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Escape Pod 920: Harvest the Stars

Escape Pod 920: Harvest the Stars is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:36 — 29.3MB)

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Show Notes

Theater of the Midnight SunThis episode is sponsored by The Theater of the Midnight Sun podcast, an anthology series of sci-fi/fantasy audio dramas where…

FUN ADVENTURE AWAITS! With wall-to-wall music and nifty stereophonic sound!

THRILL to your own little end of the world from something the size of a spaghetti noodle, in the harrowing tale “Uniform”!

HEAR Santa’s annual “State of the Workshop” address while dodging an army of partying, out-of-control elves in “Goodbye, Cruel World”!

CHUG back a Mountain Dew with a burnt-out Devil who’s bored, bored, bored with his job, in the story “Big Business”!

All this and MORE can be found at The Theater of the Midnight Sun! Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and podcast directories everywhere. Ad-free.

The Reviews Are In!

“A top notch production well worth your time! This troupe of foundlings will have you thrilled, chilled, and laughing out loud! Theater of the Midnight Sun is a serialized podcast anthology worth every minute.”

“Awesome podcast! I am truly in awe of how ‘out of the box’ these podcasts are. Completely love it!”

Harvest the Stars

By Mar Vincent

The summer Sif turned one, the starships were ripe on the vine.

They hulked in fields ringing the town where Tuja had always lived. A place far from big cities, where the starlight they fed on came pure and bright.

“The seeds start out like any seeds; small, unassuming. Until we fertilize them, tend them. Give them space to grow,” Tuja said to the infant on her lap, who must have been more focused on the fingers stuffed in her mouth than the sight of the field crew moving amongst hulls like insects scrambling over gourds. They started in the early afternoon to harvest with the dusk. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 919: Emotional Resonance

Escape Pod 919: Emotional Resonance is an Escape Pod original.

Cursing and warfare

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:17 — 41.8MB)

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Emotional Resonance

By V.M. Ayala

Arbor’s favorite part of a mission was always the first view of a planet. Even after seven hundred years of being a giant robot, it never got old. Green and blue clouds churned over purple seas, imposing storms that flashed red with threads of lightning. Beautiful.

And they were sent to clear it of all human life. Courtesy of ExoPLENTI, Inc.! Ugh, that slogan clung to their digital psyche no matter how hard they tried to scrub it from their databases.

At least this part, floating in orbit, wasn’t so bad. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 917: Challenges to Becoming a Pro Dragonracer in Apapa-Downtown

Escape Pod 917: Challenges to Becoming a Pro Dragonracer in Apapa-Downtown is an Escape Pod original.

Includes cursing and physical abuse.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:49 — 46.9MB)

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Challenges to Becoming a Pro Dragonracer in Apapa-Downtown

By Uchechukwu Nwaka

The gear is too expensive.

Honestly. There isn’t enough competition in the market. The Immersion® console alone costs an arm and a leg. Ọmọ. You’ll sweat to even get a Nigerian-used console on Jiji or at Computer Village for less than 200k. And that’s just the console. We’re not even talking about the vests or the mats.

Or the chair!

For real though. How else does somebody experience the saddle—on dragon-back—if they can’t experience the full flex of the dragon’s powerful muscles under their thighs? I’ve seen the streams of American pro dragon-racers in full Immersion® gear—visor, suit, chair! The rich kids here are enjoying, on God! (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 914: #buttonsinweirdplaces (Part 2 of 2)

#buttonsinweirdplaces originally appeared in Abyss & Apex (2020).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:49 — 40.3MB)

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#buttonsinweirdplaces (Part 2 of 2)

By Simon Kewin

(… Continued from Part 1)

The news the following morning was bad. An explosion in the middle of a market-square in Libya had been variously blamed upon a suicide-bomber and upon over-zealous security forces trying to control crowd trouble. The truth of it made little difference to the eighty who’d died, the hundreds left broken in the aftermath. Tensions had flared on the Mexican/American border after a young man fell to his death attempting to climb the wall to reach the USA. In Ireland, the names of old republican and nationalist groupings had been resurrected, wielded anew by figures wearing balaclavas and holding assault rifles.

Cho switched off the car radio. Sometimes it seemed the world was intent on tearing itself to pieces, and she needed to focus on the plan.

She’d travelled north to the Ma On Shan Country Park. Her predictions suggested there would be a button near the top of one of the remoter peaks. If it was there, it not only helped confirm her theory, it also meant she could experiment without any interruptions – something impossible part-way up a skyscraper. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 913: #buttonsinweirdplaces (Part 1 of 2)

#buttonsinweirdplaces originally appeared in Abyss & Apex (2020).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:14 — 37.4MB)

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#buttonsinweirdplaces (Part 1 of 2)

By Simon Kewin

The buttons started to appear on the last day of April, 2022.

A six-year-old boy from Nairobi, Jomi Mbenzi, was perhaps the first to spot one. Dawdling along behind his mother, her swaying yellow-orange dress and the bag of melons and paw-paws she carried, his attention was caught by the shiny button set in the stone of one of the city’s office buildings. He squatted to study it. Strange that it was so low-down, right near the ground. In his experience, switches – and all other interesting aspects of the adult world – were kept high-up, out of reach, but here was this button set right where he could get at it. He was sure it hadn’t been there an hour ago when they walked down the same road toward the fruit market. Ground-level was his domain and he noticed everything there, while the confusing, noisy grown-up world went on around him and above him.

