Genres:

Escape Pod 467: Trash

Escape Pod 467: Trash is an Escape Pod original.

Mild language that may be unsuitable for young listeners.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:16 — 22.2MB)

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Trash

by Marie Vibbert

Nanlee was a woman with the sort of past that necessitated moving to a non-extradition treaty country, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t planned on enjoying her “retirement” on Luna Colony.  She was Facilities Manager – a polite term for the boss of all janitors.  Her staff jumped anxiously at her every glance, and waste was down nine percent since she had taken office.  She was still important; the life of the colony depended on her work.  No one bothered her.  Which was fortunate, given how she used to deal with people who bothered her.

Luna Colony concerned itself with maintaining the Ungodly Huge Array on the dark side of the moon and serving as a weigh station between Earth’s inconvenient atmosphere and the rest of the universe.  Nanlee concerned herself with minding her own business.

She was at her desk when the alarms started.  A male voice recorded long ago grunted “Evacuate.  Imminent danger of decompression. Evacuate.”  No doubt he had thought he sounded important and tough. Nanlee sighed and locked her workstation.

Vince, her assistant, fell to a halt against the door as she was picking up her cane.  “Boss! The station—”

“Yes, I heard.  I do have two working ears.  Probably a drill, but gather everyone to the garage.”

Vince’s hazel eyes just about vibrated, so wide open she could see the white all the way around the iris.  “It isn’t a drill!  This is ‘we could all die tonight’ bad news.”

Nanlee paused, half on her cane, half on the edge of the desk, pulling herself out of her chair.  She fell back into the seat.  She could feel her hot-tub calling to her.  “Metaphorical death or literal?”

“Literal.  Two tons of titanium on a crash-course with our dome.”  He tapped her desk surface, hurriedly typing in his password and pulling a document, which he rotated with a flick of his hand to point at her.

It was an orbit decay projection. They always looked the same.  “And this is too big for the dome to handle?”

“It’ll crack us like an egg!”

Vince sounded excited, almost gleeful, at the prospect.  He was young.

“What the hell is it?”

“The last stage of a Saturn V rocket.  Sucker’s been orbiting Luna for a hundred years.  Maybe it got hit by some other debris, maybe it’s just decided now’s the time to land.”

Nanlee stopped herself from asking “Saturn what?” because Vince was looking at her like he’d just won the lottery.  “Does Trey know about this?”

Trey was the mayor of the colony, Nanlee’s boss.

Vince rolled his eyes.  “Of course Trey knows.”  Like that was any less valid a question than asking her if she had heard the evacuation announcement.  Nanlee wasn’t going to waste breath pointing it out. “He sent me to tell you we’ve got a little less than a day.”

“Well pack shit up!”  She poked her cane against the wall behind her to get a little boost forward.  “Get Percy and take the organic filters off-line.  They won’t survive decompression. Also—“

“No. We’ve got a day to try and save the colony.”

(Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Escape Pod 466: Checkmate

Escape Pod 466: Checkmate is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:26 — 25.8MB)

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Checkmate

by Brian Trent

The black steamrotor chugged noisily beneath the maze of damp brick arches, cutting a frothy wake in the underground canal.  Edward Oakshott stood rigidly at the bow, leaning against his silver cane. The dank stink of London’s forgotten netherworld perspirated over the vessel’s wood, the humidity visibly beading like a spate of glassy insect eyes on the many green lamplights they passed.  Edward drummed his fingers against one clammy hand.  His sense of direction, precise as his fashionable gold pocketwatch, reckoned they must be passing directly below the evening crowd at Charing Cross’ Hungerford Market.

Yet he wondered at their boatman’s skill in navigating these dark, labyrinthine channels.  How often were customers ferried to Thoth’s subterranean bazaar?  Edward grinned in nervous anticipation and peered from beneath the rim of his hat at the constellation of green lamps marking the canal’s many twists and turns.

“We shall be late if this continues,” Sophia Westbury said behind him.  Her folded parasol looked like a pale sword against her shoulder. “Really, Edward, was there no earlier date you could meet him?  It had to wait until the very eve of war?”

“The party shall wait for me.”

