Escape Artists
Escape Pod => Episode Comments => Topic started by: eytanz on November 25, 2011, 05:03:31 PM
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EP320: Thanksgiving Day (http://escapepod.org/2011/11/24/ep320-thanksgiving-day/)
By Jay Werkheiser
Read by Paul Haring
First appeared in Analog
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Kev’s stomach curled around emptiness, embracing it as a constant reminder that the colony’s Earth food was almost gone. Another three months, four at the outside. Then what? How will we die?
He bent down to look into the nearest cage. “Maybe you’ll tell us why the food here is poisonous,” he said to one of the rats inside. It rolled its dull eyes listlessly toward him. Rust-brown clumps matted its fur, and the metallic odor of dried blood hung in the air.
Is that how I’ll go, clutching helplessly at alien dirt, coughing up blood? His gut clenched tighter.
“They are not going to tell you anything,” Ahmet said from across the toxicology lab.
(http://escapepod.org/wp-images/podcast-mini4.gif) Listen to this week’s Escape Pod! (http://traffic.libsyn.com/escapepod/EP320_ThanksgivingDay.mp3)
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Sorry I been away for so long... I'm resolving to come back and comment a bit more now that my schedule has cleared up a bit, since I've been an avid listener of all three 'casts ever since.
At any rate, I'm afraid that I really didn't have much fun with this one for a couple reasons. Firstly, the work strongly struck me as an enzymologist who came across an interesting, rather highly technical concept and built a story around it. There's nothing wrong with that, I actually prefer to have a higher hard science quotient in my science fiction, so I don't even mind the detailed descriptions of the technical aspects. The problem is that too much work was done perfecting the science, and not enough mastering the rest of the storytelling tools. Many of the character interactions felt clunky and forced, bluntly delivering character development ("he realized he still cared for her"), and handing off cliche'd moments at every turn, rather than implying shifts in mood or tension. The story was constructed in individual blocks that were stacked next to one another and didn't flow from sequence to sequence well. Although the crisis point was appropriately foreshadowed, the mood of the piece felt scattered, and the listener is left wondering at the stupidity of the "grunts" who demand more food without having even the suggestion of an alternate long-term plan to keep everyone fed. Had there been a few notes about hunger driving the "grunt" population to delirium, thereby excusing seeming nonsensical demands, this would have made more sense (although then the problem of the colony surviving for another few months becomes exacerbated). Thus the first problem is one of balance, too heavy on the science without appropriate balance on the characters and plot.
The second difficulty I had was in the way this particular story fell on the ear. While Paul Haring did well with a difficult piece in most respects, I would strongly suggest that he look up pronunciation on the more common of the technical terms. For someone in a science field "spectro-photo-meter" (spectro-pho-tahmeter)and "sally-silate" (sal-eh-silate) clang off the ear rather painfully and kept pulling me out of the story. (I comment only in the hopes of helping improvement, not to be mean.)
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I think MCWagner pretty much nailed this one. The science was too much to the forefront and the human drama and tension wasn't built up enough.
I guess I'm like Goldilocks when it comes to the amount of science in my SF. Episode 319 Driving X was too little ( or at least not believable) Episode 320 was too much.
That said Driving X was much more enjoyable because the human elements and relationships were more fully rounded and therefore more engaging. I'm much more forgiving of a story light on science and stronger on character than the other way round.
Guess that's why I'm more keen on Robert Silverberg than I am on Isaac Asimov.
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I think MCWagner pretty much nailed this one. The science was too much to the forefront and the human drama and tension wasn't built up enough.
I guess I'm like Goldilocks when it comes to the amount of science in my SF. Episode 319 Driving X was too little ( or at least not believable) Episode 320 was too much.
That said Driving X was much more enjoyable because the human elements and relationships were more fully rounded and therefore more engaging. I'm much more forgiving of a story light on science and stronger on character than the other way round.
Guess that's why I'm more keen on Robert Silverberg than I am on Isaac Asimov.
