[INTERLUDE 1] - Season 1 Finale

I hope you're having a wonderful week. I'm so glad you've joined me for our wrap-up episode

of Biam Season 1. While I won't be sharing a new story with you today, I am excited to take a little bit of time to look back on all the stories we've published this season and consider what it all means. We've had 10 very different stories by 10 very different authors. But on a close read, you'll notice there are certain themes and ideas that many authors touched on in one way or another. Before we jump into discussing these themes, I want to share the

results of our Patreon poll for the top favorite Biam story of season 1. For the past three weeks, I've been collecting your feedback on all the stories we've experienced together, and the top choice is bright eyes and the lantern path by M.D. Smith the fourth. While every story I share with you this season is near and dear to my heart, I love that many listeners connected with this piece in particular. Warm, spunky and colorful, this story is definitely going to stay with me for a long time.

So over the course of this season, I've enjoyed thinking about the techniques and the themes I see in each story, and sharing these observations with you. These thoughts aren't meant to be authoritative. There are just opinions that I hope might enrich the way you see a story. And given how rich in imagery and meaning each of these stories is, my summaries can't cover everything in each story.

“But I hope that exploring key ideas for each piece deep into your appreciation for the stories,”

and maybe even nudged you to go back and listen to some of them again. Over the course of the season, two elements tie all ten pieces together, genre, and the biological theme of the stories. Speculate fiction, the genre that biome focuses on, is a term that might be new to you, but broadly speaking, it just means that these are stories that probably couldn't happen today in the world as we know it. Now, you might be familiar with genres like fantasy, science fiction, or horror,

but where do stories like a nemony fit? While it doesn't neatly fit into any of the above, it is comfortably speculative and shares more in common with sci-fi or fantasy than it does with agathicrystee mysteries or James Patterson thrillers. Old growth is another piece that moves outside traditional boundaries of genre, part sci-fi, part horror, and part awe at the majesty and

power of nature. Speculate fiction allows biome to embrace an incredible diversity of stories.

But the overarching theme of biome, life, living things in biology, helps us narrow and sharpen our focus. As far as we know, living beings and the ecosystems that they create are the pinnacle of complexity in the universe. Rareer than images, diamonds, more intricate than the fine

“nanofibers of cyberpunk exosuits, life is strange, precious, and wildly diverse. There are limitless”

approaches to examining the shapes that life takes, and the meanings that life endows upon itself. But I hope that having such a unifying theme gave you a more meaningful experience as you listen to these stories. Within the architecture of those larger themes, there are a constellation of more specific ideas and topics that biome stories explore. Control is an important one. It threads through nearly all the stories in this season. Sometimes it is a question of control

over our own bodies and minds, such as in the winnowers by Christopher Thomas, in which a well-meaning

life is ultimately tasked with selecting which parts of her husband will remain after his winnowing

procedure. The story also explores the hazy boundaries of agency, is March the wife in this story, a victim of an oppressive system, how much control does she have in the story? At other times, control is integrated at a systemic level. In the pool of the dough, by Nicholas Packwood, and in after you catch them all by Grigori Lukin, we witness characters struggling with the consequences of systems they thought they controlled. In the pool of the dough,

the system integrating across machines in biology offers salvation. It seems that without integration of the yeast into both the machines and the people who live within them, the pods that are carrying people across the stars will fail. Or if the pods don't fail, the relationships of the people in those pods will. The yeast somehow brings a balance to the system that those who designed it could not have for seen. In after you catch them all by contrast, the system promises

destruction to characters who thought themselves better than or somehow different from other Earth

“life. Preston Wehrthington imagines himself fully in control of things. And I think that's”

a feeling we all probably share. The desire to have everything running exactly according to plan. Except, of course, the exact features of his system, the inability to turn off the robots that

anti-hero. Many of the stories in this season also focus on characters at key moments of transition

