(no subject)

[skygiants]

I had a lot of relatively mindless manual labor to do last week at work, so I ended up zipping through all extant episodes of The Strange Case of The Starship Iris and enjoyed it very much!

I have a pal who works on this podcast so it had been on my radar for a while, but all I really knew about it was "scripted fiction, ensemble I think, probably takes place on a spaceship called Iris?" As it happens, I was not even correct about this much! In the first episode, scientist Violet Liu is rescued from off the Starship Iris, which has just malfunctioned in the middle of a government sample-collecting mission in such a way as to cause the death of the rest of the crew, and the rest of the show takes place on the entirely different ship on which she unexpectedly finds herself.

The first thing that jumps into my mind as a comparative for Starship Iris is Becky Chambers' books ... which feels a bit oxymoronic in a way, because one of Chambers' main things is a gentle absence of plot and relatively low immediate stakes, while Starship Iris is not only very tightly plotted but starts off immediately with life-and-death stakes and only builds from there. But despite the high stakes it still feels to me like a very gentle show in a lot of ways -- there's a heavy emphasis on empathy and trust and communication, and the characters are all generally well-intentioned people attempting to do their best by each other and their own ethics in the various dangerous circumstances in which they find themselves. It's also very Emphatically representative; cast largely of color and/or queer, foregrounded queer relationships (an established human/alien relationship acts as a fairly explicit stand-in for the social marginalization of a queer relationship, while the challenges of the main lesbian romance are not structural and societal but internal and personal to the lesbians in question), carefully inclusive about portrayals of visible and invisible disability and structural inequality, etc. (My personal favorite character is the laid-back trans linguist who quit grad school to join a crew of smugglers because it felt like less of an ethical quagmire, but still craves feedback on his Ph.D. thesis on historical alien literary epics.)

The story is set a few years after a major interstellar war between humanity -- which resulted in the imposition of a heavily propagandized military regime -- and a much more powerful, moderately expansionist alien empire. One of my favorite things about the podcast is the format of the first season, which is structured as a series of government reports on the activities of Violet Liu and comrades, increasingly punctuated and annotated by the agents assigned to the case; as the season goes on, the cast become increasingly aware of their own audio surveillance, and the question of how the authorities are accessing the recordings becomes central to the plot, with absolutely no break in kayfabe until the closing credits of S1. I dug this SO MUCH and thought it was really cleverly done! I'm a little sad this conceit is not sustainable into the second season, which has a more traditional radio drama format, but they have made it up to me with the addition of frequent interjections from an in-universe pirate radio station and so I can forgive.

Anyway, now I have listened to all that there is so far, and am, shockingly, caught up on just about everything else I'm actively listening to, I'm potentially in the market for more podcasts?? So if you have recommendations, please let me know!

For the record, my other current podcast listening:

- Friends at the Table, aka 'the only thing I listened to for approximately four years while catching up on all their content,' but now genarti are trying to listen to the current season together and use it as crafting motivation, which is part of the reason I have more time in my walking-to-and-from-work listening schedule these days
- A More Civilized Age, in which some of the FaTT people and some other people talk about Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and I use it as an excuse to rewatch the episodes along with them and argue with them in my head
- Throwing Sheyd, the Jewish demonology podcast (currently on hiatus it seems?); I'm enjoying listening through their backlog very much but also can't listen to too many episodes in a row or it all starts blurring together

Comments

[skygiants]

Thank you for the recs! I do love a Gothic ....

[skygiants]

Thank you! I've definitely seen you mention Metis in Space before and been intrigued.

[skygiants]

Thank you, that last one especially looks like a great place to get book recs!

[skygiants]

Oh, thank you! I've heard of Wolf 359 but didn't really have a great sense of what it was about ... I used to get it confused with Starship Iris actually tbh.

[skygiants]

OK but while you mention it, how much IS Greater Boston grounded in Actual Boston, because I do love a story with a sense of place I know well.

[skygiants]

Thank you so much for all these recs, this is great!! I actually hadn't realized that 'why is all of this being recorded on tape' in TMA is a full in-universe conceit, that is very cool to know. :D

[skygiants]

Oh, I think I remember you posting about Bad Gays, thank you for the reminder!

