Posts Tagged ‘marbelle’

Escape Pod 210: The Hastillan Weed

This story originally appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction (February 2006).

Rated PG for plants with many uses.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:20 — 28.4MB)

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The Hastillan Weed

By Ian Creasey

“Since we have so many new faces,” I said to the half-dozen volunteers, “I’ll start with a tools talk. Safety points for the spade — the most important is that when you’re digging, you push with the ball of your foot.”

I picked up a spade from the pile, and demonstrated by digging up a bluebell growing by the hedge. From the large bells all round the stem, I knew it was a Spanish bluebell, a garden escape that if left unchecked would hybridise with the natives. Too late now, though. You can tell the British bluebell because the flowers are smaller, deeper blue, and they’re usually
on one side of the stem, so the plant droops under their weight as if bowing down before its foreign conqueror. There’s hardly a wood left in England where you’ll see only native bluebells.

“Or you can use your heel on the spade.” I heaved the invader out of the earth and tossed it aside, knowing it would safely rot. “But you should never press down with the middle of your foot. The bones in the arch are delicate, and you can injure yourself.”

Escape Pod 107: Eight Episodes

First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2006.

Rated PG. Contains some suggestive imagery, references to infidelity, and not very good television.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:00 — 22.0MB)

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Show Notes

2007 Hugo Nominee!

Referenced Sites:
World Science Fiction Society
Steve’s LiveJournal

Eight Episodes

by Robert Reed

Eighteen months later, the fledging Web network declared bankruptcy, and a small consortium acquired its assets, including Invasion of a Small World. Eager to recoup their investment, the new owners offered all eight episodes as a quick-and-dirty DVD package. When sales proved somewhat better than predicted, a new version was cobbled together, helped along by a genuine ad budget. The strongest initial sales came from the tiny pool of determined fans–young and well educated, with little preference for nationality or gender. But the scientists in several fields, astronomy and paleontology included, were the ones who created a genuine buzz that eventually put Invasion into the public eye.

Escape Pod 97: Cinderella Suicide

First appeared in Strange Horizons, May 2006.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:30 — 29.2MB)

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Show Notes

Rated PG. Contains violence, unsavory characters, and opaque slang.

Referenced Links:
Scott Sigler
Podiobooks.com

(Technical Note: There was an encoding error in the original that resulted in a few skipped seconds at 15:00. I’ve corrected it. If this bothered you, please download the file again. If you just want to know what you missed: Suicide asks “Split?” and Tintype replies “Each.” Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks to Thaurismunths for pointing out the problem.)

Cinderella Suicide

by Samantha Henderson

List, then. 1788, New Holland becomes New South Wales, and dear England starts to send her slithies there, her dribs and drabs and pick-pocks and whores and cutthroats, to drain the cesspool Britannia’s become. And then we pin the gravitational constant, and solve Pringle’s Mysterious Logarithm, and then just when we’re ready for it there’s an explosion of a different sort (I’m a proud product of my state school, whoreboy though I became). From the skies over Van Diemen’s Land streaks a merry flaming angel arcing down to earth and boom! Kills most of the slithies, and their Bulls, and the Murri and the Nunga in their Dreamtime too, far as any know. Sky goes red from Yangtze to Orkney. A few Nunga are left, fishing the Outer Isles. And more slithies come soon, for England’s still all-of-cess, and we’d just as soon have them die.

But! Scattered all about, like Father Christmas tossing pennies, rare earth, yttrium and scandium in luscious ashy chunks. And soon there are Magnetic Clocks, and Automatons, and Air-Cars, and good Queen Vickie trulls about in a Magnetic Carriage like everybody else. But still there is cess, and ever will be, pretend as they might at home, so still the slithies are transported.

And a good thing for Merrie Olde too, because nowhere is there as much rare earth as Australia, being that’s where the Great Boom happened, and nothing so useful for gathering ore and jellies as a big jolly family of convicts. Work for the Squatters when you’re Docked; work for them after you serve your time and are pensioned, but on your own terms. Or whore-about. Or prentice to the tech gnomes. Or mine gold, which never goes out of style. Or wander the Nullarbor, looking for the Source, and die. Or fish with the Nunga, if they’d have you, which they won’t. Stick with your duet/triune mates, if you would live out the year.

Always something to do.

But don’t fly, not much, because the variable-mag will crash you deep, and don’t depend on Carriages to work all the time. Beware your metal, for it can betray you.

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