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Mur kindly introduced me in the last issue of Soundproof, but for anyone who missed that, hi. I’m Escape Pod’s Assistant Editor, and I’m most publicly known for doing the feedback segments in the podcast. I also oversee our teem of slush readers and end up sending out a lot of our rejections, and of course I lay out Soundproof. And other things, as necessary.

So in this beginning of a new year, I’m instead going to take you back a few days to the death of the last machine on earth that could turn a roll of Kodachrome from an opaque deep red film stock into color etched rectangles of plastic. Most of us have moved onto digital, which, let’s be fair, is significantly more user friendly and easier to control. Cheaper, too.

But it says something about Kodachrome — the first successful color film — that it took 75 years to be phased out of production. Sure, it had dwindled in years past, and films meant for paper prints rather than to be projected got rapidly popular, and it was a finicky, and slow, film to shoot.

Getting it developed in the last decade or so meant sending it to one place in Kansas and always worrying that the machine would break or Kodak would stop making the developing chemistry. While it’s trivial to develop black and white film at home, and not too horrible to do most modern color films, Kodachrome’s process would confound most any man.

But it was pretty. Someone wrote a bit too saccharine song about it. And it picked up the light in a bit different way than everything after it.

So this month we’re bringing you three stories in this pixelated form: Élan Vital by K. Tempest Bradford, Dead’s End to Middleton by Natania Barron, and God of the Lower Level by Charles M. Saplak.

They’re quite good.

You can download the ePub version here.

In This Issue:

—Escape Pod 269: Élan Vital By K. Tempest Bradford

—Book Review: For The Win Review by Josh Roseman

—Escape Pod 271: God Of The Lower Level By Charles M. Saplak

—Sauropod Dinosaurs had weird feet By Sarah Frost

—Escape Pod 273: Dead’s End to Middleton By Natania Barron

—Superhero Fiction: The Next Big Thing? by Adam Christopher