A New XO Has the Deck

Much as we would like to freeze our crew in cryo to preserve things as they are indefinitely, we have been advised that this would negatively impact ship operations. As a consequence, sometimes we have to bid one of our officers a fond farewell as they depart for new adventures.

Assistant editor Kevin Wabaunsee is disembarking after many years of hard work, and we are so grateful to have had him here. We’ll miss his calm presence and keen story insights, as well as his deft management of our vitally important lower decks crew.

Stepping into his position is Christine Amsden, one of the aforementioned crew who has helped ensure that our steady influx of stories doesn’t back up and cause a reactor meltdown. We are excited to have her join us at the helm.

Kevin had these parting words to share:

“I’ve been a part of the Escape Pod family for the better part of a decade, and I can’t imagine where I would be without it. I honed my editorial sensibilities reading Escape Pod slush, and being an editor here taught me so much about the craft of writing—and being a writer. My first science fiction sale was to Escape Pod, way back in 2017, and then I spent years reading submissions as an associate editor, and a few more as assistant editor. While I was on the masthead, we even nabbed a few Hugo nominations!

“As with so many partings, saying farewell to Escape Pod is bittersweet. I believe that Escape Pod is a publication the world truly needs: science fiction focused on positive, uplifting, optimistic visions of the future. I’m proud to have been a part of it. Nonetheless, time is an unforgiving adversary, and there’s simply too little of it to allow me to devote the effort and attention demanded by such a magical publication.

“So, it’s with both a heavy heart and a sense of profound optimism that I pass my assistant editor mantle on to Christine Amsden. I helped bring Christine on as an associate editor, and since then, I have consistently been impressed with her astute feedback and keen insights into submissions. I can’t wait to see what Phoebe and Christine have in store for Escape Pod: I’m sure it will be amazing.”

And Christine would like to add:

“I am thrilled and honored to be taking on the role of Assistant Editor at Escape Pod. First, a special thank you has to go out to Kevin Wabaunsee, who trained me as a slush reader three years ago and who has now placed a great deal of faith in me to carry on in his stead. I’ll miss you, and I’ll try to make you proud!

“For most of my career, I’ve been a novelist (you can find my work on Amazon). Short stories played only a small role in my world, but  only because I struggled to read them with extremely low vision. For those of you who remember the early 2000s, most magazines were in print, and online publications didn’t have a lot of clout. I did, a very long time ago, place a few short stories in now-defunct publications. With the help of magnification and a lot of effort, I managed to read my own story—but honestly, reading everyone else’s was too big a chore.

“It’s easier to be a legally blind author in 2026. In fact, Escape Pod was the very first audio market I stumbled upon (thanks to Benjamin C. Kinney, another former assistant editor). How delightful to discover short stories in my podcast feed every Friday! Better yet, these stories tended to be hopeful, even optimistic about the future.

“I started taking the craft of short story writing as seriously as the craft of novel writing, it was only natural that I jumped at the chance to slush read for Escape Pod. It’s only natural, now, that I jumped at the chance to become an assistant editor. I can’t wait to be part of honoring the vision of Escape Pod—and to help you find your next favorite science fiction story!”

And with that, back to work! These stars won’t explore themselves.

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Escape Pod 1043: The Smokejumpers

Escape Pod 1043: The Smokejumpers is an Escape Pod original.

Includes wildfires and peril.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:53 — 82.8MB)

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The Smokejumpers

By Sierra Bibi

When Fern jumps from the plane into the smoke for the very first time, she believes she has nothing left to lose. That’s not to say she’s unafraid exactly—not even hundreds of hours of simulations and dozens of practice jumps can prepare you for the reality of plummeting into the hazy unknown of an active forest fire. No, her fear is definitely there, but folded and tucked somewhere deep inside herself. Compartamentalized.

The smoke hurtles towards her, the ground below hidden. She rips her parachute—a massive thing designed to support the heft of her exoskeleton—and jerks backwards. (Continue Reading…)

Good News Everyone! We’re Hugo Finalists!

