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Samantha's Christmas Partridge

48:08 recording · AUTO · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

Escape Pod replays Samantha's Diary, where a rich stranger's Twelve Days of Christmas gifts drive Samantha to Liam.

  1. The song taken literally becomes a plagueEvery gift in The Twelve Days of Christmas arrives daily and cumulatively, until 107 birds, cows and trampolines fill a London flat.
  2. Owning the tech means owning the victimFranz Dodecker owns Multiphones, Speakeasy and Household Robotics, so Samantha's phone, diary and Housebot all work against her orders.
  3. Romance is the subplot, not the crisisMerle Lafferty argues Christmas rom-coms put the heroine's chaos first, with love a distant second B-plot, as in Newsletter and 12 Dates.
Executive Summary AI
  • Escape Pod episode 1025, a Flashback Friday, presents Samantha's Diary by Diana Wynne-Jones, hosted by co-editor Merle Lafferty and narrated by audiobook narrator Emma Newman, in a story that originally ran in Stories, All New Tales.0:58
  • The diary opens on December 25, 2233, with catwalk model Samantha back in London from her mother's Paris party, where she was paraded past rich men, before a leafless tree and a caged partridge arrive at her flat and her Housebot keeps letting more deliveries in.3:08
  • After partridges, pigeons, hens, parrots, five gold rings a day and geese pile up, her ex-boyfriend Liam works out that an admirer is sending her the items of a two-hundred-year-old song called The Twelve Days of Christmas.23:22
  • Her mother names the sender as Franz Dodecker, the diamante-toothed multimillionaire who owns Multiphones, Speakeasy and Household Robotics — and therefore her phone, her diary and her Housebot — and phoning him off has no effect as swans, cows, milkmaids and trampolines follow.25:59
  • Buried in birds, a Bird Protection Trust complaint over one hundred and seven delivered birds and nine trampolines full of bouncing lords, Samantha proposes to Liam, invites Franz to her flat as revenge, and escapes with a fifth parcel of rings as her dowry.37:49
Key Quote
“I'm Merle Lafferty, your host and co-editor.”
— Merle Lafferty1:31
Key Quote
“Thanks, mother, but I earn quite enough on the catwalk to be happy as I am.”
— Emma Newman3:40
Key Quote
“I'm being stalked by a nutter that keeps sending me birds.”
— Emma Newman11:05