Genres: Classic S-F, Space
[EDITOR: This was originally released as audio-only, and we don’t have the rights to post the text of this story. It’s widely available online by searching.]
Mother never wanted me to take the meteorology job. “Those high fences and secret regulations,” she said. “There’s something shady about Rubens’ Medicines” —dear Mother’s tone was sarcastic when she wished it— “mark my words, Genevieve. Dull work, too, and why don’t they use automatons?” But it was that or go in as a governess or lady’s maid, and that would have been a bitter pill to swallow indeed.
I smile wryly at my little medicinal joke as I smooth down the page of the logbook. In any case, testimonials prove the worth of Rubens’ medicinal tonic above our competitors across Britain (to say nothing of the endorsement of Queen Victoria’s Surgeon): Worth every penny to save Da from consumption… Jarvis’ Elixir did nothing but Rubens’ saved her… The only cure, everyone knows it…
The hours are long, true, but the nursery is a pleasant place to work, with its high glass ceilings. I like seeing the tidy berry crops from my laboratory bench. Besides, it’s warm in winter, if a little stifling in summer.
Genres: Genetic Engineering, Space, Technology
So let’s do it this way. I’ll show you whatever I want and you’ll believe me, because I’m an octopus. I might as well get some benefit out of it, not that we ever had much – especially not since you left. Humans, huh?
Humans.
(Continue Reading…)
Genres: Dystopia
“I’ll trip you first abba!”
Tagedouchet teased her father as she leaped over the long stick he swung at her ankles, raising a puff of sand with her sandals, the gritty substance drifting between her toes, and landed, folding her knees, narrowly dodging the swing of her father’s Takuba sabre.
She swung her stick at his knees. He parried with his own and hammered her with his curved sword. The old, wiry man was still strong. Her blade blocked his attacks, but her shoulder bent almost to dislocation. She used a break in his thrusts to roll over to the side and sweep him off his feet with a sharp spin of her long stick. He hit the ground without a word, rolled over, and leaped back to his feet.
“Told you!” she said, the thick turban wrapped around her face muffling her words in the evening sun, setting behind the dunes around them.
“It’s important for trainees to build up some confidence, and…”
The beating wings of a Han Industries helithopter cut his words short, leaving a shadow across the sand like a giant firefly.
They instinctively covered their eyes, closed their mouths and stopped breathing. Some people said it did little good — whatever radiation seeped from the uranium transported from the mines would trickle in — but they did anyway, perhaps more in disgust of the corporation than for protection.
Her father spit a gob of black phlegm into the sand at the thopter’s passage, traces left from his own years working the mines around Arlit.
“Let’s get going,” he said “the drones’ll start flying soon.”
Genres: Aliens, Alternate Reality/Alternate History, Humor
Summer 1901
Upon my arrival at the Durham’s dance, it was quickly apparent to me that their daughter’s new purebred fiancé was not the evening’s star as gossip had foretold. Instead, a dashing green-skinned gentleman had garnered a pack of giggling admirers.
I had never encountered a person of such fascinatingly verdant coloration before, and yet I immediately had an odd pressure upon me to accept this man and not question his visage.
How peculiar.
I retreated to a far wall. My brow furrowed in thought; the motion hurt. My face was caked with powder adequate to make an elephant sneeze, all to obscure the final, yellowed vestiges of what had been a black eye.
Such a blemish would have been abhorrent to the flibbertigibbets filling the room, but then, they also had the mental acumen of chocolate éclairs. They prowled these parties for husband material the way big game hunters stalked moose, each seeking to bag something brag-worthy and best kept stuffed in a parlor. This green-skinned man was fresh meat, though it seemed no one else had noticed his greenness at all.
(Continue Reading…)
In 2018, Escape Pod published a number of original and reprint science fiction stories. If you are nominating and/or voting for these awards, please consider our original publications for the Short Story category of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, among others. The full list is below!
Escape Pod is eligible for the Best Semiprozine Hugo Award. 2018 staff include Co-Editors Mur Lafferty and S.B. Divya, Assistant Editor Benjamin C. Kinney, and Audio Producers Adam Pracht and Summer Brooks.
Mur Lafferty and S.B. Divya are also eligible for the Best Editor (Short Form) Hugo Award. (Please nominate both on same ballot.)
A full list of current Escape Pod staff is available here, including our Guest Editors for Artemis Rising 4, S. Kay Nash and Laura Pearlman, and our Guest Hosts, Tina Connolly and Alasdair Stuart. We are very proud of our crew and the work we’ve done, and we thank you for joining us in this orbit around the sun.
