Archive for the ‘Vajra Chandrasekera’ Category
Enjoying some Clarkesworld short fiction by Reed and Chandrasekera, Narrated by Kate Baker
Posted on: June 10, 2017
Me and audio fiction have a tenuous friendship. I tend to get distracted while listening to audio fiction, which means I have to listen to the same stories over and over and over again, almost like they are long musical pieces. Do I listen to the occasional audio book? Sure do. Are they something I seek out? Not really. But . . . long commute to work through beautiful farmland is the perfect setting for some audio short story podcasts. And Clarkesworld has the amazing Kate Baker. So there’s that.
If you’re not sure audio short stories are for you, find something narrated by Kate Baker. Her voice is warm and welcoming, drawing you in to the inflections and pauses. When I listen to her, I feel like it’s just the two of us having an intimate conversation in a dark pub where the bartender knows us and lets us hang out at that table in the back as long as we’d like. She’s not reading me a story, she is telling me a story. My brain responds to her voice the same way my brain responds to music, even though she’s not singing. All that to say that Kate Baker’s voice has absolutely spoiled me.
Still, I stick with the shorter of the short stories that she narrates. Maybe the more I listen to, the more I will want to listen to and will download longer stories? Time will tell, I guess.
Last week, I listened to “Left of Bang – Preemtive Self-Actualization for Autonomous Systems” by Vajra Chandrasekera from the April issue (issue #127) of Clarkesworld, and “Two Ways of Living” by Robert Reed from the March issue (issue #126) of the same magazine. Both were narrated by Kate Baker, and by “listened to”, I mean I listened to them each at least 3 times. Only today, as I’m writing this blog post am I actually looking at the text versions on the Clarkesworld magazine website, mostly to just check the spelling of character’s names. How strange the shapes of the text seems, after having heard the stories on audio.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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