Electromancy is a new audio fiction fantasy adventure podcast, which follows the story of Jenna, a teenage lightning mage (or electromancer) who, after hiding her powers for years, is finally discovered and forced to attend the Royal Institute for the Study of Sorcery. There she will find allies, enemies, mysteries, monsters, and intrigue. And you thought your high school was bad.
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Happy Audio Drama Sunday! My new job starts tomorrow so it's been deep cleaning time around my place. I've been re-listening to some favourites so this one's a little long!
@storiesfromylelmore Episode 210 - Check Up: More Keryth backstory! We're finally learning more about the vague references she's made to a hospital stay. That must have been a scary time for her family! I'm glad she didn't have a bad experience there, and she was so cute over the walkie-talkie. Fruit Snack Day is absolutely wild. Poor Rion. And Elas has learned more about themself! They have an aptitude for magic! That's so cool! 🏥
@forgedbondspod Chapters 1-4: This is one that I've been waiting for, and the first episode came out just before the holidays. It's a retelling of the story of Aphrodite and Hephaestus, and I am loving it so far. I absolutely adore the friendships between Ares and Aphrodite, and Hephaestus and Dionysus. And I also wanted to punch Zeus in the face, even though I love Alasdair Stuart (that man is everywhere!) I'm very excited to see where the story goes and how Aphrodite and Hephaestus' relationship develops. 💍
@monkeymanproductions MTO Phases - Story 1 - Roger: We're getting more Moonbase Theta, Out content!! As a Patreon supporter, I've had the privilege of reading these short stories over the past year, getting a little look at what some of our favourite characters have been doing following the conclusion of the series. Also, some characters that we never got to know so well. When I found out that Cass (voice of Michell L'Anglois) would be putting together an audio version of the stories, I flipped out! I'd already heard that he did character voices to fill in for missing actors during rehearsals and recording sessions, so I'm even more stoked to get to hear some of those impressions. 🌘
The first of these recording, which was released this week, started us off strong! Of course it had to be Roger, and I love how it was essentially a continuation of his scene from the epilogue. I love the baby ACs too, and Cass's accent choice for Gammie was spot on (inspired by the lovely Reception Bot). Their conversation was so sweet, and the image of Gammie and Uncle Roger discussing poetry (and perhaps writing their own poems) is now forever in my mind. 📖
@monkeymanproductions Waiting For October S1 Episode 3.5 - Auncle Lantern: This episode is so beautiful. I love the way we got to hear both Auncle Lantern's clacking sign-language as well as xir inner monologue. Xir description of how the denizens of October have grown and made their place in their world and ours is so moving. We should all be taking Auncle Lantern's advice to keep growing, keep revising the story. 🎃
@electromancypodcast S1&2: I loved Electromancy S1 but wasn't in the right brain space to listen to S2 when it was released at the end of 2023. I'm very glad to have listened now though! The world and the plot keep building, but there's still so much more the learn. Trust was a big theme of S2, how hard it is to build and how easy it is to break. Now just what did the Dean see inside Jenna's mind? ⚡
@woodenovercoats re-listen: Continuing my cleaning/re-listening, I returned to Piffling Vale and enjoyed it all over again! I love all of these characters so much, and I love hearing their journies over the 4 seasons. Remember, other people are all there is. Also, you are the most important person in the world, and so am I. ⚰️
@ameliapodcast S3 Part 1: There's so much going on this season and I love it! I've been enjoying having Amelia as part of the team, and getting even more Alvina. But where did our Italians go? What about Kozlowski? Also, how old is the Interviewer? Is he immortal? Thing are getting pretty wild, between Russia and Panaragua! And now they're going to have to work at cross purposes!? ☕
Happy Audiodrama Sunday! Right now there are so many shows I follow that are releasing an episode every other week. It’s great! But it does mean I have a lot to write about. This week - Electromancy relisten, lots of werewolves, the arc finale of WBN, and more!
