Author Archive

Escape Pod 205: Requiem in D-minor (for prions, whale and burning bush)

First appeared in Hub #24.

Rated PG-13 for violence and mad cow disease.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:25 — 18.2MB)

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Requiem in D-minor (for prions, whale and burning bush)

By Ian McHugh

Kevin switched the audio over to the projector. The lecture hall was filled with outdoor noises. Wind hummed softly over the microphone, cattle lowed nearby, a truck accelerated in the distance.

A roan steer staggered around a concreted yard, its mute distress accompanied by clattering hooves and the fleshy slap of its thigh striking the ground when it fell. A new sound was introduced – incongruous, but familiar to Kevin’s audience.

Whale song.

Gradually, the cow’s shaking stilled, until it could stand securely. Its muscles continued to tremble, but not enough to upset its equilibrium while it listened.

Escape Pod 204: The Fifth Zhi

First appeared in Interzone

Rated PG-13 for cloning and some adult themes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:33 — 25.1MB)

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The Fifth Zhi

By Mercurio D. Rivera

Zhi 4’s scream pierces the Siberian night.

My spiked metal boots crunch through the snow as I race towards him, with Zhi 6 running at my side. The nanochip in my brainstem clicks on, and I reach out with my mind, but I can’t sense even a trace of Zhi 4. A few seconds earlier his form had been outlined by the dark turquoise glow of the force field.

We stop twenty feet short of the field’s perimeter. Beyond it, the hazy silhouette of the colossal Stalk looms, its millions of cilia undulating.

My bodysuit hums as it transmits data back to Xiang Xu Base, situated behind the Rusanov ice cap half a mile away.

My pulse flutters in anticipation and I take a deep breath to try to rein in my excitement. I — like all Zhis — have been designed with an insatiable curiosity about the Stalk’s origins and vulnerabilities. Knowing I’ve been bred to feel this way doesn’t make me feel it any less. Where did the Stalk come from? Why is it here? How can it thrive in these temperatures? I see the same questions reflected in Zhi 6’s expression.

Escape Pod 203: The Legend of St. Ignatz

First appeared in Ideomancer

Rated R for religious themes, carousing, and transubstantiation of a different sort.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:39 — 40.0MB)

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Show Notes

Closing song, Jesus Clones

The Legend of St. Ignatz

By Samantha Henderson

“You’re a disgrace to your calling and your species.” The Cardinal’s words were at odds with the verging-on-seductive voice of the translator embedded in the Anturean’s Chlor-tank. From beneath lowered lashes Ignatz O’Reilly, D.D. Inter-Species, watched his superior’s mouth-tendrils vibrate, a gesture he knew denoted extreme lust or mounting rage.

Lust was out of the question, he supposed.

“Falling-down drunk at Mass. Passing out in Confession. And don’t think your little black-market dealings go unnoticed.” The Cardinal’s posterior spines flushed blue. Ignatz averted his eyes even further, studying the faint brown lines crisscrossing each other on a slate floor the color of dried blood. The mutant squid bastard really was mad this time.

“If I might be permitted to explain, Your Eminence…” Ignatz’s tongue tasted like last night’s liquor. “I indulge for purely medicinal reasons…a slight asthmatic condition…any allegations that I would engage in illegal…”

Genres:

Escape Pod 202: Will You Be an Astronaut?

First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Rated PG-13. Deceptively G…

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:12 — 19.4MB)

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Will You Be an Astronaut?

By Greg van Eekhout

Astronauts are people who ride rockets into space.  They must train for a very long time before they go.  Astronauts must be brave and smart.

Will you be an astronaut?

The biggest rocket ever was the Saturn V.  On the launch pad it was taller than a 30-story building.  Today’s rockets are smaller and lighter.  Today’s rockets can be launched more than once.  They have wings and can come back to earth and land like airplanes.

When a rocket launches, it’s like an earthquake. The ground is shaking! There is flame and smoke. It’s like an explosion!

Antonio is strapped into his seat.  He is about to ride to a space station.  Because there is no air in space, Antonio must wear a space suit.  In the suit, Antonio can breathe and talk over radio.  He wears a helmet with a special faceplate that protects him from the sun.  The fingers of his gloves have tiny claws that help him work with small objects.

What’s all that noise? It must be a rocket! Astronauts are traveling to space!

5-4-3-2-1!  Lift off!

Escape Pod 201: Harry The Crow

First appeared in Aeon Speculative Fiction.

