We are completely aware of the backlog of submissions and are going to spend January tackling it. We are closed for submissions until February. Since we hadn’t made an official blog post about it till today, the stories that have arrived before noon, Jan 3, Eastern Standard Time, will still be considered.
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Dear Faithful Listeners And Readers—
Happy 2012! It’s looking to be a very exciting year at Escape Pod, and we’re delighted you’re still hanging out with us!
We had a lot of fun bringing you different things in 2011, from our first audio drama at the end of the year to the various story collections to our supporters. And thanks to your supporters, by the way. It’s amazing to realize we’re in our seventh year doing this, and we’ve operated in the black the entire time. We couldn’t have done that without you, so thank you.
To be completely honest, it hasn’t been smooth sailing. We got behind in submissions this year, even with some time off to catch up. Authors got angry, as they should have done, and we’ve figured out where things went wrong and are working on fixing it. I won’t offer excuses, only that I’m responsible for this magazine and I let down our authors, and I’m very sorry for this. We’re closing our doors to submissions in January in order to get everything organized.
Hugo voting is open, from now until March 31! I’ll have a blog post soon about what Escape Pod has offered that is eligible, and we’re appreciate a consideration if you’re eligible to nominate.
Resolutions are promises to fail, so we won’t make any, but we do promise to continue to bring you weekly SF that will be fun. And lose those 10 pounds, of course.
Have a safe and happy 2012. Be mighty, and have fun!
Mur Lafferty
Editor
It is easy to love a book when it has been cruel to you. Myths of Origin by Catherynne M. Valente is a hard book, and one that will encourage most readers to put it down. It contains four short novels, each of which will challenge the reader to make sense of its elaborate metaphors and strange perspectives. The language in this book shows a poet’s fondness for unexpected juxtapositions. Anyone who cannot read a book simply for the beauty of the writing should not pick this one up at all.
However, those who are brave enough to read the Myths will be rewarded with four extraordinary novels. The first one, The Labyrinth, is by far the least comprehensible. Most of it seems to be happening inside the protagonist’s head. She reminds me of Alice, and her Wonderland is the Labyrinth of Crete. Whether or not there’s a minotaur in the middle is still an open question at the end, I think — there is a bull of sorts, but it’s complicated. This novel is dense and wild and does not seem to have much of a point other than to prove that a novel like itself can exist. I liked the bit with the rabbit.
The second novel is Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams. This is the one that I was most looking forward to when I picked up Myths of Origin, though I found that the next novel in the sequence did most of what I wanted this one to do. Once again, Valente finds the connections between totally unrelated things — in this case, a wild woman living in an abandoned pagoda in the mountains of Japan, and the Sphinx of Thebes. Each chapter begins with the name of a season from the Japanese calendar of the Heian period, and most don’t last more than a page. Like Labyrinth, this book is filled with powerful images. I had a sense that if I’d spent more time studying Japanese folklore or Babylonian creation myths, I might have gotten more out of Yume no Hon.
The Grass-Cutting Sword is my favorite of the four, but also the most upsetting. It tackles the story of Susano and the eight-headed maiden-eating dragon. It also speaks to the varied cruelties inflicted on women — on beautiful women, on plain women, on obedient women, on wild women, on mothers and on sisters. Valente plays with voices in The Grass-Cutting Sword. The dragon and the eight maidens speak while sharing the same body, while Susano narrates his own story and the story of his mother. This book is bloody.
Under in the Mere proposes that California is a place where questing knights from King Aurthur’s court can go to hunt their beasts or find their grails. It matches each character from Arthurian legend up with a card from the tarot and with an overarching image — Kay the robot, Galahad the shapeshifter, and so on — and plays each image out to its furthest extreme. It quotes the relevant passages from Malory in case the reader is unfamiliar, and then takes them in the most unexpected directions. It is a fine book in and of itself, though I will admit to being tired after reading the other three.
If you can treat each of these novels as a separate piece, and perhaps take breaks between them, then Myths of Origin is a fine collection. Fans of Catherynne M. Valente should read this book, not just because it is more of her beautiful prose, but also to see reflections of ideas that she returns to in her other works. Myths of Origin is beautiful. It demands patience; it speaks in riddles. I am glad that I read it, but I am also a little bit glad that it’s over.
/SFX/ CLOCK TICKING, FADE TO
/SFX/ DOGS BARKING IN DISTANCE
SAM: Like?
BECCA: Like.
SAM: (growls like a dog, sexy)
BECCA: Like?
SAM: Like.
/SFX/ DOGS BARKING IN DISTANCE
BECCA: Lick?
SAM: (giggles) Like.