NEW SHOW ALERT Spout Lore’s spinoff Mall Brats is no longer Patreon exclusive! Mall Brats is a Blades in the Dark actual play about 3 kids who live in a giant shopping mall in a fantasy world and do crimes. This is a relisten for me, a year or so ago I subscribed to their patreon for a month and binged the whole thing. My only criticism is that the new version of the theme song isn’t as good as the old one.
I relistened to @electromancypodcast this week. I love this show, it feels so thorough in it’s approach to the setting and core conflict. Electromancy would adapt so well to a tv show, I can see so many of the scenes in my head. I don’t know how else to say it, the show feels like it was written like a tv show. Don’t get me wrong it’s great in an audio medium, but it would also be great as a tv show.
In @storiesfromylelmore this week poor Rion! He’s like Molly from Epithet Erased except he’s overworked by choice, and he also has to deal with werewolf racism. He didn’t even get a hug! The luck charm was really cool worldbuilding but also such an incredibly meaningful gesture from Keryth. Literally giving someone your luck because you care about them is so powerful.
@worldgonewrongpod also had an episode focused on werewolves this week. It has a very different interpretation of werewolves to Ylelmore, but both used them as an allegory for actual marginalized groups. Werewolves are so versatile.
Starwhal Odyssey released it’s second episode this week. It’s officially moved away from 5e, the new system seems cool. I loved the audio design for gamer space, and the gaming chair spelljammer helm is such an inspired choice.
I have a lot of distinct thoughts about the arc finale of @worldsbeyondpod. First off is that they have trains? That’s not something I expected from this setting. Immediately following that revelation was another party split, the rest of the party really is so irresponsible without Suvi. Stealing anything other than the coven wand was so dumb, Indri can curse the shit out of them for that. There was a complete tone shift in the last half hour of this season, at least Suvi isn’t going to be as upset this time.
We had part 5 of @midnightburgr’s Welcome to the Horizon. Everyone is high! I’m glad Verge is enjoying themselves, Verge and Deidre is fun. I guess Verge has a thing for humans, first Leif and now Deidre.
Case study: IREC-A59 released its third episode this week. It’s really good so far, it’s making me want to reread Project Hail Mary. I love that no one knows the captains name, that’s a great detail.
I listened to part 3 of Moonward, the @midstpodcast AP miniseries. For some reason I didn’t expect it to lean into horror, but given the setting, I shouldn't be surprised that it did.
We went to the Paris Olympics this week in Mission Rejected. That was a fun episode, I loved the image of two random Olympic athletes taking on a bunch of kidnappers and destroying them. Interesting to see the nation of Val Verde again. Mcgrath hitting up Athena for a gadget was great.
I didn't get through all the new shows that came out this week, there's still some more for next week. I also want to try to catch up on The Once and Future Nerd, I think I need to start from the beginning of book 2.
I have been quiet for a long time. Just wanted to check in with you, Tumblr.
I am currently trying to finish writing season 3. It is coming along, slowly. There are some bits I'm really excited about. There are other parts that are really hard to make work. But I am going to finish it. I don't yet know if it will be the final season.
I am also working on an unrelated, 8-episode, stand-alone sci-fi love story called Shelar and the Scavengers. I wrote the script while season 2 of Electromancy was in production, and it is in production now. My hope is to release in early 2025. I haven't decided if I'll make a tumblr for it yet.
Thank you all for being patient and sticking with me. I really want to get the rest of this story out into the world soon, but its more important to me to get it right.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
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Tonight (May 30) at 6:30PM, I’m at the NOTTINGHAM Waterstones with my novel Red Team Blues, hosted by Christian Reilly (MMT Podcast).
Tomorrow (May 31) at 6:30PM, I’m at the MANCHESTER Waterstones, hosted by Ian Forrester.
Then it’s London, Edinburgh, and Berlin!
