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Escape Pod 876: Like Stars Daring to Shine

Like Stars Daring to Shine was first published by Fireside Magazine, July 2022.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:08 — 43.2MB)

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Like Stars Daring to Shine

By Somto Ihezue

When the boy opens his housing unit’s steel door and the incandescent lights pour into his face, he does not blink away. “Little suns” — this is what everyone calls them. The massive disks hover in the atmosphere, spilling streams of radiant light to the ground. The boy stares into the trees, mere meters from the door, and the forest encaving the unit stares back. A breeze finds him, whistling through the trees and into his dungarees. Threadbare with a Batman logo printed on them, the over-alls belonged to his mother when she was a child. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 871: The Contrary Gardener (Part 2 of 2)

The Contrary Gardener originally appeared in Eclipse Online, October 2012 and has been reprinted in:

  • Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2013, ed. Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2014.
  • The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, ed. Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books, 2014.
  • Telling the Map: Stories (Small Beer Press collection, 2017)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:49 — 55.1MB)

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The Contrary Gardener (Part 2 of 2)

By Christopher Rowe

(Continued from Part 1)

Even in the ‘Ville, even in a family of master cultivators, tickets were not easy to come by, so it was not unusual that Kay Lynne had never been to the Derby. What was unusual was her absolute lack of desire to attend the race.

Kay Lynne genuinely hoped that her instinctive and absolute despisal of the Derby and all its attendant celebrations was born of some logical or at least reasonable quirk of her own personality. But she suspected it was simply because her father loved it so.

“You managed to get two tickets this year?” she asked him, and was surprised that her voice was so steady and calm.

“Just this one,” he replied, turning his back on her before she could hand the ticket back. “I decided this year would be a good one for you to go instead. There’s a good card, top to bottom.” (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 870: The Contrary Gardener (Part 1 of 2)

The Contrary Gardener originally appeared in Eclipse Online, October 2012 and has been reprinted in:

  • Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2013, ed. Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2014.
  • The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, ed. Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books, 2014.
  • Telling the Map: Stories (Small Beer Press collection, 2017)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:17 — 35.2MB)

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The Contrary Gardener (Part 1 of 2)

By Christopher Rowe

Kay Lynne wandered up and down the aisles of the seed library dug out beneath the county extension office. Some of the rows were marked with glowing orange off-limits fungus, warning the unwary away from spores and thistles that required special equipment to handle, which Kay Lynne didn’t have, and special permission to access, which she would never have, if her father had anything to say about it, and he did.

It was the last Friday before the first Saturday in May, the day before Derby Day and so a week from planting day, and Kay Lynne had few ideas and less time for her Victory Garden planning. Last year she had grown a half dozen varieties of tomatoes, three for eating and three for blood transfusions, but she didn’t like to repeat herself. Given that she tended to mumble when she talked, not liking to repeat herself made Kay Lynne a quiet gardener. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 869: Excuse Me, This Is My Apocalypse

Escape Pod 869: Excuse Me, This Is My Apocalypse is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:51 — 71.7MB)

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Excuse Me, This Is My Apocalypse

by Amy Johnson

It was a glorious day when she finally made it to the beach and fell to her knees, into sand unexpectedly soft and warm, and beheld the devastation. The sun smiled and the air danced with spindrift and in the water lay broken shipping cranes, gathered by the ocean’s currents into a jumbled breakwater, one atop another, too many pieces to know how many cranes had once stood intact. In their harbor bobbed the hulls of overturned ships, still buoyant with air long dead, enormous stepping stones, their way now lost.

She had tried to prepare herself for the desolation of this moment. But her preparations hadn’t worked. They never did. With each new discovery of emptiness and destruction, the truth of her aloneness hit her fresh. For as far as her eyes could see, there was no one. And there would be no one, no human, at least, to leave footprints on this sand, to taste the ocean’s salt in their mouth, no one but her. She let her anger, stiff and distant and enormous, unfurl, welcomed its magnificent warmth. She was the last of her kind—

Was that a guy in a bright orange t-shirt?

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 866: The Sea Goddesss’ Bloom

Escape Pod 866: The Sea Goddesss’ Bloom is an Escape Pod original.

Post-apocalyptic themes and war.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:10 — 65.2MB)

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The Sea Goddess’ Bloom

By Uchechukwu Nwaka

There is doubt in my heart.

Here, in the Blackwater, doubt is dangerous.

Doubt is rancid. Like slitting the mud-smeared belly of a catfish, only to find its guts blackened by pollution, then watching it spill back into the blacker waters of the creek. Blackwater is a literal name; it is not symbolic. These people do not care about legacies. The only thing that matters is continuity. Continuity does not require permanence.

At least Oba says so. Surely Oba cannot be wrong.

Yet I doubt. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 863: A Shoreline of Oil and Infinity

Escape Pod 863: A Shoreline of Oil and Infinity is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:05 — 54.1MB)

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A Shoreline of Oil and Infinity

by Renan Bernardo

Conchinha
Charging… 87%
Energy source: light
Message:
Good morning, Vitória. The water is cold today. Brrr.