Escape Pod and Hugo logos on a planet and nebula background, text: 2026 Hugo Awards Best Semiprozine Finalist
We are honored to once again be Hugo finalists!
2025 was a stellar year for Escape Pod, celebrating both our 20th anniversary and our thousandth episode. It’s been an amazing journey, and it is the support of our listeners that brought us all this way.
In addition to them, we wouldn’t be where we are without the writers who crafted these stories in the first place, and without the narrators whose performances brought them to life. Our crew of readers and producers and hosts and everyone on the admin side also keep our starship sailing on, for which we are eternally, immensely grateful. These include:


Kevin Wabaunsee and Phoebe Barton, our assistant editors

Tina Connolly and Alasdair Stuart, our intrepid hosts
Adam Pracht and Summer Brooks, our audio producers

Marcus Tsong, Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko, Ewen Ma, Christine Amsden, Rick Danforth, Michael A. Pepin, EA Crawley, Abhijeet Sathe, Sarah Loch, Phoenix Alexander and Casey Lawrence, our associate editors

After twenty years, we still struggle with what “fun” and “hopeful” and “escapist” science fiction means from an editorial perspective. The terms are subjective, and a single work may not encompass all of them. Fun can be tempered by fatigue, hope by hardship, escape by painful experience. Even so, in recent years we believe it’s been more important than ever to give people a reason to feel good for at least an hour a week, and we’re still proud that our audience knows what they will get when they download Escape Pod.Thanks to everyone in our audience for joining us on this journey. We’re proud to help keep your escape pod fully stocked with stories.

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Escape Pod 1042: More Tomorrow (Flashback Friday)

“More Tomorrow” was first published in Automata Review, March 2018, and previously published as Escape Pod 713, in January 2020.

A few grade-A curses.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:07 — 50.1MB)

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More Tomorrow

By Premee Mohamed

DAY 5

Anyway, it turns out trilobites aren’t very good eating even if you haven’t eaten in days. I had particularly high hopes for the fat, humped asaphids, thinking they would taste like shrimp, but everything I’ve caught so far is strictly armor and attitude, plus they bite. Discovered this morning that if you just hoik a trilobite in the fire and assume terminal temperature, it crawls out and shakes itself off like a little tank. Complete decapitation required. PAPER IDEA: Mechanisms of apparent trilobite invincibility. They’re not strictly aquatic, either, they come right up on land and look at you while you’re eating their friends. Jesus.

Also cut my fingers to shit butchering the first one; to be honest, it was hard to tell who was butchering who. (Whom?) Easier going now since I chipped an axe out of a piece of blue flint that I found a ways up the beach. Poor replacement for the one we lost, but it cracks the armor at least, and then you can roast them without explosions and shrapnel. Still have to cut them up to get the few calories worth of meat inside though (which doesn’t, incidentally, taste like shrimp). They’re survival food. A couple more days and I’m going after some of those big meaty arthrodires though, the ones I can see gliding through the crystal-clear water with little signs on their back saying “EAT ME.” I’m already tired of trilobite though not yet tired of surviving.

Note: Can I eat any of these algal mats. Different from seaweed at sushi restaurant how exactly.
(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1041: Love in the Time of Dust and Venom

Love in the Time of Dust and Venom originally appeared in 2013 Fiction River – Time Travelers.

Includes a form of assisted suicide.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:35 — 42.5MB)

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Show Notes

Sponsored by Mixtape Stories

Love in the Time of Dust and Venom

By Sharon Joss

Using his walker to brace himself, Keiko watched her ancient grandfather stoop beside the packed dirt path and tug at a weed. Nearby, sprinklers sang shoop-shoop-shoop in the stillness, sending cascades of water across the wide expanse of lawns. She saw his eyes twinkle as he slapped the roots against the side of his worn black trousers. The scent of moist earth joined the fragrance of lavender and eucalyptus in the quiet July morning.  The old man stood and slowly put the dandelion in his pocket. He knew she didn’t approve, but this had become their little ritual.