Have you ever read a novel that was so good you almost felt angry at it? I mean, maybe that’s just me, but there is one author who consistently triggers my literary pleasure centers so hard that I get spillover into all my other senses, and that’s Ian McDonald, who has a new novel out: Hopeland:
Seriously what the fuck is this amazing, uncategorizable, unsummarizable, weird, sprawling, hairball of a novel? How the hell do you research — much less write — a novel this ambitious and wide-ranging? Why did I find myself weeping uncontrollably on a train yesterday as I finished it, literally squeezing my chest over my heart as it broke and sang at the same moment?
Hopeland is a climate novel, and it’s not McDonald’s first. Hearts, Hands and Voices (published in the US as The Broken Land) is a climate novel (that also happens to be about the Irish Troubles). So is his stunning debut, Desolation Road, which I picked up at a mall bookstore in 1988 and lost my mind over:
But those were climate novels written in the early stages of the discussion of the gravity of the anthropocene, and so climate change was more setting than anything else. In Hopeland, the climate is more of a character — not a protagonist, but also not a minor character.
The true stars of Hopeland are members of two ancient, secret societies. There’s Raisa Hopeland, who belongs to a globe-spanning, mystical “family,” that’s one part mutual aid, one part dance music subculture, and one part sorcerer (some Hopelanders are electromancers, making strange, powerful magic with Tesla coils).
We meet Raisa as she is racing across London in a bid to win a rare, open electromancer title. She is on the brink of losing, but then a passerby pitches in to help: Amon Brightborne, part of another mystical family whose stately, odd manor in the English countryside can only be reached by people who can work the “gateway,” which makes the road disappear and reappear. Amon is a composer and DJ who specializes in making music for very small groups of people — preferably just one person — that is so perfect for them that they are transformed by hearing it.
Amon’s intervention in Raisa’s bid for electromancy unites these two formerly disjoint families, entwining their destinies just as the world is forever changing, thanks to the decidedly un-magical buildup of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere. They have a romance, a breakup, a child. They are scattered to opposite ends of the Earth — Iceland and a tiny Polynesian island.
Their lives are electrified. Literally. On her passage to Iceland, Raisa confronts a ship-destroying megastorm, speaks its true name, and sends it away before it can sink the container ship — captained by a Hopelander who gives her free passage — that she is sailing on. In Iceland, she falls in with more Hopelanders, tapping a thermal vent to create a greenhouse cannabis farm, which begets a luxury salad greens business, then an electricity plant that attracts cryptocurrency weirdos like shit draws flies.
Amon, meanwhile, is sinking into drunken ruin on his island paradise, where he becomes a kind of mascot for the locals, who respect his musical prowess. The island is sinking, both figuratively and literally, as its offshore king, hiding in a luxury mansion in Sydney, drains its aquifers for the luxury bottled water market and loots its treasuries to fund his own high lifestyle.
McDonald takes a long time getting to this point. This is a 500 page novel, and the build to this setup takes nearly 300 of them. Every word of that setup is gold. McDonald’s prose often veers into poetry, or at least poesie, and he has this knack for seemingly superfluous vignettes and detours that present as self-indulgences but then snap into place later as critical pieces of a superbly turned narrative. How the fuck does he do it?
How does he do it? How does he deliver a sense of such vastness, a world peopled by vastly different polities and populations, distinctly different without ever being exoticized, each clearly the hero of their own story, whether they live on a tiny island or captain an American battleship?
I mean, cyberpunk — the tradition McDonald most obviously belongs to — was always about a post-American future, but no one ever managed it the way McDonald did. He delivered a superb, complex, Indian future in 2004’s River of Gods:
And Turkey in 2011’s Dervish House, a novel of mystical nanofuturism set in an Istanbul that is so vividly drawn that you feel like you can reach through the page and touch it:
Those were ambitious books, but Hopeland puts them to shame. It draws on so many threads — music and art, climate justice, mysticism, electrical engineering, economics, gender politics — and has such a huge cast of finely drawn characters. By all rights, it should collapse under its own weight. I mean, seriously — who can write multi-page passages describing imaginary music and make it riveting?
