Archive for OK for Kids

Escape Pod 250: Eros, Philia, Agape

Originally published in: Tor.com

Rated PG for marital strife and implied child abuse.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:09:53 — 48.1MB)

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Show Notes

Show Notes:

  • This is a long one, we’re bringing occasional novelettes to Escape Pod now, and what better to launch the effort than a Hugo nominee?

Next week… Escape Pod looks at an alternate history with alternate aliens.

Eros, Philia, Agape

By Rachel Swirsky

The objects belonged to them both, but Adriana waved her hand bitterly when Lucian began packing. “Take whatever you want,” she said, snapping her book shut. She waited by the door, watching Lucian with sad and angry eyes.

Their daughter, Rose, followed Lucian around the house. “Are you going to take that, Daddy? Do you want that?” Wordlessly, Lucian held her hand. He guided her up the stairs and across the uneven floorboards where she sometimes tripped. Rose stopped by the picture window in the master bedroom, staring past the palm fronds and swimming pools, out to the vivid cerulean swath of the ocean. Lucian relished the hot, tender feel of Rose’s hand. I love you, he would have whispered, but he’d surrendered the ability to speak.

Escape Pod 245: The Moment

Originally published in: Footprints

Rated PG: for Space Exploration and Looking into the Abyss

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:52 — 23.3MB)

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Show Notes

Show Notes:

  • Enter the Escape Pod Flash Contest! It runs June 1- July 4, stories must be under 500 words. More information at the link.
  • Editor’s note: Thanks so much to Dave Thompson and Peter Wood for taking on this project of securing all five Hugo stories during the hiatus of Escape Pod. Most of the work was done before I joined, and this wouldn’t have happened without them stepping up.

Next week… Another Hugo-nominated story!

The Moment

By Lawrence M. Schoen

One of the first generation of Krenn had lived long enough to reach the site, though none had expected to. The very first Krenn had conceived of this journey in the distant past, dedicating his life and his posterity to the pilgrimage with an ever recycling population of clones. Like their clone-father, each was an optimized collection of smart matter no bigger than a speck. Hundreds of generations of Krenn had lived and died during the voyage, their remains enshrined into niches in the very walls of the vessel that now lay shattered at its destination.

The survivors flooded out upon the steppes of the heel, rejoicing despite the crushing weight that gravity forced upon them. They settled in, constructing mansions of haze and shadow, and waited for enlightenment to come. The mission and purpose of the first Krenn remained with each of them. This place had been the site of the greatest triumph of the greatest archaeocaster in all of history. Before the beginning of the quest, Krenn—the original Krenn—had felt drawn to it. He had cultivated the tales, sifted myth from coincidence, mastered the lost language of the interview-eschewing, spatial curmudgeons of the ancient dark times, and recreated the route through dimensional puzzles to this theoretical location. The odds of success had been so absurd not a single entelechy of Krenn’s crèche dared invest time or expense in the project. And yet, here they were, nearly three hundred unique individuals sharing the template of Krenn.

Escape Pod 243: I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno

Simultaneously appearing in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 1, June 1, 2010.

Rated PG-13: for sexual description.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:56 — 21.9MB)

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Show Notes

Show Notes:

  • Thanks to John Joseph Adams and Lightspeed Magazine for the opportunity to run this fantastic story at the same time as their launch. Go check out their magazine and subscribe!
  • Enter the Escape Pod Flash Contest! It runs June 1- July 4, stories must be under 500 words. More information at the link.

Next week… we begin our annual Hugo short stories rundown, with five weeks of award-nominated stories! I’m taking a 4-week break from hosting, but I’ll see you in July!

I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno

By Vylar Kaftan

I knew you loved me, of course. It was written in your eyes when you looked at me, a physics problem with no clear answer. If an irresistible force meets an immovable object, what happens then?

They meet. That’s all we know. Relative to each other, they are in contact. From within the object or the force, there is no way to tell if you’re in motion.

Escape Pod 242: The Love Quest of Smidgen the Snack Cake

First appeared in Space and Time Magazine, issue 108.

Rated PG: for innuendo-heavy snack cake desire.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:56 — 39.3MB)

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Show Notes

Show Notes:

  • Mur will be at Balticon this week, along with Drabblecast’s Norm Sherman! Come by and say hi!

FRIDAY

  • 5pm Reading

SATURDAY:

  • 3pm NaNoWriMo for Noobs
  • 8pm Autograph Session

SUNDAY

  • 4pm Girls’ Rule Live!
  • 5pm Story Improv
  • 8pm ISBW Live!
  • Enter the Escape Pod Flash Contest! It runs June 1- July 4, stories must be under 500 words. More information at the link.

Next week… the podcast comes on a special day: June 1. And it shows us that love is relative. And so is Reno.

The Love Quest of Smidgen the Snack Cake

By Robert T. Jeschonek

For her entire adolescent and adult life up until three weeks ago, Lynda had been the queen of junk food. Aside from the briefest blips of non-junk spending due to occasional failed diets, she had purchased only the most fattening, high-cholesterol, chemical-soaked foods available from grocery stores, restaurants, vending machines, and mail order websites.

In short, she was the perfect woman. Though she was on a diet that day, she had eaten non-nutritious foods in great quantities all her life. Though her last purchases had been salad greens and bottled water, her 250-pound body told the true story.

I knew she was just waiting for someone like me to come along.

Genres: ,

Escape Pod 241: Thargus and Brian

Escape Pod 241: Thargus and Brian is an Escape Pod original.

Rated F: for two f-bombs and some serious munchies.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:53 — 28.3MB)

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Show Notes

Show Notes:

Next week… we discover that food is, in fact, love.