— Mur Lafferty & S.B. Divya
Wasps Make Honey (3500 words) by Penelope Evans
Sweetness at the End (2600 words) by Jenny Rae Rappaport
The Sixes, The Wisdom, and the Wasp (5500 words) by E.J. Delaney
A Cure for Homesickness (5970 words) by S. L. Scott
All Profound and Logical Minds (5900 words) by Bennett North
A Study in Symmetry, or the Chance Encounter of an Android and a Painter (4300 words) by Jamie Lackey
Promise (5400 words) by Christi Nogle
Assistance (5500 words) by Kathryn DeFazio
Surveillance Fatigue (2200 words) by Jennifer R. Donahue
Humans Die, Stars Fade (3700 words) by Charles Payseur
After Midnight at the Zap Stop (5200 words) by Matthew Claxton
Me, Meg, and The Thing (6000 words) by Gian-Paul Bergeron
Toastmaster (500 words) by Kurt Pankau
Dollhouse (500 words) by Karen Osborne
Kaiju Outside Hope (500 words) by Maria Haskins
So Sorry You’re Going Extinct! (470 words) by Paul R Hardy
Subtle Ways Each Time (2100 words) by Y.M. Pang
Loyalty Test (2500 words) by Andrew Gudgel
Beatrix Released (6000 words) by Shaenon Garrity
Hoping for Red (3800 words) by Adam Knight
Heart of Ash, Heart of Steam (3500 words) by Malon Edwards – first published in Steampunk Universe, Jan 2, 2018
Mother Tongues (3700 words) by S. Qiouyu Li – first published in Asimov’s, January 2018
When We Fall (5200 words) by Kameron Hurley
Cat Pictures, Please (3400 words) by Naomi Kritzer
Sparg (2000 words) by Brian Trent
Lonely Robot On A Rocket Ship In Space (4300 words) by A. Merc Rustad
My Generations Shall Praise (5500 words) by Samantha Henderson
Anna and Marisol in Time and Space (7200 words) by Tim Pratt
Fandom for Robots (3600 words) by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Fire Rode the Cold Wind (4400 words) by Aimee Ogden
The Endangered Camp (4000 words) by Ann Leckie
An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition (46oo words) by Ken Liu
Lucky Shot (13400 words) by Gerri Leen
At the Village Vanguard (Ruminations on Blacktopia) (4800 words) by Maurice Broaddus
Paradise Regained (5900 words) by Edward Lerner
Oracle (3600 words) by Dominica Phetteplace
The Revolution, Brought to You by Nike (9900 words) by Andrea Phillips
A Handful of Dal (1500 words) by Naru Sundar
Some Things I Probably Should Have Mentioned Earlier (1700 words) by Laura Pearlman
And Then There Were (N-One) (19350 words) by Sarah Pinsker
The Big So-So (5200 words) by Erika Satifka
Caesura (3700 words) by Hayley Stone
Herd Mentality By Jay Caselberg
Midnight Blue By Will McIntosh
On a Clear Day You can See All the Way to Conspiracy By Desmond Warzel
Ulla By Daniel Schwabauer
Disarm By Vylar Kaftan
Imma Gonna Finish You Off by Marina J. Lostetter
Impossible Dreams By Tim Pratt
Into the Breach By Malon Edwards
Genres: Genetic Engineering
Vixen had just one question for the doctor:
“Can you do it?”
Doctor Fizzwinkle smiled and patted the fur on Vixen’s neck. Outside of the office, the winds whipped furiously, as they did most of the time north of the Arctic Circle. In the office, though, the glow of fluorescent light and the smell of rubbing alcohol made Vixen feel secure and cared for.
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “The procedure you heard about is simple in principle―I would take DNA samples of you and Mr. Vixen, then analyze the cells to see your genetic predispositions, and manipulate the chromosomes to produce the calf that you and your husband desire.”
“Then why not?” Vixen said, stamping her hooves in a little dance.
“Well, everything is simple in principle,” the Doctor said. “But I’ve never done it before.”
Vixen smiled and shook her antlers. She nuzzled against Doctor Fizzwinkle. All the reindeer, indeed all of the animals in the North Pole, loved the good doctor, the best veterinarian north of sixty-six degrees latitude.
“Have you and Mr. Vixen tried all of the techniques I presented? Did he take the pills I prescribed?”
“Yes, and yes,” Vixen replied.
“Give it time, and patience, and you can certainly have a healthy, normal calf.”
“But I don’t want a normal calf!” blurted out Vixen. The Doctor smiled sadly and shook his head.