There was no writing on or near the button, nothing to suggest what its purpose might be. Buttons often had words on them to say what they did, words he rarely understood. Or else, they had warnings nearby telling you not, under any circumstances, to press – a fact which always struck him as odd. Why have a button you couldn’t press? (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 911: Driftwood in the Sea of Time

Escape Pod 911: Driftwood in the Sea of Time is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:22 — 46.3MB)

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Driftwood in the Sea of Time

By Wendy Nikel

They’d warned us about the paradoxes, but humanity has always had a way of ignoring the things we don’t want to think about and disregarding the parts that don’t align with how we want the world to operate.

One minute, you’re a self-assured time traveler from the twenty-first century, flashing up and down along the timeline with your TimeBand™ on your wrist, and the next, you’re stuck here, bobbing among the driftwood. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 909: Murder or a Duck (Flashback Friday)

This story originally aired as an Escape Pod Original in Escape Pod 545 (October 2016)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:56 — 42.9MB)

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Murder or a Duck

By Beth Goder

George called out, “Mrs. Whitman, you have a visitor.”

Mrs. Whitman strode from her workroom, her white hair skipping out of its hairpins. She straightened her work skirt, massaged her bad knee, then hurried down the hall.

“George, what’s happened to the lamp with the blue shade?”

“To which lamp are you referring?” George smoothed down a cravat embroidered with tiny trombones. Improper attire for a butler, but George had never been entirely proper.

Mrs. Whitman examined the sitting room in further depth. The blue lamp was gone, as were the doilies, thank goodness. An elegant table sat between the armchair and green sofa, which was infused with the stuffy smell of potpourri. Behind the sofa hung The Roses of Wiltshire, a painting that Mrs. Whitman had never cared for, despite its lush purples and pinks and reds. And the ficus was there, too, of course.

Mrs. Whitman pulled out a battered notebook. George’s trombone cravat indicated she was in a timeline where he was courting Sonia. A good sign, indeed. Perhaps, after six hundred and two tries, she’d finally landed in a timeline where Mr. Whitman would return home safely.

Consulting her charts, she circled some continuities and crossed out others, referring often to an appendix at the back. The notebook was worn, its blue cover faded. And it was the twelfth one she’d had since starting the project. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 907: A Layer Thin As Breath

A Layer Thin As Breath originally appeared in Metaphorosis, July 2019.

Includes cursing and personal peril.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:05 — 70.6MB)

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A Layer Thin As Breath

By T. K. Rex

“Valley. Can you still hear me?”

Julian’s voice filtered through her dying radio. The Prince of Cats was a speck of light, dimming through the gold-grey film that, atom by atom, was devouring her helmet.

Valley tried to say something, anything. Failed.

Julian was sobbing on the other end. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so kzzzzzzchchchcffft-” and that was it. Her radio was gone.

“Oh god,” she breathed to herself, to no one. “Oh god,” I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. She sobbed once, twice, and then, with tears pooling in her eyes and the Prince of Cats invisible through the liquid, she found a pocket of calm, like stepping from a noisy bar onto a cool, quiet street.

Something brushed against her hand, and she cried out, startled. Her vision was still blurred by tears, and the thing dissolving her space suit was like an iridescent veil across the glass of her helmet, but through it all she could see the outline of her hand.

Not her glove.

Her hand. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 905: Six Ways to Get Past the Shadow Shogun’s Goons, and One Thing to Do When You Get There

Six Ways to Get Past the Shadow Shogun’s Goons, and One Thing to Do When You Get There was originally published in Galaxy’s Edge, April 2023.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:04 — 40.4MB)

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Six Ways to Get Past the Shadow Shogun’s Goons, and One Thing to Do When You Get There

By Stewart C. Baker

1. Dust ’em

“Listen, little lady,” the guy in front of the door is saying with a sneer. “There’s two types of swordsman…”

Chiyome’s already heard enough to peg his type, so she tunes out his braggadocio and pulls out a bag of nanite dust. She’d hoped to use her status as the Shingen warlord’s only child to bluff her way in to the Shadow Shogun’s presence, but the dust works too. She blows a handful in his face and he shrieks, drops his sword, then follows it to the floor, thrashing in the station’s artificial gravity.

Behind her, Rui whistles. “What’d you give him?” The other woman asks.

“You know how my father’s always talking about unsanctioned violence and other threats to order?”

“Sure, but I always figured he only says it because he’s the one doing the sanctioning. No offense.”

“None taken. The point is, every time this guy even thinks about violence for the next 4 hours, this will happen.”

“Not bad.”

“Not bad? It’ll take you longer to beat the next one with your naginata, I bet.”

“A bet, eh?” Rui cups Chiyome’s chin in one long, slender hand and tilts her head up. “Well and good, then. We’ll bet a favor.”

“A favor and a kiss.” (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 903: Bishop’s Opening (Part 4 of 4)

Bishop’s Opening was originally published in Clarkesworld Magazine, January 2022.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:02 — 65.1MB)

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Bishop’s Opening (Part 4 of 4)

By R.S.A. Garcia

The attendants set little bowls shaped like flower petals in front Sebastian and Olly. Steam drifted upward, redolent of fresh herbs and a hint of lime. Bits of white flesh speckled with green seasonings, and rolled dumplings floated in a golden broth.

“You must be hungry by now,” Sticky said. “I made this fresh earlier today. But of course, you know that. I dropped an entire pot–”

“This is mom’s fish broth, isn’t it?” Olly said in a low voice, staring at the delicate transparent bowl.

“Her favourite,” Sticky’s voice was gentle and Sebastian’s heart pinched at the melded love and loss in his expression. “The Bishop has a fondness for it as well. I make it often for him.”

“Why do you call him the Bishop? Isn’t Bishop his name?” Sebastian asked. (Continue Reading…)

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