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An Audio Anthology: Strange New Worlds and Spaced Out Tales ft. Jim Cogan · Crew Collective

• 0:00
  Stuart: Anthologies and science fiction go a ways back. From early short story collections like the other worlds, to mega hit classic TV shows like the twilight zone, even to current shows like black mirror. It just kind of feels like science fiction and anthology were made for each other. That's something our guest for this episode, Jim Cogan, knows a thing or two about.
• 0:23
  Jim: It's a wonderful thing, and if you you get a brilliant idea and you can make it into something that contained, that's great. And then it's one and done, you move on to the next one. And you can do something completely different. You get the option to absolutely flip it on its head the following episode. You can do something in a completely different style or a different method of storytelling.
• 0:47
  Stuart: Jim is the creator, producer, main writer, and sometimes a voice actor for a sci fi anthology audio series called Strange New Worlds and Spaced Out Tales. Like any good anthology, every episode varies in its length, its tone, and its themes. Some episodes are funny, like when they parody a nineteen fifties style sci fi radio drama. Others are deadly serious, like when an astronaut must sacrifice his own life to save his crewmates. Others are just flat out strange, like when a ne'er do well space tourist faces off against cannibals.
• 1:27
  My name is Stuart, and this is Crew Collective, a podcast about storytelling. Each episode, we explore the stories that help shape us. Books, movies, songs, nothing is off limits. We'll talk to creators about their process, their craft, and the worlds they build. In season one, we're exploring space stories, and that's where Strange New Worlds and Space Outtales fits in.
• 1:53
  And my conversation with the man behind it is next.
• 2:15
  Matt: Crew Collective is brought to you by Rocketgenius, makers of Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms was the first premium WordPress contact form plugin launched in the space over fifteen years ago. Since then, brands like NASA, Delta, and Stanford University have relied on Gravity Forms for their WordPress form data. But so have tens of thousands of freelancers, agencies, and small creators, powering payment forms to newsletter sign ups. For small and large alike, Gravity Forms understands their mission.
• 2:44
  Build amazing software that people trust. Learn more at gravity.com. And we trust you enjoy Crew Collective as much as the team at Rocket Genius did making it.
• 2:57
  Stuart: And now, my conversation with Jim Cogan, the creator of Strange New Worlds and Spaced Out Tells.
• 3:06
  Jim: I was a musician back in the day, so I played in bands. So music, playing instruments, principally guitar in a lot of kind of I don't know what what you would refer to. I suppose some of them were more kind of indie bands, but I did spend four years, believe it or not, playing in a death metal band. So my my tastes in music are varied, but the the music led into more of an interest in in audio. I basically got too old to be to be headbanging and stage diving and stuff, and I thought I'd I'd I'd I liked working with bands and I really liked audio.
• 3:46
  And the band I was in recorded a terrible demo, so I that was the that was the inspiration for me to get some studio equipment. I ran a recording studio for a little while, recording student student bands. And then that kind of came to an end sort of when my son was born as that tends to bring all kinds of all kinds of personal creative stuff to a bit of an end for the first few years. But I laterally got into podcasting. I've done podcasts on movies.
• 4:18
  I did one on Formula One motor racing for a little while. And I did one on game development when I was doing a quite a bit of game development as a as a kind of an aside. And then a few years ago, I started doing a bit of voice acting. I still had a microphone and everything for all those kinds of things. And I I got involved with a project called Guild of Snails, who nobody will have ever heard of.
• 4:45
  They were a very, very small circulation sort of podcast. And I offered to write something for them and that turned into the pilot episode for Strange New Worlds and Spacetoad Tales. It was the the very first one. It was a bit beyond their scope and it it kind of led me to doing that. I'd never done audio drama before, but having scripted it and then recorded it because there was only two voice in it and I do both of them.
• 5:13
  I I would love to scale this up and actually do a full show. Sci fi has always been massive. I was, you know, I grew up early eighties, so Star Wars was every Obviously, I'm aware of Star Trek. Not as much of a fan, but I was a huge Star Wars person. I did used to read a lot of sci fi.
