Clarkesworld Podcast April 2013: Finisterra (David Moles)

[james_davis_nicoll]

Finisterra (David Moles)

The text version can be found here.

Read by Kate Baker

An engineer seeking a new life signs up with hardened criminals, only to discover their crimes don't stop at a bit of poaching.

So, the details that kept yanking me out of this were all world building on Earth, specifically details like

[...]the Nazarios, like the other Christians of Punta Aguila, however valued, however ancient their roots, knew that they lived there only on sufferance.

and

a slow, patient, reliable thing that dated from before the founding of the London Caliphate.

And it does seem to be the Punta Aquila in the Dominican Republic.

Could be the sort of detail tossed as "look, the world changed" but in a 2007 story, a casual reader might be forgiven for hearing Eurabia dogwhistles.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 2007.

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Comments

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

I'll note his popular "Seven Cities of Gold" is set in a "flipped" world (Muslims at or near the top, Christians at the bottom - indeed apparently worse off than Muslims in our world), and the Christians playing the Crazed Religious Reactionaries set off an atomic bomb in a Muslim-occupied city - it's not like its a theme he hasn't touched on before.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Man, do I just move in the wrong circles or are science fiction writers and right-wing crazies like 350 times more into Establishing A Caliphate than actual Muslim people are?

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Ding ding ding ding.

They also obsess about seventy-two virgins more than any Muslim I've ever met, probably because if you put seventy-two of them into a room, you'd have their version of Muslim heaven.