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Cast of Wonders 658: Your Hold is Ready

Cast of Wonders 658: Your Hold is Ready is a Cast of Wonders original.

homophobia, censorship, fascist dystopia

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:02 — 20.6MB)

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Your Hold Is Ready

by Laura Duerr

The news is spreading. We try to keep working through our English tests, but it’s becoming impossible to focus. Laughter and drumming call us to join the crowds on the streets, as irresistible as Odysseus’ sirens. I imagine myself tied to my desk chair, ears plugged up with wax instead of noise-canceling headphones, and chuckle to myself.

Mr. Lanigan leans around his monitor. “Molly, did you just giggle?”

“Possibly?”

Two storeys down, the crowd erupts with cheering. The students nearest the windows peer out wistfully. So does Mr. Lanigan. He ought to be retired by now, but he’s still here, and we’re glad. He’s kept a lot of our secrets and we’ve kept his. At first it was weird to watch out for someone so much older than us, but he stood up for us every chance he got, and somehow, together, our ordinary classroom discussions became outlets for us to be ourselves: to give voice to the dreams and hopes that had miraculously survived not just high school, but high school under all this.

(Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 657: Plutopalooza

First published in Nature Futures, 13 March 2024

End of the world

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Plutopalooza

by Gretchen Tessmer

Tess and Gemma have been camped out on their tartan picnic blanket for days already and they plan on staying until the very end…of the concert or the world, whichever happens first. Smart money is on the latter. The way those lads are going at their bass lines and anthems up on stage, they’re in this until the lights go out for good. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 656: Unconventionally Bound

Cast of Wonders 656: Unconventionally Bound is a Cast of Wonders original.

Aftermath of a fire

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:08 — 19.4MB)

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Unconventionally Bound

by Açai Sparrow

With ash-stained gloves, I ease another book free of the charred shelf. Deckle sneezes at the burnt leather, but she guided me to this one for a reason. Despite the sorry state of the cover, the pages look to be mostly intact.

The next book is much worse off, and I can barely identify it. Still, I can feel Deckle’s certainty through our bond. One of next year’s students will need it.

I nearly trip over the book after that; it must have fallen at some point. It takes a bit of doing to retrieve it, Deckle tucking herself under my arm as I lower myself to the floor. The edges of her scales leave raised red lines on my skin. They’ve been getting sharper; I should probably get around to getting a reinforced sleeve soon. The book’s cover crumbles a little when I pick it up, and I get the feeling some of the pages are damaged, but none fall out, so it can probably be repaired. As inappropriate as it may be, I’m excited by the task ahead. It will be refreshing, compared to assembling new covers or making whole replacement copies. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 655: The Carmel B Crazies

Image by Christopher Keough from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:52 — 38.3MB)

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The Carmel B Crazies

by Rick Kennet

On the day she turned seventeen Cy De Gerch peered through a window into rusty red desert and saw her future squatting darkly in its launch cradle.

She’d been discharged from hospital an hour before and had made her quick way to Styx City Starport. Standing now at the window into Launch Cradle 3, her bag slung over the shoulder of her new Martian Star Corps tunic, she gazed through the glass like a kid outside a toy store. Utopia Plain, her new toy, smooth, black, ellipsoid, seemed to squat in its cradle amid a patch of the red desert of Mars. Recently repaired after a battle with Xenoid warships at Rigel, the starship’s liquid lines were unbroken but for the pressure tunnel extruded from her forward hatch. A thing of space, it seemed to sit impatient to lift into the pink-brown sky and the void beyond.

All her fears and excitements came flooding back – a feeling of elation at this new beginning aboard her first ship; a scary feeling too of coming adrift, separated from her family on Phobos and the surrogate family of her space cadet section, training days ended.