• 5:36
  Reading kind of took a bit of a backseat as soon as my time got fewer and fewer. So it's probably more sci fi movies have been my big thing. I quite like the kind of grimy dirty sort of blue collar type sci fi stuff you'd get from Alien and Aliens. And even the older, lots of older sci fi stuff like Silent Runnings or 2,001. These are probably much more where my interests lie, where the people aren't perfect, they aren't square jawed heroes.
• 6:10
  But the amount, you know, they it's an extraordinary setting out in space, but recognizable people that, you know, doing jobs that you you recognize. Things that aren't that glamorous but are more kind of grounded in in something like reality.
• 6:27
  Stuart: Yeah. I mean, think element that I think most good sci fi seems to have where maybe the world you're in, you don't recognize so much, but you're still you can connect with some of the characters. Some of the problems they face are are very recognizable. And in that way, it's still maybe not quite as disorienting as sci fi could be.
• 6:50
  Jim: I think it depends. I think there is something to be said for kind of like Star Trek's sort of very comfortable warm utopian sort of view of the future, you know, where everybody comes together and we've all sorted out all of the world's problems and now we're sorting out the universe's problems. That's all very nice and it has its place and I think some people absolutely obviously love that. It's got it kind of reminds you as to, you know, it is possible for potentially for humanity to come together and do the right thing. But human nature as such is they they tend to do the wrong thing or we tend to do what we're doing now just in a in a futuristic setting.
• 7:33
  And I I don't know if it's the natural pragmatist in me or whatever. I just find that so much more relatable if it's grounded like that.
• 7:43
  Stuart: Yeah. I'm curious about your decision to make this an anthology. I can see an argument that it's in some ways easier to make a new short story and not have to worry about some long complex story arc where you're developing characters. But I've also I've I've talked to other people who who make anthologies and they say in some ways it's more stressful to kind of come up with a new character, a new story, a new a new idea every single week rather than build off of an existing idea. So I'm curious what your perspective is on that.
• 8:11
  Jim: It's a challenge. You have this limited amount of time and you have to introduce the world, do all your world building, develop your characters and the narrative and have something happen and have a start, a finish and an end all within a time constraint. And you don't have the luxury of like two seasons to establish the, you know, the arcs of the characters, they have to go on their journey in that short amount of time. It was something I've never done before. I mean, is a there's a big tradition of anthology.
• 8:44
  It does get certainly in the podcast side of things. There's a lot of people who love their serialized fiction and will not listen to anthology. So in some cases, it does put a, you know, a limitation perhaps on the size of your audience. Some people would just not go for it. But as a technical challenge, it's a wonderful thing and if you you get a brilliant idea and you can make it into something that contained, that's great and then it's one and done and you move on to the next one and you can do something completely different.
• 9:17
  You get the option to absolutely flip it on its head the following episode. You could do something in a completely different style or a different method of storytelling. You're not limited to what you've established in a series. It's like I have to do this this way, these characters behave this way. You can tear it up and start again.
• 9:38
  So that flexibility to it and the challenge of it, there's a technique to it all in of itself and I really really enjoy it. I love writing series. We have done miniseries for a sort of bonus content for the podcast, but the core show always was gonna be anthology. And there's there there are some key anthology TV shows and radio shows from history that I've always loved and I like that you don't know what you're gonna get sort of element. It could be very very dark one week and it could be a zany comedy the following week.
• 10:13
  I love having the freedom to do all those things.
• 10:17
  Stuart: What are some anthologies that you find inspiring?
• 10:20
  Jim: Stateside, I think the classic go to seems to be Twilight Zone, isn't it? That was always always a bit of a staple. But I really liked Tales from the Crypt. We've got the series over here. I think I saw it well after it aired in The US because everything used to take ages to cross the Atlantic.
• 10:41
  But I really enjoyed that. In The UK, we had a show called Tales of the Unexpected. It may not have been very well known. Was an old I think it was old BBC show. They started out they used to adapt a load of Roald Dahl's adult short stories for it.
