Depending on how you look at it, I’m either very lucky or very pitiful. I listen to podcasts for upwards of 8 hours a day. For commutes, single half hour episodes of shows like Savage Love and Rick Steves are fine, but for my kind of  hours, I need more content. The answer is the podcast novel.

There is currently a dearth of options in podcast fiction novels. If you like horror and sci-fi, you’ll be all good, but any other genre is pretty much non-existent. As far as mastery of the medium goes, Scott Sigler is king. He’s also kind of a jerk, but we’ll get to that later.

Sigler has three completed podcast novels: Ancestor, Earthcore, and The Rookie, and a fourth novel in progress: Infection. Ancestor, Earthcore and Infection are all scientific thrillers, tackling genetics, geology, and virology respectively. The Rookie is definitely a break from that, a sports novel about the Intergalactic Football League.

As far as technical skill goes, Sigler has it in spades. His novels are tight and well crafted, perfectly set up for the serialized podcast, with a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter to keep you listening. He does the voices.

(This is my biggest pet peeve. Why the fuck are you podcasting if you aren’t going to do the voices? Old school radio shows figured this out 80 years ago. Post your text online and leave it at that, or find a decent reader, because you may as well be writing fanfiction if you aren’t doing the voices.)

Now for the drawbacks. Sigler’s novels are drenched in machismo. I tend to laugh it off, but after awhile, it gets really, really old. He writes violence and action the best, so he puts a lot of that into his novels, but the fill-in and characterization are clunky. His female characters are either ex-CIA killing machines (men in drag) or soft pushover types, the first ones to die. He avoided that pitfall in The Rookie by leaving women out of the book entirely. Like that line in Take Me Out, the locker room was “a hotbed of latent asexuals.”

I was listening to Half Share by Nathan Lowell, and there was a dig at Sigler that kind of sums it up. A drunk, pompous asshole decides to follow the main character, Ishmael, out of the bar after Ish “steals” his date. He is promptly decommissioned by one of Ish’s crewmates and stuffed under a table to sleep it off. The asshole’s ship? The Sigler. I giggled.

And that’s how you know I’m a geek.

So, basically, Scott is the best in the field, but the field’s not that great. Podcasters still have a lot of learning to do from old-time radio and traditional fiction. Writers who can do genres other than sci-fi, horror, and thrillers will find a huge demand. Everything seems very male-oriented.