[The Outpost won the Gold Mark Time Award for best sci fi audio drama for 2008] You wake up, millions of light years away, in a place nothing like home.  ...What do YOU do? Cast List Grant Hickey - Gene Thorkildsen Vanessa 98949 - Julie Hoverson Lassiter - Russell Gold Yasmin - Melissa D. Johnson Recorder - Beverly Poole Episode and incidental music from the album "...go..." by Sulatus (www.sulatus.cbl.pl).  (available on Jamendo.com) [Used under a Creative Commons license.] Show theme:  Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com) Recorded with the assistance of Ryan Hirst of Neohoodoo Studio Editing and Sound:   Julie Hoverson Cover Design:  Brett Coulstock "What kind of a place is it?  Would you believe it's a habitat, in an asteroid cloud, in a distant corner of the galaxy?" ********************************************************* The Outpost This story was very loosely inspired by the movie Suna No Onna (Woman in the Dunes), from 1964; directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara from the novel by Kôbô Abe, as adapted by Eiko Yoshida, starring Eiji Okada and Kyôko Kishida and the sand.  It's an awesome film - superficially about a man who is trapped by a small town and placed with a woman as her new husband.  In the film, he's an office worker and amateur entymologist seeking to make some kind of name for himself by finding a new species of bug on his day trip to a beach.  He falls asleep and wakes to find he missed the last bus, but a local town has someone who will take him in for the night  - a woman who lives at the bottom of this odd huge sand pit.  The whole town live at the bottoms of these pits, and we slowly realize that the sand has built up over the town for generations, and they just dig out the areas around the huts by night and have the sand taken away. The woman lost her husband and child in a sandslide and cannot handle the work of digging the sand all by herself, so they have placed the man with her as her new husband - letting him down and taking away the ladder.  The man also finds out that he's not the only one - other men in other houses were similarly abducted. I didn’t want to work with any of that for my story, specifically since I had determined to make it a gender reverse, and a woman kidnapped and handed to a man to be trapped as his wife is kind of ... a lot of real history. So I focused on the subtext and themes of the movie.  At its heart, it's a culture clash, the man representing "modern japan" (in the 60s) and the town and woman being so traditional that they won't even leave ancient homes that are being devoured by the sand.  In modern life, people are cogs, and he's coming from a life where he's basically interchangeable - hardly even missed when he vanishes - into one where the good of the community and the comfort of the partner are directly affected by the actions of the individual and each person is therefore important. That gave me a more satisfying framework to play with.  By creating these two cultures - the efficient and interchangeable people she comes from - where even her personal achievements are somewhat generic - and the humble, personal, and individual life in the asteroids, where he takes time to respect the dead, and is proud of his little triumphs. I also wanted an equivalent to the sand.  The film is basically a three character piece, with the sand as much a presence as the two people in it.  I made the outpost, with its gripes and problems, sounds, and needs, as similar to that as I could.   I like to think it's the writing that makes this episode really great but I give a lot of credit to my costar, for being able to bring to life a male character that is strong without being overbearing, who is in control without being controlling, and who is never ashamed to feel. That left me free to be a bitch.  Of course the climax comes in both stories when the captive has a chance to walk away.  I won't spoil it. **************************************************************** THE OUTPOST Cast: Ol