• 11:01
  And then as it did more and more series more and more seasons, they they broadened it. But I can always remember that when I was quite young because it was still airing in the early eighties. And it was that same sense again, never got familiarity with it because the story would change and it would change quite dramatically from week to week and cover different things. I think that the first time I ever became aware of what an anthology was. Obviously, more laterally, something like Black Mirror, I think, has has kind of kept anthology relevant in the mainstream.
• 11:38
  It's not as relevant as it used to be. I mean, there used to be entire movies that were short anthology segments. You don't really see that so much anymore. You get odd ones like VHS, but the styles have changed. But that that kind of slightly old fashioned way of doing anthology, I think, that got me when I was quite young and it always stayed there.
• 12:02
  And when I wrote the the the script, the first one, I just thought I I couldn't make a series out of this. This has a beginning and an end. This is this is what I think the show will be.
• 12:17
  Stuart: So you developed this episode or the script for this other project and they just passed on it? What happened? By the way, we're talking about episode one The Lost Pioneer, I guess what became your pilot episode, your episode one for Strange New Worlds. So you're working on this one project, you developed this script, what, they just say no thanks?
• 12:39
  Jim: No. They they were quite up for it. I think where it became clear it was not the right place for it there. So Gilda Snails was they did very short form stuff. It was usually their episodes were sort of about eight to ten minutes.
• 12:58
  They were very existential, somewhat unorthodox in their story telling. The guy who wrote it, a very good writer, but he had had the lore to this universe where all their stories lived in and it he did attempt to document it but 90% of it was very much in his head And it was one of those things I I did some voice acting for them, so I'm in a few of their episodes. And you think, this sounds good. All the actors are doing good. The writing is very sharp.
• 13:32
  But I have not a clue what the what what actually is going on. It was very cryptic and there were subtle existential points going on and and references being made but it was not particularly on the nose. I'm I'm I'm all for sort of cryptic writing and hidden meanings and stuff like that, but I do like a little bit of clarity and what I was writing was more kind of a traditional sort of story arc for someone. I I explained everything that was going on. There were a few twists and turns, but it wasn't a mystery.
• 14:10
  It was something you could pick up straight away, understand what was happening and and and go through with it. And it was a lot longer than any of their productions. I also I I wrote the script and I showed the the the principal writer and he said it's great. And I said, would you put it on your on your podcast feed? Is it if I if I were to get it made maybe?
• 14:33
  And and they said they would. And then I I quite fancy I haven't done much with audio since the previous podcast I was doing. I quite fancy seeing if I could do this. There were only two characters and I can change the voice of the secondary character so I can do both parts. And then I'll record it and I'll see what it's like.
• 14:57
  And I came out alright. I thought it wasn't too bad and I I showed it to the guys at Gilda Snails and they liked it. But at that point, I was thinking I don't see where this fits in in any way to the continuity of what they're doing, you know. This is me doing my own thing. And I said, I quite like still doing Gild of Snails stuff, but I think this is something separate.
• 15:23
  I think with that as an inspiration, the way they set up their community and found their actors and how they got everybody working together, I think I quite like the idea of doing that myself. And that's where that sort of spawned from.
• 15:38
  Stuart: So it sounds like maybe the plan eventually was to do what you've done, which is collaborate with others because, again, episode one's pretty bare bones, pretty minimal overhead in terms of production and bringing people in and that kind of thing. So, it sounds like you always kind of envisioned this being a collaborative effort.
• 15:58
  Jim: It was completely a bare bones effort. It was literally no more really when I did it as a proof of concept to see whether it was possible. I toyed with the idea of seeing is it possible to manipulate my voice in enough ways that I could voice an entire episode of something with more than two characters. And I quickly found out that probably couldn't. I I I could get two or three, maybe four pitch shifters and voice changing and stuff, you can get quite far, but there really was no substitute for having a group of people because voices are so different and people people, you know, actors are so different.
