Note to self: do not listen to space-themed sci-fi podcasts while driving. There will be beeping noises and you will think they are coming from your car and it will freak you out.

alright I need more podcast reccs, fiction, non-fiction, inter-dimensional, all are welcome just drop the name in the comments (I'll tag ones I've already listened too)

I think it speaks numbers that no matter how many times I see it or I knows it's coming. I'll always tear up when there's a cannon queer relationship, not subtext but actually front and center.

Podcast people I need your help. A while ago I listened to a couple episodes of a sci fi fiction podcast where a human guy moves to an out of the way station/planet/something that was the hosting place of a failed world fair thrown by humans for aliens. Main dude ends up accidentally living with the ambassador from an alien species that cause humans a large amount of psychological distress to look at. I forgot to bookmark it and I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the pod. Does anyone have any leads?

Happy Rosh Hashana guys have some marker experiments with my new favorite Jewish character of all time, Brian Jeeter. And Krejjh!!! ID below, lengthy design decision ramblings below that :)

[ID: A marker drawing of Krejjh and Jeeter from The Strange Case of the Starship Iris. Jeeter is a light-skinned human with short curly hair. Krejjh is an alien with four arms and mid-length hair in elaborate braids. They are lying on a mattress together with their arms and legs overlapping, partly covered by a blanket. Krejjh is face down and their limbs are spread out across most of the mattress. They are drawn in purple. Jeeter is face up and smiling slightly in his sleep, and drawn in blue. He has visible top surgery scars and oxygen tubing leads from under his nose to a machine beside the mattress. Also on the floor are two pager-like devices, a pile of notes and books, and a tablet showing two figures in elaborate hats. END ID]

Marker test number two has been marginally successful!! Still trying to figure out how best to get a degree of smoothness. My main regret with this is Krejjh’s sleeping position honestly. ‘Krejjh is exhausted flops face down and takes up the whole bed’ is, I maintain, a hilarious idea. But now we can’t see them smiling back at Jeeter! Their fancy braids are supposed to be a Dwarnian thing, I wanted to give them something appearance wise that could have cultural significance. I figured Dwarnians might have a variety of hair textures just like humans, so I wanted to go with something that works similarly for lots of different types of hair. I have them on a mattress to drive home the makeshift way they’re using the new ship (I intended this to be set mid season 2). The stuff on the floor is supposed to be coms, linguistics research, and everyone’s favorite Dwarnian soap. Also, big thanks to @high-voltage-rat for answering my hopefully spoiler free vague questions, this was a good drawing to have a resident Biomed Person for! Believe it or not a lot of work went into figuring out where Krejjh’s extra arms should go that would not have been possible without her anatomy textbooks and well-informed suggestions. (The muscles for the bottom arms are upside-down versions of the musculature in human shoulders (and Krejjhs’s top arms) if anyone was wondering. Also the bone structure is behind their digestive organs, so their stomach pokes out more than a human’s… which you could also see if I chose their sleeping position better. Alas.) Also for telling me enough that I could Google the right words to figure out an oxygen tank but Future but like the Right Amount of future. (The nose piece is name dropped so I left that pretty much unchanged, but rat said you’d usually need pressurization at night so the ‘tank’ is a little more flexible and technologically advanced than what we have right now in the real world. So it can act like a cpap and it squishes but you still gotta lug it around, keeping it nice and cannon aligned.) Finally, they’re so uh. Scantily covered because the ship is allegedly kept at 37 degrees… which for a while I thought was Celsius but maybe it’s Fahrenheit?? Anyway. 37 Celsius is really warm. So. It was the only logical way.

i can't love ANOTHER character names brian. goddamn it.

>>I'm listening to fiction podcasts with 5 fans.<<

Sorry to bother you. I don't follow you, and you have no reason to know who I am. Someone I follow reblogged your post about getting through the WGA strike by consuming old or obscure media.

The line about podcasts with small fandoms jumped out at me. There are two podcasts of which I am one of those five fans.

The first is Girl in Space.

The second is The Strange Case of Starship Iris.

Both have some things in common, like a woman protagonist/primary narrator and a science fiction setting that involves space exploration as the background. Also both put the protagonist into opposition to an imperialist colonizing Earth government in some way.

Starship Iris has more overtly queer elements and themes.

Anytime I see something that might be an opportunity, I try to spread awareness of these two podcasts.

I did actually at one point try to listen to Starship Iris! At some point I'd like to go back to it, the first episode didn't hook me too well, and I think there was something about the audio editing or mixing or quality overall that I think I wasn't a fan of? But also shit was going on in my life, I'm not surprised I had a hard time getting it to stick. In turn, I will recommend to you my podcast I was indirectly mentioning in the post: Wolf 359! It's another really good science fiction podcast, it starts off as a comedy and then things get worse. Plot wise, it does become this really interesting look at the experiences of different people living in a capitalist society, and does a great job with thinking about alternate states of "being" we might not immediately recognize as in line with our ideas of life. Also there's classical music, and a shit ton of pop culture references.

