Clarkesworld Podcast June2012: Immersion (Aliette de Bodard)

Immersion (Aliette de Bodard)

Read by Kate Baker

A woman goes to great extremes to assimilate into her husband's culture, losing herself in the process.

Winner: 2012 Nebula Award for Best Short Story and 2013 Locus Award for Best Short Story,

Nominee: 2012 BSFA Award for Best Short Story, and 2013 Hugo Award for Best Short Story

Finalist: Theodore Sturgeon Award

Fairly well received, I'd say. Not only that but it came up several times as SFContario, so it was damned convenient it was the podcast I listened to on the way to Toronto.


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Clarkesworld Podcast June 2012: If the Mountain Comes (An Owomoyela)

If the Mountain Comes (An Owomoyela)

Read by Kate Baker.

In a village whose water supply is brutally controlled by a single man, his daughter has to choose whether her father's claim that the village survives because of his close control of a vital but rare resource or a visitor's claim that the villagers can learn to manage their resources themselves.

Very much not an Analog* story. In Analog the strongman is always clearly right to domineer the sheeple; the only question is how many people will have to die to make the point.

* In the eras I read it.


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Escape: The Vanishing Lady (Alexander Woollcott)

The Vanishing Lady V1 (Alexander Woollcott)

The Vanishing Lady V2 (Alexander Woollcott)

(Again, multiple versions, and I only listened to the first one)

A British woman relates to her daughter the troubling story of how her mother vanished in Paris, where not entirely the 1889 Exposition Universelle was being held. When she returned from a trip to obtain medicine for her ailing mother, the woman discovers her mother gone and nobody will admit to having seen her. As it turns out, there was important information withheld from the woman that circumstances will make available during the course of her story.

Based on a famous urban legend.

I cannot imagine the conversation we are told is going to occur after the end of the play will go very well.

Escape: Snake Doctor (Irvin S. Cobb)

Snake Doctor V1 (Irvin S. Cobb)

Snake Doctor V2 (Irvin S. Cobb)

A no-account poor white-trash wife-beater gets the idea of robbing the local snake-oil merchant. Already fearing the man as a witch doctor, the wife-beater takes the precaution of shooting the Snake Doctor in the head. To his horror, the man appears to shake off death like an old coat. It gets worse from there.

From reading up on Cobb, I suspect it's just as well this isn't one of his stories that has a black character in it.

So, this happened

Via the Weaselking:
Manitoba Progressive Conservative Leader and former Conservative MP Brian Pallister on the oncoming holidays.

"Brian Pallister's holiday wishes for "infidel atheists"" (Watch on YouTube)

Pallister supported Canada's famed strongman Stephen Harper for leadership of the Conservative Party.

Derek Johnson finds little to love in this year's SF movies

WHich is only to be expected because SF movies are generally an even stronger proof of Sturgeon's Law than prose SF and prose SF is mostly forgettable crap. One detail did catch my eye:

You had to prepare yourself for the hate mail you'd receive if you said something even remotely negative about Ender's Game, despite the defensive, shrill tone taken by those who praised it.

This has never happened to me so I will take it as evidence of how experiences can vary widely on the web. I have seen something like that for other authors, though; the Heinleinophiles can be quite irritating in their insistence that everyone join in on the fawning adulation for Heinlein.

Well, this seems a little extreme

In a case which has been described by those representing the mother as “unprecedented,” a court order was obtained, in August 2012, for the Italian mother-to-be, in England on a work placement at the time, to be enforced to give birth “by way of cesarean section.”

Want to guarantee replies to your review?

Include something like this:

Oh, before I go—I do have one critique of Frozen, though it’s more for Disney in general. I get that this is set in vaguely-Norway or some such place, but does everyone have to be white?

New Holiday for Canadians

Face Palm Monday.

Meanwhile, in Georgia

Ed Kramer pleads guilty.

I'd would call this lesson learned if I thought it had been learned

Groucho is very much not a morning cat but he's much grumpier if he gets woken up by a much younger cat prodding him in the head with one paw...

And a follow-up

Pallister used 'infidel' inclusively.