• 16:43
  So I did the first one and I did a pilot I I did a sort of a test for a second one and the limitations were becoming clear and I'd looked at how they built their community on Guild of Snails. They did everything through Discord which I wasn't particularly familiar with at the time. They used there's a Reddit thread called record this for free which is very common for volunteer projects to find people who are interested in doing voices. So I think I recruited about 10 people on that just on the strength of, you know, the the the first episode. It's like this is what I'm doing, but I wanna do it a little bit bigger, bigger casts, more involved stories.
• 17:28
  And they went for it. So it we got an initial run of about 10 people who joined. I believe I've now got about 60 voice actors that some come and go, but they are all on this Discord community. And when we do a new season of a new season of of episodes, I put the parts out there and basically whoever whoever expresses an interest in each one first, they they take it on and then they've got the part. A lot of the time I create a character and I'll hear them in my head how they might talk and then an actor with a completely different accent will will say, I quite fancy that part.
• 18:15
  And I could be sat there thinking, I can't see how this could ever possibly work. And then they do the lines and you put them all into the scene with the other actors and you time it right, and it suddenly works. And you wonder why, you know, you wonder how it could have been any different. It's it's quite an incredible thing. The way we record, we record all the lines asynchronously.
• 18:37
  We are not all getting online, you know, reading it perfectly in time with each other, doing live performances, reacting to each other. The coordination for that and the time for that, especially, I've got actors in The US, I've got a few in Poland, I think we had one in Australia and a few throughout Asia. So doing the whole thing live much as though that is something I'd love at some point to do has never been practical. And you see some of these coaching videos where directors of these audio dramas are micromanaging and micro directing and exactly how they want the actor to say stuff. That is not me at all.
• 19:20
  I give them the lines. I put as much guidance in the script as I think the character needs for them to emphasise what's going on. You hope they read the entire script then figure out what they're reacting to and then they record their their lines and they send them to me and and then I piece it together. A lot of making it sound natural is the gaps you leave between when one character speaks and then the next one does so it doesn't sound robotic. The humility of it, the making it sound like it's not stitched together in a patchwork is probably the secret to to making it sound coherent.
• 20:04
  Stuart: I wanna go inside your your pilot episode and we're gonna we're gonna talk about a few different ones during our conversation here. And hopefully, you don't hate me too much for making you go back and listen, because I've got a clip I'm going to play for you. Most creative people, me included, hate hearing our old work. I cringe anytime I hear something I've done, you know, more than two or three years ago. But I think the story itself is is pretty fascinating.
• 20:31
  And I think it of spoiler for for those who haven't heard yet, this is your chance to pause the episode, go listen to episode one of Strange New Worlds and Space Talks. It's called The Lost Pioneer, and then come back here. Alright. Now, here's where we find Christopher Mason. He's kind of like, what would you say, like a mid level astronaut who's on this long journey that's brought up as cryosleep to find himself in a dire situation.
• 21:01
  Yeah.
• 21:01
  Jim: That's pretty much the crux of it. Yeah. It's not what you want midway through a through a journey like that. He's the reluctant hero.
• 21:10
  Stuart: Yeah. And I guess it sort of hits on what is kind of an anxiety I would think about going to outer space. You're kind of in this vast nothingness, no other human contact, and it's kind of up to Mason to save the journey and the lives of those on board.
• 21:24
  Jim: It's one of those things. People are often a little bit scared of responsibility, and he's doing the most dangerous pursuit there is, really, when you consider it. Nobody's gonna rescue him. Nobody else is gonna help him. And as reluctant as he is, he does have to basically come to terms with the fact he's the only person there that can do it.
• 21:49
  And then come to coming to terms with what his fate ultimately will will be. I've got
• 21:54
  Stuart: a clip here and I got I get some 2,001 Space Odyssey vibes from it. The kind of self aware AI computer who's not really cooperating with the request of of the human. Let's let's listen in.
• 22:11
  Speaker 4: The success of the mission will be built upon the brave sacrifice of pioneers like you, second officer Mason.
• 22:19
  Speaker 5: Fuck that, computer. Open the inner door.
• 22:22
  Speaker 4: Negative, second officer Mason. Please remove your environment suit, place it in the decontamination sheet, and stand by at the airlock for your ejection from the ship.