Rated R: contains violence, strong language, and counting coup.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:37 — 35.4MB)

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Show Notes

Editors Note: As you may have noticed, episode 201 is appearing before Episode 200.  We’re still working out the kinks of an agreement with the mysterious agent forces mentioned in an earlier update, but we should have that episode for you soon, and we think it’ll be worth the wait.  Rather than keep you waiting any longer, we’re bringing you 201 out of sequence.

Harry The Crow

By John Kratman

“A construct is no Crow!” Tommy shouted, the ridiculous war bonnet he’d worn to my father’s funeral slipping off his head. He pushed it back with an angry swipe of his hand, glaring at the gathered members of the tribe, daring them to laugh.

“Harry can do everything a man can do,” I said. There were many people in the lodge that I recognized, but there were many more, ghosts of my past, who should have been there and were not. “He can hunt, write poetry, sing a song. He can think and he can feel. I taught him how to shoot and how to track, how to read and how to write. No matter that he sprang from my brain instead of my manhood. He is my son, the only one this old man will ever have. He is a Crow.”

“What can a machine know of tradition and honor?” Tommy asked, his lined face veiled in the shadows cast by the fire. He drew a pipe from his pocket and packed it with angry jabs of his age-spotted hand.

Escape Pod 199: Elvis in the Attic

First appeared in SCIFICTION.

Rated PG: contains Elvii.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:30 — 21.0MB)

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Elvis in the Attic

By Catherine M. Morrison

We had an Elvis in the attic.  Again.

Echoing in the ducts, his voice woke me around 2 A.M.  I hopped from bed and headed for the attic–they always it up there.  A Vegas Elvis stood by a rack of old clothes singing “Blue Christmas” to them.

As I edged in the door, he segued to “Jingle Bell Rock.”  He waved me down to the front of his meager audience, conferring a special favor.  I settled cross-legged on the floor and enjoyed his tunes.

For months there has been an Elvis infestation all over town, but this was the first Vegas Elvis we’d got.  He worked the room hard, sweat dripping down the side of his forehead.  He was dressed in his trademark white jumpsuit with the spangles and beads and the big white cape he flourished dramatically.  The acoustics up here sucked, but even a big fat Elvis could rock the house.

Escape Pod 198: N-words

First appeared in Seeds of Change, 2008.

Rated PG-13. Contains racism and genetic engineering.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:33 — 38.1MB)

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N-words

By Ted Kosmatka

They came from test tubes. They came pale as ghosts with eyes as blue-white as glacier ice. They came first out of Korea.

I try to picture David’s face in my head, but I can’t. They’ve told me this is temporary—a kind of shock that happens sometimes when you’ve seen a person die that way. Although I try to picture David’s face, it’s only his pale eyes I can see.

My sister squeezes my hand in the back of the limo. “It’s almost over,” she says. Up the road, against the long, wrought iron railing, the protestors grow excited as our procession approaches. They’re standing in the snow on both sides of the cemetery gates, men and women wearing hats and gloves and looks of righteous indignation, carrying signs I refuse to read.

Escape Pod 197: From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled…

First appeared in Asimov’s Feb 2008

Rated PG. Contains the destruction of cities, a lack of trust, and sentient suits.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:00 — 40.5MB)

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From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled…

By Michael Swanwick

Imagine a cross between Byzantium and a termite mound. Imagine a jeweled mountain, slender as an icicle, rising out of the steam jungles and disappearing into the dazzling pearl-grey skies of Gehenna. Imagine that Gaudí—he of the Segrada Familia and other biomorphic architectural whimsies—had been commissioned by a nightmare race of giant black millipedes to recreate Barcelona at the height of its glory, along with touches of the Forbidden City in the eighteenth century and Tokyo in the twenty-second, all within a single miles-high structure. Hold every bit of that in your mind at once, multiply by a thousand, and you’ve got only the faintest ghost of a notion of the splendor that was Babel.

Now imagine being inside Babel when it fell.

Genres:

Escape Pod 196: Evil Robot Monkey

First appeared in the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, vol. 2 edited by George Mann.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:10 — 13.8MB)

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Show Notes

Special closing monkey music by George Hrab

Evil Robot Monkey

By Mary Robinette Kowal

Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.

Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like feces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.

Escape Pod Flash: A Preference for Silence

Rated R. Contains sexual situations and noisy people.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:01 — 4.1MB)

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A Preference for Silence

By Lucy A. Snyder

Veronica was a spaceworthy lass with a definite preference for silence and a sensitivity to detail. She’d never lost her tea in zero gee and had always been the first to note when the coffee maker needed cleaning or when the fluorescent lights would flick-flicker in signal of the bulbs’ impending death.

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