Author Topic: EP718: How the Emperor of All Space and Every World Awoke to the True Nature...  (Read 1324 times)

divs

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Escape Pod 718: How the Emperor of All Space and Every World Awoke to the True Nature of Reality and Why it Didn’t Matter

Author: P. H. Lee
Narrator: Eric Luke
Host: Mur Lafferty
Audio Producer: Summer Brooks

Escape Pod 718: How the Emperor of All Space and Every World Awoke to the True Nature of Reality and Why it Didn’t Matter is an Escape Pod original.

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The Emperor was bored. This was a problem. His Imperial Majesty, King of every Spiral Arm, Prince-Protector of Coreward Republics, Thearch of Bohm and its dependencies, Grand Duke of the Exterior Habitats, Elector of Both Magellanic Clouds, Guardian of All One Hundred Holy Relics and Defender of the Faith, the Emperor of All Space and Every World could not be bored. When he was not administering his empire—a task that consumed more than half the day—he was supposed to be entertained by his court—replete with jesters , dancers from Akyll and Boas , and singers from the Ibelia Habitat —or comforted by his harem—staffed entirely by beautiful concubines from Isa  and eromenos from R’  The Emperor, by convention and necessity and custom and law, could want for nothing.

    All of the advisors in the Depleted Uranium Palace were distraught. “Your most Imperial Majesty,” they explained to him time and time again, “you cannot simply be bored. You want for nothing, and everything is at your command. It is not possible that you could be bored. If you were, if even the whole of space was not enough to entertain a single man, then what good would be your empire? Surely you cannot simply be bored. There must some other explanation. Perhaps you are ill?”

    In response the Emperor—who had heard this speech as many times as he had advisors, and was well and truly bored of it—would sigh. “Perhaps you are right,” he would say, and sigh again. “Let us see what our doctors have to say.” But although the imperial doctors—the best of the best from Mimward —examined the Emperor time and again, they could find nothing wrong with his imperial person.




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Wouter Bjerg

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Another one I really liked. The humor reminded me of Terry Pratchett's Discworld style of writing: comical characters without them acting too nonsensically, and with the occasional bloodshed not shied away from.



CryptoMe

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This one did not work for me at all. I didn't find it funny, particularly the bloodshed bits - I found those callous, both on the part of the character and the author. None of this was redeemed for me by the ending, which seemed trite and too self-meta-aware in a "look at me, I'm being clever" kind of way.