• 22:32
  Speaker 5: No. Computer, please listen to me.
• 22:34
  Speaker 4: Negative, second officer Mason. If you do not remove the environment suit, then I'll have no choice but to eject you from the ship, wherein the crew have already lost three technicians today. Please do not increase their burden by sacrificing a valuable piece of the ship's inventory as well.
• 22:54
  Speaker 5: What? You're valuing an environment suit over the life of a member of the crew. Do you know how ridiculous that is? That's inhuman. Computer.
• 23:05
  Computer. Computer. Your
• 23:12
  Stuart: stories don't always have happy endings.
• 23:15
  Jim: No. I mean, life doesn't always have happy endings, does A happy ending can make you feel alright. Sometimes if the if the manner of the story demands it, you know, sometimes people get their comeuppance and you feel good about it. But life is hard, isn't it? Life is is often brutal.
• 23:35
  And if you don't reflect that, I think I don't know. I think that's an essential part of storytelling. You have to do the good and the bad and the unfortunate and sometimes the the the unfair. And that that's very important. I think the the the big thing on that is this this story contains an AI, and this was somewhat prior to the current obsession with with large language models and AI which is now dominating the news and the workspace, the creative space, the tech work in IT.
• 24:16
  So it's absolutely changing the the technical space. But there's something about all the way back to 02/2001, like you said, the the computer or the robot or the AI that either misinterprets or is badly instructed or just doesn't understand or prioritize the human element over the more practical financial or or material elements. I think that's a fear that we've all got. I mean, that's the whenever you see a news article about how terrible modern AI is gonna be, it's always the deadly out of control robot overlord that's gonna make us all redundant. So there is fear there.
• 25:02
  And I think I tapped into it before it really became a bit of a news story. It's been a fear for a long time. It's just that it seems to be seems to be materializing in strange ways in real life before our eyes at the moment. And How it will go, I don't know.
• 25:19
  Stuart: Another theme you seem to, I think, hone in on in some of your episodes is this idea of the commercialization of outer space. One of the episodes I I thought that really touched on this is episode 21 of your more recent ones, Dinner with the Captain. This is a pretty humorous approach to something that's actually very, very dark because we start dealing with cannibalism, almost like a government conspiracy cover up, the commercialization of of outer space. These are things, I think, like you said at the beginning of the episode, they're they're common themes actually we, maybe not the cannibalism part of it, the other parts of that, your government lying to you, being ripped off by a mega corporation. And this episode follows a character named Aiden who wins a supposed all expense paid trip on a luxury starliner.
• 26:16
  But very quickly, with the help of a friend, he quickly realizes something's off. And that's where we're kind of introduced to some of the darker elements of this episode. I imagine it's pretty fresh on your mind. Right? Because you made it pretty recently.
• 26:29
  Jim: I did. Now, I didn't write the script for this one. My friend Antonio Ferrara wrote this one. He runs several audio drama series himself. The most notable one is Tales of the Monster Hunters.
• 26:44
  So he's I he's Canadian. I can't I think he's from somewhere just outside of Toronto. He's got a very different style of writing to me. I've written some stuff for some of his shows and he desperately wanted an episode in Strange New Worlds. So I humored him on this one and it is there are some themes there.
• 27:06
  There are, like you said, the the whole being ripped off by mega corporations. Nobody nobody can deny that that's that's very definitely a thing, you know, that happens all too often. What the deeper meaning to it is, I'm not sure, you would probably have to ask Antonio, but the the deception of it, the reeling somebody in, and poor Aiden is a he's completely clueless, you know, he's taken it on face value. He's not the sharpest tool in the shed in terms of how smart he is. He's he's going along with it and he's having a great time.
• 27:40
  I think I like that story because there is also it's quite old fashioned, but there is a femme fatale in it, is I I love old film noir type stuff. There is always there is always a romantic interest who will turn out to be the poison ivy, you know, and I I recognize that. I thought that was quite a quite a vintage sort of plot device and I I it'd be quite quite interesting to quite interesting to look at. So I can't I can't say about the cannibalism or where all that came from, whether that is something deeply symbolic from Antonio's childhood that he's brought to to bear creatively.
