PodCastle 921: TALES FROM THE VAULTS – The Surgeon’s Tale
Show Notes
Rated R
Host Commentary
Before we get into it, it is time—belatedly, as for once I am ORGANISED and AHEAD OF SCHEDULE in recording my host spots—to discuss the OFFICIALLY NOW A TRADITION BECAUSE IT’S THE THIRD YEAR (IF I’VE COUNTED CORRECTLY) ESCAPE ARTISTS END OF YEAR FUNDRAISER! While I may need to workshop that title a little, happily our fundraising goblins are far slicker at this gig and have once again managed to arrange a TEN THOUSAND DOLLAR MATCHING FUND from some of our most generous supporters, which means that for every local currency unit that YOU, dear listener, contribute before the end of 2025, another local currency unit will magically appear in a way they very much don’t in payslips! That counts both for one-off donations through PayPal—pop on over to podcastle.org and click the Make a Donation button—but also to new subscriptions, either through PayPal or Patreon. So, if you sign up to Patreon for the first time this month at the 7 dollar tier, for example, that magically doubles for us to 14 dollars. Or even better: sign up for an annual Patreon subscription and your 168 dollars will double to 336 dollars for us!
Oh, except—this being December, and the Year End Campaign and all that, you can get 10% off on Patreon, either your first month’s subscription, or the entire year if you plump for an annual, with the code 2025YEC—YEC as in, Year End Campaign, get it? So you can pay less, we can still get more, everyone is a winner! Except for this poor warpstone-afflicted villager with all the extra fingers that I’ve just been doing my sums with. Sorry, Harold.
…aaaaand welcome back. That was “The Surgeon’s Tale” by Cat Rambo and Jeff Vandermeer, and if you enjoyed that then honestly, this time, you’re going to have to do your own homework, because if I start listing stuff here I won’t actually get to bed tonight. Cat’s got eight other stories in our archive, plus miniatures, and Jeff has two, and there’s more on our sister shows, and they each have short stories and novels and books for writers and probably two of literally anything else you can think of, and it’s all easy to find cos they’re both incredibly successful and prolific and even as bad as it is these days, Google can still show you these sights reliably, at least. Go fill your boots.
Love changes you. Love ought to change you, or you’re not committing enough: you’re just dipping your toes and worrying about the temperature, instead of diving in. It’s not necessarily a big, dramatic change, some romantic comedy style reinvention of your life in the space of 100 minutes. I’m trying to think of a way to capture the slow, gentle change that does happen, that you almost don’t notice as it occurs over years. I don’t want to say “erosion” because that feels like saying love takes something away from you to change you, and it doesn’t, but… it does feel right for the sense of slow, gentle, unintentional sculpting. Maybe coastal erosion, fittingly, where what might be taken away is merely reshaped elsewhere: or a river changing, a new oxbow here, a new meander there, and though you cannot step in the same river twice it is, you understand, also still the same river, in the same place with the same name and fed by the same tributaries and headed the same way. It is the same, but different and changed.
If you’re really lucky, like I am, that change might just be “don’t have to keep pretending you’re something you’re not just to get by, cos if this one person can love who you really are behind the mask, it must be alright, and everyone else’s problem after all”. Change does not mean becoming, or making yourself, something you did not want to be, and certainly love shouldn’t be setting out to change someone else; nor should it be hoping that love will change you to avoid doing the work yourself—other people are not the magical solution to your issues, nor are you theirs, because that is true objectification to see them as tools, as means to an end. Love also shouldn’t, to be clear, be preserving the body of a stranger then grafting their magically reanimated arm to your own flesh; I’m not sure what that is, but I am pretty sure it’s illegal in any jurisdiction in the contemporary world.
About the Authors
Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander; the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts); and the Southern Reach series (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Paramount. He has spoken at MIT, Columbia, Yale, and Vanderbilt, and gave the 2024 John Hersey Memorial Address at the Key West Literary Seminar. Environmental nonfiction by VanderMeer has appeared in Time, The Nation, Current Affairs, and Esquire, among others. VanderMeer founded the Sunshine State Biodiversity Group nonprofit in 2023. Forthcoming work includes Absolution, a fourth Southern Reach novel.
Cat Rambo
Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches atop a hill in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She is an Endeavour, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominee. Her 2018 works include Hearts of Tabat (novel, WordFire Press), Moving From Idea to Finished Draft (nonfiction, Plunkett Press) and the updated 3rd edition ofCreating an Online Presence for Writers (nonfiction, Plunkett Press). For more about her, as well as links to her fiction and her popular online school, The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, see her website kittywumpus.net
About the Narrator
Graeme Dunlop
Graeme has been involved with Escape Artists for many years, producing audio, hosting shows, narrating stories and keeping the websites going. He was born in Australia, although people have identified him as English, American and South African, amongst other nationalities. He loves the spoken word. Graeme lives in Melbourne, Australia with his wife Amanda, and beautiful boy dog, Jake.
