Archive for Podcasts

Escape Pod 293: A Small Matter, Really

Escape Pod 293: A Small Matter, Really is an Escape Pod original.

Rated PG for violence

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:57 — 26.6MB)

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A Small Matter, Really

By Monte Cook

Only the Catholic Church of Osirus would have enough money to afford not one, but two black holes. Standing within the majestic narthex, Maria McNaki imagined the vibration of complex machinery under her feet, despite the fact that the nanosensors laced into her flesh revealed nothing other than the passing of the people in the crowd and the chanting coming from deeper within the cathedral.

The stone walls of the chamber slowly flowed with a liquid relief of gothic circuitry and religious hieroglyphic animations. The glyph depicting Setan as he tore the crucified Osirus-Christ into tiny fragments malfunctioned and remained static. Just as well. The petitioners around her made carefully devout hand signs over their hearts as they faced the ankh crucifix over the door into the sanctuary.

Religion was back in fashion this season.

Three identical priests stood next to the holy water fonts, welcoming the incoming congregation. Their white collars and black robes stood starched-still. Geneticists form-shaped all Catholic-Osirus priests into the gentle, fatherly form selected by church PR, but these three were special. The bright eyes and the shining hair indicated Aesthicel, the most expensive genengineering firm in the Earth system. This parish liked to spend money.

Perfect. That most likely meant that they were interested in obtaining more.

(Continue Reading…)

Genres: ,

Escape Pod 292: In the Water

Originally appearing in Fictitious Force.

Rated PG

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:13 — 29.6MB)

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In the Water

By Katherine Mankiller

Yvonne looked up from her monitor, the beads in her cornrows clattering as Roger walked into her office.

Roger sat in the dark wooden chair opposite her desk. “Weren’t you assigned Alice van Buuren?”

“Oh, no you don’t,” Yvonne said. “You can’t have her.” Yvonne hadn’t been assigned Alice; she’d requested her. Alice was probably the only murder victim’s wife she would ever meet. They hadn’t even put the murder in the papers. Maybe they thought there’d be a panic.

“Please,” Roger said. “I’m just trying to save you some trouble. I’ve already spoken to her, and…”

Yvonne crossed her arms and glared. “Wouldn’t you raise hell if I talked to one of your patients behind your back?”

“She’s refusing modern therapy. What are you going to do, use the old-fashioned techniques your grandmother used?”

Roger had a lot of nerve mentioning Grandma. Yvonne glanced at the photo on the corner of her desk. Grandma Jackson had been a big woman, with braids down to her hips and skin like chocolate. Grandma Jackson smiled back at the camera, all reassuring good nature.

Roger said, “I think we should just wipe her and have done with it.”

“Too bad she’s not your patient,” Yvonne said.

(Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 291: Shannon’s Law

Originally appearing in Welcome to Bordertown (Available May 24!) Read it at Tor.com.

Rated PG: language

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:16:25 — 70.1MB)

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Shannon’s Law

By Cory Doctorow

When the Way to Bordertown closed, I was only four years old, and I was more interested in peeling the skin off my Tickle Me Elmo to expose the robot lurking inside his furry pelt than I was in networking or even plumbing the unknowable mysteries of Elfland. But a lot can change in thirteen years.

When the Way opened again, the day I turned seventeen, I didn’t hesitate. I packed everything I could carry—every scratched phone, every half-assembled laptop, every stick of memory, and every Game Boy I could fit in a duffel bag. I hit the bank with my passport and my ATM card and demanded that they turn over my savings to me, without calling my parents or any other ridiculous delay. They didn’t like it, but “It’s my money, now hand it over” is like a spell for bending bankers to your will.

Land rushes. Know about ’em? There’s some piece of land that was off-limits, and the government announces that it’s going to open it up—all you need to do is rush over to it when the cannon goes off, and whatever you can stake out is yours. Used to be that land rushes came along any time the United States decided to break a promise to some Indians and take away their land, and a hundred thousand white men would wait at the starting line to stampede into the “empty lands” and take it over. But more recently, the land rushes have been virtual: The Internet opens up, and whoever gets there first gets to grab all the good stuff. The land rushers in the early days of the Net had the dumbest ideas: online pet food, virtual-reality helmets, Internet-enabled candy delivery services. But they got some major money while the rush was on, before Joe Investor figured out how to tell a good idea from a redonkulous one.

The Soundproof Escape Pod #7

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ePub version here.

Hello All—

We have listeners all over, and some of them will be heading into the winter months, but where I am spring has finally shook off the claws of winter.

But in the slice of science fiction fandom we all inhabit, spring is really notable for the return of Doctor Who to the airwaves, and thankfully for US fans, it is far closer to simultaneous transmission now that it has been the last few seasons. Physical distance matters less and less for communication, which in practice means that it is incredibly annoying to be in the US and looking at a twitter stream full of UK tweets about what the Doctor’s been on about that week. Spoilers suck (sweetie).

