Listen up: Steal the Stars

After last year’s successful resolution, I decided to dip my toes into a new-to-me spec-fic area — podcasts.

The rules as I laid them out originally* for 2018:

• I will listen to twelve spec-fic oriented podcasts, one per month.
• For each podcast, I will listen to a minimum of five episodes per podcast before I either give up or add it to my entertainment cycle

This may be much less of a triumph. It may in fact be doomed to failure. The reasons:

• I am not good at listening or paying attention. Yet most forms of multi-tasking are out when you’re listening to audio. It comes down to baking or exercising for me, and those are not always easy to fit into my day.
• I am not patient. Reading is faster and more efficient.

But when I asked for podcast recommendations, they came fast and furious, so podcasts are obviously something people enjoy. I want to be one of them.

Last month, I was supposed to listen to five episodes of Steal the Stars put out by Tor Labs, and I was excited about it. It had a contained plot within a set number of episodes, so no time for a slow build. It had action; it had romance; it had a mostly-dead alien.

Then I started listening to it and despaired.

As far as I can tell, podcasts come in types. There are the narrative types, like Welcome to Night Vale, where a single person talks slowly at you as if they were genuinely broadcasting their story, or as if they were reading a work of fiction to you. I … get along with those. One voice to follow, speaking carefully. I got through at least twenty episodes of Welcome to Night Vale when it came out.

Then there are the narrative/acted combos. Which so far, seems to be pretty common. Lauren Proves Magic is Real was one: Lauren, narrating her “broadcast” to the listener, and trading off for Keith Curry’s own journal entries—with a few accessory voices. The Bright Sessions also seems to be a mixture. The psychiatrist’s notes frame her sessions and reveal plot, while the patients “act” their stories out. These are variably easy for me to follow.

And then there’s the “radio play” style podcasts, which many, many, many people love. Steal the Stars is definitely one of those. Rapid fire dialogue mixed with personal narration with multiple voices and plot and setting and character all coming at you at once.

So fascinating! So amazing! So… impossible for me to follow. I’m not going to keep harping on this issue going forward—it’s not the podcast medium that’s at fault, it’s my poorly wired brain.

But this meant that I had to listen to the first episode about four times before I really got it in my brain, and then repeat the process for the second. I got discouraged; I cheated; I picked up the novelization.

While skimming the novel, I found myself unpleasantly surprised by the plot, and couldn’t make myself listen any further. I finished the book, but had to DNF the podcast.

That doesn’t mean Steal the Stars is bad. Far from it. The plot just wasn’t what I wanted. I like clear-cut villains and heroes and this was all twisty and morally ambiguous.

From the site:

Steal the Stars is the story of Dakota Prentiss and Matt Salem, two government employees guarding the biggest secret in the world: a crashed UFO. Despite being forbidden to fraternize, Dak and Matt fall in love and decide to escape to a better life on the wings of an incredibly dangerous plan: they’re going to steal the alien body they’ve been guarding and sell the secret of its existence.

I… kind of like my heroes to be heroic. Not mercenary. Not potentially foolish—who are they going to sell the body to? How many of their colleagues are they going to leave on the hot seat? How much betrayal is going on here and do the ones they betray deserve it???

There’s a strong The Twilight Zone taste to the plot, and a good dose of noir to the tone. Neither of which are my jam, so to speak, but if you like SF noir and the sting of The Twilight Zone, and oh yeah, a tiny dose of Lovecraft, go for it! You’ll probably love it. It’s well-written, acted, and produced.

Ashlie Atkinson, the voice actress who plays Dak, is great. Her voice is awesome. Raspy and gritty and very distinctive. The perfect narrator.

The other voices (with the exception of Lloyd, the scientist, played by Nat Cassidy, who sounded a lot like Matt Frewer) kind of blended together for me—not helped by many of them playing multiple roles. And the story-line, despite being Not For Me, holds together really well. I think I recommend the novelization over the podcast, just because I’m more easy-going about difficult characters when I’m reading them.

Daunted, I decided to give up my podcast resolution.

Later, I remembered I hate giving up.

So, the resolution continues, but!

With a few changes.

*I am not going to hold myself to listening to five episodes of any one podcast. I may listen to five first episodes of five different podcasts. Or I may listen to three from a new one. Or I may backtrack and listen to further episodes from a podcast I’d tried before.

Or hey, I may listen to five episodes of a singular podcast after all. What I’m saying is, hang loose. We’ll see how my brain does. These aren’t going to be anything like real reviews, more a collection of reactions—what I think about the plots, the execution, the eternal question of would I keep listening or is a single episode enough?

In the meantime, if you haven’t, go check out Steal the Stars and tell me what you think. Also, feel free to throw more podcast names at me if you think I might like them or miss them in my podcast trawl.

I’d love to hear from people who do listen to podcasts on a regular basis. Where do you listen to them? How does this entertainment fit into your day? Do you think of them more like books or shows or their own thing? I really want to love podcasts; come tell me how.