Some Love for The Penumbra Podcast

This past week, I stumbled into the Penumbra Podcast through a random tweet in my timeline. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen it mentioned, but this time I bothered to look into it and give a listen. Now, I’m struggling to keep myself from devouring the whole series in short order. Despite my attempt at restraint, I have already gotten a ways into season two and can’t help but listen to multiple episodes everyday.

Hyperion City is wonderful and horrible and breathtaking all at once. I’m a sucker for a sci-fi setting, but the world of Juno Steel is particularly interesting to me in how it portrays the typical faults of a futuristic society in its own unique way. Plenty of futuristic dystopias involve overpowered corporations, nosy and expansive media empires, and the contrast of the haves vs the have-nots, but the Penumbra Podcast manages to include these tropes without making them seem tired. I’m still very early in Second Citadel’s storyline, but I find the world building to be interesting, particularly because of how much they have to communicate through primarily character dialogue. There’s so much information to be packed in about the humans and the monsters and the world they inhabit and, without much in the way of narration, the writing has to clever to get the audience the information they need.

That’s only one of the ways the dialogue in the Penumbra Podcast really shines. It’s fast paced and witty, but the show doesn’t devolve into pithy quips without any depth. The show handles drama and romance and deep existential brooding with the same skill as comedy. Some of this is because of the great writing that produces stunning poetic narration and hilarious exchanges, but the acting plays a key role, as well. The voice acting is strong enough to make those well written words land. The combination makes for a riveting radio play, the likes of which I never imagined existed.

The excellent writing and acting bring the story to life, but what makes these stories so automatically important to me is their unabashed queerness. No one in Hyperion City is straight and it’s never important, expect for in the way it is extremely important for a listener who’s starved for that representation. Personally, I prefer the Juno Steel storyline over the Second Citadel one because the cast of characters and setting in Juno Steel resonate with my own identity and experience more closely. And I love sci-fi. That definitely plays a role, too.

I’ll run out of episodes of Juno Steel before too long, but for now I can take comfort from this queer sci-fi detective story. A genderqueer protagonist fighting crime on Mars is exactly the hero my younger self never imagined having and exactly the hero I’ll always need. I see myself in Juno and that’s strange and new and at times uncomfortable. It’s a good uncomfortable, though.

I hope I can one day make something that will change someone’s life the way the Penumbra Podcast has managed to change mine. It’s been a week since I found this podcast, but I know it will be a touchstone for the rest of my life. Stories have the power to bring light and clarity to a reality that is dark and muddled. I want there to be more stories out there like the Penumbra Podcast to give us some light out here (and I want to make them myself).