[skygiants]

Thanks so much for the recs! I've heard of some of these, but definitely not all of them.

[skygiants]

That's a lot of history to get through! 😂

[skygiants]

I haven't, thanks for the rec! :D

[larryhammer]

Yes. Yes, it is.

(The podcast itself is up to the early Ming, about 900 years ahead of me.)

[jesse_the_k]

+100 for Métis in Space.

While it's two people talk about this thing, it feels much tighter than most chatty pods. They canonically drink wine -- not in a "let's get plastered" way, but in a "let's enjoy each other's company."

[jesse_the_k]

I bounced after 12 eps because I couldn't keep the characters straight, but the sense of Boston -- most particularly the T -- is very thick.

[jesse_the_k]

The Ginsburg Tapes sound educational AND reinforce that it's possible to effect change.

[jadelennox]

omg it is so greater Boston. Revere is so Revere, Somerville is so Somerville, the race and class and townie-vs.-outsider dynamics and all.

[rydra_wong]

I love it so much -- there are a whole series of things where (for example) you go "Oh yeah, of course the tape recorder keeps being accidentally left on and catching plot-relevant workplace conversations, this has to happen because it's an audio podcast" and then it turns out that no, this is something odd that's happening in-world, for reasons.

They take all these things which are necessary for it to function as an audio podcast and make them part of the world-building.

[opusculasedfera]

I enjoy the One Shot Podcast, where they play short sessions of less well known role-playing games than D&D, but specifically, I think you would like the three episodes where they play "Dream Apart", a fantasy tabletop game set in the shtetl and drawing on Jewish folklore and history.

Eps are here: 1, 2, 3. (Their website navigation is terrible for finding specific eps, I'm afraid, but they have a long back catalogue of other games if you like the players and want to hear more.)

[genarti]

I listened to some of that a while back! At least, assuming it's the same one -- it is, after all, possible that multiple podcasts have decided to use that title. I needed a certain amount of brain to follow it, and haven't listened to it in a fair while, but I really enjoyed what I did listen to!

[genarti]

I've added Métis In Space to my podcast app on the strength of all these recs -- thanks! I tend to like chatty podcasts best when they're fairly tight and subject-focused and informative, and this sounds like it might fit the bill.

[landingtree]

I have nothing to add to this list except a seconding of the You're Wrong About/Why Are Dads?/Maintenance Phase rec. But I'm being a happy commensalist and downloading a whole lot of things from it! Very useful for long days in the garden.

[rydra_wong]

Also!

The Museum of Lost Objects: https://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/569791.html

David Tennant Does A Podcast With ...: https://podcastjoy.dreamwidth.org/3346.html -- Mr Tennant turns out to be an excellent interviewer, so worth checking out any episodes where you have interest in the interviewee.

ETA: I'm also dipping into Talking Scared, which has thoughtful interviews with horror writers.

[dhampyresa]

Seconding Magnus Archives (though I am only up to 143 on that one) and Maintenance Phase! I also reccomend Sawbones (about various bits of medicine, mostly historical), Death in the Afternoon (about death customs) and Apocalist Bookclub (two friends read apocalyptic fiction in chronological order).

[affreca]

Thanks for the recommendation. I'm about six episodes in, and I keep thinking I want to get back to reading my book, then remember it's a podcast. I listen to a lot of podcasts, apparently. Basically they're in three categories, based on how much attention I can give them: podcasts I listen to while working (don't care if I tune out parts, mostly history), podcasts I listen to falling asleep (stuff that it doesn't matter if I fall asleep, mostly pairs talking about stuff I only sort of care about like comics), and podcast I listen to while driving/crafting (stuff I actually have to pay attention like fiction).

[rydra_wong]

I've heard good things about Metis in Space and should check it out -- thanks for the nudge!

[larryhammer]

Snarky guy who teaches in Shanghai with family in the US, starts with the legendary prehistory with a fascinating and useful discussion of what we can really learn from the oracle bones? Icon is a soldier on a horse?

(There may be more with that title, but it's the only one I've met.)