I'll echo both of you, but only because I felt your Goldilocks reference kicks too much ass for me to attempt to come up with my own similar comment. My issue with Thanksgiving day was there seemed to be an over-abundance of the hardscience terms bogging the story down. It also was a bit grating that all the "science techs" were skinny 98 pound weaklings" whereas all the grunts sounded like the classic "ogre jock."
Overall I liked the premise and the story as it did keep me entertained, but if I had my druthers, I would like to hear more about the actual world itself and what happened to the ship that took them to the planet.
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For me, the whole concept of plant-animal aliens has been tainted by OSC, both in the deeply mediocre book that introduced me to the concept and in his more recent slide into homophobic crazypants status.
If I've got sufficient forewarning, I can groove to a story that is basically just a cool science notion, but I have to agree that the characters and the remainder of the plot were kind of flat and pasted on in this one. I'd rather have something like Tim Pratt's toxoplasmosis story - where the "plot" was functionally nonexistent and the whole thing really was just an explanation of the cool idea - than something that's got a vaguely plot-shaped structure and some character-ish blobs but that never quite manages to bring them to life.
Did anyone else think that the "grunts" were alien indentured servants at first? Logan's initial description made him sound like a monster, and I could have sworn I heard "forepaw" instead of "forearm." The divide felt a little forced, honestly. The caloric-differential thing seemed like splitting hairs ("We get the same amount of food, but has anyone considered the relative calories?"), whereas it's so easy to create a culture of elites and underdogs. Heck, my mother works at FBI headquarters, and there's a bit of strife between the analytical wing and the agents. Agents just sort of assume that they'll get the good corner offices and that they're the important people because they carry firearms, and they refer to anyone who isn't an agent as a "clerk." Some of the "clerks" include men and women with multiple PhDs in math and engineering fields, but that doesn't stop agents from all but sending them for coffee during interactions and taking for granted that any request the agents make is more important than whatever fiddly work the analysts are doing. In return, the analysts and engineers tend to get passive-aggressive, delaying requests and even playing technically-minded pranks on those who annoy them. It's the small things that really count, the subtleties in attitude and tone of voice. I felt like the harping on the word "grunts" and the sort of growly orc flavor given to them was a little simplistic.
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Did anyone else think that the "grunts" were alien indentured servants at first?
Actually, yeah, I made that same mistake. I'm glad it wasn't the case, though, as I was thinking initially that the story was going for a more literal aping of the Thanksgiving story...
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I really liked this one. Plenty of science and I thought the world was pretty cool. The nerds vs. grunts was a little heavy but I guess to me it was believable.
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I enjoyed the concept and science in this one. Neat idea!
However, I felt for scientists these guys were pretty dim. What scientist WOULDN'T realize the people doing manual labor would need more food? I mean even desperate, frightened ones should see the rationale in that.
Felt very much like a jocks vs. nerds story.
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Hey, the brain uses twenty percent of the energy you take in. If you're spending all day thinking as hard as you can, you're burning calories pretty rapidly, too. :-P
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First of all, Paul Haring? You are banned from going through my head. I'll swear on a stack of lizards that I had this nightmare when I was in middle school - I was the commander of a colony mission that was slowly starving to death because we couldn't eat the local food. My dream didn't end so well.
Anyway, I loved this story. It was exactly what I want in science fiction: fairly scientifically rigorous, driven by an exploration of human nature and the consequences of where our future could lead us, and involving weird creatures that are neither plants nor animals. I agree that the characterization wasn't great, but it was definitely adequate to carry the rest of the story.
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"However, I felt for scientists these guys were pretty dim. What scientist WOULDN'T realize the people doing manual labor would need more food? I mean even desperate, frightened ones should see the rationale in that."
I was thinking kind of the same thing. Yeah hard thinking can use up quite a bit of energy, but I felt like this was the kind of a problem that would be made up specifically for this story. It gets nit picky but I think that if you were working on colonizing a planet, low food rations would be something that people, especially scientists, would notice before you had an entire colony of people nearly starving. Certainly when they don't really know yet what's actually edible on the planet.
