I had to listen to Tor.com Story Podcast #3, Nick Mamatas’ Farewell Performance
, a half dozen times before I quite got my head around it. Normally that’s a bad sign for me and fiction, but in this case I enjoyed it quite a bit. Geoffrey H. Goodwin’s breathy voice fit the story, and he effortlessly switched between narrator voice and protagonist voice between words.
It’s the end of the world, or nearly so. We have fought the aliens, and lost. One lowly street performer gives a farewell performance, perhaps for all of humanity. He entertains with lots of dark humor, keeping an audience of decrepit specimens enthralled.
I think technically this is horror, but I don’t know exactly what qualifies it in that genre or into which sub-genres the story goes (I don’t know my horror very well). Perhaps the morbid dystopian humor. Befitting Tor.com calling December 2008 Cthulu month, Farewell Performance
includes some references to cephalopods. I had to listen to it a large number of times for a few reasons. First, just to figure out what was going on at first. Second, I was predisposed to tiredness because didn’t get a lot of sleep for a couple of weeks and voices in headphones zonk me out, which I did a couple of times just before the last five minutes or so. And then after getting through it a couple of times for those reasons, I re-queued it just because I liked it. In real life, I generally stop to watch street performers, unless they are preachers or jugglers. Imagining the scene is a lot of what I liked about the story.
Oddly, since I’ve never read anything by the author before, the next podcast in my playlist was another Nick Mamatas story from Escape Pod. As with Farewell Performance
, I’ve had to re-start that episode a few times to get my head around it too. But in that case I’ve had to put the story aside for a bit to focus on other things, so there won’t be a post on it for a while.
Title: Farewell Performance (podcast)
Author: Nick Mamatas
Narrator: Geoffrey H. Goodwin
Publisher: Tor.com
Format: MP3 podcast download
Length: 22 minutes
