I’ve always enjoyed stories with characters outwitting the characters placing obstacles in their way.

Nice reading but the story was too light. The God had options to evade and really let himself be cornered. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

I’m not quite sure why this one tickled my fancy more than Firey Horse, which was a good story. It felt more unified, simpler somehow. Firey Horse’s structure wasn’t as effective.

The best fables have to be told, and that’s how this story works. Any other style wouldn’t do it justice.

Just in Rajan Khanna’s defense — he’s a friend of a couple friends of mine, and came recommended as someone with a good reading voice, but to my knowledge he’s never done anything like this kind of electronic reading before. (Many of our PodCastle readers are first-timers, as I’ve been trying to select people for acting ability over technological ability.)

That’s not to say your mention of his stumbling isn’t totally legitimate, and I’ll definitely point it out to him when I next talk to him about reading for us. But I don’t think it was a matter of being too lazy to take the time to fix it so much as lack of familiarity with the technology. In other words, if you’re going to blame anyone, blame me.

That said, I must be one of the few listeners who wasn’t enraptured by Rajan Khanna’s reading. Not that it was *bad*. For one thing, I agree with Yicheng in being thankful for the lack of a faux accent! For another, it was good that he obviously knew how to pronounce all the names correctly (which is more than I would have, without help). I’d even call it ‘good’; I just didn’t think it was ‘all that’.

Perhaps I would have liked it more if he’d gone back and edited over some of the (admittedly minor) stumblings he made. Yes, they were minor, but electronic sound editing is so trivial these days that there’s no excuse not to take the time to go back and fix them. Someone on the forum noted some background noise (which I also heard) of a child or something, which could also have been edited out.

I disagree with Benjamin and thomasowenm: I think that the one-sided dialogue could have been made to work aurally/orally (I could certainly visualize it and see it working in text), but that Khanna didn’t quite get there.

On the other hand, he didn’t over-emphasize his “T”s, which bugs me about Steve Eley’s readings. Like I say, I didn’t *hate* the reading; I just wasn’t blown away by it, like many people seem to have been.

I like the way that Moon again weaves the mythology of the East into an intriguing tale. The reading by Rajan Khanna was also good.

For me the best thing this story brought out was the mutability of fate. Truly, there is “no fate but what we make”, and we should all use our God given free will to be “Grand Cheats” whenever we see the need to make a change in the way things are.

And - happy endings always make me feel good!

There was just one element of this story that really detracted from my enjoyment: the one-sided dialogue gimmick, the monologue/dialogue - where the listener/reader hears the storyteller telling the story to a third party, who remains voiceless.
The dialogue becomes quite stilted and unnatural with this technique, since the one and only narrator must convey what was said by the other party and react to it at the same time.
And it sounds so silly, like the narrators talking to a wall. After a while, to make matters worse, my mind starts to fill in the gaps with the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher! This does NOT contribute to the drama.
I can take a few instances of one-sided dialogue - there was a bit of it in Barren’s Dance, but not too much. It was just over the top in The Grand Cheat, with the entire final scene taking place in a monologue/dialogue with TWO silent parties on the other side!

Sorry about the rant, I just felt that this would be a really great story, if it wasn’t for that gimmick.

Thank you featuring Indian mythology.