Be on your merry way, thank you for reminding me about Starship Iris! :D

propaganda under the cut!

which by the way I super recommend! it's so so well done that even in action scenes I know what's happening *as* it's happening PLUS it's all the great rebel found family starship thieves bits as Firefly but cyberpunk and gay instead

i’m new here, does Ignatius Campbell count as a sexyman? 

a revolutionary! a forger! a gardener! collaborates on an underground communication system! hates the man! fuck the system! always there for ya! hot voice! believes in building community safety because acab we keep each other safe! hosts government fugitives! a little grumpy but it’s from a place of love! 

Fandom: The Strange Case of the Starship Iris

Sample Size: 133 stories

Source: AO3

Aaaahhhh!

I'm listening to "the strange case of the starship iris" for the millionth time.

And the moment when crejj and Brian say I love you to each other in season 1 episode six is so sweet.

Saying it in each other's languages after being so cute.

It melts me every time

What do Fiction Podcasts have to say about the future?

Whenever you write a story set years from now, how you construct the world around it creates a new way to see the future, a fictional image to a reality we could be headed towards.

Fiction podcasts love to play within the sci-fi genre, and the thousands of audio dramas they have given us new pictures of what our world could look like in the next century (or a few years closer).

In this article I want to analyze the settings in the following shows: Hello from the Hallowoods, Desperado and The Strange Case of Starship Iris.

Hello From the Hallowoods

Hello From the Hallowoods welcomes us to a world ravaged by black rains and capitalism’s greed. After a natural (but man-made) disaster involving acid rain and flooding the world’s successions gave birth to two different types of beings: those who prefer to dream in a company’s “Prime Dream” and those who stay awake to continue living.

Even though the world is post-apocalyptic on paper, it never feels like it. Rather it is enchanted, there are woods where gods, revenants, devils, giants and zombies fall in love with themselves and with each other, places where community is found.

This, I attribute this to the fact that most characters don’t lament a nebulous “end of the world”, since this is the world they have always been living in and they are going to make the best of it: find family, friends, lovers, build homes and destroy bigots.

You leave the world of Hello From the Hallowoods knowing that even a doomed world is worthy of being awake for.

Desperado Podcast

Desperado Podcast also takes us to a world that was looted, but this time mainly by religious colonialism. 

Neo-colionalism has made itself tangible through genocides and direct targeting to believers that worship other than the “Old man in the Sky”.  In its first episode a community in México which revere La Catrina (a goddess in the show inspired by a popular figure in mexican art) is wiped out by the crusaders. 

From there our protagonist Elio is the sole survivor of his people, however all is not lost as he teams up with Talia (the chosen of Baron Samedi) and Shinji (whom I believe is a death kami?).

Elio now literally carries the memories of his community as the vessel for her goddess. Likewise in Desperado, the magic of the characters is the legacy their ancestors gave them, and it is what keeps them alive in the violent world. 

Though if we are ever to worry that our protagonist could fall into its clutches, the structure of the world soothes our preoccupations. You see, it is the characters within the story that are narrating their own experiences to the audience so we know that after all the pain, they ended up safe.

What Desperado tells us about the future is that, even with the ongoing genocides, white-washing of our culture, and neo-colonialism in general we will end up victorious in the end, and that our history will be forever within our memory.

The Strange Case of Starship Iris

The Strange Case of Starship Iris, is the most sci-fi audio drama out of the bunch. It follows the crew of the Rumour, a smuggler's ship, as they try to uncover the dark secrets of the Federation and evade persecution.

As with the other two properties, the future is not an easy world, but our characters are making the most of it.

In a post-war galaxy, the crew of the Rumour is smuggling space-ship parts, medicine, and erotic magazines until they find a help alarm coming from the Starship Iris and rescue biologist Violet Liu. From there they are involved in a mystery which, if the truth comes to life, they could be charged with treason against the Intergalactic Republic. 

Throughout the two seasons of the podcast, Violet Liu and company heal together the scars that the war and its result: the Intergalactic Republic left them. They fight against the government not only through robberies, infiltration, and coordinated efforts with rebel groups but also by eating latkes, drinking, singing shanties, and getting gay jewish married.

To conclude

if queer podcasts are telling us something about the future, it is that it may be equally messed up as the present but that queer, disabled people of color will exist beyond the end of the world and that even in the bleakest of futures we will continue to love and thrive.

Why do space lesbians always get separated, is yearning intrinsic to our nature or something??

Looking for a gift for the podcast lover in your life? Why not get them a podcast-inspired handmade bracelet? Until the end of the year, my gift to all the podcast lovers out there is 15% off any of my podcast bracelets!

Bracelet designs based on additional shows can be found on my Etsy. Check it out!

https://bekasbeadshop.etsy.com?coupon=PODCASTLOVE

…………… hey it’s a good podcast ok. It’s really good.

once again thinking about found family in sci-fi. thinking about how bonds form from sheerly being around one another for a period of time. thinking about families of choice, thinking about how personhood is formed through connections, thinking about shared meals. thinking about calling the people you're stuck with family. thinking about putting up with other people's flaws because you can't leave, but learning to love them for who they are. thinking about getting to experience the beauty of space with the people closest to you. it's found family, right? they found each other, sure, but they MADE the family. it was a conscious effort.