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Escape Pod 1063: Modern Birdwatching

Escape Pod 1063: Modern Birdwatching is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:12 — 32.3MB)

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Show Notes

This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get 10% off your purchase.

Modern Birdwatching

by Jeff Soesbe

I used to like birdwatching, especially hummingbirds, until the feeder on my apartment balcony started getting one-star reviews on CHURP.

CHURP
By Birds. For Birds.
/c/feeders/USA/CA_NORTH/BAYAREA/SANBRUNO
Location: 750 Glenview Drive, #206. Balcony.
Feeder Count: One.
Size: Small.
Refill Frequency: Irregular.
Average Rating: 1.5

Comments
Hummy292: Booooring. Weak syrup. Total fly-by.
UWishUCouldFlyLikeMe: If I wanted bland fluoridated water reeking of a plastic tub, I’d go back to the city park.
BeTheBlur: Can a feeder be worse than awful? YESITCAN!!!

“Those birds are so wrong!” I declared one Friday night, after two bottles of Black Butte Porter. “My feeder has been unjustly attacked. Hummingbirds don’t come by anymore. My BirdTrack ranking is plummeting.”

“Birds have smarts, and a website,” Mister Friskers, my Seal Point Siamese, said, looking out the window from his cat tree. “They’re entitled to their opinions.”

“I liked birdwatching better before birds had opinions. Or smarts. And how did *those* birds get smart anyway?”

“Genetic engineering of pets for brains and voice. Just like me, buddy.”

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1062: Extrasolar Ghost Tours: Safety Questionable, Lizards Guaranteed

Escape Pod 1062: Extrasolar Ghost Tours: Safety Questionable, Lizards Guaranteed is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:07 — 62.4MB)

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Extrasolar Ghost Tours: Safety Questionable, Lizards Guaranteed

By Hans Ege Wenger

I am a hundred and seventy-nine years old when I commit my first betrayal. It is a small one, relevant only to the blue-flecked lizards on Alda Safiya’s southernmost desert landmass. Our thousand-solar-year plan will cool the planet by forty-two degrees Celsius, just below what the lizards can tolerate. They will die—not for about three hundred years, but die nonetheless.

It’s not really an oversight on my makers’ part. All terraforming projects involve the “unavoidable loss of indigenous biodiversity” according to the briefing document in my memory. I’ve already spirited three hundred breeding pairs into cold storage in my periphery, to be rehomed in zoos once the temperature stabilizes.

But I enjoy the lizards, as they are, in situ. They tickle my remote seismic sensors with their industrious warren-digging and synchronized, foot-pounding mating dances. And I, locked in a geostationary orbit over Alda Safiya, will never visit the zoo. (Continue Reading…)

Genres: ,

Escape Pod 1061: Pigeons and Robots and Pensive Worlds

Escape Pod 1061: Pigeons and Robots and Pensive Worlds is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:13 — 44.2MB)

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Show Notes

This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get 10% off your purchase.

Pigeons and Robots and Pensive Worlds

by Trae Hawkins

We found the pigeon and its robot companion on Planet 44.

Picture-perfect, this planet, large enough for our directors to build schools of nepotistic grandeur, their tiny, grubby-fingered silver spooners staking claim to the land.

We shuddered as our ship settled onto a grassy hill, that wary, dormant beast called hope stirring awake. Planet 44 was, perhaps, the paradise that came to us in our dreams.

It looked the part, what with the plush, mossy ground, the flora sprouting as if placed meticulously by some god building its dream terrarium. The ground even rumbled for a moment, as if in welcome.

But we were getting ahead of ourselves—there was protocol to be followed, and our directors were more than likely to deny this land to us, even if it was the one.

“How’s the pressure?”

“Atmospheric or societal?”

“This is the ninth time you’ve made that joke.”

“You’re no fun. Pressure’s fine, I guess. Readers are saying we’ve got a molten core, stable temperatures. Two equidistant stars that don’t seem to be in any rush to die. Probes are currently gathering more data.”

