Escape Pod 40: Even Vadsø Thaws
Show Notes
Rated PG. Contains themes of ecoterrorism and global disaster. If you can explain that to your kids, it’s family-safe.
Referenced sites:
Short-Short Stories by Bruce Holland Rogers
SciFi Dimensions
Musical guest: Red Hunter.
Even Vadsø Thaws
By Bruce Holland Rogers
The only person who might understand is Sponheim, the Corrections Sociologist. He just arrived. It’s his job to understand me thoroughly and to write a report that his successors will use to decide if it’s safe to revive me. His report will help them decide if I am no longer a threat to society because society has changed enough to deal with me, or has learned to treat behaviors like mine.
“I am already remorseful!” I tell him at our first interview. “I won’t do it again!” We are sitting at a table by the water. A light mist falls. “I shouldn’t have done it, shouldn’t even have thought about it. Once, I was one of the people fighting to preserve the last wild polar bears! I wanted to protect the earth!” I get myself worked up. I am close to tears.
About the Author
Bruce Holland Rogers
Bruce Holland Rogers is an American author of short fiction who also writes under the pseudonym Hanovi Braddock. His stories have won a Pushcart Prize, two Nebula Awards, the Bram Stoker Award, two World Fantasy Awards, the Micro Award, and have been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and Spain’s Premio Ignotus.
The 2001 short film The Other Side, directed by Mary Stuart Masterson, was based on his novelette, “Lifeboat on a Burning Sea”.
He is a member of the Wordos writers’ group and was a member of the fiction faculty at the MFA program in creative writing of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. He has taught fiction writing seminars in Denmark, Greece, Finland, and Portugal. In 2010 he taught at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest on a Fulbright grant.
About the Narrator
Serah Eley
Serah Eley is a chaos spirit who first appeared in 2013, from the right cerebral hemisphere of a former podcaster named Steve Eley. Best known as the founding editor and host of Escape Pod, with the famous signoff “Have Fun,” Steve realized he was having more fun as Serah and gave her the body for transition and general mayhem. Now much prettier than Steve and at least seventy percent weirder, Serah lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her spouse Sadi and collects stories too fantastic to be fiction. If you ask nicely she may even tell some of them. Very nicely.
