PodDisc.com is live!

As promised in the past couple of episodes, our online storefront for selling podcast archive CDs is (finally!) up and running at PodDisc.com. This is your chance to get all of your holiday shopping done in one place — provided everyone you know wants over 45 hours of science fiction short stories on CD.

What do the discs look like? I’m glad you asked. They look like this:

Escape Pod Collection 3

Beautiful, isn’t it? And for a very slight fee, you can have your own personal message put on the CD. You can buy each disc for $10 or a bundle of all three collections for $25. Shipping is a cheap flat rate in the U.S. (and tolerable everywhere else), and satisfaction is guaranteed.

Right now only Escape Pod CDs are available, but once the business model proves viable I plan to open this up to producing archive discs for other podcasters. If that’s a service you’d be interested in, drop me a line and I’ll give you more details.

And remember: If you’ve donated $20 or more to Escape Pod this year, or if you’re a subscriber, don’t buy yet! I’ll be sending details to you in e-mail on how you can get this stuff for free.

…Right after I get some sleep.

Escape Pod 80: Union Dues: Cleanup in Aisle Five

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:00 — 23.4MB)

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Show Notes

Rated R. Contains profanity, some violence involving children, and retail corporate exploitation.

Union Dues Stories:
EP027: Iron Bars and the Glass Jaw
EP049: Off White Lies
EP062: The Baby and the Bathwater

Union Dues: Cleanup in Aisle Five

by Jeffrey R. DeRego

“Which one are you?”

The kid fans out a small stack of super hero trading cards, but it’s not a Union deck. Figures. “Lemme see what you got there.” I flip through and remember my old baseball card collection. I knew there was something special about me, when at nine-years-old, I accurately calculated the probable batting stats of each player, on every team, in the 1996 season after opening only one pack. The Union recruited me five years later after my dad beat a couple of Atlantic City casinos for ten million bucks. I was caught on security camera tape telling him when and how to bet at the roulette wheel.

“These don’t look like you.”

The card displays a blue-costumed man leaping between buildings. I hand it back to him. “Those guys aren’t real, but I am.” Wow. Did I just say that? Maybe I’ll tell the kid that Santa and the Easter Bunny aren’t real either. He’s staring at me now, I can almost see his little brain struggling to make sense of my answer. I should tell him to buy Union Cards but, you know, he’s five.

Escape Pod 79: Mountain, Man

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:00 — 25.4MB)

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Show Notes

Rated PG. Contains non-explicit sex, accidental assault, and geological scatology.

Mountain, Man

by Heather Shaw

“Look, miss, I’m going to have to cut your hair to do this. Is that all right?”

She smiled at him from her upside-down, bent-over position, so he took that as a yes. He found an old pair of garden shears and took a hunk of her hair, gathered it into a rough ponytail, and hacked it off.

A pair of mountain bluebirds flew out from where the nest of hair had been.

Escape Pod 78: The Shoulders of Giants

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:18 — 31.8MB)

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Show Notes

Rated PG. Contains minor profanity, and very tame references to populating new worlds. Hey, someone’s got to.

The Shoulders of Giants

by Robert J. Sawyer

The Pioneer Spirit was a colonization ship; it wasn’t intended as a diplomatic vessel. When it had left Earth, it had seemed important to get at least some humans off the mother world. Two small-scale nuclear wars–Nuke I and Nuke II, as the media had dubbed them–had already been fought, one in southern Asia, the other in South America. It appeared to be only a matter of time before Nuke III, and that one might be the big one.

SETI had detected nothing from Tau Ceti, at least not by 2051. But Earth itself had only been broadcasting for a century and a half at that point; Tau Ceti might have had a thriving civilization then that hadn’t yet started using radio. But now it was twelve hundred years later. Who knew how advanced the Tau Cetians might be?

Escape Pod Flash: Act of Devil

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:00 — 5.5MB)

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Show Notes

Rated R. Contains sexual violence, Satanic summonings, and similar wholesome family bonding.

Act of Devil

by Paul S. Jenkins

There was a group of them at college who were into Satanism. My mom, Betty Bloxham as she was then, was one of them. It all sounds a bit kinky, going into the woods at dead of night and dancing in the nude under the full moon.

Anyway, they were all high on drugs at the time, so I doubt they knew what they were doing.

Escape Pod 77: A Single Shadow

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:45 — 20.4MB)

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Show Notes

Rated R. Contains explicit sexual content. And ghosts. Explicit sexual ghosts, really.

Referenced Sites:
Retrieval Detachment

A Single Shadow

by Stephen Dedman

“I suppose you think we turn into cats and foxes when your back is turned?”

I smiled. “Only some of you – you, for example. You’re much too beautiful to be human, but you could be a cat, a flower, a tree – no, scratch that one, you’re too short.” I glanced at Hiroshi. “Maybe Shimako’s the tree-spirit,” I said, softly. Hiroshi ignored me, but Miyume covered her mouth and laughed.

“I assure you, I’m quite human,” she said. “I don’t doubt that Shimako is, too. And how many girls have you used that line on, before?”

Escape Pod 76: The Dinner Game

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:40 — 24.5MB)

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Show Notes

Rated R. Contains sex, violence, sacrilege, and other epic necessities.

Referenced sites:
Twenty Epics (Amazon link)
Twenty Epics (PDF download)
Silent Universe

The Dinner Game

by Stephen Eley

“Do I know you?” she says.

“I remember you,” he says, and she smiles. It’s another game. He has been a spy fleeing his country. She has been an adulterous First Lady. They have been psychiatrist and schizophrenic; vampire and victim; two blind people speculating on the world they cannot see. They will make love as themselves when they leave the Rose for a room upstairs, and tomorrow he will finish his business and leave her city. But first they dine as other people.

Escape Pod 75: Nano Comes to Clifford Falls

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:30 — 32.0MB)

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Show Notes

Rated R. Contains violence, brief sexual violence, and minor profanity.

Today’s Sponsor:

Referenced sites:
“The Coming Technological Singularity,” by Vernor Vinge

Nano Comes to Clifford Falls

by Nancy Kress

“I like the taste of home-grown tomatoes,” I tell him. “Ones at the Safeway taste like wallpaper.”

“But nano won’t make tomatoes that taste processed,” he says in that way that men like to correct women. “That machinery will make the best tomatoes this town ever tasted.”

“Well, I hope you’re right.” Then Will and Kimee spilled their fight out through the screen door into the back yard, and Jackie started whimpering on his blanket, and I didn’t have no time for any nanomachinery.