Vitória switches off the feed from her lenses and pats the tatuí’s shell, kneeling before it.

“Hey, Conchinha.” She brushes off the excess of crusted oil from the bot, scanning her fingerprint to open its main compartment. A wave breaks on the shore, sprinkling on her face and the bot. “Let’s see what you have here.”

The tatuí whirs—almost purrs. She plucks out the cylindrical cell from its rounded back. More darkened water. She doesn’t read the full report, but she can guess what it contains pretty well. Heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, hydrocarbons… All there is to know in Barra Nova’s waters these days. Layers of oil expand across both sides of the straight shoreline, coating the once gilded sand, patches of darkness suffusing the air with the stink of hydrogen sulfide that in the past made the kids call that beach The Coast of Broken Eggs. André’s kids—Vitória always thinks of them as her stepbrother’s children, though not one of them was his by birth.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 860: Solo Cooking for the Recently Revived

“Solo Cooking for the Recently Revived” was previously published in the Zombies Need Brains anthology “Apocalyptic” in June 2020

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:39 — 49.4MB)

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Solo Cooking for the Recently Revived

by Aimee Picchi

I hide my right hand behind my back when Jamie steps into the rehab center’s kitchen. Like all the rest of the reintegration counselors, he’s a Survivor. And Survivors always stare at our scars.

“Let’s start with our motto,” Jamie says.

The class intones: “Food is life.”

My friend Myra hitches her thumbs on her belt, cinched to the smallest hole, and rolls her eyes.

“And?” Jamie prods.

“To cook is human,” we finish.

Every time I say it I imagine the motto will fix me, erase my scars and everything else that happened in the last year. Get me one step closer to Carter. I once confided my belief to Myra and she laughed. That motto’s not for our benefit, sweetie, she had said. It’s so they can believe we’re still just like them.

Jamie gestures for me to join him at the front of the classroom, the home-ec lab inside a former middle school. About twenty of us are lined up at ovens and sinks and Formica countertops where students scratched blocky initials inside of hearts. I don’t want to think about what probably happened to the kids.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 816: Merely Players

Escape Pod 816: Merely Players is an Escape Pod original.

Death and loss.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:02 — 44.5MB)

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Merely Players

by Erik Grove

Jester stopped his bicycle in front of the thrift store window and looked through the glass at the plastic fat man with a jaunty red hat and an army surplus gas mask. He’d been Santa Claus once, a long time ago before the world ended and everyone died. He could still do a Santa Claus laugh. Like a bowl full of jelly.

“Holly jolly,” he said and engaged the kickstand with his foot. He took a crowbar from his backpack and smashed the glass. He tossed the gas mask aside and went for the white beard on the mannequin underneath. He pulled it on and leaned back. The trick to a perfect Santa Claus laugh is leaning.

(Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 800: Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death

Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death originally appeared in A People’s Future of the United States in February 2019.

Includes mature content for language and violence.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:56 — 40.2MB)

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Give Me Cornbread or Give Me Death

By N.K. Jemisin

The intel is good. It had better be; three women died to get it to us. I tuck away the binoculars and crawl back from the window long enough to hand-signal my girls. Fire team moves up, drop team on my mark, support to hold position and watch our flank. The enemy might have nothing but mercs for security, but their bullets punch holes same as real soldiers’, and some of ’em are hungry enough to be competent. We’re hungrier, though.

Shauntay’s got the glass cutter ready. I’m carrying the real payload, slung across my torso and back in a big canteen. We should have two or three of these, since redundancy increases our success projections, but I won’t let anyone else take the risk. The other ladies have barrels cracked and ready to drop. The operation should be simple and quick—get in, drop it like it’s hot, get out.

This goes wrong, it’s on me.

It won’t go wrong. (Continue Reading…)

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Escape Pod 789: The Machine That Would Rewild Humanity

The Machine That Would Rewild Humanity originally appeared in Escape Pod: The Science Fiction Anthology (2020).

Isolated cursing and suggestion of violence.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:39 — 39.8MB)

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The Machine That Would Rewild Humanity

By Tobias S. Buckell

On a boat on the way to the Galapagos Islands to visit the world’s oldest tortoise, I got a call that the Central Park Human Reintroduction Center had been bombed.

I’d read somewhere that the point of travel was to see the thing yourself. To expose yourself to new points of view and to have new experiences. Before the call I’d spent two point seven seconds regarding the sweep of the Himalayas at the roof of the world and take a backup of my memory of the entire panorama. In Pattaya, I lounged at the beach and watched the aquamarine water lap the sand.

Ten years I’d planned this trip. A time to let my thoughts settle before the big push on the Central Park project.

My life’s work.

A mechanical butterfly perched on my hand with the message. To deliver it, the butterfly had wafted its way over almost two thousand kilometers of ocean boundaries, negotiated with air currents for overflight permissions, and applied for fifty different visas until it tracked my boat down.

The Institute had paid a small fortune to recall me from vacation. (Continue Reading…)

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