Posts Tagged ‘Kameron Hurley’

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Escape Pod 824: Citizens of Elsewhen

Citizens of Elsewhen originally appeared in Escape Pod: The Science Fiction Anthology in October 2020.

Contains graphic description of birth, a dead infant, and harsh language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:23 — 50.4MB)

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Citizens of Elsewhen

by Kameron Hurley

Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land, drawing no dividend from time’s tomorrows.”
   – Dreamers, Siegfried Sassoon

We drop through the seams between things and onto the next front.

The come down is hard. It’s meant to be. The universe doesn’t want you to mess with the fabric of time. Our minds are constantly putting down bits of narrative into our brains, a searing record of “now” that gives us the illusion of passing time. In truth, there is only “now,” the singular moment. We are all of us grubs hunting mindlessly for food, insects calling incessantly for mates. Nothing came before or after.

But because time is a trick of the mind, it can be hacked. And we have gotten good at it. We had to. It was the only way to secure our future.

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Escape Pod 740: Women of Our Occupation (Summer Flashback)

This story first appeared in Strange Horizons in July 2006.

Slight amount of sexual content.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:55 — 29.2MB)

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Show Notes

Recorded live at LonCon3.

GoodReads page for the story (Note Hurley’s referenced comment about pronoun changes)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40060356

Escape Pod: 2020 Hugo Voting Packet (Best Semiprozine)
Alasdair Stuart: 2020 Hugo Voting Packet (Best Fan Writer)

Women of Our Occupation

by Kameron Hurley

[EDITOR: We don’t have the rights to post the text of this story.]

Host Commentary

by Alasdair Stuart

Welcome back to Summer School, where for the next month we’re going to be using Flashback Fridays to explore some of the ways science fiction plays with its biggest toys. And what bigger toy is there than alien invasion?

Well, we say aliens.

This week’s story has a certain metatextual resonance even before we get to why it is like it is. This was originally recorded live at the first ever WorldCon I attended, back in London in 2014. Audio production back then was by Mat Weller, narration was by Mur Lafferty and hosting was by me. The story was, and still is, by Kameron Hurley who is, like Escape Pod and myself, a Hugo finalist this year. If you’re a voter, please consider voting for, well, all of us. The EP and my personal voter packet information links will be in the show notes.

Now, get ready because it’s story time.

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Escape Pod 611: When We Fall

patreon.com/kameronhurley

Intense, life-threatening situation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:37 — 57.3MB)

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When We Fall

by Kameron Hurley

I don’t remember the first time I was abandoned and forgotten, but I have told the story of the second time so often that when the memory boils up it feels hot and gummy, like the air that day.

Whoever cared for me – and I can’t be certain they were legal guardians, let alone relatives – took me with them to beg at the crossroads just outside the interplanetary port. I don’t know how long they had me, but I know they were not the first. I remember being hungry. I remember a tall woman with dark hair pulling me close and saying, “Stay here Aisha.” She gave me a length of sugarcane and a mango. Her skirt was red. I still think of the red skirt when I think of home.

The people I saw as I sat out there, day after day, were all engineered for different worlds. The world I was on then, there was something about the sky… bloody red most of the day; stars the rest of the day, and a night filled with blue light. People were tailored to fit where they were from, or the place they’d chosen as home, whether that was a world or the deep black between the stars. Some were tall and fat, short and squat, or spindly; willowy as leaves of grass. Gills, webbed toes, ears that jutted out sharply from faces with eyes the size of jack bolts… many had tails; a few had four arms or more. Many wore respirators; teeth gleaming purple behind translucent masks or fuzzy full-bodied filters or suits that clung to their bodies like a second skin.