Thargus and Brian

By Stephen Gaskell

Thargus thought the time right. He set the lights to full strength and flailed and gnashed and roared as he’d been practising. He felt rather silly, but the performance seemed to be working. The human, one hand steadying its spin, looked on intensely. It moved the white stick up to its mouth, breathed in, and then stabbed the stick out against the sac wall.

“Don’t be afraid,” Thargus said, meaning the opposite. He’d seen the trick on old films stored in the moss-brain when humans always said one thing and meant another like “We’re safer if we split up.”

The human exhaled a long stream of smoke. “I’m not,” it said.

That didn’t sound right. Thargus considered his response while staring at the human. It sure was ugly. A patchwork of dirty synthetics over the majority of its body, and on top of its pudgy, pink head, strand upon strand of greasy hair. Ugh! Thargus felt sick.

“Be afraid, then,” he said.

“Why, are you going to eat me?”

Thargus didn’t feel comfortable telling an outright lie, but that didn’t mean he needed to be too honest. “I might.”

Escape Pod 240: The Last McDougal’s

First appeared in Asimov’s, January 2006.

Special closing song: “Blue,” by Yoko Kanno.

Rated PG. Contains some violence and is high in saturated fats.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:19 — 21.5MB)

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The Last McDougal’s

By David D. Levine

As the old man came in, letting the door close gently behind him, an expression came over his face that Garth had seen many times before: a compound of misty nostalgia and appalled astonishment. His gaze swept across the yellow and orange fiberglass chairs, their cracks and dings lovingly but visibly repaired; the plastic-topped tables with the white half-moons rubbed by millions of elbows; the light softly shining from the satiny steel of the napkin and catsup dispensers. Finally the old man’s eyes stopped dead on the smiling face of the six-foot-tall fiberglass cow that stood at the end of the counter, wearing an apron and a chef’s hat. “My God,” he said, “it’s Moogle McDougal.”

“It certainly is,” said Garth. “Welcome to McDougal’s. May I take your order?”

“Give me a minute,” he replied as he perused the menu. He had a comfortable old boot of a voice, rough but mellow. “It’s been… jeez, thirty years? …since I’ve been in one of these places. Um, I’ll have a double cheeseburger, a small order of fries, and….” He grinned. “…and a shake. Chocolate.”

Genres:

Escape Pod 238: Wind From a Dying Star

First appeared in Bones of the World, ed. Bruce Holland Rogers.

Rated PG. Contains sacrifice and space battles. Of a sort.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:01 — 29.6MB)

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Wind From a Dying Star

By David D. Levine

After a time she found a small patch of zeren. She spread across it, taking a little solace from its sparkling sweetness. “Zero-point energy” was what Old John called it, but to Gunai and the rest of her tribe it was zeren, delicious and rare. Gunai recalled a time when zeren was something you could almost ignore — a constant crackling thrum beneath the surface of perception — but now there were just a few thin patches here and there.

These days the tribe subsisted mostly on a thin diet of starlight, and even that was growing cold. Soon they would be forced to move on again. Yeoshi had told her the foraging was better in the direction of the galactic core, but it was so far…

Escape Pod 236: Still On the Road

First appeared in Asimov’s, December 2008.

Rated PG. Contains a little profanity and a lot of beat.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:01 — 7.6MB)

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Still On the Road

By Geoffrey A. Landis

Turns out, you know, that old dharma bum never made it off the wheel of karma. He had too many attachments, to the road, to words; and if you love the things of the world of Mara too much you fall back into the world, like gravity pulling back a rocket that doesn’t reach escape velocity. Two, three thousand years later, he’s still on the road. Really, nothing’s changed. And Neal, that old prankster, Neal never really did want to transcend, he loved to see it all streaming past the window, a constant moving circus disappearing in the rear-view mirror, loved to talk, loved it all.

Escape Pod 233: Union Dues: The Threnody of Johnny Toruko

Escape Pod 233: Union Dues: The Threnody of Johnny Toruko is an Escape Pod original.

Rated PG. Contains mature themes, violence, and some profanity. You know. Teenage stuff.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:20 — 30.5MB)

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Show Notes

Referenced Sites:

Official Union Dues Web Site

Union Dues on Twitter

Clonepod – Previous Team Shikaragaki stories

Union Dues: The Threnody of Johnny Toruko

By Jeffrey R. DeRego

I duck through the door behind her. The place is jammed with customers. “You have any money? I didn’t think to ask Miss Jennifer for any.”

TK answers, “don’t worry, just tell me what you want.”

“Large with extra sugar and cream.”

TK grins and focuses her attention on the line of people stretching from the entrance down to the counter. They all sidestep and she walks unimpeded front of the pack. “One large black, and one large with extra sugar and cream.”

The barrista, a girl of about 18, repeats the order in a flat monotone.

“And these are on the house. Everyone gets free coffee for the next two hours.”

“Free for everyone,” the clerk answers then puts our order together.

TK snickers and hands the coffee over.

Genres:

Escape Pod 208: An Almanac for the Alien Invaders

Previously appeared in Asimov’s.

Rated PG-13 for adult concepts and alien recruiters.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:56 — 28.1MB)

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An Almanac for the Alien Invaders

By Merrie Haskell

In January, there will be an annular solar eclipse, with the path of annularity moving through the Indian Ocean and into Sumatra and Borneo. Two days later, aliens will invade Earth.

No spaceships will loom large in blue skies, nor hover over our cities. At night, though, when we see blinking dots of light near the horizon, as small and pale as any star, we’ll think they’re planes or satellites of human origin. They won’t be. These are alien ships, come for conquest.

That is all we can see. What we hear is just as faint and difficult to resolve: we hear rumors. Or rather, one persistent rumor: “the aliens want volunteers.”

Naturally, I and my junior faculty friends need to drink quantities of beer to discuss this in detail. I expound that it’s a hoax.

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