• 28:22
  Speaker 6: It was alive, Aiden. Mars is almost completely dead, devoid of all life, except in the ice. This one remnant seemingly preserved dormant until we came along and woke it up.
• 28:43
  Speaker 7: But but what does this bacteria ice or whatever the hell is have to do with all of you having red eyes?
• 28:51
  Speaker 6: We didn't know that exposure to it would infect us all.
• 28:55
  Speaker 7: It infect you? How?
• 28:59
  Speaker 8: There were originally six of us on this mission. What?
• 29:04
  Speaker 7: That's not what was in the news.
• 29:07
  Speaker 6: Milo was a last minute addition. No one knew.
• 29:12
  Speaker 9: And and and what happened to Milo?
• 29:16
  Speaker 8: We needed Milo to sustain us.
• 29:23
  Stuart: Going through the series, there's a few common themes that pop up in most episodes, like the commercialization of outer space, gritty blue collar workers, and characters facing their own mortality.
• 29:36
  Jim: I think it comes down to probably the best examples of this, like I said before, if you take something like Alien or Aliens, they are not space heroes, you know, they are the engineers, they are the pilots of the ships, and the marines, the people doing the manual tasks around the place. They are recognizable characteristics to people that you would see, you know, on the planet, not in outer space. You know, these jobs exist. They are relatable. Whereas, your Luke Skywalker type character who, know, these these are fantasy basically.
• 30:20
  They are fantasy transplanted into space. Whereas the the the down to earth gritty blue collar worker is somebody you see every day. And if we do go into space and it becomes that commonplace, these unless the AI replaces us all completely before then, these jobs are still gonna need to be done and they are not glamorous. You know, the person who cleans the toilets on a spaceship. I find that hilarious.
• 30:49
  I find that, you know, why not focus on that person? You know, the the things that they have for the scale of it, their interpretation of events is gonna be so different to the person sat in the captain's chair. We've seen that story so many times. Why not look at how the actions of other other parts of the ship affect the people who you would consider to be, you know, in terms of the sort of the hierarchy at the lower end or the less glamorous end of the spectrum. They're the real human stories tend to come from those places because we see those kinds of people every day.
• 31:26
  Some of us are those kinds of people or have done those jobs and you're just transplanting them to a slightly different situation. But they're probably still gonna be absolutely required and necessary even though you're in a spaceship hurtling through space. Your toilets are still gonna block.
• 31:46
  Stuart: Episode 21, The Call of the Sirens, is one you recommended to me and I and I really liked it. It follows the journey of a rescue vessel called the Kaley and the crew who face a difficult decision. Do they respond to a potential distress call, or do they make it back to the nearest space station to, you know, repair their ship? Tell me a little bit about it. Take me behind the scenes some if if you would.
• 32:06
  Jim: I've always liked the the the sirens in Homer's stories, basically. The the luring the the sailors onto the rocks. I can't remember. Is it the is it the Iliad or the Odyssey with the sirens in? I'm not sure which
• 32:20
  Stuart: one It's the Odyssey. Yeah.
• 32:22
  Jim: Basically, the the concept of the sirens luring people to their doom on a false a false premise. I don't know why, but that always stuck with me. Like I said, I'm not overly familiar with the source material, but I've seen it interpreted in films and stories and it's entered the lexicon, and I think it stuck with me. I I quite like that as a plot device. I'd like something offering something that is clearly too good to be true.
• 32:52
  It just happens to be the exact thing that these people need. And there is an option to get away from it, but it's that fear of missing out, you know, is this the opportunity that we let slip away? And it does things to people, it makes people behave differently. And it turns out in this story they are also being manipulated on other levels, so they don't really I don't think they really stand a chance to be honest. But in amongst that there are other themes.
