Posts Tagged ‘terraforming’

Genres: ,

Escape Pod 1062: Extrasolar Ghost Tours: Safety Questionable, Lizards Guaranteed

Escape Pod 1062: Extrasolar Ghost Tours: Safety Questionable, Lizards Guaranteed is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:07 — 62.4MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Extrasolar Ghost Tours: Safety Questionable, Lizards Guaranteed

By Hans Ege Wenger

I am a hundred and seventy-nine years old when I commit my first betrayal. It is a small one, relevant only to the blue-flecked lizards on Alda Safiya’s southernmost desert landmass. Our thousand-solar-year plan will cool the planet by forty-two degrees Celsius, just below what the lizards can tolerate. They will die—not for about three hundred years, but die nonetheless.

It’s not really an oversight on my makers’ part. All terraforming projects involve the “unavoidable loss of indigenous biodiversity” according to the briefing document in my memory. I’ve already spirited three hundred breeding pairs into cold storage in my periphery, to be rehomed in zoos once the temperature stabilizes.

But I enjoy the lizards, as they are, in situ. They tickle my remote seismic sensors with their industrious warren-digging and synchronized, foot-pounding mating dances. And I, locked in a geostationary orbit over Alda Safiya, will never visit the zoo. (Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 1059: A Little Freedom Makes Us Rebels

Escape Pod 1059: A Little Freedom Makes Us Rebels is an Escape Pod original.

Mild mentions of parental abuse

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:44 — 53.2MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Show Notes

This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get 10% off your purchase.

A Little Freedom Makes Us Rebels

by Kathleen Schaefer

When our ship made landing after three centuries in space, we were ready for the inhospitable lands, the harsh nights, and the hard labor of terraforming a new planet. Aboard a generation ship, labor is familiar: every moment requires our attention. But here, nothing prepared us for the idleness. These miniature pockets of time that don’t demand our productivity are more alien than the silt-eating rubberfish in the streams of our new home. We survived six generations in space, but if anything ends us, it will be this false bounty of unfilled minutes.

(Continue Reading…)

Genres: , ,

Escape Pod 1030: The Smell of the Planet I Was Born On

Escape Pod 1030: The Smell of the Planet I Was Born On is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:50 — 44.3MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

The Smell of the Planet I Was Born On

By Rodrigo Culagovski

There are two moons visible, a large one right above us, and another smaller one about fifteen degrees below it in the star-studded night sky above the almost empty, rocky, lifeless surface of the planet. The horizon slowly takes on the slightly blue stain that comes right after the sunset.

“Still takes your breath away, doesn’t it?”

I turn to look up. Laiendro is standing behind me on the slight rise I chose to sit and enjoy the view.

“Yeah, it really does. It’s nothing like Earth, but it’s also the same, you know?” (Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 781: Seed Vault (Part 2)

“Seed Vault” was originally published in Strange Horizons (Nov 2019)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:13 — 55.7MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Seed Vault (Part 2)

By Marika Bailey

The desert rain has lulled me and I sleep all the way through the daylight hours. It is only when the light recedes and the temperature of the desolation plummets that I awaken. Minn has gathered close to me, her large musky bulk keeping me warm. Around us, there are ice crystals on the grey earth, gilding the parched shrubgrass.

It does not get this cold in the village. Our air and earth are protected by the founding guardian line that rings every settlement. So we do not have the same extremes on the red as there is in the desolation.

That last morning I left the house early, before Manman woke. Sometimes it felt like she only ever slept when I did. Passing the small garden where dasheen and eddo burst happily from rich soil, I went out to the borders of the red. Riding my manicou, Minn, it was a few minutes from the house to where the staggered boundary of stone ancestors marked the end of the red and the beginning of the desolation. I’d heard that the larger settlements had multiple rings of boundaries, pushing back back against the grey sands. But we were a young town, and had just the one.

Being out, I never wanted to turn back. It was the fire on the horizon that brought me out of my small room and smaller bed. The sands, grey, white, and black, flowed in an ombre dance as far as the eye could see. As tidal as the broken piebald seas.
(Continue Reading…)

Escape Pod 780: Seed Vault (Part 1)

“Seed Vault” was originally published in Strange Horizons (Nov 2019)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:53 — 42.9MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Seed Vault (Part 1)

By Marika Bailey

1. FIRE
I should tell you about the gods, yes? Good setting for it. Here in the desert, hunger and thirst sharpen the soul. Sharpens it enough to poke right through the side of your mind to let in the second sight.

They hitched rides like barnacles and weeds on the bellies of our soulships and crossed the dark. Slave ship, starship, no matter to them. Belong is belong, yes? They took root and grew fat in the good red earth. I am surrounded by our gods. To be honest they are a mamabloody nuisance.

Eh heh heh heh.

He laughs, Daddy Long Legs. Papa Negre. The old man who is a god walks behind me, his body made up of tumbleweeds and shadow. His laughter is the wind rattling through his snake bone ribs. He wears one face now, another next. They are all the people whose blood lies in the fields and whose bones rest in the earth.

You going de right way babygirl? He knows I am.
(Continue Reading…)

hot mature website