And speaking of the UK, we were very lucky and happy to run an interview with Lauren Beukes, who won this year’s Arthur C. Clarke award for her novel Zoo City. It’s available in an audio episode on our website, along with a (still audio) excerpt from the  book.

This month we were happy to bring you six stories, three of them flash. We ran three of the four honorable mentions from our flash contest fiction, which we should have done well before this. The forth and the three outright winners of the contest should be following in fairly close order.

We also brought you Abby Goldsmith’s A Taste Of Time, LaShawn Wanak’s Future Perfect, and Larry Hodges’ Tom the Universe. If you didn’t already listen to the on the ‘cast, I implore you to flick, scroll, click, or otherwise navigate several pages further in this to read them.

Until next month,

—Bill

Bill Peters

Assistant Editor

Contents:

Editor’s Note —3—

EP287: A Taste of Time By Abby Goldsmith —4—

Speculative Fiction And Engagement Marketing By Josh Roseman —13—

EP288: Future Perfect By LaShawn M. Wanak —15—

Book Review:God’s War By Sarah Frost —22—

EP290: Tom The Universe By Larry Hodges —24—

Genres:

Escape Pod 290: Tom the Universe

Escape Pod 290: Tom the Universe is an Escape Pod original.

Rated PG-13: sexual situations

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:17 — 23.6MB)

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Tom the Universe

By Larry Hodges

I permeate this universe, which I’ve named Tom, and guard against its destruction. If someone had done that for the universe I came from, then Mary, my sweet Mary, would still be alive, and I wouldn’t have killed her and everyone else when I accidentally destroyed that universe.

And now I’m on the verge of destroying much more.

My name is also Tom. I was an undergrad in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore that January in 2040 when I made the discovery that doomed us all. My field of study was cognitive science, the study of human consciousness. What makes us aware of ourselves? Is it just the biomechanical workings of the brain, or something else?

Sherlock Holmes said, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” I spent countless hours in the lab eliminating the impossible, and there didn’t seem to be anything left, improbable or not. The interconnectivity required for human consciousness to exist was just too many levels beyond what was possible. By all rights, we should all be unconscious blobs of matter mechanically going about our business as directed by electronic impulses from the brain, with no more consciousness than a calculator. I suffered brain cramps in the lab trying to figure out what improbables were left.

(Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod Special Episode- The Arthur C. Clarke Award Winner!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:43 — 25.5MB)

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You heard it here first, folks, we have an exclusive interview and book excerpt from this year’s Arthur C. Clarke award winner, Lauren Beukes, author of Zoo City (Angry Robot Books)!

Zoo City explores a present day, but alternate, Johannesburg, and follows the story of Zinzi December, one of the animalled – people who are psychically bonded with animals due to crimes they have committed in the past. Zinzi has a talent for finding lost things, but when she is asked to take on a missing persons case, her life becomes increasingly more complicated and she discovers that beneath the seedy underbelly of Zoo City, things can – and do – get a lot worse.

Rated PG-13 for talk of sex workers and street violence.

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

Genres:

Escape Pod 289: Flash Contest Honorable Mentions

Escape Pod 289: Flash Contest Honorable Mentions is an Escape Pod original.

Rated PG for some naughty language in Many Mistakes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:30 — 10.1MB)

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Show Notes

This episode has three of the honorable mentions from the flash contest we held on our forums.

Captain Max Stone versus DESTRUCTOBOT!

By Angela Lee

Read by: Joshua McNichols

When last we left our heroes, Captain Max Stone and his brother Billy had just navigated Hyperion’s perilous asteroid field and battled their way into the fortified base of the villainous robot Destructobot. The dastardly robot’s latest scheme is the deadliest yet – he intends to destroy the Earth using a high-powered negabomb! Will Max stop Destructobot in time? Or will the earth be vaporized?

 

Many Mistakes, All Out of Order

By M. C. Wagner

Read by: Wilson Fowlie

The first mistake was in our thinking they were ghosts. In our defense, the tradition of vanishing, translucent figures wailing in the night might’ve influenced us.

 

Mr. Omega

By Arnold Gardner

Read By: Marshall Latham

Mr. Omega checked the time on his trans-dimensional pocket watch and stared out the taxi’s rain pelted window. Four minutes to midnight. Four minutes to the culmination of his life’s work.

Genres:

Escape Pod 288: Future Perfect

Originally published in Ideomancer

Rated R: language, adult situations

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:16 — 19.5MB)

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Future Perfect

By LaShawn M. Wanak

I saw you at a party once. You stood by the bookshelf, reading a tattered volume on Proust. You wore an orange and yellow XTC shirt beneath brown flannel. I bumped your elbow by accident and you looked up, your eyes startling green.

I smiled and said, “Hi. I’m Nina.”

“Hi. Eric.”

I trailed behind you for the rest of the party. You introduced me to your friends and I laughed at their jokes. Twice, our sleeves brushed against each other.

