audio drama | Joe Jots

I divide my podcast listening between audio drama and music discussions. Currently, we’re into the third and final season of The Strange Case of Starship Iris, one of the best of the SF audio dramas going.

It’s a combination of great storytelling and characterization – these, of course, being the keys to much great audio drama. We can’t see the characters, so we’re dependent on how they talk to one another, right? How well do they do it. There are even two characters in this drama with the same name, and we don’t confuse them. Technically good work, but the storytelling is key.

So what’s it about. In the first episode, Violet Liu is the only survivor of a sabotaged spaceship (the titular Iris). I hope this isn’t a spoiler – we learn pretty early that it was doomed to failure. In Violet’s last minutes, she’s rescued by a team of smugglers operating in the aftermath of a war between Humans and an alien race called the Dwarnians. The crew of the ship, the Rumour, is mostly human, save for the pilot, Krejjh, who is a Dwarnian. The ship’s translator/cook, Brian Jeeter is Krejjh’s partner. Brian studied Dwarnian literature before the war, knowledge that more than once comes in very handy.The crew is also mostly female and there’s a healthy dose of queer.

The first season has the crew running a variety of contraband and trying to keep out of sight of the Earth government. We slowly learn that everyone on the ship has something to hide related to the war. Or reasons to hide (such as: no one was supposed to survive the destruction of the Iris). Eventually we learn how close Krejjh is to the Dwarnian hierarchy (very, but her engagement to a human makes that tenuous).

From very early on we care about this cre and what happens to them and appreciate their qualities and shortfalls and fears.

Also: Did I mention the theme song?: Fear for the Storm always gets to me. It’s refrain, When I go to sea, don’t fear for me, fear for the storm encapsulates the themes of the story: Going up against elemental forces and with the self assurance to say, ‘we’ve beaten unbeatable situations before and we’ll do it again.

Midway through season 3, and we’re totally engaged with all the features of great pulp – the heroes are this close to death in each one and cheating it again and again, as the crew is on an impossible mission to rescue one of their own.

Joe Sam says: Check it out.

The Infinite Noise is a slightly supernatural queer YA something that includes romance, but mostly not. I don’t read a lot of YA, so I’m not sure how to characterize it. The story follows two neurodivergent high school boys. Caleb is an empath – he can be overwhelmed by the emotions of others. He’s also on the football team. Adam suffers depression and is one of the stars of the debate team.

One thing that grabbed me about this book was the alternating first person narratives. Caleb and Adam are very different but have an endearing quality to their differentness. Adam’s depression has been known to lead to self-harm – it’s nice to read of a boy in this position because this is thought to be mostly a girl’s issue. We meet Caleb before a fight he has after which he blacks out. The fight is the impetus to put him in therapy. There are no spoilers in that – we learn these things about both boys in the first couple of chapters.

Note that this is released as a ‘Bright Sessions Novel’, Dr. Bright being Caleb’s therapist. I’m not sure how I came to this book – my guess is that it was a Tor.com freebie, but it might have been some other special offer. That said, it wasn’t until I read the afterward that I learned that The Bright Sessions started out as an audio drama podcast. This gives the book (and its place in a series that has two more books, both of which have different protagonists) more sense. Because the voices came out of audio drama, they had to be unique. Shippen succeeds admirably in bringing these differences to the page.

I also love the fact that the main characters are queer and that their varieties of neurodivergence are normalized in the context of the story. The parents are concerned, but their concerns are mostly for the health and safety of their kids, not any kind of homophobia.

Even the bully doesn’t have an issue with the fact that the two main characters are dating. It’s a little utopic, but I love how Shippen normalizes the nature of queer love – the focus on all the things they’re dealing with (including all the heavy emotions of the protagonists’ internal states, the emotions of just being adolescent, and some schoolyard violence) isn’t compounded by the fact that they’re queer. The queerness is simply adjacent. But the parents, who are most definitely issue-laden, are cool with the fact that their sons are boys in love.

As the story progresses, what we experience is a courtship and burgeoning relationship that captures adolescent angst about these things in a way that feels especially accurate. It certainly brought to mind the ups and downs of my own adolescence, in a bittersweet way.

The trick with stories like this, comprised of first-person internal monologues, is that you have to want to be in the characters’ heads, even when they don’t want to be in their own heads. It’s a feat to make that emotional rollercoaster attractive and inviting and Shippen makes it work.

I really like Caleb and Adam, so I’m not sure how I’ll feel about the other books in the series. I’m curious about the original audio drama that gave birth to the stories. A couple of episodes of The Bright Sessions are waiting on my phone.

Fave podcasts #1 – Starship Iris

Review: The Infinite Noise by Lauren Shippen