The Nature of Audio Fiction
A quick hike at Norris Lake to regain my hiking bearings leads to enjoying not only beautiful scenery, but a beautiful story from one of my favorite podcasts.
I recently took a trip up to Norris Lake, a reservoir north of Knoxville to restart my hiking practice. The past couple of years of pandemic did a lot to interrupt my weekly day hikes and I hope to get myself back into the habit. But I realize that it’s probably best to start off slowly. Therefore, I started off with a short hike, just over a mile. This is a path around the lake that I’ve taken before, and it’s a relatively easy trail and I looped back through the cabins to return to the parking lot near the welcome center.
I took a few pictures shown here on a temperate Saturday morning. Fall had just started to make its imminent presence known and the change from the heat from this summer was welcoming. Nothing of real note happened on the trail but I did take the opportunity to listen to a bit of audio fiction.
The speculative fiction magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies has been a mainstay of my podcast listening for many years now and for this hike, I chose to listen to a short story from one of the latest issues. The story is “In Case You’re the One to Devour a Star”, by Tamara Jerée.
This is a beautiful fantasy story of love and magic with gorgeous imagery. Jerée has an adept touch at tugging on the heartstrings and making you feel the emotion of the tale. The plot itself is not particularly original, but I would say that it wasn’t intended to be. It’s a story of two people, their life together and their discovery of their different worlds. There is a good amount of world-building and the way in which the magic of the story works is very evocative and intriguing. There’s no big quest, not even a huge amount of character development, but it is still a well-told story and worth a listen.
One aspect of the world piqued my interest and that relates to the use of gender in the story. Everyone in the story is referred to as “she.” There are many possible ways in which one could interpret this. Perhaps there aren’t multiple genders, but only one; perhaps there are multiple genders, but only one pronoun. Or there is a binary and those that might be represented by “he” are elsewhere. It’s not explained and it really doesn’t matter to the story. It was just an idle question on my part.
But what deepened the mystery was that when an infant is introduced as a character, the pronoun used was “they.” So, why was “they” used if there was only one gender? Or what was the significance of the difference in pronoun. My favorite theory is that “they” is simply the pronoun for a child, and that they gain the adult pronoun “she” when they reach a certain age.
Again, it doesn’t matter at all to the story and I really don’t care if I ever find out what is the reality. But I do like that the story left it undetermined, so that I got the opportunity to think about it and explore that aspect of pronoun usage. Recent years have brought pronoun usage into the forefront of language, at least in English. I find this a wonderful opportunity to experience language change in action and an opportunity to see language match new thoughts about personal identity.
This story made me feel and made me think, and that’s always a treat.
