Twice means it’s not a fluke! We are thrilled to announce that Escape Pod is again a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine! Our excellent team’s work of fifteen years has led up to this recognition, and we’re so grateful to those who nominated us! We would be nothing without you, our authors […]
Alasdair Stuart is a professional enthusiast, pop culture analyst, and writer. He is a Hugo Finalist for Best Fan Writer, and a British Fantasy Society Best Non-fiction finalist for his weekly pop culture newsletter The Full Lid. His nonfiction can be found at numerous genre and pop culture venues, including regular columns at the Hugo Award-winning Ditch Diggers and […]
In 2020, Escape Pod published 21 original science fiction stories and 32 reprint stories. We also published a print anthology with 9 original stories, and 6 reprints. If you are nominating and/or voting for these awards, please consider our original publications for the Short Story category of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, among others. The […]
Shadowboxer (Excerpt) By Paul Di Filippo Generally speaking, I need only three minutes of concentrated attention to kill someone by staring at them. If I’m feeling under the weather, or my mind is preoccupied with other matters–you know how your mind can obsess about trivial things sometimes–it might take five minutes for my power to […]
The ’76 Goldwater Dime by John Medaille I started in 1962, that’s when I became a numismatist. You know what that is? It’s the study of… well, it’s not the study of anything. It’s coin collecting, is what it is. I was ten in 1962, and Christmas I got my first coin album. I didn’t […]
Immersion By Aliette de Bodard In the morning, you’re no longer quite sure who you are. You stand in front of the mirror–it shifts and trembles, reflecting only what you want to see–eyes that feel too wide, skin that feels too pale, an odd, distant smell wafting from the compartment’s ambient system that is neither […]
The Evening, the Morning and the Night by Octavia Butler [EDITOR: We don’t have the rights to post the text of this story.] Host Commentary by Alasdair Stuart Welcome to Escape Pod Summer School’s final month! The plan with these episodes has been to stack all our flashbacks in one place, and to use them […]
Them Ships by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Leonardo says that the Americans are going to fire some rockets and free us from the tyranny of the aliens and I say: who gives a shit. Lemme tell you something: It wasn’t super-awesome around here before the aliens. At least we get three meals every day now. I used […]
Repo By Aaron Gallagher It took concentration to perform delicate work in the cumbersome gloves of the suit. The rounded fingers were metal-tipped, and bulky. Elise painted the tips of her gloves with luminous paint for ease when working outside. The octopus found the wires and shorted the alarm. The device glowed green and she […]
Women of Our Occupation by Kameron Hurley [EDITOR: We don’t have the rights to post the text of this story.] Host Commentary by Alasdair Stuart Welcome back to Summer School, where for the next month we’re going to be using Flashback Fridays to explore some of the ways science fiction plays with its biggest toys. […]