But congrats to Logan for being the only character to think outside his generalization of character. Kind of reminded me of Buck in the new Planet Of The Apes movie. If you haven't seen it I won't say anything, but I liked the fact that it was a "grunt" making the out of character adjustment in this story after the grunts are portrayed as being not so intellectual up to that point.
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Did anyone else think that the "grunts" were alien indentured servants at first?
Actually, yeah, I made that same mistake.
Me too.
I was disappointed to learn that they were human. Due to the title and the timing of the story I was sort of expecting the grunts to be natives, and learning that they were probably ex-military type people (that's the final impression I got) kinda ruined an already mediocre story for me.
I agree with and echo everything that has already been said here, and have one more thing to add.
When they were finally figuring out what the problem was, it was too damn slow. I mean, honestly, these guys live in the future, they've traveled to another planet where the biology isn't compatible with Earth biology (kudos to Jay for not falling into that Star-Trek-human-compatible-universe mistake) and they expect the plants and animals to behave like Earth ones do? Haven't they seen any science fiction? That's always the case! The plants and animals are either symbiotic or different stages of the same organism, usually the latter. If I were there, that would be the first thing I'd look for.
And finally, I like my science-fiction more science-y (not to say that I don't like less science-y scifi) and that was probably the best part of this story, the science.
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Okay, apparently I'm in the minority here, but I couldn't help but enjoy this one. I mean, how many stories have bench scientists as main characters that aren't cut straight from someone's childhood prejudices? I thought that all of the named characters were reasonably well drawn, and the gradual build of Kev and Logan's relationship worked for me. I also had fun trying to "figure out" the chemistry puzzle before it was spelled out for us. Plus, the story had an actual ending!
So, I acknowledge all the previously mentioned criticisms, but I'm willing to give them a wink this time. ;)
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For me, the whole concept of plant-animal aliens has been tainted by OSC, both in the deeply mediocre book that introduced me to the concept and in his more recent slide into homophobic crazypants status.
There are crazypants plant-animal aliens in Hamlet's Father? :D
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Plus, the story had an actual ending!
That's just you being conditioned badly by the past few EP stories :P
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I really liked the ideas in the story, though I did wonder about the accuracy of some of the technical pronunciations. I've often thought about the divide between plants and animals, and I like that the author came up with a way that *sounded* scientifically plausible. And used a real star system.
Did anyone else think that the "grunts" were alien indentured servants at first?
Actually, yeah, I made that same mistake. I'm glad it wasn't the case, though, as I was thinking initially that the story was going for a more literal aping of the Thanksgiving story...
For about five seconds. But I didn't think "Logan" would be an alien name, and the author agreed with me....
For me, the whole concept of plant-animal aliens has been tainted by OSC, both in the deeply mediocre book that introduced me to the concept and in his more recent slide into homophobic crazypants status.
There are crazypants plant-animal aliens in Hamlet's Father? :D
Yeah. Angst in the Plants.
(ok, I couldn't resist that. Though lord knows I should have....)
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I found this story to be a little too heavy on the terminology to work so well in audio -- I don't know that any narrator could've made all the terminology work correctly. And, outside of the science, I found too many cliches (Mandy had auburn hair... OF COURSE... and Ben the Biologist looked like a scrawny geek but stood up to the workman... OF COURSE...) and too many plot cul-de-sacs (especially the trip off the reservation) that I think the author was trying to resolve with the discussion during the town hall meeting but it just didn't work out well for me.
But my biggest beef with the story is this: WHY THE HELL WOULD HUMANS COLONIZE A PLANET WITH NOTHING TO EAT ON IT??? Did they not have any survey probes? Any testing? Any advance parties? Scout ships? ANYTHING? I mean, zillions of planets out there, find one where we can eat the vegetables. I just kept coming back to that point as I listened to the story.
So, not a win for me overall.
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Plus, the story had an actual ending!
