Posts Tagged ‘YA / Young Adult’

Genres: , , , ,

Escape Pod 1001: Death by Pink in the Lollipop Apocalypse

Escape Pod 1001: Death by Pink in the Lollipop Apocalypse is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:03 — 54.1MB)

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

Death by Pink in the Lollipop Apocalypse

By Ryan Cole

In the dark of her bed, curled up in her sheets, Susie tried to hide from the next few days and the reckoning they’d bring: of prom and graduation and the dozens of goodbyes she’d have to force herself to say, wishing she could follow. No college escape. Her applications rejected. Not to mention that she’d been bragging for months—to Piper and all her other refugee friends—about the fake acceptance letter from Delaware State, and the phony full-ride, and the lie that she’d be rooming with Piper in the fall, just like they’d always wanted, two peas in a pod.

Which made her want to run—like Dad always did. But she couldn’t be like him. Couldn’t leave when his only child needed him most. When the city they’d fled—along with half a million others—was buried in a thick layer of saccharine crust. A crust that devoured every street, every house, every skyscraper standing like a hollowed-out lollipop, that only kept spreading, kept crushing every straggler that lay in its path, as relentless as a river and impenetrable as stone. (Continue Reading…)

Genres: , ,

Escape Pod 998: The Carina Nebula

The Carina Nebula originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, July/August 2023.

Includes a few A-grade curses.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:31 — 64.4MB)

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

The Carina Nebula

By Kelsey Hutton

I heard the soft shit shit shit just when I’d almost floated past the blue hatch door that led into some kind of storage room. I had to laugh. I mean, how many times have I said that? Plus the voice sounded older, a woman’s, and I love when adults just say what they mean, instead of carefully guarding every word around “the kids.”

I wasn’t really doing much, just wandering through some of the ship’s back tunnels. So I reached out right before momentum took me past the hatch and grabbed onto the cool metal. I pulled myself back and shook my head side to side a little to clear away my clouds of dark hair.

We were in zero G these days, and like, I knew that tying my hair back was probably the smarter decision when zooming around, but whatever. My hair was kinda curly, kinda wavey, with some straight pieces thrown in for kicks. The sculptures it made floating around my head was probably my best feature, so hair ties be damned. (Continue Reading…)

Genres: , , , ,

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)

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

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…)

Genres: , , , , ,

Escape Pod 949: A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls

Escape Pod 949: A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:14 — 39.2MB)

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

A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls

By Brian Hugenbruch

“Hey Marty,” Mom asks, “got a moment?”

I cringe whenever Mom’s voice has that tone to it. I don’t know what she’s going to say; but if I’ve learned anything in my thirteen years on this desolate, oxygen-deprived rock, it’s that she’s going to find a way to say the most mortifying thing possible. It would be impressive, the way that every sentence excavates my stomach—if it weren’t my stomach she was mining!

Okay, that’s unfair. Maybe this time it won’t be so bad?

“That girl who just walked past us. Why didn’t you ask her out?”

Or not. (Continue Reading…)

Genres: , ,

Escape Pod 763: No Spaceship Go

No Spaceship Go was originally published in Dailysciencefiction.com in November 2010.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:46 — 49.1MB)

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

No Spaceship Go

By Annie Bellet

The boys lay on their backs side by side staring up through the open roof of the abandoned building. Dylan clutched Meek’s hand in anticipation as the ground shook and a roar filled the air. Tiny pebbles danced up from the ground around them and dust ran like water off the crumbling walls.

“Ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five,” Dylan whispered, “four… three… two… one.”

The shaking increased and he had to release Meek’s hand to shade his eyes. Smoke billowed up into the air, a streak of fire ahead of it. Then the true sonic blast of the rocketship hit them in a wave as the boys squinted to make out the ship speeding through the atmosphere. It sounded like the crackling of a hundred fires, or perhaps the blast of the biggest blowtorch Dylan could imagine.

Meek whooped and crawled to his knees, staring up into the sky.

“Do you think that’s the one we’ll be on someday?” he asked Dylan.

Dylan rolled to his side and propped himself up on one arm. Dust had accumulated on Meek’s round, tan cheeks and Dylan fought the urge to wipe it away.

“Nah, by the time we’ve saved enough to get our home on Elle Four, the ships’ll all be new I bet. We’ll ride on a superfast one for sure.”

“I want to grow peppers.” Meek smiled up at Dylan, his crooked teeth warping the line of his chapped lips.