“It will be a scandal,” Sophia said, though her bell-like voice belied the smile on her lips.  Edward was already the scandal of the decade. Chessmen were synonymous with shadowy, secret shufflings in the night; living legends who could be your banker, teacher, butcher, parent, or carriage driver during times of peace.  Edward’s public antics had shocked Europe into a buzzing hive.

Sophia sighed and looped her arm round his.  “What do you know about this Thoth?  Any man who dwells like a spider beneath London, spinning mechanical webs beyond the Ministry’s sight…”  She shivered.  “I feel like Faustus!”

“Henry sent a Bishop here last autumn, darling, the one who defended Cornwall.  If Henry says Thoth is trustworthy, that is good enough for me.”

At these words, the boat banked sharply through a new arch, throwing up a huge wake.  Edward steadied himself with pressure to his cane, but cast a ghastly glare at their boatman in the ship’s small cabin.

“Edward!”   (Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Escape Pod 465: The Sky is Blue, and Bright, and Filled with Stars

Escape Pod 465: The Sky is Blue, and Bright, and Filled with Stars is an Escape Pod original.

Contains two curse words.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:40 — 22.5MB)

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The Sky is Blue, and Bright, and Filled with Stars

by Edward Ashton

Dot reaches the summit of Mary’s Rock just after six, maybe an hour before sunset. It’s a clear, cool September day, with a scattering of tiny white clouds in a royal blue sky, and a soft, steady breeze from the west that brings the faint smell of burning things up from the ruins of Luray. She drops her pack at the top of the trail, pulls out a water bottle, and scrambles up the last thirty meters of broken granite to the high point. The trees on the north side of Thornton Gap a half-kilometer below are just showing the first hints of color, tiny flecks of red and gold mixed into a sea of dark green. Off to the west she can see the smoke now, rising from what looks like a brush fire far down the valley. She sits down, leans back against a waist-high block of stone, and drains half of her water in one long, lukewarm pull.

She’s been here once before, when she was years younger and there were still a few people raising goats and vegetables down in the valley. It was winter then, and she spent a crystal-clear, bitterly cold night out on the overlook, bundled into her mummy bag, sleeping in hour-long snatches, waking each time to a different dazzling pattern of stars and station-lights. The beauty was almost overwhelming, and she vowed then to come back some day, to see what it was like to spend a night on the summit when she didn’t have to worry about hypothermia.

As the sun begins to redden and dip toward the horizon, Dot climbs to her feet and makes her way back down to the overlook, a flat half-circle of stone maybe forty meters across, hanging out over four hundred meters of empty space. A hawk rides the breeze, floating almost stationary out over the drop. It looks at her, dips one wing, and falls like a stone, chasing something down below. Dot retrieves her pack, pulls out her food sack and her alcohol stove. She’s low on fuel. Four more days, maybe five, and she’ll be cooking over an open fire until she can find some more. As she measures out her supper, she realizes that she only has a few days worth of beans and noodles left. No point in cooking when you’ve got nothing to cook, and she’s at least a week’s walk from the nearest resupply. She sighs, and pours a third of what she’d taken back into the sack. (Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Escape Pod 464: Red Dust and Dancing Horses

This story was originally published in Stupefying Stories, March 2012.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:43 — 20.5MB)

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Red Dust and Dancing Horses

by Beth Cato

No horses existed on Mars. Nara could change that.She stared out the thick-paned window. Tinted dirt sprawled to a horizon, mesas and rock-lipped craters cutting the mottled sky. It almost looked like a scene from somewhere out of the Old West on Earth, like in the two-dimensional movies she studied on her tablet. Mama thought that 20th-century films were the ultimate brain-rotting waste of time, so Nara made sure to see at least two a week. Silver, Trigger, Buttermilk, Rex, Champion—she knew them all. She had spent months picturing just how their hooves would sink into that soft dirt, how their manes would lash in the wind. How her feet needed to rest in the stirrups, heels down, and how the hot curve of a muzzle would fit between her cupped hands.The terraforming process had come a long way in the two hundred years since mechs established the Martian colonies. Nara didn’t need a pressure suit to walk outside, but in her lifetime she’d never breathe on her own outside of her house or the Corcoran Dome. There would never be real horses here, not for hundreds of years, if ever. But a mechanical horse could find its way home in a dust storm, or handle the boggy sand without breaking a leg. She could ride it. Explore. It would be better than nothing. Her forehead bumped against the glass. But to have a real horse with hot skin and silky mane…

“Nara, you’re moping again.” Mama held a monitor to each window, following the seal along the glass. “No matter how long you stare out the window and sulk, we can’t afford to fly you back to Earth just to see horses. They’re hard to find as it is. Besides, you know what happened when that simulator came through last year.” (Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Escape Pod 463: Rockwork

Escape Pod 463: Rockwork is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:49 — 39.8MB)

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Show Notes

Also mentioned in this episode, treasured author Eugie Foster passed away.

