CoW Ep. 221: Dinovember! The Jungle Between

[danooli]

Episode 221: Dinovember! The Jungle Between by Holly Schofield



• Narrated by Amy Sturgis
• Audio production by Jeremy Carter
• A Cast of Wonders original!

A special thank you to our audio producer Jeremy Carter for the excellent photo in this week’s episode artwork. Check out his Etsy shop, On The Edge Photos.

Holly Schofield’s stories have appeared in dozens of publications including Lightspeed, Crossed Genres, and Tesseracts. She travels through time at the rate of one second per second, oscillating between the alternate realities of a prairie farmhouse and her remote writing cabin in the wilds of North America. For more of her work (including free stories!) and a list of forthcoming publications, see her website.

Amy H. Sturgis holds a Ph.D. in Intellectual History and specializes in the fields of Science Fiction/Fantasy and Native American Studies. She lives with her husband, Dr. Larry M. Hall, and their best friend, Virginia the Boston terrier, in the foothills of North Carolina. You can follow her on Twitter, or check our her website for more details.

Tanya:
I look over at my wife Anahita, where she squints at yesterday's video of the theropod. She pushes her hair back from her sweaty forehead, the very picture of a field biologist. We have extended a canopy over our work area in front of the shuttle yet the temperature is still 34C and heat radiates up from the ground under my boots. I close my eyes for a second and roll my shoulders. In our ten days on Munroe Two, we have only collected minimal data on the tool-using parthenogenic dinosaurs, not enough to publish. Any conclusions will be iffy at best. Our allotted time ends tomorrow.

Click here to listen to Episode 221
Click here to read the text of the story

Tags: Amy Sturgis, anthropology, birth, Cast of Wonders, children, cooperation, dinosaurs, Dinovember, Holly Schofield, Jeremy Carter, nurture, offworld exploration, parents, rule breaking, science, Young Adult fiction

[Kaa]

Excellent. I love the naïveté of the mother, thinking she had left nothing behind when she left the most important thing behind.

[Unblinking]

Ooh, really liked this one. 

Interesting how their prime directive forbade interference with this intelligent species until the intelligent species could consent.  But, despite having no real common language except for the observation of each other's actions, in the end the alien DID consent by giving her egg freely to them in the hopes that it would be able to survive.  (Whether it will be able to survive or not is questionable, since they may not be able to produce suitable food or the kind of psychological support for an infant of a species that they have very little understanding of, but when the alternative is certain destruction I think this is the best alternative).  By taking care of her child the best she can, our human protagonist has been given the thing she most sought for her career--an egg to study.  Hopefully it will turn out as well as possible for both of them, and hopefully the scientific community can recognize that the egg was given freely, not stolen.