“What kind of peppers?” Dylan grinned back. They’d had variations of this conversation before and Dylan didn’t pay much attention to Meek as the boy launched into his usual daydream about gardens and pepper plants.

Dylan daydreamed about something else entirely as he fixated on Meek’s lips, his eyes drifting to the dimple in his friend’s left cheek. He didn’t notice at first that Meek had stopped talking and instead stared up at him with those dark, nearly pupil-less eyes.

“Oh, hmm? I’m sorry.” Dylan murmured.

“Pebble for your thoughts?” Meek smiled again. (Continue Reading…)

Genres: , ,

Escape Pod 701: Martian Chronicles (Part 2 of 2)

This story first appeared in the 2011 YA anthology Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:07:39 — 95.2MB)

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

Martian Chronicles

by Cory Doctorow

I didn’t go back to the Junior Colonists’ Lounge for a whole week. Instead, I spent the time with my dad, who seemed pleasantly surprised that his son wanted to hang out with him. It made me feel bad, like I’d been neglecting him. But it also made me ask myself why my father didn’t think it was weird that I wasn’t spending any time with kids my age. Dad had always been busy on Earth, traveling half the time for work, spending his time at home with his computer over his face, barking angrily at it while his hands worked the keyboard like a mad player attacking a church-organ.

I didn’t mind, to be honest. Actually, I preferred it to those times when Dad decided to get all “dad-like” and insist on throwing a ball with me or take me to some kind of sports-match or play some game on the big living-room screen with me. It wasn’t that it wasn’t fun, but there was always a moment when we stopped talking about the game or the project and found ourselves sitting in awkward silence, trying to pretend that the reason we had nothing to say was that we were concentrating too hard on the matter at hand.

On Earth, Dad had been a hotshot statistical risk-analyst. This is not an easy thing to explain. But basically, what he did was tried to figure out how to balance investments to minimize risk. Say there’s an industry that benefits when someone finds a better way of growing wheat — the bread industry, say. And then there’s another industry that suffers when someone finds a better way of growing wheat, like, maybe, I don’t know, the corn industry? I forget how he explained this, to be honest, but this is generally the idea. So what he does is figures out how to invest some money in both industries, so that if someone finds a better wheat-growing technique, the investment in bread pays out, and if no one invents it, the investment in corn pays out. That’s the rough idea. What he did was like ten million times more complicated, though.

(Continue Reading…)

Genres: , ,

Escape Pod 700: Martian Chronicles (Part 1 of 2)

This story first appeared in the 2011 YA anthology Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:32:25 — 127.0MB)

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

Martian Chronicles

by Cory Doctorow

They say you can’t smell anything through a launch-hood, but I still smelled the pove in the next seat as the space-attendants strapped us into our acceleration couches and shone lights in our eyes and triple-checked the medical readouts on our wristlets to make sure our hearts wouldn’t explode when the rocket boosted us into orbit for transfer to the Eagle and the long, long trip to Mars.

He was skinny, but not normal-skinny, the kind of skinny you get from playing a lot of sports and taking the metabolism pills your parents got for you so you wouldn’t get teased at school. He was kind of pot-bellied with scrawny arms and sunken cheeks and he was brown-brown, like the brown Mom used to slather on after a day at the beach covered in factor-500 sunblock. Only he was the kind of all-over-even brown that you only got by being born brown.

He gave me a holy-crap-I’m-going-to-MARS smile and a brave thumbs-up and I couldn’t bring myself to snub him because he looked so damned happy about it. So I gave him the same thumbs up, rotating my wrist in the strap that held it onto the arm-rest so that I didn’t accidentally break my nose with my own hand when we “clawed our way out of the gravity well” (this was a phrase from the briefing seminars that they liked to repeat a lot. It had a lot of macho going for it).

(Continue Reading…)

Genres: , ,

Escape Pod 668: The Harmonic Resonance of Ejiro Anaborhi

The Harmonic Resonance of Ejiro Anaborhi was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), March 2018

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:50 — 72.1MB)

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

The Harmonic Resonance of Ejiro Anaborhi

by Wole Talabi

The spindly, sleek ship hurtled forward at hyperliminal speed, blurring its own intricately patterned design in six dimensions and wrecking the fabric of space–time in its wake. Its captain adjusted the dial on the control panel, accelerating the ship three thousand lightspeed units faster in Planck time. Reality shifted.

The sphere that was chasing the ship matched their maneuver and kept the distance—if it could still be called that—between them, unchanged. The sphere suddenly added an extra-dimensional rotation to its motion and burst ahead with a surge of energy that set off a singularity event behind it. It slammed itself against the ship finally, throwing off gigantic streams of pure energy, and latched on to it with long, spiny hydra-like tendrils that branched into manifold others.