Rockwork

by R. M. Graves

Dog sat at her kit, in the cavernous dark at the back of the stage, with Meg’s kiss chilling on her lips. That hadn’t fixed her nerves at all. Now Dog’s chest shook worse than her hands, jacked up on the worry of letting her girlfriend down, again.

The crowd didn’t see or care. As Meg took her spot out front, they thrummed the darkness with their chanting, “Rock… Work! Rock… Work!”

Dog’s sticks were already slick in her palms as she snapped rubber bands around them. She shuffled in her seat, checked contacts, toggled switches and sensed Meg’s impatience, standing in the dark between the drums and hungry fans. Dog brushed trembling fingers over the kit and it twitched around her, jittery. It hated gigs.

“Come on, Rocky,” she whispered and cogs whirred back at her. She shook her head. “Purring? Seriously?”

The kit’s blind trust made Dog gulp an urge to up and run. No. This time. This time Meg would be proud of her. Proud of them. No screw-ups. No zoning out.

She took a deep breath and kicked a volley of hard thumps into the black. The audience hushed. Cannon-shot beats echoed, overlapped, and swelled like an approaching army. A machine-gun of rimshots and the lights, and the crowd, exploded.

Dog scowled into the glare of spotlights as the ‘Rockwork’ burst into life around her; a kit stretched beyond drums to form an entire robotic band. Butchered musical instruments twitched and writhed in a hellish chromed engine of noise. Cogs spun plectrums at wire. Hammers rapped on the broken teeth of piano keys. Thumbscrews wrenched raw electric scales out of strangled frets.

Dog set her features into maniacal control, sweat already trickling over her bald head, pooling in her eyebrows; her arms gleaming pistons at the snare and toms.

Meg swayed her hips to Dog’s driving cacophony; her playful nonchalance creating a tantalizing silhouette to the audience, but taunting Dog behind. Hinting at what she had to lose. The music press were in tonight, but there was more than the band at stake.

The Rockwork was autonomous to a point, but it relied on Dog to keep it in line. Left unchecked it would spin off on its own groove without regard to Meg. Or the audience. Dog pressed her lips, rolled an extravagant fill across the toms, thrashed out her anxiety in the splash and crash. Meg’s cue.

The fans bounced along with the opening bars. Meg tossed Dog a warning frown, the gobo’s lit her up, and her voice rang out. The crowd, already jumping, flung its hands in the air like antennae for more and howled in pleasure. (Continue Reading…)

Author Eugie Foster passed away 9/27/2014

author and narrator Eugie Foster

Eugie Foster, author, editor, wife, died on September 27th of respiratory failure at Emory University in Atlanta.

In her forty-two years, Eugie lived three lifetimes. She won the Nebula award, the highest award for science fiction literature, and had over one hundred of her stories published. She was an editor for the Georgia General Assembly. She was the director of the Daily Dragon at Dragon Con, and was a regular speaker at genre conventions. She was a model, dancer, and psychologist. She also made my life worth living.

Memorial service will be announced soon.

We do not need flowers. In lieu of flowers, please buy her books and read them. Buy them for others to read until everyone on the planet knows how amazing she was.

–Matthew M. Foster (husband)
from http://boingboing.net/2014/09/27/rip-eugie-foster.html

——————————————————————————–

Ms Foster has been featured as an author and a narrator on all of the Escape Artists podcasts.