Around two in the morning, you left with your friends. An hour later, I also left. I crossed the empty campus, humming under my breath, wondering if I’d ever see you again.

The watch on my arm beeped.

“This experiment will measure how small changes occurring before a certain event affect its outcome positively and negatively.”

The chair is her creation. She bought the frame on impulse at a medical supply shop. The conical helmet, perforated with slender tubes, fits on top. Whenever she maneuvers her head beneath it, she thinks of the hair dryers at her mother’s beauty salon. All those bulky astronaut bonnets lined in perfect rows, vibrating air molecules to a feverish pitch. She likes this scientific homage to her mother extracting time from thin air.

“Recording of the control event complete. Setting a change in a condition set slightly in the past. The goal of this first jump is to see if this will change the outcome of the event to a more positive circumstance.”

She types on the laptop built into the armrest, then glances at the elaborate flowchart tacked upon the far wall of the laboratory. Written in
her own hand, neat and precise, equations and sums branch and connect like a roadmap of a probability highway.

She wonders which formula will have his lips pressing against hers.

“Test #1. Begin.” (Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Escape Pod 287: A Taste of Time

Originally published in Deep Magic, May 2004

Rated PG: references to infidelity

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:05 — 22.8MB)

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Show Notes

Show Notes:

  • No feedback this week because of site issues!
  • Next week… don’t drink the water.

A Taste of Time

By Abby Goldsmith

1.

On the night she turned twenty-nine, Jane sat on her narrow bed, watching TV and drinking alone. She’d gone through a bottle of wine and was mostly through a second bottle. Tomorrow morning would be painful.

Or she could stop worrying about tomorrow. The ibuprofen in her cabinet kept popping into her mind. Jane wasn’t sure if all those pills chased by alcohol would be enough to end her life, but the idea of looking up how to commit suicide online seemed just too pathetic.

The front door of her tiny apartment creaked open.

Jane leaned forward, peering through her bedroom doorway. A black wine bottle stood on the floor, with a placard dangling from its silver ribbon.

Her gaze immediately went to the deadbolt. It was in place, as she’d left it.

Jane shut the TV off and listened for noises from the hallway. All she heard were the sounds of Boston traffic outside. Several weeks ago, after she’d come home to find her boyfriend screwing a fat chick on her couch, she’d had the locks changed. No one could have gotten in.

Yet the bottle sat mysteriously on the wooden floor.

At last, Jane crossed her apartment, checking every shadow for an intruder.

She picked up the bottle. The placard had gilded letters, making it a potentially expensive gift.

Tabula Rasa
Warning: There Is No Return

Jane flipped the placard over twice, but nothing else was written on it.

She listened, alert for any noise. Mystery had never been much a part of her adult life, and it gave her a strangely excited feeling. If the warning label meant something like poison, it seemed like a more dignified way to go than pills and alcohol.

Her reflection on the black surface of the bottle was disturbingly clear. There she was: Plain Jane, a frumpy woman with a double-chin and acne scars.

She unscrewed the cap and popped the foil underneath. A stringent smell wafted up, making her wrinkle her nose and salivate at the same time.

“Happy birthday, Jane,” she told herself, and swallowed a mouthful. (Continue Reading…)

The Soundproof Escape Pod #6

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The ePub version can be found here.

Welcome to April! —

March was a sad month worldwide, and I, frankly, am looking forward to leaving winter behind. (Yeah, I know March starts spring in the Northern Hemisphere, but the damp and dank weather we’ve been having the US South makes me feel more like winter than January did.)

First, the world was shocked by the disasters in Japan, earthquake, tsunami, and the continuing threat of radiation from their nuclear plant.

Then fantasy lost one of its masters with the death of Diana Wynne Jones. Any fan or writer of fantasy needs to read her Tough Guide to Fantasyland, and, well, any of her other books. Thirdly…

Well, hell, isn’t that enough?

Many people find themselves feeling lost and useless when it comes to disasters, especially if they’re happening far away. Luckily, some very quick and innovative SFF fans and professionals (including Pseudopod’s own Alasdair Stuart) got together to create Genre for Japan ( http://genreforjapan.wordpress.com/ ), an auction featuring signed books from authors, collections of books from publishers (like Tor and Angry Robot), and editing or critique services from agents and editors. All proceeds go to the Japan Tsunami Appeal run by the British Red Cross. (They know what they’re doing.) Give generously and you can get some awesome prizes.

We hope you’re enjoying the monthly Soundproof PDFs.

We have had gotten a couple of questions asking why some of our audio stories don’t get printed on the site or in the Soundproof. The answer is simple: we don’t have the rights.

We buy the audio and ebook rights to all stories we are able to, but sometimes we are only able to get the audio rights, so those stories are in our audio feed. As we move forward we will do everything we can to get both ebook and audio rights.

Here’s to a better month.

——Mur

Mur Lafferty

Editor

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