As you’ve likely noticed, Escape Pod and all of our siblings in the Escape Artists family have a new look! We’re very excited about our lovely new website, but as with any frontier, we’re likely to encounter some unexpected problems.
We appreciate your patience as settle into our new home!
If you have any technical difficulties or simply want to give us your feedback, please drop us a line at ansible@escapeartists.net
It’s with mixed emotions that we announce our news: S.B. Divya and Mur Lafferty are the new co-editors of Escape Pod. Our beloved Norm Sherman has stepped down from the big chair due to a variety of personal reasons. Benjamin C. Kinney has taken the role of assistant editor.
Norm has been a force of nature at the Pod, steering it with a sure and steady hand. Everyone here at Escape Pod and elsewhere in the Escape Artists family is deeply grateful for his hard work, and sends him all their best.
Mur and Divya look forward to bringing you the best, thought-provoking, and fun science fiction they can find. You can reach us at the new alias for Escape Pod editorial queries: ansible@escapeartists.net.
If you haven’t listened to last week’s episode, this may come as news, but I’m stepping down as editor of Escape Pod. I am very sad to do so, but all of my projects are spreading me too thin, and I don’t feel as if I can give any project my best effort. I don’t want EP to suffer because of this, so I’m stepping down.
I’m delighted to announce, however, that Norm Sherman, our part-time host, has agreed to take over editor duties. I love Norm’s intros, and his sense of humor, and I know he can keep up the vision Steve Eley had of Escape Pod allowing science fiction fans to “have fun.”
I will officially step down on December 31, and Alasdair Stuart of Pseudopod fame will be taking over as interim editor for a few weeks, then Norm will take over. I’m excited to see what he does with the podcast, and assure you that you’re in excellent hands.
Happy holidays, and have a fun and mighty new year.
~Mur
Not so much changes as clarifications. Also, I added a too long, didn’t read version. Highlights are below:
TL:DR Version
Hey fans, narrators, and authors of Escape Pod! I don’t have a kaffeklatch this year at WorldCon, so I’m just setting up an Escape Pod meetup. I’m going to say we should meet up at 4pm on Saturday at the Big Bar in the Hyatt. If things change, check here or my twitter handle (@mightymur).
I haven’t been to the Big Bar, but it looks like a good meeting place for mid-afternoon. If it doesn’t work out, we can go somewhere else.
For years now, we have done our best here at Escape Pod to bring you audio renditions of the Hugo-nominated short stories. Our original reason was to allow the Worldcon voters to have access to all the nominated stories, as some stories wouldn’t be easy to find (eg, it was in the January issue of a magazine you don’t read…). But now, Worldcon is putting out the Hugo pack for its members to receive the stories in ebook form.
Even though the voters now have the stories emailed to them, we still embrace the tradition of dedicating May to the best stories voted on by fandom. So get ready for Hugo month!
Note- even though we have dedicated ourselves to SF-only stories since branching off Pseudopod and Podcastle, we will run non-SF stories during the Hugo month, if they are nominated. (And this year we have three!)
Also, this year we had a new thing happen- An Escape Pod reprint AND a Podcastle reprint were nominated! We are so thrilled to have already offered these stories, but to remind you, and keep all the Hugo posts together, we will be bringing you Podcastle’s recording of “The Paper Menagerie,” and rerunning “Movement” as a mid-week special.
The nominees and the schedule:
“The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” by E. Lily Yu (Clarkesworld April 2011) – Running 5/3/12
“The Homecoming” by Mike Resnick (Asimov’s April/May 2011) – Running 5/10/12
“Movement” by Nancy Fulda (Asimov’s March 2011) – Running 5/14/12
“The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction March/April 2011) – Running 5/17/12
The very funny “Shadow War of the Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead City: Prologue” by John Scalzi (Tor.com) will not be appearing on Escape Pod, but you can (and should) read it in its entirety at Tor.com. And here’s a taste:
Night had come to the city of Skalandarharia, the sort of night with such a quality of black to it that it was as if black coal had been wrapped in blackest velvet, bathed in the purple-black ink of the demon squid Drindel and flung down a black well that descended toward the deepest, blackest crevasses of Drindelthengen, the netherworld ruled by Drindel, in which the sinful were punished, the black of which was so legendarily black that when the dreaded Drindelthengenflagen, the ravenous blind black badger trolls of Drindelthengen, would feast upon the uselessly dilated eyes of damned, the abandoned would cry out in joy as the Drindelthengenflagenmorden, the feared Black Spoons of the Drindelthengenflagen, pressed against their optic nerves, giving them one last sensation of light before the most absolute blackness fell upon them, made yet even blacker by the injury sustained from a falling lump of ink-bathed, velvet-wrapped coal.
Read more at Tor.com.
This year’s stories are pretty amazing, (two of them may drive you to tears- long time EP fans will easily guess one of the culprits) and it will be tough voting. But we hope you enjoy Hugo month as much as we enjoy bringing it to you.
You can also get ALL of our Hugo-nominated stories on one feed! Subscribe here!
Hey everyone! We’ve had some staff changes here at Escape Pod, and that’s thrown some things off schedule, and for that I take full responsibility and apologize. But we’re getting back on track, and here’s what you can expect in the next few days and weeks:
And below, the oft-requested epub versions of the last 3 Soundproofs!
Thanks for your patience!
I wanted to let people know that we’ve changed the submission guidelines slightly- we used to have a $300 cap on payments, but that is no more!
We want short stories between 2,000 and 6,000 words. The sweet spot’s somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 words. We pay $.05 a word for new fiction at this length, $.03 a word for reprints. ($100 minimum payment)
For the rare story (and they will be rare) longer than 6000 words, there is no longer a cap on payment.
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.
Hey folks,
We’ll be closing to submissions next Monday (the 6th) until August as we clear some stories out of the inbox and cut down a bit on the inventory of stories we’ve already bought.
–Bill