When he first came to live with them, he spoke rarely, and then only Japanese; a language she struggled to recall from childhood. She found him to be a man of expression, rather than words. The first time she brought him to the LA County Arboretum he spoke to her of how much he missed his wife and home.  Now they came every Tuesday morning, after she dropped the boys off at school. There was no sense of time or country here.  They’d come to think of the botanical gardens as their special place.

He toddled over to their favorite bench; the rough wooden one beneath the purple jacaranda tree with a good view of the Queen Anne Cottage. Then, as the bees hummed around them, he took her hand as he often did, and her 97-year-old grandfather began to tell her about lightpulse technology. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1040: Gods and Spirits Our Witnesses

Escape Pod 1040: Gods and Spirits Our Witnesses is an Escape Pod original.

Loss of an infant

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:47 — 36.8MB)

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Show Notes

Sponsored by Mixtape Stories

Gods and Spirits Our Witnesses

by S. C. Mills

We met in a public-access data booth at night, during yet another tropical storm, long after the angry god of the sea had gorged himself fat on Earth’s old icecaps. Rain hammered the booth’s cracked plastic walls with such brutality that I didn’t hear you walk in. I was staring down the chart of jacked-up daily data rates when you sidled into the tiny booth with me, half-lit by a stuttering streetlight. Close enough to touch, in a space meant only for one. You squinted at me, like you were calculating whether I was friend or foe.

You were scrawny, soaked to the bone, no doubt seeking any shelter from the sea god’s rage. Only a year or two younger than me, maybe, but your slim shoulders made you seem half my size. And the way your pretty wet eyelashes clumped together ’round your storm-gray eyes sent my blood rushing and my chest swelling with an ancient kind of pride. Like I was born to do nothing but give you all I had.

(Continue Reading…)

Special submissions call: Democratic Futures

The Escape Pod logo on a space background with rows of stylized human figures behind it, on top text reads "Democratic Futures"
Democracy isn’t a new concept, but its parts and parameters have shifted across the centuries. Cultural changes and technological advancements have impacted how it is perceived and how it functions. Suffrage has, in many places, expanded, but is still not universal. Different systems and ballot designs have influenced election outcomes in unpredictable ways. Electronic voting machines abound, but in some places, marbles are dropped into containers as stones were thousands of years ago. Political manipulation can be subtle or overt, from propaganda to gerrymandering to outright violence.

What will the future bring? That’s what we’re here to find out.

Escape Pod is opening for a special Democratic Futures submission window from now until June 30th. We’re looking for science fiction stories about the future of democracy, whatever that might look like to you. Send us eccentric alien elections, post-human propaganda machines, dystopian door-knocking campaigns, opposition research spy operations—anything that examines and interrogates the myriad interconnected aspects of democratic systems, and their constellations of possibilities and permutations in the near- or far-term.

Escape Pod leans in the direction of escapism, hope and optimism rather than grimness and gloom. We love to see funny stories, which can include dark humor that doesn’t punch down, and satire that isn’t painfully bleak. Remember that the failure mode of irony is sincerity, so if you’re mocking something, be sure you’re hitting the right target.

We’re not interested in stories that contain sexual assault, rape, child abuse, animal cruelty, gore, or horror. We also do not want to see stories that treat the hardships of marginalized people or groups as thought experiments. While we may have published stories with that type of content in the past, they are not currently a good fit for Escape Pod.

Our primary audience is adult listeners and readers. Strong language and sexual situations are fine, but we are not an erotica market.

We publish our stories in text and audio, but audio is our primary format. Because our audience cannot easily reread or skim, we prefer stories of high clarity and tight pacing. Complex syntax, elaborate structures and typographic novelties (e.g. footnotes) are difficult for us to publish.

For original fiction, we want stories from 1,500 to 6,000 words (our sweet spot is 2,000 to 4,000), and for reprints we accept 1,500 to 7,500 words.

We look forward to seeing what your democratic futures hold!

