Rated PG. Contains mature themes and wistfulness.
Referenced Sites:
2008 Hugo Awards
“First of May” by Jonathan Coulton (Not work-safe)
“Let me show you,” I said, pulling out my wallet. I took my Deirdre’s photo out and handed it to her.
“It’s uncanny,” she said, studying the picture. “We even sort of wear our hair the same way. When was this taken?”
“Forty-seven years ago.”
“Is she dead?”
I nodded.
2008 Hugo Nominee!
Rated PG. Contains implied violence and themes of death.
Referenced Sites:
2008 Hugo Awards
WisCon May 23-26, Madison, WI
Closing Music: “The Fall” by Red Hunter.
They would have called her salvage, if there were anyone left to salvage her. But she was the last of the war machines, a three-legged oblate teardrop as big as a main battle tank, two big grabs and one fine manipulator folded like a spider’s palps beneath the turreted head that finished her pointed end, her polyceramic armor spiderwebbed like shatterproof glass. Unhelmed by her remote masters, she limped along the beach, dragging one fused limb. She was nearly derelict.
The beach was where she met Belvedere.
Rated PG. Contains heavy racial and political themes.
Referenced Sites:
Decoder Ring Theatre
We don’t see a lot of mixed couples around here, and we’re not like some of the other states in the Confederate United Republic. It’s not like they’re gonna get killed or lynched or nothing. But it’s tough just the same. And although it’s weird enough that they’re an interracial couple, it seems to me that they’re arguing about something bigger than merely coming into this café.
I don’t know any Blacks. You got to go to Laramie, or Cheyenne to see them. But I watch Cosby when it’s on. The Confederacy ain’t as bad as the folks in Columbia might think. Sure everyone’s segregated, but it’s all equal and the Platte County school district is pretty good about African-American History Month.
Rated PG. Contains moderate violence.
Audible.com Promotion!
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Referenced Sites:
PodCastle
Closing music: “I Crush Everything” by Jonathan Coulton.
I spent the longest five weeks of my life in that tank and in a deeper pool, healing, testing, practicing. My feet and toes had been augmented much like my hands, my thighs shortened to maximize the available muscle. I was damned quick. Relearning construction techniques with my new fingers was sometimes frustrating, yet my progress was real and those periods of solitary labor became important to me.
At the surface, in the shallows, doctors poked and prodded and put me through redundant tortures. I had been warned that the study of my new body would be extensive and did my best not to fear or hate them, but I’d never imagined such intense scrutiny. During my years as a SEAL, I had been like a bug under a microscope, constantly evaluated and scored. Here I was the microscope, my body the only lens through which they could measure their work. Stenstrom tried to be my buddy, as he had always tried, joking and asking what I’d do with the money, yet his possessiveness was obvious. “We’ll be famous,” he said. “We’ll change the world.”
I wasn’t a slave or a pet, exactly, but I was anxious to get started. To get away from them.
Rated PG. Parental guidance suggested for violence and ennui.
Audible.com Promotion!
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Referenced Sites:
Jared Axelrod’s Commissions
We are somewhere among the tallest mountains of the world. When we arrived, I was locked away in a cargo hold, so I don’t know exactly where. Our home is a small, drafty castle and a separate laboratory. Dr. Octavio had the locals construct the lab before he tested the new death ray on their village. There’s very little left there. In my little bit of spare time, I try to bury the bodies and collect anything useful to the doctor’s experiment.
My primary duties consist of keeping the castle’s furnace running and clearing the never-ending snow from the path between the two buildings. Sometimes, it falls too fast for my slow treads and shovel attachment to keep up with and I find myself half-buried in the snow. It is horrible on my gears when this happens, but I use heavyweight oil now and it helps.
It is one of the few benefits of my metal frame that I appreciate. Life in this contraption is like being wrapped in swaddling clothes. I wonder if I would feel anything if my casing caught on fire? I need to ask the doctor when he isn’t in one of his moods.