Even then, sitting alone on the mat with my mango and sugarcane, I couldn’t imagine that none of these people wanted me. I used to pretend, sitting at every port then and later, that somebody would come up and recognize me, or see me and just want me, not for some gain of theirs, but out of pure, unadulterated love. I was skinny and long-fingered, with squinty eyes and tawny skin covered in fine hair. I had a high forehead and a bright shock of white hair that stood straight up. I still wear it that way, long after I figured out the tricks for taming it, because I never did like being tamed. I suppose it never occurred to me to ask why none of them looked like me, because none of them even looked much like each other. I heard once that there’s a test you can take to find out what system your people are most likely in, but I can’t afford the test, and sure couldn’t afford to go back. And who’s to say they’d want me now, when they didn’t before?
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Escape Pod 462: Women of Our Occupation

This story first appeared in Strange Horizons in July 2006.

Slight amount of sexual content.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:15 — 20.9MB)

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Show Notes

Recorded live at LonCon3.

Women of Our Occupation

by Kameron Hurley

[EDITOR: We don’t have the rights to post the text of this story.]

Tea, Bodies and Business: Remaking the Hero Archetype by Kameron Hurley

Kameron Hurley is the author of the novels God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture a science-fantasy noir series which earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Kitschy Award for Best Debut Novel. She has won the Hugo Award and been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Nebula Award, the Locus Award, BFS Award, and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. Her latest novel, The Mirror Empire, will be published by Angry Robot Books on August 26th, 2014.

 

Tea, Bodies and Business: Remaking the Hero Archetype

Hero.

Ok, I want you to stop right there.

Think about what image popped into your mind when you read “hero.” The first one.

NO CHEATING.

What’s the first image your mind conjured on reading that word?

Hero.

Who is it?

Who is… he?

These days, when I read “hero” the image that pops up is some superhero, because I’m inundated with Marvel movie images all day. Thor comes to mind. Maybe, if I haven’t been eating movies for awhile, it’s Conan.

Hero: a dude. Muscles. White. Butch.

Hero. First image. Every time.

It takes some additional thought, some re-training, for me to see anything but that archetype when I first think “hero.” I have the same trouble with nearly every term we say is gender-neutral or totally inclusive that… well… turns out isn’t. That’s because when we learned what words meant, we had certain types of images placed in front of us. We learned to associate those images with the word.

We ate what the stories and media fed us, and it’s why, to this day, we conjure them again and again when we see those words in text, when we hear them in conversations. We carry those expectations. It’s why, often, we get so upset or simply surprised when the hero we see on the page doesn’t conform to the image we learned.

Subverting expectations has become a hallmark of the gray, grimdark(er) fantasy tales now, and the even darker obsession in more general media of mythologizing serial killers (Bates Motel, Hannibal), elevating them to, if not heroes, then complex protagonists worthy of having their stories told; it’s cultivating compassion for killers. Yet still, there anti-hero heros are the same sorts of heroes: white, male, butch.

I can think of only two movies with women killers we’re meant to sympathize with, and both because they’d been sexually assaulted – Thelma and Louise and Monster. And to be honest, I don’t imagine anyone would call the women in these films heroes. Red Sonja is, perhaps, a proper hero, but is, once again, motivated by a sexual assault. Male heroes are heroic because of what’s been done to women in their lives, often – the dead child, the dead wife. Women heroes are also heroic for what’s been done to women… to them. (Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 207: Wonder Maul Doll

Appeared originally in From the Trenches

Rated R for violence and sexual situations.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:01 — 21.3MB)

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Wonder Maul Doll

By Kameron Hurley

We set down in Pekoi as part of the organics inquisition team, still stinking of the last city. We’re all muscle. Not brains. The brains are out eating at the foreigners’ push downtown, and they don’t care if we whore around the tourist dregs half the night so long as somebody’s sober enough to haul them out come morning. When the brains aren’t eating, they’re pretending to give us directions in the field, telling us where to sniff out organics. They’re writing reports about how dangerous Pekoi is to the civilized world.

We’re swapping off some boy in a backwater push the locals cleared out for us. We’re sitting around a low table. I pass off another card to Kep. Luce swaps out a suit. She has to sit on one leg to lean over the table. It’s hot in the low room, so humid that moths clutter aroundour feet, too heavy to fly.

The boy’s making little mewling sounds again. Somebody should shut him up, but not me. This is my hand. I’m ahead.

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