BECCA: (howls like a dog)
Genres: Holiday Special
“Eat,” said MooninMama, “You have a long winter ahead.” LittlestOne turned her head away as MooninMama lifted the spoon of raspberry pie dripping with honey and caribou fat. LittlestOne was sleepy, too sleepy, for what she planned.
“I am already full,” said LittlestOne. Her stomach rumbled, giving away her lie.
MooninMama shrugged and set the plate away. It was beginning to get cold in the cave as the crackling fire burned down to embers. Soon it would be time to sleep, time to dream of spring, when they would awaken, shivering, and find that Santy Clawr had visited them.
(Continue Reading…)
Escape Artists is doing another donation drive, and giving you a load of holiday stories by Mur Lafferty in exchange for your support! Just like we did with the Alphabet Quartet, you can donate $50 or subscribe for $5 a month and get twelve audio stories! Five were previously published on Escape Pod (many of them rerecorded), two were published elsewhere, and five are completely new.
The Reason for the Season
MESSAGE REDACTED
Zuzu’s Bell
750,000 of Your Friends Liked This
Citytalkers
Santa in My Pocket
and six more!
And hey, did you donate to the Alphabet Quartet donation drive? Then these stories are automatically yours!
This time on Science Future: Various stepping-stones to human augmentation.
Science fiction inspires the world around us. It inspires us to create our future. So we look to the future of science to find our next fiction. We look to Science Future. The Science Future series presents the bleeding edge of scientific discovery from the viewpoint of the science fiction reader, discussing the influences science and science fiction have upon each other.
Last month we were treated to a story about human performance. EP318: The Prize Beyond Gold by Ian Creasey was about a human with incredible abilities surrounded by transhumans with mediocre abilities. It took place in a world where humans regularly modified their bodies beyond what we consider to be the human normal but focused on one human who hadn’t and might not and yet still had the chance to exceed all of them.
Yet the story was cheating in asense for the protagonist already had a capability that far exceeded that of the standard human template. So much so that he was under constant surveillance for the possibility of actual augmentation. The stealthiest augmentation for one competing in sports today is drugs. In the future, the definition of drugs might be expanded beyond simple chemical concoctions. Rohit Talwar, the founder of Fast Future Research, gave a talk at Intelligence Squared’s If conference about the possibility of digital drugs via direct manipulation of brain chemistry using transcranial magnetic stimulation. One could only assume this kind of manipulation would be extremely hard to detect. No chemical traces and nothing invasive or even ingested. Except that in The Prize our protagonist had his doppelgänger, which was an atomic scale simulation of himself. This copy could easily have been used as both a training and surveillance device.
It is hard to believe the precision needed to copy someone down to the atomic level could be easily done via external sensors and implants would obviously not be allowed for competitive reasons but they likely used a more advanced version of this system. Researchers led by the California Institute of Technology have created a series of microchips that can quickly and inexpensively assess immune function of a human from one single cell harvested from their body. With a device like that, occasionally sampling the body for a drop of blood and building a clone that could forecast the physical changes one might undergo after eating cake seems almost feasible.
The Gift focused more on the possibility of human enhancement. Changing a the body to give one abilities that they could never hope to achieve within a human genetic code. Two of the enhancements referenced were increasing intelligence and empathy. The brain is a complicated organ in charge of many things that we don’t understand and the idea of enhancing seems far off. Repairing it, less so. There is promising research in the field of cybernetics that helps repair brain damage. Created by Theodore Berger and his team at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering and researchers at Wake Forest University, a neural prosthesis is able to restore a rat’s ability to form long-term memories after they had been pharmacologically blocked. This is the first step to augmenting something like intelligence and empathy.
But what if dramatic enhancement was not really what someone like Michito was looking for? Well a discovery by Columbia University Medical Center researchers may lead to a better understanding how to fundamentally change the human body in subtle ways. They have shown that not all traits passed on to offspring without the use of DNA but instead naturally occurring viral agents called viRNAs which modify the creature’s RNA. RNA acts like DNA’s messenger in the body, relaying the code. So if the RNA is modified, then the DNA of the being is effectively bypassed. This kinda of science could be harnessed to create a slightly faster person or creating large-scale immunity against difference diseases.
Obviously research into human augmentation continues, be through a biological, technological, or chemical means. Stories like The Prize Beyond Gold will continue to give us reasons to achieve new and different levels of augmentation. Afterall, most of us will never be Michito but we could possibly be better than him.
There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means – either may do – the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier. – Benjamin Franklin
I sit beneath the dark green sky, overlooking the valley that has changed much over the years. What was once a stream has swelled into a river while, to the east, lush vegetation grows where I think there was once a shallow lake. I can’t remember definitely. The information is stored inside me, filed, itemized; I’m merely unsure how to access it. It will come to me. Later, when a random search, an unrelated thought, cracks open the proper conduits and a pulse of electricity resurrects the knowledge, unbidden.
