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...

Starting a podcast exactly the way you want. With Podbean, you get the whole package - reliable podcast hosting, unlimited storage and bandwidth, promotional tools, podcast advertising and premium content. Over 180 thousand people choose Podbean to create their stunning podcasts. Try it free now.

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…

FREE SFF and Horror, you ask? We answered. All of these ebooks are FREE.

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 …

Subtle Ways Each Time By Y.M. Pang A man loses a woman. It’s happened a thousand times before and it’s phrased like this nine hundred times. A man loses a woman. As if she were car keys, an umbrella, a scraggly doll in the arms of a child. A literal and grammatical object to be …

Some Things I Probably Should Have Mentioned Earlier By Laura Pearlman Dear Kevin, I’m sorry I waited so long to tell you this, but I really hate your vacation cabin. Everything about it creeps me out. The sound of crickets at night makes my skin crawl. They sound like impending doom: like a critical piece …

Caesura by Hayley Stone 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 …

This Wine-Dark Feeling That Isn’t The Blues by José Pablo Iriarte The Odyssey contains over three hundred mentions of color. Black. White. Red. Not a single blue though. Even the ocean is not described as blue, but as “wine-dark.” Likewise with the Koran and ancient Hebrew scripture: no blues, anywhere. This is what I focus …

The Best We Can By Carrie Vaughn In the end, the discovery of evidence of extraterrestrial life, and not just life, but intelligence, got hopelessly mucked up because no one wanted to take responsibility for confirming the findings, and no one could decide who ultimately had the authority—the obligation—to do so. We submitted the paper, …

The Harmonic Resonance of Ejiro Anaborhi by Wole Talabi The spindly, sleek ship hurtled forward at hyperliminal speed, blurring its own intricately patterned design in six dimensions and wrecking the fabric of space–time in its wake. Its captain adjusted the dial on the control panel, accelerating the ship three thousand lightspeed units faster in Planck …

The Scent of Lions by Tara Campbell “Congratulations, Mrs. Costa,” chirped the young Life Center nurse. “You’re ready to go home! Here’s your shield.” Maria raised the infant in her arms high enough for the nurse to slip the slim, silver band around her waist. “Let’s check the charge.” The nurse stepped back and smiled, […]