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Escape Pod 241: Thargus and Brian

Escape Pod 241: Thargus and Brian is an Escape Pod original.

Rated F: for two f-bombs and some serious munchies.

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:53 — 28.3MB)

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Show Notes

Show Notes:

Next week… we discover that food is, in fact, love.

Thargus and Brian

By Stephen Gaskell

Thargus thought the time right. He set the lights to full strength and flailed and gnashed and roared as he’d been practising. He felt rather silly, but the performance seemed to be working. The human, one hand steadying its spin, looked on intensely. It moved the white stick up to its mouth, breathed in, and then stabbed the stick out against the sac wall.

“Don’t be afraid,” Thargus said, meaning the opposite. He’d seen the trick on old films stored in the moss-brain when humans always said one thing and meant another like “We’re safer if we split up.”

The human exhaled a long stream of smoke. “I’m not,” it said.

That didn’t sound right. Thargus considered his response while staring at the human. It sure was ugly. A patchwork of dirty synthetics over the majority of its body, and on top of its pudgy, pink head, strand upon strand of greasy hair. Ugh! Thargus felt sick.

“Be afraid, then,” he said.

“Why, are you going to eat me?”

Thargus didn’t feel comfortable telling an outright lie, but that didn’t mean he needed to be too honest. “I might.”

Escape Pod 240: The Last McDougal’s

First appeared in Asimov’s, January 2006.

Special closing song: “Blue,” by Yoko Kanno.

Rated PG. Contains some violence and is high in saturated fats.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:19 — 21.5MB)

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The Last McDougal’s

By David D. Levine

As the old man came in, letting the door close gently behind him, an expression came over his face that Garth had seen many times before: a compound of misty nostalgia and appalled astonishment. His gaze swept across the yellow and orange fiberglass chairs, their cracks and dings lovingly but visibly repaired; the plastic-topped tables with the white half-moons rubbed by millions of elbows; the light softly shining from the satiny steel of the napkin and catsup dispensers. Finally the old man’s eyes stopped dead on the smiling face of the six-foot-tall fiberglass cow that stood at the end of the counter, wearing an apron and a chef’s hat. “My God,” he said, “it’s Moogle McDougal.”

“It certainly is,” said Garth. “Welcome to McDougal’s. May I take your order?”

“Give me a minute,” he replied as he perused the menu. He had a comfortable old boot of a voice, rough but mellow. “It’s been… jeez, thirty years? …since I’ve been in one of these places. Um, I’ll have a double cheeseburger, a small order of fries, and….” He grinned. “…and a shake. Chocolate.”

Mur on Becoming Escape Pod’s editor

Cross posted from Murverse.com:

I’ve been hinting at a seekrit project for a while now, and it’s finally public: Steve Eley, the brilliant mind behind the first podcast fiction magazine, is stepping down from Escape Pod, and I’ll be taking his place.

I’ve been involved with Escape Artists in one way or another several times in the past five years. Steve has published several of my short stories, and asked me and Ben Phillips to helm Pseudopod when it launched. I had to step down in 2007 because i had a day job and simply had to let some outside things go.

I’ve been working behind the scenes on the EP thing for a couple of weeks now, sifting through slush with some truly dedicated volunteers. We re-launch after our hiatus next week on Escape Pod’s fifth anniversary with Steve’s last podcast. Then I will take over hosting for three weeks, then we will run our traditional Hugo short story offering. July is when I’ll settle into the job fully with hosting and editing. We’ve got some new things coming up for the podcast this summer.

But never fear! The podcast is awesome because of Steve’s vision: fun SF, and I’ll never turn away from that.

I’ve got a great team helping me, and I’m very excited to see where we can steer this ship. Thanks for all the congrats that came through Twitter and email so far, it really means a lot to me that people have confidence in my ability to take this amazing podcast and keep it strong.

The State of Escape Pod, and a Message From Steve

A message from Steve, posted on the forums:

Hi all,

This’ll be a short message, with a longer one later.  First things first: I am alive.  Family’s doing well, including Harper:

There’s been a lot going on, but that’s a lousy excuse to be radio silent for this long.  I’m sorry about that.  This doesn’t justify it, but it’s symptomatic of one thing: I’ve been managing my energy poorly.  I’m being stretched too thin.

That warrants more explanation, and I’ll say more soon.  What I want you to know right now is that I’m going to be resigning from Escape Pod.  This isn’t actually a negative, although it probably sounds that way.  It’s the right thing to do for myself and it’s the right thing to do for the podcast.  There’s a plan in the works to bring new energy in — one or more people who will do better by you than I have lately.