That's just you being conditioned badly by the past few EP stories :P
LOL! I actually went back and re-listened to the last two scenes and I stand by my statement that it has a real ending. Whether it was a good ending is still up for grabs though. :P
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But my biggest beef with the story is this: WHY THE HELL WOULD HUMANS COLONIZE A PLANET WITH NOTHING TO EAT ON IT??? Did they not have any survey probes? Any testing? Any advance parties? Scout ships? ANYTHING? I mean, zillions of planets out there, find one where we can eat the vegetables. I just kept coming back to that point as I listened to the story.
I concede that the lack of advance information is kind of a stretch, but in the story's defense, a disaster on the ship prior to arrival is part of the problem. They ended arriving with a lot less than they assumed, and Mandy was the one who held what they had together before they even got there.
Which reminded me of the one thing that really bugged me about the story - the idea that Mandy and Kev couldn't get married because she was Mayor. Now, if that was *her* excuse, ok, then that's a Mandy problem; but the narrative doesn't exactly make that clear. I can't imagine a star-fairing society of the future would have a problem with a woman chief executive having a husband, though. That's just nuts.
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Which reminded me of the one thing that really bugged me about the story - the idea that Mandy and Kev couldn't get married because she was Mayor. Now, if that was *her* excuse, ok, then that's a Mandy problem; but the narrative doesn't exactly make that clear. I can't imagine a star-fairing society of the future would have a problem with a woman chief executive having a husband, though. That's just nuts.
My impression was that it was Mandy's problem, not a societal one. She was definitely pushing Kev away throughout much of the story, and he complained about how distant she had become due to the stress she was under.
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I enjoyed this one, partially because I enjoyed the science involved, and partly because it had a frikkin ending. I know enough about chromatography and biology to understand what was being said, but not enough to nit pick the errors like I do in astro-sciences. The story itself was interesting to me because it really is human nature to align ourselves in an us/them system.
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Hey, the brain uses twenty percent of the energy you take in. If you're spending all day thinking as hard as you can, you're burning calories pretty rapidly, too. :-P
Thing is it always uses about that much, whether you're watching X Factor, sleeping or solving the world's hardest science problem. (in order of mental energy needed). Thinking hard won't use more calories.
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Sorry I been away for so long... I'm resolving to come back and comment a bit more now that my schedule has cleared up a bit, since I've been an avid listener of all three 'casts ever since.
At any rate, I'm afraid that I really didn't have much fun with this one for a couple reasons. Firstly, the work strongly struck me as an enzymologist who came across an interesting, rather highly technical concept and built a story around it. There's nothing wrong with that, I actually prefer to have a higher hard science quotient in my science fiction, so I don't even mind the detailed descriptions of the technical aspects. The problem is that too much work was done perfecting the science, and not enough mastering the rest of the storytelling tools. Many of the character interactions felt clunky and forced, bluntly delivering character development ("he realized he still cared for her"), and handing off cliche'd moments at every turn, rather than implying shifts in mood or tension. The story was constructed in individual blocks that were stacked next to one another and didn't flow from sequence to sequence well. Although the crisis point was appropriately foreshadowed, the mood of the piece felt scattered, and the listener is left wondering at the stupidity of the "grunts" who demand more food without having even the suggestion of an alternate long-term plan to keep everyone fed. Had there been a few notes about hunger driving the "grunt" population to delirium, thereby excusing seeming nonsensical demands, this would have made more sense (although then the problem of the colony surviving for another few months becomes exacerbated). Thus the first problem is one of balance, too heavy on the science without appropriate balance on the characters and plot.
The second difficulty I had was in the way this particular story fell on the ear. While Paul Haring did well with a difficult piece in most respects, I would strongly suggest that he look up pronunciation on the more common of the technical terms. For someone in a science field "spectro-photo-meter" (spectro-pho-tahmeter)and "sally-silate" (sal-eh-silate) clang off the ear rather painfully and kept pulling me out of the story. (I comment only in the hopes of helping improvement, not to be mean.)
Couldn't put it better. And the comment by Raetsel about Asimov is spooky. Asimov was famously inept at character development and this read just like one of his earlier stories. Great idea, sound science, dopey colonists and clunky, linear plot progression.
