (hides)
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Of course my favorite way was when her descendant came back in time and killed her, but that's clearly more Escapepod, isn't it? ;-)
I think this would have been much more difficult a short story to read than it is to listen to. It would have been broken up in to such short 'chapters' with each of the ways that Jane Austen died, it would likely have felt choppy or disjointed. The reading seems to give it more clarity and the breaks feel more natural.
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Well, that was..umm...
Okay, I didn't get it. I guess we got warned in the intro that the only thing the vignettes had in common was death and Jane Austin, but for some reason, I kept trying to figure out if the second vignette was supposed to be in the future of the first vignette, and how all of it had to do with the idol, and by the time I realized that none of the vignettes were actually related to each other, I was already on the fifth vignette, whereupon I said "Screw it...I give up..."
The only reason I listened all the way through because of Amal. YAYYYY AMAL! But other than that...meh.
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Admin: Moved some off topic threads about Alan Moore over to the Gallimaufry (http://forum.escapeartists.net/index.php?topic=5385.0) board. Not because I think it really threatened to derail discussion, but because I think we really needed a thread to talk about Alan Moore and his awesome scariness.
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Admin: Moved some off topic threads about Alan Moore over to the Gallimaufry (http://forum.escapeartists.net/index.php?topic=5385.0) board. Not because I think it really threatened to derail discussion, but because I think we really needed a thread to talk about Alan Moore and his awesome scariness.
Restoring my comment on the story proper, then:
Did not see the point of this story at all. Five vignettes that went nowhere.
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Okay, I didn't get it. I guess we got warned in the intro that the only thing the vignettes had in common was death and Jane Austin, but for some reason, I kept trying to figure out if the second vignette was supposed to be in the future of the first vignette, and how all of it had to do with the idol, and by the time I realized that none of the vignettes were actually related to each other...
That.
That's why the first vignette was my favorite.
Overall... not my thing. Maybe because I've never read any Jane Austen books or seen the filmed adaptations.
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Okay, I am a big Jane Austen fan. I've read every book (including The Annotated Pride and Prejudice (http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Annotated_Pride_and_Prejudice.html?id=Z6yEh5g4iIcC), which is fabulous if you are into history) and seen every movie version of everything available. I even know a little bit about her life, which is all there is to know because she had her sister burn all her personal papers after her death.
That said, I still have no idea how or why any of these vignettes related to Jane Austen. They could just as easily have been about any other female(s) from that time period.
I would have enjoyed these much more without the superfluous name dropping.
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Some novelist thinks Jane Austen may have been murdered (http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/crime-novelist-claims-jane-austen-died-arsenic-poisoning-173146375.html)
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I don't get the appeal of this one.
It might be because I don't know the first thing about Austen or any of her books. It seemed like it was very dependent on being an Austen-o-phile. I can't say that I dislike Austen's writing because I've never read any of it, but none of it sounds even slightly appealing either. I expect I'll read it at some point, filing that under the heading "Wanting to find out what all the fuss is about" but it'd be near the bottom of my substantial "to-read" stack.
I got the impression anyway, that the story didn't really need to be about Jane Austen in particular, and if it didn't, then it just seems more like name-dropping in the hopes of increasing the popularity of the story without it actually enhancing the content.
Of the five I enjoyed the 4th one with the vampire sister the best. As a standalone flash piece, I'd probably say I liked it. But lumping the five together and presenting it as a single unit hurt them all as far as I'm concerned. There was some tenuous linkage among them, but nothing that I'd say really adheres them together, so it just ended up losing the flashbang appeal of a quality flash piece and overstayed its welcome beyond the merits of the text.
By the way, does anyone know what was supposed to be happening in the 5th world, with the attack on the ship? Is that supposed to refer to anything specific? Who are the attackers, and why can't she fall into their hands? A bit and piece here and there reminded me of Frankenstein with the mention of a monster and them being on a boat, but I'm not sure who the army of attackers would be in that case. The fifth world is the only place where I really got a hint that these stories are truly connected, because she is carrying the cross that an unnamed man had given her. From that I gathered that the time traveler has been going back in time many repititions to try to save her life, and these 5 were times that he failed to save her from a fate, but then he went back and tried again in a different way, presumably coming before Cassandra started draining her and giving her a cross to preserve her, etc...
I tend to overthink such things, but just thinking about the title drove me a little bit crazy thinking about sets (in the mathematical/logic sense). Presumably there is exactly one way that Jane Austen died in our world, but the complement of that set is the ways that Jane Austen did not die. This is an infinite set. I saw the title many weeks before I listened to the story and so the title had more time to make an impression on me than the rest of it. "Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died" is less appealing to me than "The Way Jane Austen Died" because it lacks the specificity and reality, and any 5 plucked out of the infinity will make me ask "why these five?". It kind of reminds me of a line I've seen while critiquing someone's story, that was along the lines of "Candace's sister was as thin as Candace wasn't." Odd wording, and so incredibly non-specific as to be a bit maddening. Even if we know exactly how thin Candace is, the complement of her thinness is an infinite set. The same goes here.