Escape Pod won’t be going away.  I really do think the podcast matters.  The stories matter, and the audience matters.  And I’m not going to say you’ll never hear my voice again.  But I won’t be trying to keep everything on my shoulders.  That worked for a few years, and I felt I needed to keep coming back to it.  But I think you deserve better.  And we’re going to work to make sure you get it.

Whew.

So.  How’s things with you?

Escape Pod will be back up and running May 12 (which, incidentally, is our 5 year anniversary/birthday/thingie). Also, we will be closed to submissions until July 1. If you do not hear from us by then, feel free to resubmit.

We’ll be announcing the new editor shortly, until then, thank you for your patience, your support, and your concern.

Genres:

Escape Pod 239: A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness

Originally published in: Futurismic, April 2009.

Opening poem: “Scientific Romance”

Rated R. Contains mature sexual situations and adult themes. (And robot themes.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:30 — 18.9MB)

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A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness

By Tim Pratt

My step-daughter Wynter, who is regrettably prejudiced against robots and those who love us, comes floating through the door in a metaphorical cloud of glitter instead of her customary figurative cloud of gloom. She enters the kitchen, rises up on the toes of her black spike-heeled boots, wraps her leather-braceleted arms around my neck, and places a kiss on my cheek, leaving behind a smear of black lipstick on my artificial skin and a whiff of white make-up in my artificial nose.

“Hi Kirby,” she says, voice all bubbles and light, when normally she would never deign to utter my personal designation.

“Is Moms around? Haven’t talked to her in a million.”

I know right away that Wynter has been infected.

Genres:

Escape Pod 238: Wind From a Dying Star

First appeared in Bones of the World, ed. Bruce Holland Rogers.

Rated PG. Contains sacrifice and space battles. Of a sort.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:01 — 29.6MB)

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Wind From a Dying Star

By David D. Levine

After a time she found a small patch of zeren. She spread across it, taking a little solace from its sparkling sweetness. “Zero-point energy” was what Old John called it, but to Gunai and the rest of her tribe it was zeren, delicious and rare. Gunai recalled a time when zeren was something you could almost ignore — a constant crackling thrum beneath the surface of perception — but now there were just a few thin patches here and there.

These days the tribe subsisted mostly on a thin diet of starlight, and even that was growing cold. Soon they would be forced to move on again. Yeoshi had told her the foraging was better in the direction of the galactic core, but it was so far…

Escape Pod 237: Roadside Rescue

First appeared in Omni, July 1985.

Rated R. Contains profanity and mature (if alien) themes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:30 — 14.1MB)

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Roadside Rescue

By Pat Cadigan

“That’s a long time to wait.” The navigator’s smile widened. He was very attractive, holo-star kind of handsome. People who work for aliens, Etan thought. “Perhaps you’d care to wait in my employer’s transport. For that matter, I can probably repair your vehicle, which will save you time and money. Roadside rescue fees are exorbitant.”

“That’s very kind,” Etan said, “but I have called, and I don’t want to impose—“

“It was my employer’s idea to stop, sir. I agreed, of course. My employer is quite fond of people. In fact, my employer loves people. And I’m sure you would be rewarded in some way.”

Escape Pod 236: Still On the Road

First appeared in Asimov’s, December 2008.

Rated PG. Contains a little profanity and a lot of beat.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:01 — 7.6MB)

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Still On the Road

By Geoffrey A. Landis

Turns out, you know, that old dharma bum never made it off the wheel of karma. He had too many attachments, to the road, to words; and if you love the things of the world of Mara too much you fall back into the world, like gravity pulling back a rocket that doesn’t reach escape velocity. Two, three thousand years later, he’s still on the road. Really, nothing’s changed. And Neal, that old prankster, Neal never really did want to transcend, he loved to see it all streaming past the window, a constant moving circus disappearing in the rear-view mirror, loved to talk, loved it all.

Escape Pod 235: On the Human Plan

First appeared in Lone Star Stories, February 2009.

Rated PG. Contains entropy and age. A lot of it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:31 — 20.3MB)

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On the Human Plan

By Jay Lake

I am called Dog the Digger. I am not mighty, neither am I fearsome. Should you require bravos, there are muscle-boys aplenty among the rat-bars of any lowtown on this raddled world. If it is a wizard you want, follow the powder-trails of crushed silicon and wolf’s blood to their dark and winking lairs. Scholars can be found in their libraries, taikonauts in their launch bunkers and ship foundries, priests amid the tallow-gleaming depths of their bone-ribbed cathedrals.

What I do is dig. For bodies, for treasure, for the rust-pocked hulks of history, for the sheer pleasure of moving what cannot be moved and finding what rots beneath. You may hire me for an afternoon or a month or the entire turning of the year. It makes me no mind whatsoever.

As for you, I know what you want. You want a story.