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The second difficulty I had was in the way this particular story fell on the ear. While Paul Haring did well with a difficult piece in most respects, I would strongly suggest that he look up pronunciation on the more common of the technical terms. For someone in a science field "spectro-photo-meter" (spectro-pho-tahmeter)
This is a general note to all future narrators: Generally speaking, something that does the measuring has the emphasis before the "meter", and the measurement has the emphasis on the "meter". e.g. kilometer = kill -o-meeter, centimeter = cent-i-meeter, thermometer = ther-mahmeter, speedometer = speed-ahmeter, etc.
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This is a general note to all future narrators: Generally speaking, something that does the measuring has the emphasis before the "meter", and the measurement has the emphasis on the "meter". e.g. kilometer = kill -o-meeter, centimeter = cent-i-meeter, thermometer = ther-mahmeter, speedometer = speed-ahmeter, etc.
Not sure I'd agree with that. In England, well I guess I'll be more specific in the Midlands of England but I think it is pretty widespread we would say kil-ahmeter to fit with how you mentioned speed-ahmeter. Most online sources I looked at allowed either pronunciation. But we do say cent-i-meeter.
And it's always at times like this I wish I knew how to use the international phonetic alphabetic so I could be sure people could read what I was hearing, as it were.
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This is a general note to all future narrators: Generally speaking, something that does the measuring has the emphasis before the "meter", and the measurement has the emphasis on the "meter". e.g. kilometer = kill -o-meeter, centimeter = cent-i-meeter, thermometer = ther-mahmeter, speedometer = speed-ahmeter, etc.
Not sure I'd agree with that. In England, well I guess I'll be more specific in the Midlands of England but I think it is pretty widespread we would say kil-ahmeter to fit with how you mentioned speed-ahmeter. Most online sources I looked at allowed either pronunciation. But we do say cent-i-meeter.
And it's always at times like this I wish I knew how to use the international phonetic alphabetic so I could be sure people could read what I was hearing, as it were.
Here's some basis for my viewpoint:
http://youtu.be/CZVG9Ji08xg (http://youtu.be/CZVG9Ji08xg)
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Here's some basis for my viewpoint:
http://youtu.be/CZVG9Ji08xg (http://youtu.be/CZVG9Ji08xg)
A good point entertainingly made but if you say kilometre like the video then in England it will sound a little odd to most people's ears, I would opine. Though mostly they'll probably say how much is that in miles? ;)
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MCWagner summed it pretty well (though that won't stop me from doing it myself too!).
I don't mind a science-based story, but I would've liked more fully fleshed characters. It did feel very much like an Asimov story in that respect.
If the science conundrum had been baffling and mysterious then I'd probably give it higher marks, but when I heard about the two apparent species on the planet that both had odd characteristics, my first thought was "They're two distinct stages of a single species' life cycle, like the larval and pupal stages of an insect." It really surprised me that this crossed my mind a few minutes into listening but the professional biologist who is devoting all of his time to studying these lifeforms did not think of it. He seemed way too intent on classifying into Earth-based classification systems--that seems like a rookie mistake to go to another planet and assume that its life will fit neatly into our own classification systems. I mean, on our planet, isolated ecosystems can produce lifeforms that don't fit well into our ecosystem--like our good friend the platypus.
And yes they should've included in their plans that laborers would need more calory intake. Between this oversight and the biologists' lack of critical thinking, I really wonder how long this colony is going to last. What else did they mess up? Did they forget to bring plants to produce oxygen? Did they forget to bring antibiotics?
As others said, I too was wondering what the "grunts" were for way too long. I was picturing pig-men for quite a while, either genetically engineered workers or a captured alien race. One thing that SF writers have to focus on that mainstream writers don't is clarity between expressions and reality, especially in a short story and especially at the beginning of that story. If you describe someone as "walking on air" or "moving mechanically" at the beginning of an SF story, it could be either literal or figurative, so for full reader comprehension it should be a bit more explicit. Same here with the expression "grunts", could've been spelled out that they were humans right away.
I am glad that it had an actual ending though, it seems like quite of few of the EA stories recently are lacking those.
