Archives for December 2007
EP138: In the Late December
Published on 25 Dec 2007 at 1:27 am.
17 Comments.
Filed under Podcasts, Rated PG.
Read ‘EP138: In the Late December’
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By Greg van Eekhout.
Read by Stephen Eley.
Closing Music: “Chiron Beta Prime” by Jonathan Coulton.
First appeared in Strange Horizons, December 2003.
They come to a cloud of silver mist, and there Santa finds a little boy made of molten silver with liquid silver eyes and sweeping silver delta wings. His wrists are ringed with missile launchers, and a rounded cone emerges from a cavity in his chest. Once there were many silver boys, fleets of them, protecting the outermost parts of inhabited space against things that came from outside inhabited space. But now, there is only the silver boy.
“You, sir,” the silver boy says, “are a tiresome consciousness cluster. Your binary value system remains as laughable as it is irrelevant. How you manage to remain cohesive is beyond me.”
“My value system is hardly binary,” Santa says. “In between naughty and nice I’ve made room for you: grumpy but fundamentally sound. Do you want a toy or not?”
Rated PG. Contains some dark Santa-related imagery, and the heat death of the universe.
EP137: Citytalkers
Published on 21 Dec 2007 at 4:30 am.
18 Comments.
Filed under Podcasts, Rated PG.
By Mur Lafferty.
Read by Deborah Green.
Closing Music: “O Come All Ye Faithful,” performed by Twisted Sister.
Gloria blinked. “Why do the people in Cleveland love Christmas more than anywhere else?”
Toby grinned and spread his hands on the bar, unadorned fingers splayed. He stared at them, “I didn’t say Cleveland’s people loved Christmas. I said Cleveland.”
“And you’re saying Charlotte doesn’t like Christmas?”
Toby took a deep breath and let it out. “Oh, no. I’m saying Charlotte flat out hates Christmas.”
Gloria kept her voice level, the best thing to do when dealing with a crazy person. “And why do you think this?”
“I’m an urban shaman. A citytalker. I’m here to talk to Charlotte to find out why it’s unhappy.”
Rated PG. Contains moderate violence and stronger weather.
Referenced sites:
Heifer International
Podsafe Music Network (Terms of Use)
EP136: Bright Red Star
Published on 14 Dec 2007 at 4:33 am.
19 Comments.
Filed under Podcasts, Rated R.
By Bud Sparhawk.
Read by Paul Haring (of Escape Pod Classic).
First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2005.
Survivors isn’t exactly the word. What they found were sixteen bodies without arms, legs, and most organs. What remained were essentially heads hooked up to life support and fueled by oxygenated glucose pumps. There were a couple hundred strands of glass fibre running from the ship’s walls into each skull, into each brain, into each soul. Four of the sixteen were still functioning–alive is not a word to describe their condition.
There was no hesitation on the part of Command. They ordered everyone, except combat types like us, from the most likely targets. Humanity couldn’t allow any more people to become components for the Shardie offense.
But civilians never listen. Farmers were the worse, hanging onto their little plots and crops until somebody dragged them away, kicking and screaming at the injustice of it all. That’s why we were here. Forty settlers had stupidly refused to be evacuated from New Mars. Forty we didn’t know about until we got that one brief burst.
My mission was to make certain that they didn’t become forty armless, legless, gutless, screamless weapon components.
Rated R. Contains strong violence and heavy moral themes.
Referenced Sites:
Reading is Fundamental
Starship Sofa
EP135: Stu
Published on 6 Dec 2007 at 11:59 pm.
12 Comments.
Filed under Podcasts, Rated G.
By Bruce McAllister.
Read by Stephen Eley.
Appears in The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories, from Golden Gryphon Press.
The first time I met Stu, I was just a kid and there weren’t any lights hovering over his house. The last time I saw him, when I was grown and we both knew what life could be if you let it, there were. That’s the best way to start, I guess.
That first time, our dad piled us into our old Chevy wagon–the kind you took to drive-in movies with sheets on the seats and your kids in pajamas–and drove us to the north county, saying only, “Stu is an inventor. He’ll never see any royalties from his inventions because the Navy owns them, but he’s an inventor, the kind that made America great.”
How had he first met Stu? How does anyone in the Navy get to know a wide-eyed, crazy-haired inventor who wasn’t at all “strack,” who shouldn’t have been anywhere near the military but somehow was? On a Secret Project, of course. My brother and I‚Äîwho were 10 and 6 at the time–were sure of it. Our dad and Stu had to be working on a Secret Project together.
Rated G. Contains military bureaucracy, but nothing more disturbing.
EP Review: Beowulf, Grendel, and Beowulf
Published on 1 Dec 2007 at 6:09 pm.
6 Comments.
Filed under Podcasts, Rated PG, Reviews.
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Translation by Seamus Heaney .
A Novel by John Gardner .
A Film by Robert Zemeckis .
Reviewed by Jonathon Sullivan.