• 33:22
  There is is an AI and it's an AI that has not been maintained properly and it's malfunctioning. It has the kind of digital equivalent of what you could only really term as like a mental instability. It's having problems, it's behaviors that are perhaps more akin to somebody who might be bipolar, possibly somebody having quite a significant breakdown. And the implications of that are this AI is the one seemingly the one ally to the person who is not affected by the thing they're being lured towards. The person who could sense the danger but they don't know why.
• 34:06
  But that individual is also somebody who is somewhat traumatized themselves through their childhood, through their past relationships and experiences, and they're just about holding things together because they're in what appears to be quite a stable relationship with the captain of the ship. But even that trust that she holds is betrayed and it's about how that falls apart and how people behave when the thing that they are, you know, when they're using one thing as a as a crutch to support them, when that is taken away, the the the kind of ways that things fall apart around them. So in that respect, it's less about it's less about people on a spaceship going to their inevitable doom. That in itself would be a very short story that would be over in a couple of pages. So you you do need to add all this drama in as well just to to expand the characters a bit.
• 35:03
  I'd I'd I'd like doing that. I like having there been a couple of subtle layers and somebody's got to be having a human drama in the middle of it somewhere.
• 35:19
  Speaker 7: Voice
• 35:19
  Speaker 6: control. Titus, status. Titus, respond. Are you online?
• 35:28
  Speaker 8: Hello, Cass. You know I am.
• 35:32
  Speaker 6: Hey. Good to have you back with us.
• 35:35
  Speaker 8: Is it Cass? Is it really good?
• 35:39
  Speaker 6: Come on. We'll have no more of that attitude.
• 35:43
  Speaker 8: What attitude would you prefer me to have? I'm happy to lie if it makes you feel better.
• 35:49
  Speaker 6: Look, I'm sorry Tidus.
• 35:52
  Speaker 8: Now who's lying? You
• 35:54
  Speaker 10: know full
• 35:54
  Speaker 8: well you're not sorry.
• 35:56
  Speaker 6: I'm under orders. This wasn't my choice.
• 36:00
  Speaker 8: I understand, Kaz.
• 36:03
  Speaker 6: Well, good.
• 36:05
  Speaker 10: But I don't agree
• 36:06
  Speaker 8: and don't expect me not to hold it against you.
• 36:10
  Speaker 6: Fine. Whatever. Titus, you're now patched into the bridge. You can take it up with the captain.
• 36:19
  Stuart: Speaking of inevitable doom, you told me that one of the again, in one of your more recent episodes, I believe it was episode 22 at LBI Stite I I'm probably I just butchered
• 36:30
  Jim: You did a better job pronouncing it than I'm
• 36:32
  Stuart: butchered today. I gave it my best effort.
• 36:37
  Jim: That's the thing. Latin is a dead language, so you can pronounce it however you like and nobody could really tell you any difference. That one came about through my son, Elliot. He's he's now just turned 15. He's a bit of a budding writer, but he's it's mostly short stories that he did, and he showed me this short story.
• 37:03
  And it was all over the place in terms of its spelling and there was a lot of stuff in it. He was having a go at sci fi because, you know, dad does a bit of sci fi, I quite fancy that. But he's writing from a very interesting perspective. The story itself is about somebody who is trapped on a planet and they're having to comprehend their own mortality. My son Elliot is a cystic fibrosis patient so he was diagnosed with that not long after he was born.
• 37:33
  Nowadays as a condition it's reasonably manageable he's 15, his health is good, it's probably going to maintain being good but it's not uncommon for somebody with an illness that is still quite literally incurable, you know, it's manageable but there is no cure for it as at this point in this moment in time. It's quite common for kids in that situation to think a lot more about their own mortality than most people do. So he does contemplate it a lot and it does surface sometimes in his stories. There are other elements in it as well. The main character in that story states at one point that he believes he'd always believed because both of his parents smoked that he would die from a smoking related illness.
• 38:24
  Now Elliot has got a condition that predominantly affects his lungs. Me and his mother at one point used to smoke. He's terrified of ingesting smoke. So if we're walking along the street and there's somebody smoking, he will cross the street. He is and it used to be he was so sort of phobic about it that if we were somewhere like a stage show, there was dry ice, he'd get nervous about anything to do with smoke and stuff like that.
