“Cloud Dragon Skies” by N. K. Jemisin

After a long day of doing nothing of working on my dissertation and/or planning my relocation across the country, I listen to a lot of podcasts (I switch the focus of what I listen to – right now I’m focused on skeptical, astronomy, and Sci Fi shows; I always enjoy the personal journal type of audio blogs, too). I tried a new (to me) cast called Escape Pod (”The Science Fiction Podcast Magazine”), which includes readings of short stories. Escape Pod #114 included the short story Cloud Dragon Skies by N.K. Jemisin.

When I listen to a reading of a short-story I usually fall asleep: it reminds me of being read a story when I was a kid.

Cloud Dragon Skies, wonderfully read by Máia Whitaker, was a different experience. I wasn’t riveted by the action (there isn’t a lot of it, thankfully). But, I was gently pulled in by a story of two apparently very different communities interacting. The “sky people”, who live up in space stations, come down to talk with those who remain on a post-global warming devastated world. The narrator is a young woman who grew up in the simple, low-technology community that remained and survived the literal fall-out of the devastation.

The main character’s point-of-view of the “sky people” and their “white bags” for clothes (space suits) is realistic and believable. She finds that her friendship with one of the sky people (a young man her age and with the same dark skin color and facial features as hers) troubles her assumptions about both his people and her own. In fact, it’s this interior focus of the story that seduced me in and kept me attentive to the very end of the story. The “cloud dragons” refers to the shapes (and sentience?) of the clouds that drift across a red-colored sky that is the focus of her first conversations with the “sky people” man. (TINY SPOILER: We eventually learn that the sky’s red color is due to the remnants of all the chemicals pumped into the sky before the ecology of the world collapsed so that the majority of the populace chose to live up in the sky on various space stations and terraformed areas of one of the rings of Saturn).

I typically enjoy, love, and hunger for science and speculative fiction that focuses more on character development and the interior and interpersonal consequences of a future world (rather than the space opera adventures that dominate TV, movies, and most books and short stories). I particularly enjoyed how Jemisin took a contemporary sociological, historical, and scientific issue (global warming) and extrapolates a plausible future world that thematically reflects back on the issue it extrapolates from (while including other issues such as self-identity, love across communities, commonalities and differences across groups, etc.).

Cloud of Dragon Skies is highly recommended. You can listen online here.

Well, then, back to finishing up a dissertation and planning a move across the country…