Genres: Artificial Intelligence, Computer, Technology
TERMINATION SHOCK is a new roleplaying game from Greg Stolze, chronicling your adventures as an ordinary human rescued from hellish war by disorganized aliens. What will you do as a refugee in a strange cosmos? Cling to your past, or find a purpose among inscrutable aliens? Will you just get by, or will you redefine humanity in the eyes of a million extraterrestrials? The choice is yours in this new tabletop game, on Kickstarter now.
Priya begins by striking the words love, hate, heart, and feel from the computer’s vocabulary, and blocks the internet. It isn’t with malicious intent. She does it on a whim, as with most things: fixing herself tacos at eleven o’clock at night, taking a right instead of a left turn against the advice of her GPS, showing up to her brother’s funeral in bright pink and yellow leopard-print high-tops.
“Your shoes look like they’re wanted for the murder of a Lisa Frank poster,” Demetri said when she first bought them, after nearly shooting Pepsi through his nose.
“You’re just jealous because I look fly, and you’d get shot wearing these around the city,” Priya said.
“Fly? So you’re a little gangster now, huh?”
“More than you.”
He did get shot. But it wasn’t over shoes.
TERMINATION SHOCK is a new roleplaying game from Greg Stolze, chronicling your adventures as an ordinary human rescued from hellish war by disorganized aliens. What will you do as a refugee in a strange cosmos? Cling to your past, or find a purpose among inscrutable aliens? Will you just get by, or will you redefine humanity in the eyes of a million extraterrestrials? The choice is yours in this new tabletop game, on Kickstarter now.
The lichen in the cupboard has at last begun to sing. It sings in two-part harmony, bel canto, essaying a faultless duet with itself. What a strange and lovely fairy! I am convinced more and more that my earlier theory was correct, that the lichen is a bipartite organism comprising both fungus and an algae or bacterium. A remarkable symbiosis, distinct I believe from any recognized taxonomy. The love its halves sing to one another is profound enough to make one blush, and I soon retreated to the far end of the room to sketch my collection of English mice in the bone cabinet. Papa and Mamma have allowed me to keep a few childhood specimens in my room again, to be used for art lessons only.
Dinner party tonight. All the MPs got a clinical dissection, it was lively. Papa and Grandpapa are appalled by Gladstone’s capitulation to the Irish Free Staters. I agree entirely. If it were me I’d turn them all out with a thrashing. When the guests moved to the drawing room for dessert and coffee Mamma suggested I retire, as the conversation was likely to get too intellectual for a girl like myself.
(Speaking of conversation: I’ve decided to continue this diary in a new code. The previous simple substitution code was v. solvable, and the thought of Mamma reading my less charitable observations was keeping me up at night. She will go through my things! Besides it is good mental exercise to practice a new writing system.)
A few new faces among the dinner guests. One gentleman with an amusing gait, stiff and precise, like a spider. He specifically resembles the Pholcus phalangioides or Daddy long-legs. The cause of the distinctive perambulatory motion of spiders is hydraulic pressure, which assists them in flexing their limbs. The cause of the distinctive perambulatory motion of the dinner guest is unknown.
(Continue Reading…)
Genres: Aliens, Apocalyptic, Dystopia
We’re both sitting on the rotting front porch one muggy July day when Dorcas asks me if I want to break into Paradise with her. I lace up my sneakers and we do the old huff-and-puff up Negley Avenue to the big Cygnian compound on the hill.
It’s dark, which doesn’t mean much. Most of the compound-heads are wired up to the pleasure-juice on a more-or-less constant basis, and who needs light when you’ve got that? Still, it only takes about three minutes until we’re spotted climbing over the semi-permeable barrier that separates the Chosen Ones from the Not There Yet. And it only takes eight minutes until we’re sitting in the bare-bones holding tank, waiting for an attendant to rouse one of the compound-heads from their ecstasy.
I look over at Dorky. She looks over at me. She mouths the words “play along.”
And I mouth the word “what?” because for the life of me I can’t figure out what the hell the point of this little stunt is.
The compound-head enters in a thick bathrobe that hides just how fucking skinny they all are. It picks up its slate and starts to write. The chalk squeaks.
Colorless ideas sleep furiously still.
“We want to stay.”
Sonic results spiral within documentation.
The Cygnians say they’re preparing the compound-heads for life on their homeworld, the real Paradise. For three weeks all of us were jacked up on pleasure-juice dialed to Max Effect, while the Cygnians ran tests to decide which of us got to live in the compounds. They shepherded their lucky few into one of the many squat nanofoam villages that dot the entire globe. Then they turned off the tap.
What happened next… well, at least some of us survived.
(Continue Reading…)