Inspecting herself in the window’s reflection, Cy adjusted her tunic sporting its new lieutenant’s bars and ran a hand through her short dark hair, wondering if she’d surprise her new captain with her age. She thought that she might. She was the first of her breed – a product of the Gartino genetics experiment – to qualify for active service. It all depended on what Captain Ralph Brown was like. Would he understand and appreciate her as a purpose-built person, trained and schooled seventeen years for this purpose? Or would there be suspicion and mistrust?
(Continue Reading…)

collage of a woman in a red headscarf with minarets in the background

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Cast of Wonders 654: Life According to Tabeeb

Image by efes from Pixabay

This story was first published in Learning to Be Human by Flame Tree Press in February 2024.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:09 — 46.9MB)

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Life According to Tabeeb

by Ramez Yoakeim

It may take a decade or longer to train a human clinician, but it took a team of Ministry of Health technicians only seven days to certify me a Clinically Adept Machine Sentience (CAMS) and hand me control of their newest clinic on Zamalek Island. My mission, to keep the locals healthy enough to perform their essential jobs in and around Cairo, and away from human-staffed hospitals in the gated communities dotting the slopes of Jabal al Muqattam.

Once an affluent enclave, a succession of entirely predictable cataclysms saw those with means flee Zamalek to higher ground, ceding their elegant villas and Nile-front high-rises to climate refugees too impoverished to fuss over bridges and roads inundated by brackish surges of a rising Mediterranean backflowing into the drying Nile, competing with vermin for shrinking dry ground, and long journeys to get anywhere.
The moment my download into the clinic’s core completed, I unlocked the front door, turned on the lights, and displayed a welcome message on the lobby’s triage kiosk. For the next three weeks, the eighty-six specialty bots that comprised my extended corpus kept the waiting room spotless, verified diagnostic equipment calibrations, monitored consumables stock levels, and maintained the sterility of treatment areas, quite easy tasks seeing that I had no patients. Until, one Friday, an hour after evening prayers, a heavily pregnant woman burst through the doors. (Continue Reading…)

Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers Expert Meetup: Amy Brennan

Oh wow! has it been two weeks already!?  Time is REALLY flying!  (I wonder if Escape Pod left the universal time adjustment matrix running on high again after a temporal experiment? Hmmm. Will have to ask!)

But back to the main reason I’m writing this.  Two weeks ago, I attended the Expert Meet Up Event hosted by the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers group in conjunction with the Octavia Project (who support young teens & tweens in Brooklyn area who are aspiring writers) and I was the invited expert!  The event was recorded for members who could not make it, but I thought I’d do a bit of a write up here too as it draws back the curtain on what happens at Cast of Wonders – always valuable knowledge for those wanting to be published here. (Continue Reading…)

green-toned image of a bayou

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Cast of Wonders 653: Life and Death and Love in the Bayou

First published in Writers and Illustrators of the Future Vol 40, April 2024

Domestic Violence. Mention of past attempted rape.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:10 — 44.2MB)

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Life and Death and Love in the Bayou

by Stephannie Tallent

It was the February the rain fell so warm and hard the bayous swamped over old man Rochambeau’s gator curing shack and the whole parish smelled like graveyard mold and sour-smelling gator crap, even the houses built up on stilts above the high-water line, that I decided to help my mama once and for all. No matter the cost to my soul.

’Bout that shed . . . I knew old man Rochambeau would just hit up my mama to use the ham hut for his haul, and she’d say yes, so I didn’t feel too bad. Not for him, anyway.

Felt bad for my mama, who’d be stuck bumping up against log- shaped hunks of gator meat while she seasoned and cured the hogs. Touch one of those logs of meat, and it’s like the Spanish moss is dragging against the back of your neck, like the spirit of the gator is still there and pissed off and just waiting to chomp on you and roll you.

Those spirits are truly there, lurking to garner just a bit of power, enough to touch the living world. (Continue Reading…)

black cows in a grassy field against the skyline.

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Cast of Wonder 652: Habitat

Cast of Wonder 652: Habitat is a Cast of Wonders original.

spider-like creatures

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:08 — 48.2MB)

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Habitat

by Juliette Beauchamp

The orb appeared on a Friday. Just popped up in the northeast corner of the horse pasture, out where the grass grew thin and the ground was spotted with gopher holes. It was black and not a bit shiny despite the heat shimmers dancing around it. From a distance, as Cole and I rode along the dry creek bed, it looked more like the absence of something. A blank spot in the air.

