Contents (Are Malcontent) Editor’s Note —3— Podcastle’s Editor’s Note —4— EP292: In The Water By Katherine Mankiller —5— Book Review: Brave New Worlds By Sarah Frost —12— EP293: A Small Matter, Really By Monte Cook —13— Book Review: Ship Breaker By Josh Roseman —21— EP294: The Night Train By Lavie Tidhar —23— Escape Pod Publisher: Paul Haring – paul @ escapeartists.net Founder: Steve Eley – steve @ escapeartists.net Editor: Mur Lafferty – editor @ escapepod.org Assistant Editor: Bill Peters – bill @ escapeartists.net The Soundproof Escape Pod and all works within are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. All works are copyright their respective authors. Hello Gentle Listeners— May brought us the announcement of the Hugo Awards nominees, which means that June is Hugo Month! For years, Escape Pod has been buying the rights to most of the Hugo short story nominees, and this year is no different. We’ll be featuring three of the four nominees, and since June has five Thursdays, we will also be featuring two longer stories that got Nebula and/or Hugo nods! We also have the ebook rights to the stories, which is an Escape Pod first, so next month’s Soundproof will be a collector’s item. (If a digital file could be collectible. Which it can’t. So never mind. But you know what I mean; it’ll be cool.) I’m very excited to see our site growing so much. We want to send extra special congrats to the podcasts who managed to make it onto the Hugo Ballot this year! 2010 winner for Best Fanzine, Starship Sofa, has gotten another nomination, and Writing Excuses has received a nod for Best Related Work. SSS has wonderful stories from many masters of SF, and Writing Excuses has wonderful discussions on how to write genre fiction. We are thrilled that these quality pod- casts are getting attention from fandom. I’ll be reporting from WorldCon in two and a half months, and liveblogging the Hugo Awards. More info soon! A question we get a lot of is, “Why do you not have all the stories in your PDF?” The answer is simple- au- dio and ebook rights are purchased separately, and sometimes an author cannot or will not grant us both rights. Or there are stories we’ve purchased before we started purchasing ebook rights, so we have no right to give you text versions of the stories. We take our authors’ rights very seriously and will only release the format for which we have rights. Audio-only stories are fewer and fewer these days, but there still will be an occasional one in our future feed. Speaking of the feed, some people have asked that the Soundproof Escape Pod have its own feed, or the audio have its own feed. Or the R stories to have their own feed. We get this question a lot and can’t really create custom feeds for each listener - but never fear, there is a solution. I’d like to point you to a page that gives you some RSS options, including some things you can do to custom make your own EP feed. From How To Subscribe (http://escapepod.org/subscribe/): You can make your own special Escape Pod feed by subscribing to http://www.escapepod.org/category/ XXXX/feed where you replace XXXX with the category you want to subscribe to. Categories are listed on the front page in a drop-down box on the right. Have at it! Lastly, in order to get the submissions under control, we’re taking two months off and closing for submis- sions on June 6th. We hope you enjoy this issue, chock full of awesome stories, reviews, and Nebula reporting. We hope you have a wonderful summer (or winter, if you’re on the other side of the world) and keep listening! We will have other announcements next month! ——Mur Mur Lafferty Editor —30— 3 [Basically, sometimes you have to let one of your fellow editors borrow the car, so to speak. This is one of those times. I told him to avoid that dragon’s nest he always goes too close to. Still — good luck. -Ed.] Hey Folks— In late 2007, I took a trip down to San Diego’s Conjecture convention. I’d been listening to Escape Pod for a couple of years (PodCastle hadn’t even started yet) and so I was thrilled that the very first panel I got to see featured Tim Pratt, Heather Shaw, and Greg van Eekhout. Tim had just won a Hugo for his story “Im- possible Dreams” (which I first heard at Escape Pod, yo!) and proceeded to do a collaborative reading of ABC flash fiction. Essentially, they divvied up the alphabet, wrote flash