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