Oracle By Dominica Phetteplace The two biggest applications for predictive software are killing people and selling things. Rita was quite successful at the latter. She founded a nail-polish-of-the-month club that used an online personality quiz to determine customer preferences. Bold cremes for basics, chunky glitters for the outrageous, and dark, sparkly metallics for edgy, forward-thinking geniuses …

Dr. Mbalu and the Butcher’s Daughter By Megan Chaudhuri With a raspy pop, the cell sprayer in Rebecca’s hand sputtered one last drop of fur progenitor cells. Ignoring her stiff back, she leaned over the culture vat and daubed the cells onto the pink, gel-sculpted contours of a cheetah’s back muscles. The gel rippled; Rebecca held …

Nothing to See Here By Arthur Doweyko There is a comfort in the strength of love; ’Twill make a thing endurable, which else Would overset the brain, or break the heart. ~William Wordsworth I heard a squawk—kind of like the goose call that comes out of a police cruiser. Blinking red and blue lights danced …

Straight Lines Naru Sundar This time they sent someone in a suit, neutral gray silk with utterly glorious creases, monofilament thin. “I’m Xiao Quan-Fei. They said you like to call yourself Em?” Emergent Behavior in full, but I always hated the pontificating tone in the name. Fucking shipwrights. Fucking irony too, but let’s not go …

Fire Rode the Cold Wind By Aimee Ogden The brown woman came to Vrau from the sky, without a name of her own. Piarcu knew that she was nameless, even though the women of his family only whispered it when they thought no one else could hear. It was they who had cared for her …

AUTHOR: Michael Glyde NARRATOR: Joe Williams HOST: Alasdair Stuart This story has not been published previously. Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our Wikia Thank you for visiting us on Facebook and Twitter about the author… M. Glyde recently moved 1813 miles from Pittsburgh, PA to El Paso, TX, …

AUTHOR: Nancy Fulda NARRATOR: Trendane Sparks HOST: Alasdair Stuart Recollection originally appeared in CARBIDE-TIPPED PENS, an anthology edited by Eric Choi and Ben Bova, TOR Books, December 2014. Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our Wikia Thank you for visiting us on Facebook and Twitter about the author… Nancy Fulda is …

Run By C.R. Hodges The claxon blares three times: all clear. We file out of the underground shelter and up the serpentine lava tube. Our semi-annual hibernation drill, bureaucratic gibberish for run down to the emergency shelter and hide, is now monthly. I’m all for avoiding nuclear annihilation, but I wish the drills weren’t scheduled so …

The Android’s Prehistoric Menagerie By A. Merc Rustad The world explodes. Unit EX-702 comes back online when UV wavelengths activate its solar plating. Its optics are crusted with red dust; a low-powered system scan concludes that though its left arm is missing and there is excessive oxidation damage along its chassis and helmet, as well as …

Two Steps Forward By Holly Schofield I eased myself down off the running board of the ’28 Hudson sedan then laid a hand on the hood in mute sympathy for its overheated pistons. A quick buttoning-up of my topcoat and a tug on my fedora and I felt ready to approach the farmhouse. The old …

Trusted Messenger By Kevin Wabaunsee Dr. Thaddeus Begay had been expecting a dying child in the exam room, but no one had said anything about a woman half-dead from starvation. He stepped inside and muscled the door shut—like the rest of the clinic, it was made from metal reclaimed from the original dropship, and like everything …

The Zombee Project 3.0 By Allison Mulder Jensen brought the job offer to each of them in person, like no one did anymore. She poached them from the best labs and the best apiaries, all over the world. Put everything she knew on the table, in out-of-the-way cafés and fine-but-nothing-fancy hotel rooms and home kitchens …

Four of Seven By Samantha Mills In the waning light of an artificial sun, Camelia Dunlevy climbed a mountain with her sister on her back. Delilah was a hollow weight, bird-boned from reconstructive surgeries, unbreakable. The trouble wasn’t her bones, but her lungs. She panted in Camelia’s ear, unaccustomed to altitude, a small sound that …

Real Artists by Ken Liu “You’ve done well,” Creative Director Len Palladon said, looking over Sophia’s résumé. Sophia squinted in the golden California sun that fell on her through the huge windows of the conference room. She wanted to pinch herself to be sure she wasn’t dreaming. She was here, really here, on the hallowed …

AUTHOR: Lavie Tidhar NARRATOR: Summer Brooks HOST: Alasdair Stuart This story was originally published in The Lowest Heaven, anthology, edited by Jared Shurin and Anne C. Perry, Jurassic London, 2013. Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our Wikia Thank you for visiting us on Facebook and Twitter about the author… Lavie Tidhar’s […]

An Ever-Expanding Flash of Light By Timothy Mudie “Ladies and gentlemen, everyone you know—the entire world you know—is now dead.” Murmurs ripple through the assembled cadets. Not because they’re shocked—everyone knew what they were signing up for—but because it all happened without fanfare, a jump across light-years of space unaccompanied by any grand orchestral swell …

Blonde by Priya Sharma “When did you go bald?” Only Clarice would ask such a forthright question. “Leave her alone,” Jake drains his beer. Only he would dare contradict his sister. The clock hands have gone from late at night to early in the morning. Jake’s bar is empty of customers. The staff, who are …

An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition By Ken Liu My darling, my child, my connoisseur of sesquipedalian words and convoluted ideas and meandering sentences and baroque images, while the sun is asleep and the moon somnambulant, while the stars bathe us in their glow from eons ago and light-years away, while you are …

They were standing or sitting, hushed or tensely quiet, waiting on the news to finish breaking so someone, anyone, could breathe first. The escape pod creaked and whistled and moaned and begged for some other noise to fill its hollow body but nothing came, just the fuzz of cracked static. But th...

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Congratulations to this year’s Winners & Finalists! Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form) No World for Warriors (Variant Frequencies) by Matt Wallace Finalists: "My Caroline" (Pseudopod) by Matt Wallace "I Look Forward To Remembering You" (Escape Pod) by Mur Lafferty "The Watching People" (Escape Pod) by Paul Berger "Sacrifice" (Variant Frequencies) by Jason McDowell…

Congratulations to this year’s Winners & Finalists! Best Fiction (Short) "Absolution Insured" (Variant Frequencies) by Matt Wallace Finalists: "Hero" (Escape Pod) by Scott Sigler "Legacies" (Brief Glimpses of Somewhere Else) by Daniel Emery "The Trouble with Death Traps" (Escape Pod) by Daisy James "Truth Is" by The Seanachai, Patrick McLean --- Best Fiction (Long) How…

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These stories were either first published by Escape Artists in 2015, or were first published elsewhere in 2015 and later re-published as Escape Artists episodes. These lists were compiled by David Steffen on the EA Forums with help from other forum members: Pseudopod, Escape Pod, PodCastle. Dani Daly compiled the list for Cast of Wonders. Escape Artists encourages anyone who can to nominate their favorite authors for the most appropriate 2015 awards - they deserve them!

Mother Tongues By S. Qiouyi Lu “Thank you very much,” you say, concluding the oral portion of the exam. You gather your things and exit back into the brightly lit hallway. Photos line the walls: the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, Machu Picch…

And Then There Were (N-One), Part 3 by Sarah Pinsker Back in the hallway, I dug in my bag for a pen. I’d normally have taken notes while she talked, but I’d had a feeling it would have shut her up. Instead of a pen, I came up with the dinner roll I’d taken earlier. …

The Big So-So By Erika Satifka 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 …

Beatrix Released By Shaenon K. Garrity 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 …