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Escape Pod 1024: Some Things I Should Probably Have Mentioned Earlier (LIVE) (Flashback)

This story was originally published in Mothership Zeta, May 2016, and republished in Escape Pod 650: Some Things I Probably Should Have Mentioned Earlier (LIVE)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:10 — 37.8MB)

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Show Notes

This is a live reading from Worldcon 2018.

Some Things I Should Probably Have Mentioned Earlier

by Laura Pearlman

Dear Kevin,

I’m sorry I waited so long to tell you this, but I really hate your vacation cabin. Everything about it creeps me out. The sound of crickets at night makes my skin crawl. They sound like impending doom: like a critical piece of equipment being worn down by friction, or a thousand tiny voices, hoarse from screaming, reduced to a raspy warning chant in some ancient language.

The crickets aren’t the only problem. The smell of so much wood in one place makes my eyes burn. And is it really necessary to throw pine cones into the fireplace? Are the burnt-wood fumes not overpowering enough? I used to lie awake at night fantasizing about finding whoever came up with that idea, grinding them up, feeding them to the crickets, and then gathering up the crickets, stuffing them into the fireplace, burning the cabin down, and watching from a safe distance. Upwind, of course.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1022: Butter Side Down (Part 2 of 2)

Butter Side Down originally appeared in Writers of the Future (volume 40) – May 2024.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:42 — 77.1MB)

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Butter Side Down (Part 2 of 2)

By Kal M

 

(…Continued from Part 1)

 

INTERVIEW LOG 10023869-01-03

SUBJECT: SMITH, JOSEPH (HUMAN)

Captain Crab said humans have special abilities? Oh, sure, that’s true. It’s called sweat. It’s this biological function humans have to regulate our body temperature. You’ve heard of it? Yeah. It makes us great endurance athletes. We can also do this nifty thing called going into the alarm stage. Basically, in an emergency, our brains turn off our pain receptors and divert all energy into survival. So we’re kind of weak and slow, normally, but under duress we get this big burst of power. Sometimes you hear stories of humans managing weeks without food, or lifting several times our body weight, or cutting off our own limbs to escape a trap. An injured human can keep going for ages. That’s why, when things get dangerous, you want a human around just in case. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1021: Butter Side Down (Part 1 of 2)

Butter Side Down originally appeared in Writers of the Future (volume 40) – May 2024.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:04 — 69.2MB)

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Butter Side Down (Part 1 of 2)

By Kal M

DEPARTMENT OF LAW ENFORCEMENT CASE FILE 10023869

UNITED INTERGALACTIC SPACE COUNCIL OF FREE SENTIENT PERSONS (PLAINTIFF) VS HUMAN JOSEPH SMITH (DEFENDANT)

CHARGE(S): THEFT OF FEDERAL PROPERTY, TREASON, BREACH OF CONTRACT, CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT MURDER, WARMONGERING, CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT GENOCIDE

STATUS: DECIDED

VERDICT: GUILTY

SENTENCE: DEATH.

(Transcript begins).

INTERVIEW LOG 10023869-01-01

SUBJECT: SMITH, JOSEPH (HUMAN)

STATUS: DEFENDANT

It’s not such a crazy situation when you think about it. All I did was fall in love with a toaster and cause an intergalactic political incident. I don’t see why it’s such a big deal. It could’ve happened to anyone, yeah? (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1015: Space Pirate Queen of the Ten Billion Utopias

“Space Pirate Queen of the Ten Billion Utopias” was first published in Lightspeed Magazine in November 2021

Copious amounts of casual strong language.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:53 — 56.6MB)

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Show Notes

This story was written in the summer of 2020, while the police were rioting and the atmosphere in the author’s hometown was composed of 40% teargas, 50% wildfire smoke, and 10% covid-19 aerosols.

Space Pirate Queen of the Ten Billion Utopias

by Elly Bangs

Ursa Major got right the fuck out of our universe on the very afternoon she learned there were other options. It was the lucky break of her life that she just happened to be there, a short sprint from one of those points where the alien aethertrain briefly punched through into our world: a multidimensional mechanical worm intersecting our reality as a rush of vaguely boxcar-like shapes strung between entry and exit portals, thirty-odd feet above one suburb or another, a cornfield, a strip mall, a stadium. Ursa left with neither a second thought, nor the thinnest inkling of return, nor the name and gender her parents had always tried to hang on her, nor anything else she couldn’t cram into a backpack and still have room for the purpose-bought spool of rope and grappling hook by which, after several tries, she finally snagged one of those boxcars (for want of any other earthly concept to describe them) and held on for dear life.

She had one regret. It was not that she hadn’t bothered to ask whether there was breathable air in whatever weird multidimensional space the train was heading into. It wasn’t longing for anyone or anything she was leaving behind in our world — not even me, and I don’t begrudge her that. No, her sole regret was that in the instant the hook caught and the rope went steel-taut and she careened away into the multiverse on the alien aethertrain’s relentless momentum, shock and reflex took over and denied her the presence of mind to flip this particular version of Earth the bird, once, hard.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 1010: Grifting the Zaxonite

Escape Pod 1010: Grifting the Zaxonite is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:44 — 24.8MB)

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Grifting the Zaxonite

by Cooper C. Wilms

Of all the cons in his little black book, Trevor McKay liked his current grift the best. Small-fish stunts like his Spanish Doubloon gambit were always foolproof and reliable for a week of food and booze, but there was no challenge to it. His Slot Machine Repairman scam raked in the dough and let him flex his inner thespian, but the security at the casinos would inevitably recognize his face. But The Stranded Zaxonite, as he had come to know it, made him proud to call himself, not just a con man, but a con artist.