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I merely thought this story was okay. I was very excited that we got a whole and complete plot this week and I didn't feel frustrated at the end of the podcast by dangling threads. I think that the more interesting part of this story was the relationship and politics and that got short shrift. The main character was concerned about his girlfriend and her political problems, but never tried to address them directly instead focusing on saving the colony through science. In fact the author kept only hinting at those people problems at in passing when I would have preferred a little more focus. In the end he did save the world through science and a bit of politics. He will probably be a better mayor than his girlfriend, but, really, the most recent scientist savior may not the best political leader and the colony needs to come up with a better way to select one.
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The story lost me a bit, too technical. I thought the narrator did very well, but it was an upward hill battle against all the sciency stuff. I'm probably jus dumb though. I did appreciate the ending. I kind of had a cliche grunt vs. geek eye roll going on, but I was softened as it concluded. As usual, I loved to death Norm's intro/outro bits. Are the Kardashians an ancient lost tribe? We'll never know.
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Well, I liked that this one had an ending, but I found this ending dull and predictable. I was looking for a twist. Something like: it was only the mice who couldn't tolerate the food, but for humans it was fine because of something weird and previously unknown in the indigenous life forms....
All my other opinions have already been stated by someone else, so I won't repeat them here.
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Are the Kardashians an ancient lost tribe? We'll never know.
If we're talking Cardassians, it's your warring Star Trek aliens you're after http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4hSgOVZtPs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4hSgOVZtPs). Kardasshians are closer to home and much more dangerous.
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It was nice to hear a story where the science stood front and center (although it was kind of depressing that the methods of science apparently stopped developing around 1970 in this universe, so that they had to resort to IR absorbance spectra). The story suffered a bit from the tiresome 'we-against-them' cliche with the grunts all being a threatening mob while the scientists were all oh-so-righteous and had something like personalities.
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This was an okay story. Most of it did sound like technojargon gobbedly-gook to me (and I smiled towards the end when the scientist started explaining what he found and a grunt yelled "TECNHOBABBLE! GRRRR!!") While it was cliched, the tension between the techs and the grunts had the most interest, with the second being the tension between the main character and his girlfriend. It was interesting how he came into leadership while she seemed to burn out. Her not showing up at the meal was particularly telling. But yeah, okay story. Didn't grab me strongly, but it was okay.
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Sorry to drag this up out of the archives, but I read the other comments and it seems nobody else was annoyed by this story for the reason I was annoyed.
The science, and scientists, in this story were bad. Sorry, but I couldn't get over how dumb everything "sciency" about this story was. Rather than list all of the flaws, I'll just point out that cool-sounding terms does not make it science. Problem-solving by knowledgeable characters (either pre-existing knowledge, or facts and theories revealed during the story) using logic, reason, and a nice dose of empiricism is what's needed. The characters in this story were mostly clueless, and the entire setting was unbelievable as a result. I couldn't care about the characters, even as they starved to death, because I kept expecting the lid to come off and the alien overlords to stop their "let's-memory-wipe-some-humans-and-torment-them" experiment - that was a more plausible explanation to me for the circumstances than what we were told in the first half.
I'm dangerously close to a rant here, and it's only my second comment ever here. Sorry, I'll be good - I'm sure I'll have much more positive things to say about other stories as I work my way through the archive.
And thanks again to everyone at Escape Artists for all the fine work.
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I guess my biggest challenge with this story is there was The Grunt and then there was a collection of nerd-blobs, one of which was kinda girly shaped. This Thanksgiving feast was all turkey when I wanted some cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.
But my biggest beef with the story is this: WHY THE HELL WOULD HUMANS COLONIZE A PLANET WITH NOTHING TO EAT ON IT??? Did they not have any survey probes? Any testing? Any advance parties? Scout ships? ANYTHING? I mean, zillions of planets out there, find one where we can eat the vegetables. I just kept coming back to that point as I listened to the story.
Or where was the ship? How did they eat while on the ship? If it's the slow sort of travel, wouldn't they have effective hydroponics and other food synthesization mechanisms in place from the journey? It can't be FTL travel or there wouldn't be a problem.