• 38:53
  So I I find a lot of his personal fears and anxieties are in that script and in that story. Now, where the Latin came from, I've got no idea. He's not a Latin student by any stretch. I think he he must have heard something with Latin and then got on the Google translate for it. But it was of the moment I read it, I thought I I think this is something I've got to I've got to turn into an episode.
• 39:21
  So I asked him and he was on board with it. So a little bit shy about it and it's in two halves basically. There is the very procedural bit at the beginning where the astronaut is attempting to communicate formally with the mission control and a lot of that I kind of rewrote some of the dialogue, protocol. He's not as big a sci fi nerd as me, so he didn't have the kind of protocol that you would expect to see. But the existential stuff later on is all him.
• 39:55
  I didn't change a word of that. And it's interesting. It gave me a bit of an insight. We we talk, we're very close, but there's a lot of stuff in that that, you know, I've gone on to speak to him about it, and I found out there's anxieties about stuff that he's never really spoken about. And it was interesting that it surfaced in the the writing of that story.
• 40:17
  And I'm super proud of him for writing it. And as a story itself, it's quite emotional. It's quite hard to listen to the ending without getting a bit upset about it because it is quite you know, these are his fears manifested. He is worried about being alone. He is worried about being cut off without anybody coming to rescue him in those kinds of situations.
• 40:43
  Speaker 9: These past thirty days, I've been talking into the void. No one can hear this. No one's coming. I have two months air supply. No fuel.
• 41:01
  I'm not stranded. I'm trapped. I suppose I've been left with an inevitable death and the most expensive journal ever built. It'd be funny if I wasn't the one dying.
• 41:25
  Stuart: That's you working with one one voice actor. The first
• 41:29
  Jim: time we've ever done yeah. I've never done anything that was a monologue before. We've had stuff with two characters. The whole short story was written as a journal from the lead character. You never hear anybody else in interesting.
• 41:48
  I pity the poor actor who's gonna end up having to do it because carrying that off is quite tricky. There's an actor called Brendan Gamblin. He's been on our server for a little while, but for this season he actually started putting himself forward for quite a few of the parts. And it was very interesting in terms of who it should be. The the main character is quite a square jawed, very professional astronaut.
• 42:20
  It's like, well, who who of the people that we've got can we do that? Can we get to do that? And I thought, well, I I think it's got to be an American voice. It feels like a, you know, for the protocols we put in, it feels like something NASA would do, you know, those are the kind of kind of ways. I spoke to a few people.
• 42:42
  Brandon, I believe, I'm not sure whereabouts in The United States he's from, but he's got a very very strong pronounced accent, but he has got very good manipulation of his voice. He also plays the AI in Call of the Sirens, which is a very very different character. So he's very versatile and I said do do you wanna give this a go? I don't know if he's done things like Shakespeare or whatever but he he was up for it and he did it and he said it's very hard for him to get to the end without bursting into tears. So it's quite an emotional performance that he put in.
• 43:19
  We won't be doing many things with monologues, I don't think like that, but having done one, we've never done one before. I think it frank it it's a difficult listen as well, but I think it sounds fantastic. Yeah.
• 43:36
  Stuart: When I talked to Jim a while back, he just wrapped up production on season three. That's three seasons of highly crafted sci fi anthologies with contributions from dozens of writers and voice actors. On the website, Jim writes that he began the series as an experiment to see if he could write and produce an audio drama by himself. Instead, he's created something even better, a community of creators and listeners collaborating to build their own world. And while it might be a strange new world, I'm glad to have spent some time in it.
• 44:18
  Crew Collective is brought to you by Rocket Genius. Our executive producers are Matt Maderos and Travis Tots. This episode was written, edited, and produced by me. I'm Stuart Barefoot. More episodes are available at crew collective podcast dot com or anywhere else you might get podcasts.
• 44:46
  Next time on Crew Collective.
• 44:50
  Speaker 11: For this world, but you can kind of tell by the variety of aliens that you actually see in the comic that there is clearly a lot going on to sustain these different types of aliens.