fiction stories for each letter, such as “E is for Excrement” and “N is for Nevermore Nevermore Land.” It was a fantastic reading - hilarious, poignant, thrilling, and most of all - they knew how to have fun. I left the convention knowing, just knowing, that one day - this ABC book was going to be big. But nothing happened. Several years passed, and still - nothing happened. And then, toward the end of last year - I realized, I’m at Escape Artists, co-editing PodCastle, and that awesome book I remember? Is out there still, and nobody’s heard it. So, I talked to Ben Phillips, and then I talked to Tim, Heather, Greg, and Jenn Reese - who came aboard to help them finish up the collection - and we came up with a plan. I decided it’d be awesome to send the Alphabet Quartet out to listeners who’d been kind enough to sign up as paid subscribers or make a one-time donation to us of $50 or more since January 1, 2011. Times are tough, we know, and not everyone can donate, so all the Escape Artists podcasts are going to be sharing a few of these stories with everyone who wants them (and also at the Drabblecast). Additionally, all the stories are available to read there for free at Daily Science Fiction, a great new online magazine that emails you free SF/F stories daily, so everyone wins. Thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoy the extra stories. ——Dave Dave Thompson Co-Editor of Podcastle [One hoopy frood -Ed.] —30— 4 EP292: In The Water By Katherine Mankiller Yvonne looked up from her monitor, the beads in her cornrows clattering as Roger walked into her office. Roger sat in the dark wooden chair opposite her desk. “Weren’t you assigned Alice van Buuren?” “Oh, no you don’t,” Yvonne said. “You can’t have her.” Yvonne hadn’t been assigned Alice; she’d request- ed her. Alice was probably the only murder victim’s wife she would ever meet. They hadn’t even put the murder in the papers. Maybe they thought there’d be a panic. “Please,” Roger said. “I’m just trying to save you some trouble. I’ve already spoken to her, and…” Yvonne crossed her arms and glared. “Wouldn’t you raise hell if I talked to one of your patients behind your back?” “She’s refusing modern therapy. What are you going to do, use the old-fashioned techniques your grand- mother used?” Roger had a lot of nerve mentioning Grandma. Yvonne glanced at the photo on the corner of her desk. Grandma Jackson had been a big woman, with braids down to her hips and skin like chocolate. Grandma Jackson smiled back at the camera, all reassuring good nature. Roger said, “I think we should just wipe her and have done with it.” “Too bad she’s not your patient,” Yvonne said. “I could take her away from you, you know.” “Don’t you dare!” There was an awkward silence. “It’ll be less confusing for her if I come with you,” Roger said. “Just to hand her off to you. You understand.” “Fine,” Yvonne said. “Whatever.” “Good girl,” Roger said, and Yvonne gritted her teeth. “Room 314.” He stood. “Let’s go.” “Now?” Yvonne said. She picked up her coffee and almost took a sip, then put it down again, making a face. It was cold, and it had been so bitter hot that she’d taken caffeine pills with orange juice instead. Roger snorted. “That bad?” Roger clearly wasn’t going anywhere, so Yvonne stood, picked up her jacket, and followed Roger out of her office. The halls were white to the point of being blinding after her calm, earth-toned office, and reeked of disinfectant. They went upstairs and over to room 314. Roger placed his hand on the identification plate and the door slid open. “Hello, Alice,” Roger said. The patient, a skinny, pale woman with brown hair, backed away from Roger. She reminded Yvonne of someone, although she couldn’t put her finger on whom. The patient fell into a seated position on the bed, mouth open, staring at Yvonne. Before Yvonne could say anything, Roger said, “This is Doctor Jackson. Doctor Jackson, this is Alice.” “We’re not going to hurt you,” Yvonne said. 5 The patient–Alice–stared at Yvonne for a moment, then shut her mouth. She shot Roger a defiant look. “I’ll just leave you to it,” Roger said, and left. “Hello, Alice,” Yvonne said. “You can call me Yvonne if you prefer.” “We’ve met,” Alice said. It wasn’t a question. Alice really did look familiar. “Refresh my memory?” “It doesn’t matter,” Alice said and looked away. There was an uncomfortable silence.