McDonald is just so damned good at writing love-letters to places that turn them into characters in their own right. The first third of Hopeland treats London that way, bringing it to gritty life in the manner of Michael de Larrabeiti’s classic Borribles trilogy:
Or, for that matter, China Miéville’s debut novel King Rat, itself out in a fancy new Tor Essentials edition with an introduction by Tim Maughan, who absolutely bullseyes the appeal of Miéville’s novel of underground music, mystical societies and urbanism:
I have loved Ian McDonald’s work since I picked up Desolation Road in that mall bookstore when I was 17. One of the absolute highlights of my writing career was writing an introduction for the 2014 reissue of Out On Blue Six, a book that mashes up David Byrne’s solo projects, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Dick’s Do Androids Dream in a madcap dystopian comedy:
I’ve read everything I could find about how he manages these giant, weird, intricately constructed novels, like this fascinating 2010 interview about his research process:
But despite it all, I find myself continuously baffled by how manages it, but each book just stabs me. For one thing, he’s such a good remix artist. His three-volume, essential retelling of Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress starts with Luna: New Moon (2015):
Which substantially out-Heinleins Heinlein, adding thickness and rigor to the tropes Heinlein tossed in as throwaways. Then, he topped himself with the sequel, Luna: Wolf Moon (2017):
Before bringing it all in for a screaming landing that tied up the hundreds of threads he pulled on in the course of the previous two volumes with the conclusion, Luna: Moon Rising (2019):
In each volume, McDonald proved — over and over — that he understood precisely what Heinlein was trying to do, then outdid him, and, in so doing, shredded Heinlein’s solipsitic, simplistic, seductive argument about a libertarian utopia.
Perhaps this is McDonald’s greatest gift: his ability to rework others’ ideas, tropes and tales, without ever trying to hide his influences, and then vastly outdoing them. That’s certainly what was going on with his wild-ass, deiselpunk YA trilogy, which started with 2011’s Planesrunner:
One important McDonaldism: being deadly serious about his whimsy. The books are all very whimsical, but never frivolous. To get a sense of what I mean here, consider his 1992 graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch, a deadly serious comic book about the Klu Klux Klan, told entirely through adorable teddybears in a noir cityscape, whose dialog is heavily salted with Tom Waits lyrics:
Back to Hopeland. It’s a climate novel, because what else could you write in this time of polycrisis? The book is vast enough to convey the scale of the crisis. The storms that ravage the world are both personified and realized, a terror to compare to any literary monster or Cthuhoid entity. But it’s called Hopeland for a reason, because it’s a book about hope, not nihilism, a book about confronting the crisis, a book about solidarity and love, about overcoming difference, about challenging the way things “just are.”
That’s why I was crying and holding my heart yesterday on the train. The hope. What a ride.
One of the reasons I was in such a hurry to read this novel now is that I’m appearing on a panel with McDonald this coming Saturday, June 3, at Edinburgh’s Cymera festival, along with Nina Allen, author of the new novel Conquest:
I’m so looking forward to it. I’ve written a couple dozen books since I read my first McDonald novel as a teenager, and while I still have no idea how McDonald does it, there’s something of his work in every one of my books.
Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Nottingham, Manchester, London, and Berlin!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Electromancy is an urban fantasy audio drama which takes place in a world much like our own, but with a little more magic. Mages in this world are rare, and are identified as children and taken to be trained for government service. Jenna, a young electromancer, has been hiding her powers to avoid this fate, but when she is finally detected, she must survive in a challenging new world. This setting of Electromancy is so detailed, and I love learning about the students' powers and how they work. The shenanigans everyone gets up to are also very fun! If you like the complicated world-building of fantasy novels, you'll like Electromancy. There's a map of the world on the website! That's how you know it's good! I've done a little bit of sound design and acting in the show, and I'm quite fond of it. But one of the highlights for me is Leslie Gideon's performance as Brynn!
Re-listening to Electromany in preparation of season 2 starting next week, and uh, the dean with a hidden agenda voiced by Karim Kronfli seems a bit more sinister than I remember. Would this have anything to do with Re: Dracula? Surely not.