Referenced Sites:
Nawashi, a podcast novel by Graydancer
Closing music: “Blue Genes” by George Hrab
Gruen was on the sixty-first master, and while his wisdom had grown steadily, he had worn very little. He was incredibly well-preserved–the palms of his three-fingered hands still sported the deep, swirling ridges that had worn to nothing in most people before they’d lived thirty years. Indeed, all of the myriad folds and ridges in his thick maroon skin were for the most part intact. His eyes were still housed in tight sockets, surrounded by thickly-ridged cheeks.
Besides the feet, the eyes were the greatest point of weakness for those who aspired to read the works of the masters. Ceaseless up-and-down eye movement caused the sockets to wear out, and eventually the reader’s eyes fell out. At that point they were forced to trace the carved words with their fingers. Friction quickly took its toll on the hands; readers rarely made it through one master’s teachings this way before their hands were ground to the wrist, and they were finished.
Closing Music: “Chiron Beta Prime” by Jonathan Coulton.
They come to a cloud of silver mist, and there Santa finds a little boy made of molten silver with liquid silver eyes and sweeping silver delta wings. His wrists are ringed with missile launchers, and a rounded cone emerges from a cavity in his chest. Once there were many silver boys, fleets of them, protecting the outermost parts of inhabited space against things that came from outside inhabited space. But now, there is only the silver boy.
“You, sir,” the silver boy says, “are a tiresome consciousness cluster. Your binary value system remains as laughable as it is irrelevant. How you manage to remain cohesive is beyond me.”
“My value system is hardly binary,” Santa says. “In between naughty and nice I’ve made room for you: grumpy but fundamentally sound. Do you want a toy or not?”
Referenced sites:
Heifer International
Podsafe Music Network (Terms of Use)
Closing Music: “O Come All Ye Faithful,” performed by Twisted Sister
Gloria blinked. “Why do the people in Cleveland love Christmas more than anywhere else?”
Toby grinned and spread his hands on the bar, unadorned fingers splayed. He stared at them, “I didn’t say Cleveland’s people loved Christmas. I said Cleveland.”
“And you’re saying Charlotte doesn’t like Christmas?”
Toby took a deep breath and let it out. “Oh, no. I’m saying Charlotte flat out hates Christmas.”
Gloria kept her voice level, the best thing to do when dealing with a crazy person. “And why do you think this?”
“I’m an urban shaman. A citytalker. I’m here to talk to Charlotte to find out why it’s unhappy.”
The first time I met Stu, I was just a kid and there weren’t any lights hovering over his house. The last time I saw him, when I was grown and we both knew what life could be if you let it, there were. That’s the best way to start, I guess.
That first time, our dad piled us into our old Chevy wagon–the kind you took to drive-in movies with sheets on the seats and your kids in pajamas–and drove us to the north county, saying only, “Stu is an inventor. He’ll never see any royalties from his inventions because the Navy owns them, but he’s an inventor, the kind that made America great.”
How had he first met Stu? How does anyone in the Navy get to know a wide-eyed, crazy-haired inventor who wasn’t at all “strack,” who shouldn’t have been anywhere near the military but somehow was? On a Secret Project, of course. My brother and I–who were 10 and 6 at the time–were sure of it. Our dad and Stu had to be working on a Secret Project together.
Referenced Sites:
SFF Audio
“We’re all committing a crime,” Audra said, leaning back and closing her eyes. “That’s part of what we’re paying you for.”
Technically, she was right. Extreme Safaris took their clients to unsanctioned or dangerous worlds, trips which could result in serious fines or, in Bryer’s case, the loss of his ship’s clearance for those areas. So far, Bryer had managed to avoid the fines simply by having his clients sign a document that said they had insisted on a trip to the unsanctioned area. He had never had his clearance removed, but he figured it wouldn’t be a serious problem. He could always charter another ship.
“You shot a sentient being,” he said. “You didn’t pay for that right.”
“Oh?” She tilted her head toward him. “Is there a higher fee for that?”