It wasn’t until we got closer that we realized there was something there after all: a giant, dull marble suspended about three feet off the ground. The horses didn’t like it, rolling their eyes and snorting, but they were ranch-bred and broke and used to doing things they didn’t like.

Cole slid out of his saddle and passed his reins to me. I held his mare as she pawed and swished her tail while Cole walked over to the thing.

“It feels funny,” he said as he got closer. I wasn’t surprised to hear it since the hair on his head had begun to float upwards. (Continue Reading…)

old playing cards

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Cast of Wonders 651: The Liar

Image by Emilia from Pixabay

First published in The Book of Witches (edited by Jonathan Strahan, August 1 2023, Harper Voyager)

swearing, assault, murder

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:43 — 73.8MB)

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The Liar

by Darcie Little Badger

The Mysterious Woman

Jodie sat in a bench-filled lounge outside the Dominion Casino poker room. It was 6:18 p.m., and she’d been waiting for a table since 5:30. A 32-inch flat-screen TV on the wall displayed the standby list and indicated she was up next, along with four others identified as Pete M., Joe T., Olav A., and Bartholomew S.

Lowering her phone, she wondered if the sweaty, pink-faced man sitting next to her was Joe, Olav, or Bart. There were a dozen people in the room, but he was the most visibly nervous, his right leg bouncing.

“Howdy,” he said, noticing Jodie’s attention.

“Afternoon. What’s your name?”

“Pete.” He jabbed a thumb at the waitlist screen. “That Pete.”

“Call me Jodie.” (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 650: Witches Racing Cars

Cast of Wonders 650: Witches Racing Cars is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:25 — 39.0MB)

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Show Notes

Image adapted from a photo by JAMES OKAJA from Pixabay

Witches Racing Cars

by Nadav Schul-Kutas

A small crew is waiting at the starting line. They’re all buzzing around the car, poking and prodding and talking amongst themselves. It won’t start, which is unsurprising. The car never starts on its own, but the young men with big ideas want to know why and the thrill-seekers are worried their team will get disqualified if this goes on any longer. A woman named after a forgotten god points towards a ruined gas station. A figure draped in feathers and marked with machine grease appears from behind the ARCO’s crumbling walls.

Finally, the witch is here. (Continue Reading…)

silhouette of a woman with her arms raised against a backdrop of the golden gate bridge

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Cast of Wonders 649: Little Wonders 46 – Seize Your Future

Cast of Wonders 649: Little Wonders 46 – Seize Your Future is a Cast of Wonders original.

Abortion themes, loss of agency

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:17 — 25.1MB)

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Show Notes

What the Water Gave Her was first published in Pop Goes the Page, May 2023

What the Water Gave Her

by Race Harish

The witch was a small man, but otherwise rather ordinary. He had white hair, kind eyes, and a fondness for darjeeling tea. He called himself Mother.

The directions were unclear. But it was unwise to question a witch so she pays that as little mind as she can. The slip of paper bearing the directions crumples in the tight clutch of her fist, the writing surely too smudged and sweat soaked to be of any use to her now. She is glad that she had the sense to commit it all to memory before she began the journey. (Continue Reading…)

Nommo Award 2025 Short Story finalist: Bodies of Sand and Blood

We’re thrilled to share that Plangdi Neple’s story Bodies of Sand and Blood is a finalist for the 2025 Nommo Award for Best Short Story!  The Nommo Awards recognise works of speculative fiction by Africans, and are nominated and voted on by members of the African Speculative Fiction Society.

Bodies of Sand and Blood was first published in April 2024 as episode 580 with narration by Brent Lambert and featured as one of our 2024 Staff Pick episodes with new commentary as episode 621

You can read the other excellent Nommo Award finalists via the links on the award’s press release page.

 

Many congratulations Plangdi!