https://escapepod.org/2005/09/01/ep017-the-life-and-times-of-penguin/
https://escapepod.org/2006/02/02/ep039-my-friend-is-a-lesbian-zombie/
https://escapepod.org/2007/08/30/ep121-the-snow-womans-daughter/
https://escapepod.org/2009/09/03/ep214/
https://escapepod.org/2009/12/18/ep229-littleblossom-makes-a-deal-with-the-devil/
https://escapepod.org/2010/10/07/ep261-only-springtime-when-shes-gone/
https://escapepod.org/2013/03/21/ep388-trixie-and-the-pandas-of-dread/

http://pseudopod.org/2008/05/23/pseudopod-91-caesars-ghost/
http://pseudopod.org/2009/04/10/pseudopod-137-the-reign-of-the-wintergod/
http://pseudopod.org/2012/01/20/pseudopod-265-biba-jibun/
http://pseudopod.org/2013/07/19/pseudopod-343-magdala-amygdala/

http://podcastle.org/2008/10/08/pc028-the-tanuki-kettle/
http://podcastle.org/2009/07/29/podcastle-63-daughter-of-botu/
http://podcastle.org/2010/05/25/podcastle-105-honored-guest/
http://podcastle.org/2011/11/22/podcastle-184-black-swan-white-swan/
http://podcastle.org/2010/01/02/podcastle-miniature-45-when-shakko-did-not-lie/

Escape Pod 462: Women of Our Occupation

This story first appeared in Strange Horizons in July 2006.

Slight amount of sexual content.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:15 — 20.9MB)

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Show Notes

Recorded live at LonCon3.

Women of Our Occupation

by Kameron Hurley

[EDITOR: We don’t have the rights to post the text of this story.]

Now that Hugo month is over, here are the results…

You’ve been listening to Hugo stories through August as it’s our tradition to feature nominees. Now that the episodes have all run, we thought you might like to see the results.

 

2014 Hugo Award Winners

Loncon 3 is delighted to announce the 2014 Hugo Award and John W. Campbell Award winners.

3,587 valid ballots were received and counted in the final ballot. A PDF is available with the full statistics for the nominating and final ballots.

Best Novel: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Orbit US / Orbit UK)

Best Novella: “Equoid” by Charles Stross (Tor.com, 09-2013)

Best Novelette: “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” by Mary Robinette Kowal (maryrobinettekowal.com /Tor.com, 09-2013)

Best Short Story: “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” by John Chu (Tor.com, 02-2013)

Best Related Work: “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative” by Kameron Hurley (A Dribble of Ink)

Best Graphic Story: “Time” by Randall Munroe (xkcd)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form): Gravity written by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón, directed by Alfonso Cuarón (Esperanto Filmoj; Heyday Films; Warner Bros.)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form): Game of Thrones: “The Rains of Castamere” written by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, directed by David Nutter (HBO Entertainment in association with Bighead, Littlehead; Television 360; Startling Television and Generator Productions)

Best Editor – Short Form: Ellen Datlow

Best Editor – Long Form: Ginjer Buchanan

Best Professional Artist: Julie Dillon

Best Semiprozine: Lightspeed Magazine edited by John Joseph Adams, Rich Horton, and Stefan Rudnicki

Best Fanzine: A Dribble of Ink edited by Aidan Moher

Best Fancast: SF Signal Podcast Patrick Hester

Best Fan Writer: Kameron Hurley

Best Fan Artist: Sarah Webb

The John W. Campbell Award for the best new professional science fiction or fantasy writer of 2012 or 2013, sponsored by Dell Magazines (not a Hugo Award): Sofia Samatar

The 2014 Hugo Award winners were announced at a ceremony held at Loncon 3 on Sunday evening, 17 August 2014 in London. The ceremony was hosted by Justina Robson and Geoff Ryman and broadcast live via Ustream with additional live text coverage viaCoverItLive.

Escape Pod 461: Selkie Stories are for Losers

This story has been previously published by Strange Horizons in 2013.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:38 — 15.0MB)

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Show Notes

This story has been nominated for a Hugo Award.

Please, also remember our friend P.G. Holyfield and donate to his fund if at all possible.

Selkie Stories are for Losers

by Sofia Samatar

[EDITOR: We don’t have the rights to post the text of this story.]

Movie Review: Kick-Ass 2

The following review contains spoilers for Kick-Ass. It also contains adult language, due to the name of one of the characters. Reader discretion is advised.

In my reviews of movies here on the site, one thing I always try to mention is the film’s soundtrack. Much as some people writing about Firefly say that the ship is a character, so too is the music in any TV show or film. And sometimes movies that get little or no play can have great soundtracks.

Kick-Ass 2 is one such film.

(Continue Reading…)