He twisted his cigarette into the bar’s ashtray and raised his bourbon to his lips. His mark had to be a particular breed of man. Isolated. Desperate. Willing to believe. He scanned the room and took short, silent sips. He passed over the trio of soldiers in flirtatious conversation with a waitress, and ignored the man by the turquoise-inlaid jukebox that clearly owned the black Sportster out front; but there, in the back, with the thick Buddy Holly glasses and the beat-up porkpie, was the perfect target.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 989: Holding Patterns

Escape Pod 989: Holding Patterns is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:31 — 50.6MB)

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Holding Patterns

By Jennifer Hudak

I dream about the trees sometimes. I think we all do, even though none of my generation were alive when the forest was actually growing. We don’t dream about them the way they are now—stunted and dormant—but the way they were when the first colonists arrived here on Ariadne: pale smooth trunks growing straight and true, latticed with ropy, red-leafed vines that cradled the heavy fruit dangling off the branches. The canopy towering dozens of meters overhead, everything quiet and lush and smelling of damp. People say that back then, you could watch the trees growing in real time, budding branches and unfurling leaves. Even in the vids and holos they show us in school, the trees look so sturdy, so real—so permanent—that you could forgive someone for believing that they’d grow forever.

But the trees here want something we can’t give them—some murmur of information, an arboreal greeting, the plant equivalent of a rough hug and a shouted Hello! Good to see you! They’re waiting for something that will never happen.

Just like us. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 986: Lyra, From Many Angles

Escape Pod 986: Lyra, From Many Angles is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:24 — 69.7MB)

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Lyra, From Many Angles

by Hiron Ennes

When they came, it was in a craft the size of a golf ball. Smooth and round and perfectly seamless, it cut open the night sky in a pale streak. For a scant second it struck a fiery blemish across the moon’s face, catching the attention of forty-four children, twelve adults and a bewildered flock of geese before boring a meter-wide crater into a dry lakebed in northern Mexico.

The explosive technicians were the first to the scene. Then came counter-bioterrorism, lumbering in prophylactic spacesuits prophetic of their evolution into the Global Office of Extraterrestrial Affairs. Soon after came the Agencia Espacial Mexicana, the Northern Hemispheric Space Association, what remained of the UN, then a dozen other acronyms, most of which would dissolve before the year was out. The confused tangle of letters amassed around the crater, investigated, argued, agreed, backstabbed, and then finally excavated the little craft only to bury it in a bunker in Corpus Christi. There it stayed the worst kept secret on Earth for nearly fifty years.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 984: Imperial (Flashback Friday)

Imperial originally appeared in Monolith 6 and on Escape Pod episode 1 on May 12, 2005.

Rated R. Contains profanity, sexual content, politics, and sarcasm.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:05 — 62.4MB)

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Show Notes

Jonathan Sullivan: https://erincairns.com/ErinCairns/About/Press+Kit

Serah Eley: https://escapepod.org/people/serah-eley/

Adam Pracht: https://escapepod.org/people/adam-pracht/

Alasdair Stuart: https://pseudopod.org/people/alasdair-stuart/

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_and_Guildenstern_Are_Dead

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3FFfmWvyAk

Silent Album
https://www.isthiswhatwewant.com/

Hot Singles In Your Area
https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/hot-singles-in-your-area-jordan-shiveley/7704976?ean=9781800183414

Imperial

By Jonathon Sullivan

(Excerpt)

Dennis blinked through his dripping eyelashes at the irresistible abomination seated on the blue-green grass two meters in front of him. The Pig smiled her bio-engineered leopard-smile at him and kept her right hand prominently in contact with the stun-gun at her hip.

He stared, too choked with shock, desire and tepid river water to speak. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 965: T-Rex Tex Mex / Mother Death Learns a Trick

Escape Pod 965: T-Rex Tex Mex / Mother Death Learns a Trick is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:27 — 39.5MB)

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T-Rex Tex Mex

by Sarina Dorie

“Whoa! Hold on, partner!” the host of the party asked with his fake Texan accent. “What is that costume supposed to be?”

Of all the insufferable things, he was wearing a cowboy hat on his green, scaley head.

Dinosaurs did not wear hats.

Other costumed partygoers passed by the buffet table where I’d just placed my bag of candy, between a bowl of offensive kale chips and what smelled like mashed cauliflower. The humans at the Halloween barbeque apparently had no more intention of eating their offerings than I did, as they steered clear of the vegan display.

I couldn’t cook, which was why I had brought candy. Obviously.

“I’m a dinosaur,” I told my host. “Rarr.”

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 948: Thank You for Doing Business with the Xyb’lor Principality

Escape Pod 948: Thank You for Doing Business with the Xyb’lor Principality is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:15 — 33.8MB)

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Thank You for Doing Business with the Xyb’lor Principality

by Rachel Meresman

Jaxon was not a connoisseur of art, but he could identify a work’s salient features. And the salient features of these particular works were that they were valuable, lacking any obvious security system, and right there.

“Don’t even think about it,” Pen’s voice said pleasantly in his ear.

“I think the figurine on the left is solid karynite,” Jaxon murmured into his comm, low enough not to trigger the translation device on the table.

“You can’t steal it,” Pen said.

“You never want me to steal anything,” Jaxon said. “It really puts a damper on our relationship.”

“True,” Pen replied. “But stealing from the Xyb’lor would be suicidal. Which is why no one will think to look for us here.”

(Continue Reading…)

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