“There are trees! There, in the distance!”

“Planet S87 had trees.”

We all fell silent. We did not like to talk about Planet S87.

“Keep your helmets on, for now. Just in case.”

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1060: Soft Currency (Flashback Friday)

Soft Currency first appeared as an Escape Pod original in Episode 473 on December 24, 2014.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:45 — 55.1MB)

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Soft Currency

By Seth Gordon

When Cassie Levine was nine years old, her family lived in the center of Boston, Lyndon B. Johnson was President, and Cassie learned that her mother was a criminal.

The two of them sat in a parked car on Blue Hill Avenue, outside Ethel Glick’s grocery store. While Cassie ate an ice-cream sandwich, her mother smoked a cigarette. The sandwich, the cigarettes, and three bags of groceries had come from Mrs. Glick’s store. When the ice cream sandwich was half gone, Cassie asked, “Why did you change Dad’s money at Mrs. Glick’s? Why not go to the bank?”

Cassie’s mother had passed Mrs. Glick a twenty-dollar bill; the older woman had tucked the bill under the counter and handed back a stack of coupons; then, her mother had used some of those coupons to pay Mrs. Glick. Each twenty-coupon note showed a picture of Margaret Mitchell, holding a copy of Gone With the Wind. Cassie’s little brother called coupons “cootie money,” because only women and girls could use them. (Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 1059: A Little Freedom Makes Us Rebels

Escape Pod 1059: A Little Freedom Makes Us Rebels is an Escape Pod original.

Mild mentions of parental abuse

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:44 — 53.2MB)

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Show Notes

This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get 10% off your purchase.

A Little Freedom Makes Us Rebels

by Kathleen Schaefer

When our ship made landing after three centuries in space, we were ready for the inhospitable lands, the harsh nights, and the hard labor of terraforming a new planet. Aboard a generation ship, labor is familiar: every moment requires our attention. But here, nothing prepared us for the idleness. These miniature pockets of time that don’t demand our productivity are more alien than the silt-eating rubberfish in the streams of our new home. We survived six generations in space, but if anything ends us, it will be this false bounty of unfilled minutes.

(Continue Reading…)

Genres: ,

Escape Pod 1058: Riftwork (Part 2 of 2)

Riftwork originally appeared in Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls Who Invent and Imagine anthology in July 2025.

Includes tight, underground spaces.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:02 — 54.1MB)

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Riftwork (Part 2 of 2)

By C. W. Maurer

(…Continued from Part 1)

I glance back at Risa to find her backing away from the damaged support, wiping her fingers on her worksuit. She looks at me, blinking. “What do you mean, ‘water’?”

“The tunnel’s flooded. Flooding.” It must slope down from the turn, because the next 50 feet or so are submerged. “It’s not deep, but if it’s spread that far since Zef went through yesterday…”

She shudders and takes a few more steps away from the wooden support, wiping her hand again. “There must be another leak here. A small one. The wood is rotten through. That couldn’t have happened since yesterday.”

I stand at the corner, staring at the pool of water in front of me and the flat layer of gray-white sediment covering the bottom of it.

For that much sediment to have washed in overnight… (Continue Reading…)

Genres: ,

Escape Pod 1057: Riftwork (Part 1 of 2)

Riftwork originally appeared in Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls Who Invent and Imagine anthology in July 2025.

Includes tight, underground spaces.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:23 — 44.9MB)

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Riftwork (Part 1 of 2)

By C. W. Maurer

It’s no secret that the surfies think we’re crazy.

It’s no surprise either, when you think how thin the air is up there. With all the light and noise and space, I doubt a person could think two thoughts in a row without their attention going off-route.

How else could they misunderstand so much?

Risa told us once—during some late-night chatter in the girls’ residential node—that most surfies she grew up with think all us rifters work the periphery. Her own da thought she’d be setting up a bed in un-shored tunnels with a million tons of rock and concrete and steel and people overhead.

