Archive for Podcasts

Escape Pod 216: βoyfriend

Originally appeared at Worldchanging.ca

Rated R for language, teen-adult situations, and virtual steadies. Also, Norm’s sexy talk.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:20 — 31.1MB)

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βoyfriend

By Madeline Ashby

Violet snapped three photos of herself from various angles, sent them, and waited for her boyfriend’s response. He rang her up—a slow vibrating purr, unlike the staccato door-knocking of her mother’s ringvibe—and said: “Me likey. Now take it off.”

Violet frowned. “You were _supposed_ to dig up the backstory on the dress.”

“Well, you can’t blame me for getting a little distracted. Besides, isn’t it bad luck for me to see?”

“That’s only for weddings, not prom.”

Escape Pod 215: Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store

First appeared at Robin Sloan’s blog, June 8, 2009.

Rated G. May contain creepy imagery and disturbing data visualizations.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:36 — 32.0MB)

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Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store

By Robin Sloan

IT’S 2:02 A.M. ON A COLD SUMMER NIGHT.

I’m sitting in a book store next to a strip club.

Not that kind of book store. The inventory here is incredibly old and impossibly rare. And it has a secret—a secret that I might have just discovered.

I am alone in the store. And then, tap-tap, suddenly I’m not.

And now I’m pretty sure I’m about to snap my laptop shut, run screaming out the front door, and never return.

Escape Pod 214: Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast

First published in Interzone #220 (Feb 2009).

Rated R for sex, masks, and violence

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:51 — 39.7MB)

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Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast

By Eugie Foster

Each morning is a decision. Should I put on the brown mask or the blue? Should I be a tradesman or an assassin today?

Whatever the queen demands, of course, I am. But so often she ignores me, and I am left to figure out for myself who to be.

Dozens upon dozens of faces to choose from.

1. Marigold is for murder.

Genres:

Escape Pod 213: A Monkey Will Never Get Rid of Its Black Hands

Escape Pod 213: A Monkey Will Never Get Rid of Its Black Hands is an Escape Pod original.

Rated R for amputation fads.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:40 — 34.8MB)

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A Monkey Will Never Get Rid of Its Black Hands

By Rachel Swirsky

Papa and Uncle Fomba told me if I didn’t join the army, they’d kill me. They didn’t. They cut off my hands.

This was after U.S. forces marched on Syria, but before we invaded Lebanon. On every city block, posters of Uncle Sam entreated every Tom, Duc, and Haroun to get blown up in the name of freedom. Papa and Fomba gave me two weeks to enlist. I ran for Canada instead. They caught me.

Escape Pod 212: Skinhorse Goes to Mars

Originally published in PostScripts

Rated R for strong language, strong violence, and world-spanning tumors.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:53 — 28.8MB)

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Skinhorse Goes to Mars

By Jay Lake

When I met Skinhorse, my first thought was old. Which was weird. Nobody gets old these days. We all die young, some of us after living a long time, if we’re lucky.

He was in Piet’s Number Seven, a bar-cum-caravanserai in an illegal orbit trailing far enough behind Vesta to be ignorable. Piet’s had been instantiated in an old volatiles bladder that had done the Jovian run a few too many times before falling into the surplus circuit. You could store entire cities in Piet’s cubage, which made for a somewhat attenuated bar experience. Plus the place had one of those gravity cans — yes, those gravity cans — which meant your drink stayed stuck down long as you were near a Higgs carpet.

So there I was annoying myself with three perfectly disrespectable rock jocks, each of us out to fleece the others, when this cadaver starts to stand over me. We’re all forever young or forever dead, but this armstrong looked like he’d shaved about half a cent too deep across his whole body, then restored his dermis with spray-on thermal insulation.

Escape Pod 211: Carthago Delenda Est

Story originally appeared in Federations.

Rated PG for political machinations and waiting…

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:50 — 21.2MB)

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Carthago Delenda Est

By Genevieve Valentine

Wren Hex-Yemenni woke early. They had to teach her everything from scratch, and there wasn’t time for her to learn anything new before she hit fifty and had to be expired.

“Watch it,” the other techs told me when I was starting out. “You don’t want a Hex on your hands.”

By then we were monitoring Wren Hepta-Yemenni. She fell into bed with Dorado ambassador 214, though I don’t know what he did to deserve it and she didn’t even seem sad when he expired. When they torched him she went over with the rest of the delegates, and they bowed or closed their eyes or pressed their tentacles to the floors of their glass cases, and afterwards they toasted him with champagne or liquid nitrogen.

Before we expired Hepta, later that year, she smiled at me. “Make sure Octa’s not ugly, okay? Just in case—for 215.”

Wren Octa-Yemenni hates him, so it’s not like it matters.

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.”

Genres:

Escape Pod 209: On the Eyeball Floor

Escape Pod 209: On the Eyeball Floor is an Escape Pod original.

Rated PG for for angry awakening sentience and some swearing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:38 — 25.8MB)

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Show Notes

Closing song by Andrew Richardson

On the Eyeball Floor

by Tina Connolly

We’ve got robotic arms to put the eyeballs in. Metal clamps to pulldown the eyelids. Tony, on Four, keeps the grease vats filled. Oil squirts nineteen times a minute to keep the eye sockets from squeaking. Tiny slick needles stitch on the lashes, while millions of different irises get stamped in magenta and yellow and cyan, so no two will ever be alike, just like us.

All that, and they can’t engineer anything—or anyone—to take over my job. People in Organs go home coated with grease and vinegar; people in Bones have lost fingers to the machines, and still nobody wants the job where a hundred half-live cyborgs line up in rows, twitching when your back is turned. Waiting for someone to talk to them, feel for them. Transcend them to life.

There are safety signs around the factory. “Scrub Up.” “Know Thyself.” “Don’t Blink.” That last is the best piece of advice, here on the eyeball floor.

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.

Escape Pod 207: Wonder Maul Doll

Appeared originally in From the Trenches

Rated R for violence and sexual situations.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:01 — 21.3MB)

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Wonder Maul Doll

By Kameron Hurley

We set down in Pekoi as part of the organics inquisition team, still stinking of the last city. We’re all muscle. Not brains. The brains are out eating at the foreigners’ push downtown, and they don’t care if we whore around the tourist dregs half the night so long as somebody’s sober enough to haul them out come morning. When the brains aren’t eating, they’re pretending to give us directions in the field, telling us where to sniff out organics. They’re writing reports about how dangerous Pekoi is to the civilized world.

We’re swapping off some boy in a backwater push the locals cleared out for us. We’re sitting around a low table. I pass off another card to Kep. Luce swaps out a suit. She has to sit on one leg to lean over the table. It’s hot in the low room, so humid that moths clutter aroundour feet, too heavy to fly.

The boy’s making little mewling sounds again. Somebody should shut him up, but not me. This is my hand. I’m ahead.

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