Genres:

Escape Pod 1039: The Many Rebirths of Karina Morita

“The Many Rebirths of Karina Morita” first appeared in 2025 on Tim’s Patreon

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:16 — 44.3MB)

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Show Notes

Sponsored by Mixtape Stories

The Many Rebirths of Karina Morita

by Tim Pratt

My problems all started when I died.

People didn’t die too often on my hab, or anywhere else on the planets and stations of the Standard Curve; we cured illness and aging long ago, but there were still occasional deaths by misadventure. I was flying an ultralight to the outdoor sex and ice cream festival on the Melodious Archipelago when an unexpected updraft sent me spinning out, straight into the side of a familiar mountain (it was hollowed-out and contained an eternal-night dance club). As the meticulously textured stone surface rushed toward my face, I thought, “Oh well, at least I had a backup yesterday.” I’d lose my memories of the morning, sure, but my post-breakfast orgasms hadn’t been any better than usual, and the hollandaise on my dodo eggs was only okay too.

I was supposed to wake up in the cozy rebirth lounge of my own home on the Shimmering Terrace, my consciousness decanted into a fresh clone, as I’d done a dozen times before. Instead, I awoke naked and shivering, stretched out on a long table in a small room with silver walls, while a short woman wearing a pure white jumpsuit and an elaborate crown of stainless steel smiled down at me. “Karina Zephyrus Morita!” she said. “Welcome to the Interval. I’m your technician. I see this is your first time passing through. Don’t worry, we’ll get you assessed and processed quickly.”

I shrieked and sat up on the table. Was I in some kind of clinic? Had there been a mishap with the cloning process? I felt fine, and the bits of me I could see didn’t appear malformed. “What’s happening? Who are you? What is this place?”

(Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Escape Pod 1038: Meet the Mets

Escape Pod 1038: Meet the Mets is an Escape Pod original.

Contains brief moments of violence and bigotry towards a transgender character

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:03 — 60.5MB)

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Show Notes

Sponsored by Mixtape Stories

Meet the Mets

by Ace Tilton Ratcliff

1964

Bobby didn’t know who threw the first punch.

A fist glanced off his cheek, then a smattering of blows rained down in the darkness, a private thunderstorm of focused pain. His head was empty of everything but his brother Tom’s voice as he became a profligate expenditure of answering energy and motion. Wrist straight. Tuck your thumb over, not under.

Tom, weaving and bobbing in insistent demonstration beside their enraged dad. The sound of Tom’s closed fist smacking his open palm added an erratic tempo to being bodily thrown out the front door. Bobby tripped down the steep front steps, falling in a heap of his own clothes, scattered haphazardly across the sidewalk. It was the last time he’d seen his family.

Growing up, he’d figured out teeth and nails worked where skirts held him back. Roberta—he hated that name, especially once he realized his dad hated him—became a spitting, hissing, feral beast who drew blood however and whenever they came after him for who he was.

(Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Escape Pod 1037: We Who Live in the Heart (Part 3 of 3)

We Who Live in the Heart originally appeared in Clarkesworld, May 1, 2017.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:02 — 51.4MB)

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Show Notes

Quantum Superposition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_superposition

Cloudward Ho

https://dimension20.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Cloudward,_Ho!

Void Merch

https://voidmerch.threadless.com/collections/escape-artists-inc-x-voidmerch-1

We Who Live in the Heart (Part 3 of 3)

By Kelly Robson

(…Continued from Part 2)

Once we’re in the equatorial stream, we ride the wind until we get into the right general area. Then we wipe off the appetite suppressant, and hunger sends us straight into the arms of the nearest electrical storm.

The urge to feed is a powerful motivator for most organisms. Mama chases all the algae she can find, and gobbles it double-time. For us on the inside, it’s like an old-style history doc. Everyone stays strapped in their hammocks and rides out the weather as we pitch around on the high seas.

I always enjoy the feeding frenzy; it gets the blood flowing.

I’d just settled to enjoy the wild ride when Ricci pinged me.

Two crews tried surgical interventions on the regenerated tissue. Let me know what you think, okay? Maybe now we can convince them to let you help. (Continue Reading…)