We apprentices won’t even see the periphery nodes until we’re journeymen.

And the journeymen might get to work in the periphery nodes, but it’s still math-practice and map-drafting and material-inventory duty under the eye of the masters for three more years.

Only the masters venture into the tunnels.

They’re the ones the surfies really mean, when they call us crazy. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1056: Woolly

“Woolly” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction (May/June 2025)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:09 — 60.6MB)

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Show Notes

This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get 10% off your purchase.

Woolly

by Carrie Vaughn

At five a.m., Joy got a call from the truck stop off the freeway east of the city. Wasn’t the first time.

“Did it get dumped? Did it get loose from a truck?” Joy asked.

“I don’t know,” the night manager answered. “But it’s digging around in the garbage and you’d better get here before Miles shows up and shoots it.” Miles was the day manager. He’d shot the last mini woolly they’d found digging in the garbage.

Fortunately, the morning rush hadn’t hit, so the expanse of asphalt around the rows of pumps was mostly empty. At the back of the building, a couple of truckers were standing aside, pointing their phones. That told her right where the commotion was. She retrieved a yardstick and a bag of cabbages from her van.

She heard him before she saw him, banging on steel, along with the squelch and thud of bags and boxes getting scattered. When she rounded the corner, she saw the mess for herself.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1055: Impossibility Crow (Flashback Friday)

Impossibility Crow was originally published as Escape Pod episode 557 on January 5, 2017.

Includes violence and swears.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:30 — 47.9MB)

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Impossibility Crow

By Remy Nakamura

The Kingdom Coffee Missionary Handbook tells Paulo that he should always put his guns away during a door approach. He’s heard this hundreds of times before, but the Handbook speaks with a voice of authority, deep like a luchador’s, strong like a drill sergeant’s, calm like his abuelito’s. It slides in just under his ARgog’s selectively amplified environmental audio. 450 bonus points if the contact is completed without violence, calculates the Handbook, 900 if there are no deaths. Each death harms the public image of the Kingdom, the Handbook tells him. Paulo nods agreement. Way better to spread the faith on the no-kill difficulty setting.

Still, Paulo is not stupid, so he pauses to load Rambo, his ancient and lovingly modded M4A1 Carbine, before slinging it across his back. Looking bad-ass is his favorite violence prevention technique. The Handbook says nothing about tear gas, and he decides not to mention the CS smoke grenade in his left pocket. His last couple of leads had ended with tense stand-offs. Goddess, yo creo, he prays silently. Help my unbelief. He fingers his mala of Robusto beans, sniffing hard to catch its fading aroma. (Continue Reading…)

Genres: ,

Escape Pod 1054: Takahata-fudo

Escape Pod 1054: Takahata-fudo is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:42 — 62.8MB)

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Show Notes

This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get 10% off your purchase.

Takahata-fudo

by Meridel Newton

If you walk far enough along the old Keio line rail tracks to the west of the crumbling city, you eventually reach a steep hillside covered in blue and purple flowers, host to a beautiful wreck of a temple. The flowers are always blooming, and the temple seems somehow arrested in time, caught between its former glory and the genteel decay that afflicts all human constructs. There’s a stream with clear flowing water and a perfect little retainer pond, and there I’d stopped to refill my water supply when I first met Satou Sekihito, the temple attendant.

It is, of course, unusual for me to encounter anyone at all this far from the city center, much less a lone old man with no weapon but a pushbroom he probably made himself. So I was maybe a little off my guard, which is the only reason he got as close as he did before I heard a soft footfall and whirled around, nearly dropping a precious canteen as I did so.

Picture this, if you will: an old man, thin, but taller than most younger men these days. No mask. He wears a grey robe that was once light blue, and hakama that hangs in tatters around his ankles. He’s wearing tabi, and oddly enough, that’s the detail that relaxes me. You can’t walk very far in tabi, or over any rough terrain at all. This old man probably doesn’t stray far from the temple grounds. He can’t be any threat.

(Continue Reading…)

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