Listen Up: The Haven Chronicles

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.

The amendment to the rules:

• 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.

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.

This month, I checked out The Haven Chronicles.

The premise (from their site):

The Haven Chronicles follows a group of soldiers as they investigate a distress signal on the corporately owned backwater planet of Haven. From spontaneous human combustion to Lovecraftian horror; they soon discover that they’re in for more than they bargained for!

I picked this one up all on my own because I liked the premise–a distress call, mysterious shenanigans on a mysterious planet, a dysfunctional crew dealing with monsters (probably monsters, I thought). Some of my favorite old school reads were like that. I give you, as examples, Simon R. Green’s Mistworld, Ghostworld, and Hellworld—short books that I devoured happily. I’m a sucker for mysterious horror, especially when the protagonists are numerous enough that surely some of them will survive!

So what did I think?

Well, I listened to this podcast all the way through (at the time, that meant through episode 11 and a handful of minisodes). So there’s that. It may have been simply the method of listening. After an iTunes battle (that I lost, f***ing program of DOOOM), I ended up burning all the available episodes to CD and listening to them in my car. Old school, right?

Sometimes the old ways work.

Onto the review.

In some ways, this was a successful podcast. I listened to it. I enjoyed the characters. I mostly managed to keep track of the voices. The premise is entertaining, and the execution is…

Okay, the execution is both entertaining and really damned irritating.

Character-wise, The Haven Chronicles is a fun podcast. I would listen to a lot of episodes about these characters flailing all over the place and snarking at each other.

Plot-wise, it’s utterly maddening and I would have given up after episode 8 when a character recaps incoherently for nearly seven minutes of babble without any real utility. It’s a never-ending series of events without any real context. There are several times where the characters demand to know what’s going on, and then… the script cuts away and never tells the listener what they learned.

Events jump around without any real sense of continuity or concern about plot holes.

We’re told one moment that Sergeant Borden knows every inch of his ship. Next moment, he’s saying he’s never been to the engine rooms.

There are two men left in charge on the bridge of the ship, and a stranger wanders through, asking for direction, which they give him. Later, they realize that they’ve never seen him before, and temporarily shrug his presence off as him being “new”, though… they’ve been in space for a long time?

How big is this crew that that even seemed like a possibility? The space crew is a collection of amiable walking disasters.

And what’s up with the mad Russian doctor they keep locked in the lab?

For being a future time period, the pop culture references and technology are all modern.

The setting is terrible in that I never had any idea how things related to anything else. There’s a ship and a tower and a planet and a city. And three of those things seem to be “Haven”. I never knew how populated the planet was, or how developed. The crew of the ship that answers the distress call are supposedly unable to leave until they’ve checked everything out, which… seems to involve puttering around in a tower? Without any other people around? So much blank space left to fill. Since most of the mystery depends on the answer of “what the hell is happening on Haven?”, the fact that we don’t actually see much of Haven at all is a problem. Getting setting across in an audio narrative is appallingly hard, I  imagine, and they just don’t hit the mark here.

So nothing connects to anything else, and the mystery stays mysterious all the way through. By episode eight, I was aggravated, wanting a transcript, and a red pen.

The plot moves forward significantly only in two or three moments, most of them “minisodes”.   The minisode: “Distress call”, which lays out the threat. They’ve taken over. Don’t let them leave the planet! And the minisode: “Redacted” where you learn that a series of women are undergoing some life-changing experimentation. That’s about as straight-forward as things get.

My working theory is: unchecked psychic powers as a result of mad science unleash hell, destroy the only city on the planet, and leave a few powerful, but immature women squabbling over the remains and using their abilities to make things look like normal for reasons of their own. And somewhere there’s a psychic grandma pulling strings. And a couple of corporations duking it out.

On the technical level, I didn’t think The Haven Chronicles was nearly as polished as Steal the Stars or Lauren Proves Magic is Real.  There were places where one voice would be much quieter/louder than another, which sounded inadvertent. There are a lot of sound effects that were not useful. I feel like they were supposed to mean things but… I couldn’t translate what the sound effect was supposed to be.

Also, I found their website weirdly disorganized, especially their cast page. On it, some voices & voice actors were left unaccounted for, and others were often listed by their surname when the podcast episodes use their first names. So not helpful.

In the end, a few things about The Haven Chronicles are clear. This is obviously a labor of love from the actors and writers, and their enthusiasm really goes a long way. I don’t care about the answers to the plot problems (probably a good thing because I doubt they’re going to show up anytime in the foreseeable future), as much as I like the characters.

The final question: would I keep listening?

I’m not sure. While I’m typing this up, episode 12 is downloading on iTunes. I could see myself checking in from time to time, seeing what’s up with the crew, but I think that the lack of answers will keep me wandering off again. On the bright side though, I think I’m getting the hang of listening better.