The audio podcast of the first story I ever sold, “Pahwakhe,” is now online at PodCastle. It’s very flattering to have joined some pretty illustrious ranks in the Escape Pod/PseudoPod/PodCastle family.
I’d like to offer a big thanks to Rachel Swirsky for giving the story a spot at PodCastle, to Sean Wallace and Paul Tremblay at Fantasy Magazine for being the first to give the story a shot, and to C. G. Furst for his reading.
When you have a quarter of an hour to spare, go check it out!
Just listened to it. Gord, that’s a lovely and sad bit of work. Did you base in on a particular piece of research or lore?
Thanks, Marvin!
Yeah, it’s based on a story I ran across in a book called, um… um… well, it’s in a notebook somewhere now, but I can find it if you’re curious. I skimmed the book in the lovely Seattle library while there during Clarion West, for which this was my week 6 story. I was looking for Korean folktales involving shamans, and found this one instead. (It got a good critting by my class, including our teacher that week, Vernor Vinge.)
Actually, I was already (dimly) familiar with the story, though, I think from some short-lived Canadian TV series, kind of an Aboriginal Folktales Twilight Zone kind of thing. But in the original, the ghost people definitely are ghosts… dead people of the same general culture as the chief and his daughter, though apparently a different band. The introduction of white-folks is entirely mine.
Although it was a little short and fast-paced for my own personal taste, I’d echo what Marvin said, and then of course it was a minature!
It’s a bit of a leap, but actually it most reminded me of what my favorite Southeast Asain history lecturer was always at pains to do, namely presenting colonization by European powers from Southeast Asians’ perspectives themselves, rather than the mere chronology of expansion and coloring of the map that most history classes provide. So I enjoyed hearing this alternative perspective on the colonization of North America too.
Not that it has anything to do with your story, but after being an avid listener of Steve Ealy’s commentarys on Escapepod for many years, I found the accompanying music to the host’s introduction before the story on Podcastle very distracting and annoying!
Thanks, James!
Yeah, this was just a small attempt to tell the story from some other perspective than “ours.” Even though it’s thoroughly an “other” perspective that is, at the same time, “ours.”
I’m thinking about something a little longer and slower paced, drawing on the weirdness of technological and political encroachment in a Southeast Asian society (Myanmar’s) that kind of works this way too… where locals don’t just see it as bizarre, or inexplicable, but happen to see it as a change to be coped with, and some make out like Microsoft while others try and fail, and many bear the brunt of a shift they weren’t prepared for.
Maybe I’ll recruit you as a beta-test reader when I am at the point where I can show the thing to someone else…