The sphere began to consume the ship in a dazzling display of fractured light and twisted gravity, tendrils reaching into it like the fingers of some monstrous creature seeking sustenance. The ship’s captain, in a panic, condensed every aspect of themself into one place for the first time since they’d first gained super-sentience. They could not let the ship be taken. If the object it carried fell into the hands of the beings that controlled the sphere, every conscious aspect of the universe could become a weapon in their hands. It was better if all was lost; destroyed forever. The object pulsed a thought in agreement with them. They resonated with resolve. This would be the final act of the Great War. It had to be done.
(Continue Reading…)

Genres: ,

Escape Pod 630: Midnight Blue (Flashback Friday)

Midnight Blue originally appeared on Escape Pod on August 11, 2011 on episode 305 and was first published in Asimov’s.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:01 — 77.1MB)

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

Midnight Blue

By Will McIntosh

He’d never seen a burgundy before.  Kim held it in her lap, tapped it with her finger.  She was probably tapping it to bring attention to it, and Jeff didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of asking to see it, but he really wanted to see it.  Burgundy (Kim had insisted on calling it burgundy red when she showed it at show and tell) was a rare one.  Not as rare as a hot pink Flyer or a viridian Better Looking, but still rare.

A bus roared up, spitting black smoke.  It was the seven bus–the Linden Court bus, not his.  Kids rushed to line up in front of the big yellow doors as the bus hissed to a stop.  A second-grader squealed, shoved a bigger kid with her Partridge Family lunch box because he’d stepped on her foot.  All the younger kids seemed to have Partridge Family lunch boxes this year.

“What did you say it did when you’ve got all three pieces of the charm together?”  Jeff asked Kim.  He said it casually, like he was just making conversation until his bus came.

“It relaxes time,” Kim said.  “When you’re bored you can make time pass quickly, and when you’re having fun you can make time stretch out.”

Jeff nodded, tried to look just interested enough to be polite, but no more.  What must that be like, to make the hour at church fly by?  Or make the school day (except for lunch and recess) pass in an eyeblink?  Jeff wondered how fast or slow you could move things along.  Could you make it seem like you were eating an ice cream sandwich for six hours?  That would be sparkling fine.

“Want to see it?” Kim asked.

“Okay,” Jeff said, holding out his hands too eagerly before he remembered himself.  Kim handed it to him, looking pleased with herself, the dimples on her round face getting a little deeper.

It was smooth as marble, perfectly round, big as a grapefruit and heavy as a bowling ball.  It made Jeff’s heart hammer to hold it.  The rich red, which hinted at purple while still being certainly red, was so beautiful it seemed impossible, so vivid it made his blue shirt seem like a Polaroid photo left in the sun too long.
(Continue Reading…)

Genres: , , ,

Escape Pod 629: An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition

An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition originally appeared in March 2016 as part of the collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:44 — 64.3MB)

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

Show Notes

Author’s Notes:

For more on consciousness as compression, see:

Maguire, Phil, et al. “Is Consciousness Computable? Quantifying Integrated Information Using Algorithmic Information Theory.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.0126 (2014) (available at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.0126).

For more on natural nuclear reactor piles, see:

Teper, Igor. “Inconstants of Nature”, Nautilus, January 23, 2014 (available at http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/inconstants-of-nature).

Davis, E. D., C. R. Gould, and E. I. Sharapov. “Oklo reactors and implications for nuclear science.” International Journal of Modern Physics E 23.04 (2014) (available at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.4948).

For more on SETI and the Sun’s gravitational lens, see:

Maccone, Claudio. “Interstellar radio links enhanced by exploiting the Sun as a gravitational lens.” Acta Astronautica 68.1 (2011): 76–84 (available at http://www.snolab.ca/public/JournalClub/alex1.pdf).]

An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition

By Ken Liu

My darling, my child, my connoisseur of sesquipedalian words and convoluted ideas and meandering sentences and baroque images, while the sun is asleep and the moon somnambulant, while the stars bathe us in their glow from eons ago and light-years away, while you are comfortably nestled in your blankets and I am hunched over in my chair by your bed, while we are warm and safe and still for the moment in this bubble of incandescent light cast by the pearl held up by the mermaid lamp, you and I, on this planet spinning and hurtling through the frigid darkness of space at dozens of miles per second, let’s read.
(Continue Reading…)

hot mature website