“in their lives. Rosita, in Stormchaser, by Toshiya Kamei, is entering adolescence,”

starting to engage with her sense of agency, and discover the consequences that come with making decisions. Meanwhile, the narrator of the girl who shouted yes at the heart of her ship, by River S, explores the physical and emotional world of a girl who is closer to adulthood than Rosita. She is still exploring her physical and psychological identity, and how that fits among her peers and society at large. But she has already made some of the biggest choices that

will define her life. Her challenge is to fully embrace those decisions. And finally, we have Ted, the forester from Old Growth by Steve Zison. Transitioning into retirement, the story shows us that he can still learn new things about the field of study to which he has devoted his life. The speculative elements in each story helps direct our attention to aspects of these characters

that you and I share with them. You and I have never fought giant space aliens, except maybe

in video games. And we've never flown through a hurricane that can talk to us. But we know what it's like to be angry and to struggle with that emotion. We all have moments where we are unsure about our boundaries. And I hope all of us have enjoyed moments of awe when we discovered there

“was more to learn about something that we thought we had mastered. Finally, I think one subject that”

speculative fiction is particularly good at addressing is that of the unknown. Specifically, immense, sometimes cosmic forces that are beyond comprehension. While much of literature touches on themes of great or mysterious forces beyond our control, literary fiction and stories in more realistic genres tend to approach themes of fate, spirituality, and forces beyond human control in oblique terms. In more realistic writing, characters face death, natural disasters, and quirks of

nature as inevitable and ultimately uncontrollable elements of life. If characters struggle against

these forces at all, they do so as metaphors for the struggle to accept reality. The fact that one cannot outrun fate, or death, for example. By contrast, speculative fiction, like what we enjoyed together in this season, often makes colossal and mysterious forces physical, and challenges characters to face them directly. For example, in Stormchaser, Rosita doesn't just face hurricane quickly, she has to talk to it and reason with it. In writing on the wall by Jordan

Hirsch, a shield faces questions of faith and miracles with a very real physical manifestation of a message, maybe a message from the gods, maybe not. The story ends on a wonderfully ambiguous note, but the physical reality of the miracle is left in no doubt, only its interpretation.

I would also say that powerful forces are at play and Nissa Harlow's find me again. While the

more straightforwardly sci-fi element of this story is the fact that it takes place on a different planet, it is the new world's flora that forces halt the narrator to finally face an embodiment of her deepest grief, in a way that she has either been unable to, or has chosen not to do back on earth. Ghosts and apparitions are one of the longest running elements of speculative fiction for a reason. They make concrete, our hopes and fears, and shards of grief that otherwise slip

around the edges of our minds. Of course, these observations only just begin to scratch the surface of everything these stories contain. I'm sure there's much more in these stories that you spotted, images and ideas that interact or collide with others in interesting ways. I encourage you to give yourself a few minutes to just sit and think about these ideas and let yourself daydream. I would also warmly welcome you to join our growing Patreon community and drop a note to share

your thoughts. You can even follow and comment for free if you'd like. Although, I truly hope you will consider pitching in even a couple of dollars a month. Your support allows me to actually

“pay the authors for their amazing stories. Right now, the pay is not much, and honestly,”

I wish I could offer each author so much more. With your help, I'll be able to. As I've already mentioned, although the first season has wrapped up, I have so much more to share with you between now and September when our second season kicks off. I'm grateful that each author from the first season was available and excited to do an interview with me, some on camera and some as written exchanges. I'll be sharing the audio portion of these interviews with you wherever you

listen to your podcasts. But if you'd like to see the video and read the written interviews, head over to the biome Patreon channel where new content will continue to go up every week. I want to thank you dear listener for enjoying these stories together with me. As the solo creator of season 1, I have worn at least six different hats. I am the editor, scriptwriter, producer, host,

and as a perfectionist that can be hard to swallow. But I believe in sharing great stories so

“strongly that I think it's worth the time in the effort it takes to make biome happen. I also have”

faith that every future season will get a little bit better as we grow our community and adfokes

to the team that brings biome to life. As always, I want to give a special thank you to Shinella,

“our biosphere level supporter on Patreon. Shinella, you are a vital part of what biome is”

becoming. Finally, I'd like to thank each of our authors, Jordan Hirsch, Nissa Harlow,

Christopher Thomas, Grigori Lukin, Nicholas Packwood, River S, J.M. J. Bruer, M.D. Smith,

“the fourth, Toshiya Kameh, and Steve Zison. Season 1 exists because of the rich worlds you have shared”

with us. I invite you to join me next Tuesday for my interview with Jordan Hirsch, the author of Writing on the Wall. Thank you for listening to biome with me, your host and narrator, Alex Zubin. Until next time, farewell, wherever the days take you. (upbeat music)