Lady Astronaut of Mars is on Tor.com.

There are wonderful people in the world. Patrick Nielsen Hayden offered to run “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” on Tor.com so that I had a definitive, published-this-year, version of the story.  Since one of the things that the Hugo committee mentioned regarding the disqualification of audiobook version of “Lady Astronaut of Mars” was the presence of “stage directions,” I edited both of them out of the story for Tor.com.

For example, that meant that: [snorts]“Now what do I have to be depressed about?”

Became: I gave an unladylike snort. “Now what do I have to be depressed about?”

To me, this is taking advantage of the medium in the same way that I’d take advantage of a paper book to think about typesetting and illustration as ways to enhance the story. A lot of times when I’m narrating other people’s fiction and I hit a line like that, I’m always torn about actually snorting because it seems redundant. At the same time, it feels like I’m misrepresenting the character by not reading the dialog the way the author intended it.

While it is possible to read an audiobook with a completely neutral tone, that style is essentially lying to the listener. After all, writing developed to record the spoken language. We don’t usually speak with a consistently neutral tone, and we certainly don’t tell stories that way. When I’m teaching my “How to Give an Effective Reading” workshops, I talk about the importance of using  an emotionally invested narrator. That’s because we are wired to pick up emotion from people’s voices. When a narrator gives a neutral read, they are, in essence, saying that the words they are reading aren’t important. There are all sorts of cues that we generate vocally when we’re talking in daily life. A skilled narrator uses those cues to deliver the story in the way the author intended.

Is this acting? Well… yes. It’s acting in service of the text.

I was really happy with the narrator for  “Lady Astronaut of Mars.” Allyson Johnson does a wonderful job conveying the characters and, to me, really nailed the heart of the story. Did she give a dramatic reading? I hope so. That’s the way I wrote it.

So you should be able to enjoy it in print without any of that; it’s the same story, just in a different medium. You can read the whole thing over at Tor.com. .

Meanwhile, here’s a teaser.

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. She met me, she went on to say, when I was working next door to their farm under the shadow of the rocket gantry for the First Mars Expedition.

I have no memory of this.

She would have been a little girl and, oh lord, there were so many little kids hanging around outside the Fence watching us work. The little girls all wanted to talk to the Lady Astronaut. To me.

I’m sure I spoke to Dorothy because know I stopped and talked to them every day on my way in and out through the Fence about what it was like. It being Mars. There was nothing else it could be.

via The Lady Astronaut of Mars by Mary Robinette Kowal | Tor.com.

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