Over this past weekend I uploaded the season 2 finale of Wild Speculation! That means that I am a little over a year into this whole podcast thing, with 16 original short stories up and freely available for your listening pleasure.
To celebrate this milestone, I thought I’d give a run-down on the eight episodes of season two, a little of my thought process behind each episode, and links to them, should you decide that you want to listen to one or more of them. Each story stands on its own, so listen to as many or as few of them as you like, in whatever order you like.
Ep. 1: You Can Never Go Home Again
You Can Never Go Home Again is about a crew of an experimental space ship that returns to Earth, only to find all the people and animals have disappeared. They search the country for some clue as to what has happened, and find dangers they never could have anticipated.
This first episode started out as a little flash piece I put together for a contest on the now-defunct Narrative social media platform. In the flash piece, on of the astronauts has gone home to find it abandoned like the rest of the world. Despite knowing that his family won’t be there, he holds onto hope until he arrives at the house and finds it empty.
You can listen to You Can Never Go Home Again here.
Ep. 2: I Am The Monster
I Am The Monster follows a young man who has been indoctrinated in a fundamentalist religion that believes that humans should live on Earth, other sentient species should live on their own planets, and humans shouldn’t make mechanical modifications to their bodies. He is caught in an explosion, and it forces him to consider his positions in a new light.
I originally wrote this story with the intention of submitting it to Apex Publication‘s anthology, Invisible Threads. Unfortunately, the Kickstarter to fund that anthology launched right as the coronavirus pandemic was starting to get bad last spring, so people were holding on to their extra cash, and it did not fund. So I included this story in the podcast instead.
This story draws on my own experiences and observations growing up in and around conservative Christianity.
You can listen to I Am The Monster here.
Ep 3: Legacy of the She-Wolf
Legacy of the She-Wolf creates a backstory and motivation for one of the most pivotal, yet under-explored characters in Roman Mythology: the wolf that finds the babies Romulus and Remus and, instead of eating them or leaving them alone, decides to raise them as her own. Without that decision, Rome never comes into existence, and the whole history of the world is altered.
But why did this wolf decide to do this? Could it be because she was more than just a wolf? And what if she had an ulterior motive for sparing those boys?
I love re-imagining mythology and fairy tales. Looking at the story from a different character’s perspective, changing the setting, or otherwise shifting the lens helps to take something familiar and find new meaning in it. This reinterpretation of classic stories is the most common type of story in Wild Speculation in the first season includes both a fractured fairy tale (The Stepsister) and different perspective on a Bible story (The Giant’s Last Day). Now, with Legacy of the She-Wolf, I venture into Roman Mythology.
You can listen to Legacy of the She-Wolf here.
Ep. 4: The Jupiter Boomerang
The Jupiter Boomerang is a story about a race. Spaceships speed away from the Asteroid Belt out around Jupiter and back over the course of about a week. It is the biggest race in the solar system, and only happens every four and a half Earth years (when Ceres and Jupiter are closest to each other). And Jaylen, a hotshot young pilot, has been dreaming of being in this race her whole life. Now, she finally gets her chance, even if the circumstances are… less than ideal.
When I started writing this story, it was intended to be a bit more family-friendly than the other stories in the series. It was supposed to be a ‘girl and her horse’ story, but set in space. And it is… though it is darker and filled with more intrigue than your typical story that fits the trope. And not quite as family-friendly as I’d originally intended. Oops.
(And, yes, for those of you wondering, some of the inspiration for this story did come from The Expanse‘s Julie Mao and her racing ship that we never actually get to see her use in the story.)
You can listen to The Jupiter Boomerang here.
Ep. 5: The Collector
The Collector is a dark fantasy story about a thief who steals what he believes is a trapped sprite that will grant him wishes. But what he thinks will make his dreams come true instead thrusts him into a nightmare.
This story started out as an attempt to write fantastical horror, but the fantasy side of it ended up being much stronger than the horror side. Despite that, this is the story from this season that I, personally, think is my strongest, with the best balance of character, plot, and worldbuilding. So if you are unsure of where to start and don’t mind horror elements in a story, start here.
The inspiration for this story is two-fold. First is the story The Inn of the Seven Blessings, by Matthew Hughes, which is included in the George R.R. Martin-edited anthology, Rogues. While the two stories have very different plots and tones, the protagonists of both are thieves who steal something that turns out to contain an entity that is more than they bargained for. The second inspiration was the idea of a horror story version of beloved children’s myth. I’ll let you listen and figure out which myth I mean.
You can listen to The Collector here.
Ep. 6: The Wheel of Death
The Wheel of Death is a near-future noir story in which all prisons are now privately run and the owners of these prison corporations will find and exploit any loophole they can to squeeze every last cent of profit they can out of their prisoners.
Agent Larkin, an over-worked, underpaid employee of the Department of Corrections arrives at a prison to investigate a tip that they had drowned a man in front of an audience at the last prison rodeo. He is surprised to find that, not only do they not try to hide it from him, they are under the impression that the whole thing is technically legal. Could they be right?
The truth is, private prisons already do everything they can to profit off of their prisoners, from negotiating lucrative contracts with the government, to treating prisoners as basically slave labor, to prison rodeos, where prisoners are given opportunities to make a lot more money than they normally could in prison… though often at the risk of serious injury.
If you imagine a future where that has only gotten worse, and combine that with a future where the courts decided that Benjamin Schreiber had, in fact, completed his life sentence when he died, but was then revived, you get the world of The Wheel of Death.
You can listen to The Wheel of Death here.
Ep. 7: Orphan of Mars
Orphan of Mars tells the story of a girl named Arra who lives on a Mars that bears more resemblance to an old company town in Appalachia than it does an exciting new frontier for humanity. She feels trapped by the constraints put on her in this rigid society, so she tries to chart a new course for herself. Unfortunately, this has some unintended consequences…
This story is an origin story for one of the characters in the novel I am currently writing. It zooms in on the plight of those who live in a place where the Company controls everything: all the businesses, all the work, the government, everything. How does a person find their own path in a world like that?
You can listen to Orphan of Mars here.
Ep. 8: Roll For Deception
Roll For Deception is a dark comedy set in a D&D-esque world, but where the characters face problems that hit all to close to home.
The Chimera Company is an adventuring party; or, in other words, a team of private contractors for hire for jobs that might include some sort of danger. Basically, they are mercenaries. But jobs have been hard to come by in recent months, as the war recently ended, and squads of highly experienced ex-soldiers have been flooding the ‘adventuring party’ market. Now, every job worth doing requires more experience than the Chimera Company has. But when they find a potential client in a tight spot, they figure they can get away with lying on their resume about how much experience they actually have. Unfortunately, they are so consumed with maintaining their own lies that they don’t stop to ask who might be lying to them…
The first kernel of this story came while I was rewatching the show Firefly. In an episode titled The Train Job, the crew of the Serenity is hired by a gangster named Niska to steal something off of a train. In their meeting with Niska, he opens a door that shows a young man being tortured for failing the gangster. Niska tells the crew that the young man is his nephew.
As I watched this episode this time around, I wondered, “Isn’t it kind of convenient for Niska that his nephew just failed him, allowing him to show off the torture to make a point to the crew of the Serenity? What if that really is his nephew, but he’s not being tortured? What if the nephew works for Niska by pretending to be tortured as an object lesson to any crews that Niska hires?” And Roll For Deception grew from there.
You can listen to Roll For Deception here.
This has been a great season. Thank you to everyone who has listened to my stories, and especially those of you who have given me feedback! I look forward to making season three next year!
