As I mentioned back in March, Scott Sigler is busy publishing his novel “Earthcore” as a podcast series. I’m finding it compulsive listening.
The story is pretty compelling, with an interesting range of characters, locations and situations. I have to bow to Scott’s voice acting talents - the voices are recognizably his, but still recognizably different from each other. I guess it’s a small hazard of doing it this way, but sometimes the vocal differences tend toward caricature rather than character - the Australian accent of the lead mining engineer seems a bit of a stretch to me, for example. These are only very minor niggles, though.
Counting all the episodes so far, his is easily the lengthiest podcast I’ve listened to, and that has had some intriguing effects that I wasn’t expecting. Listening to a continuing story while going about normal life has led to some strange audio/visual associations. I listened to the section where Sonny the Prospector met up with Herb the Assayer, while browsing in Maplin (an electronics and audio store), for example, so that’s the image that always comes to mind when I think of Herb or his office.
Some parts of the story have been delightfully tense. The meeting between Herb and Kayla the Psycho would have had me on the edge of my seat if I hadn’t been walking into work at the time.
If I have any criticisms they are probably only relatively minor things about the presentation and sequencing of the episodes. I can’t help feeling that Scott, in common with many podcasters, is stuck in the idea that people will be listening to each episode as it is released. Real podcast listeners are not always like that - I usually wait until I have downloaded a whole audio book before starting listening to it, for example, or listen to a directory full of a particular podcast in one go.
This wouldn’t be much of a problem except for the “Previously on Earthcore” and “Next Episode” headers and footers that appear on every episode. When you are listing to a whole sequence in one hit, such things just get in the way and dilute the tension of story rather than building it.
Similarly, the bundling of chapters seems a bit odd. I’m lucky in that I struggled to find a player that will remember where I had got to when I switch it off, but I know that many don’t. Given that the story splits naturally into smallish chapters, it seems strange to provide them for download only as clusters of two or three. Drip-feeding them one chapter every few days would seem a better alternative on the surface (and avoid the “oops” of inadvertently using an “&” in the filename which prompted a re-post of one such chunk).
Once again, though, I must emphasise just how trivial my suggestions are in comparison to the excellent quality of the podcast as a whole. I really can’t wait for each new episode, and each one goes straight to the top of my playlist as it comes in.
And I’d like to give a nod to the web support, which really adds to the listening/reading experience. See a map of the mountain! Visit the faux earthcore web site! Read Scott trying to contain his excitement!
Well done Scott and the Dragon Page.
Read more, and subscribe if you haven’t already done so, at EarthCore: A Podcast Novel
