AMP12: Day 11
Tonight's podfic: Little By Little To the Truth: or, a Narrative of the Atlantis Expedition, written by telesilla (who is on the BP list! This is excellent news).
Little By Little... is my fill for the 'steampunk' square on my au_bingo card (you can tell because there are mechanical bugs on the cover, and also Ye Olden Times Photographs), and that's the main thing I have to say for this fic. Not that it isn't excellent - I have a huge love for telesilla's fics: her series Long Long Road, The Devil You Know, Ventura Highway, and Colonel Meredith & Dr. Jay are all fantastic reads, and I have plans for podficcing Ventura Highway - but, well, I just don't get steampunk. At all. It's not an AU that appeals overmuch to me, and I have a hard time reading stories set in such an AU without thinking, "Well, why didn't you just write them in the future!?" (It's kind of like how, if I find a prompt on a kink-meme where the prompt-ee has asked for, like, "Character A is a guy but he totally has a vagina and a g-spot and a uterus hidden up in there, and now he's having Character B's babies," I tend to be all, "Just write him as a girl! Girls already have those parts! So much simpler! And with fewer assbabies!")
But telesilla has written a steampunk Stargate: Atlantis AU, that relies only glancingly on the steampunk-iness. The heart of the story itself - Rodney has been held captive by a Native Pegasan Civilization! John has to Save Him, and help Rodney work through his Trauma! John isn't good at Feelings! Rodney gives John an Orgasm! - is wonderful, and the interludes from Elizabeth's journal are really great (she doesn't get a whole lot of screen time, as this is in large part a Team Bonding Story, so her journal entries are a nice way to make Elizabeth's perspective on the whole ordeal known), it's just... well, why can't we just move all the steampunk stories to the future, instead? Then everyone can have their gadgets, and I won't keep having conniptions as I read.
(This is not a dispersion on anyone who enjoys steampunk AUs. In fact, if you want to give me some recs, or even tell me about why you enjoy them, I'd be more than willing to keep an open mind about the whole genre. I just don't get it, and so my confusion keeps me from enjoying the AU.)
Anyway, you can find the approximately 40 minutes of mp3 for this podfic over here (thank you, paraka, for hosting me!), or you can click below for the streaming option:
(Additional note: this podfic was recorded using my Dad's MacBook Air while my own MacBook was in the shop, which has a more advanced version of GarageBand and an apparently crappy mic. I didn't realize 'til after the fact (recording was done, and so was all the editing and sound effects) that the sound quality with his two-months-old laptop is less awesome than my 6-years-old one. So, it's not as crystal-clear as previous podfics (but it's still not as painful to listen to as some of my earliest ones, so that's okay!))
(This podfic was also recorded for the "Out of Order" square on my podfic_bingo card - I recorded all of Elizabeth's parts first, then the rest of the fic, and then slotted Elizabeth's bits back into place at the end.)