Until then, I am content to wait.
Below my knee, the dented brass-coloured metal becomes the red of a tree trunk, substituting as a shin and foot. Like an antiquated peg-leg, like a stereotypical pira…pi…pi-
Pi is 3.1415926…
The organic substance must be replaced occasionally, but the concept has served satisfactorily for almost two hundred years. It was easy to jury-rig. Not so my mnemonic core. I lack the appropriate tools and diagnostic programs.
Yes. There had been a lake, teeming with the hoorah-thet fish.
I call them fish simply to provide a basis of comparative orientation. Fish only exist on earth, and this is not earth. Earth is a long, long way away.
(Continue Reading…)
Genres: Space
I hate to start out this way, but before we get to the reason I’m standing on this stool with a fez on my head, in the middle of the night, in front of a double-cal-king bed in a furniture store—which, yes, Officer, I swear I’ll confess I broke into illegally—before we get to any of that, there’s something I have to tell you. I know it’s awful, evil, and just plain wrong, but there’s no way around it, and you won’t understand anything else unless I say this right up front, so here goes:
Stephen was stoned.
And when I say “stoned” I mean he’d eaten enough brownies and smoked enough pot to put the economies of five or six minor countries into a severe, long-term deficit crisis.
It was okay. It helped him cope with the chemo. Mellowed him out. We didn’t have to fight over who got to hold the remote. He was better in bed too—not as neurotic.
Didn’t complain about my mustache when I kissed him. Suits me right for shacking up with a clean freak.
The weed was my revenge—well, the fact that the weed made it possible for him to eat. We had to grow our own—only way we could afford it, though I swear we probably spent as much on the electricity as we would have on the bud. Not a great climate for it, not in the winter.
So, the revenge part—that would be his appetite. When he smoked, it came back. It was the only time it came back. And there were only two things he could handle:
Brownies.
And chicken noodle soup. The really rancid stuff that came in a red and white can. (Continue Reading…)
In beginning, Josh think it funny to write review of book Bigfoot: I Not Dead using Bigfoot style of writing. However, realize will get annoying fast and not want annoy readers. So will stop.
While I was on vacation recently, a friend of mine gave me a copy of Graham Roumieu’s third Bigfoot book, Bigfoot: I Not Dead. At first blush, it looks like a kids’ book; it’s full of illustrations and the text is artfully hand-written. It’s also a very slim volume. But she and her husband both said it was hilarious, and it’s quite short, so I figured, why not?
After reading the book, I can say that I should find it funnier than I actually do. The style of humor is supposed to be right up my alley — Bigfoot is written as a self-deprecating, lonely guy who just wants to be understood, but occasionally gets angry about his life or the state of the world. I did laugh a few times, but mostly I just found it generally amusing in the way one finds the comedy club emcee’s jokes generally amusing.
As the book is so short, it doesn’t really justify one of my usual 1000-word reviews, but I do want to call attention to some of my favorite bits, including:
As for the pictures: I don’t really know how to review, critique, or even react to artwork*, but I’ll give it a shot, since after all this book is illustrated: the artwork is good, and appropriately primitive-looking — after all, Bigfoot is ostensibly the writer of this book. The pictures really fit well with the narrative. The ones containing blood aren’t quite as good, I think, perhaps because that part of the narrative gets away from Bigfoot’s “trying to fit in as a person” dialogue in favor of his “I’m a giant forest creature who can bash your head in with one blow” dialogue, but overall it works quite well.
Bigfoot: I Not Dead retails for $15 USD, according to the UPC on the back. I don’t think I could pay that much for a book this short, and I’m glad it was a gift. However, I do think the book is funny enough to be worth reading, especially if you enjoy juvenile humor and/or retellings of the lives of mythic creatures. If you can find it in the library, or you’re one of those “go into the bookstore, sit on the couch, and read a book” people, why not grab all three Bigfoot books? Most folks should be able to read them all in one sitting.
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Note to Parents: This is not a book for young children, despite its appearance, size, and font. It contains violence, adult language, and discussions of sex. I’d say it’s PG-13 at worst, though. Of course, you should use your own discretion when it comes to your children.
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* My grandfather, now that he’s retired, has taken up art — he paints, carves wood into really amazing carnival horses (especially for someone suffering from Parkinson’s in his dominant hand), and he’s learning to play the piano. When we visited his house during Thanksgiving weekend, he showed me everything he had made and was currently working on. I tried to make the appropriate appreciative noises, but I felt like I was being repetitive. I’m certainly proud of him, and I often talk about his work when grandparents come up in conversation, but when it comes to actually reacting to artwork for the sake of artwork, I often have difficulty. I suppose members of my family who don’t read genre fiction but are forced to read my writing are the same way.