Contents Title Page Letter from the editor EP327 Reveants EP328 Surviving the eBookalypse EP329 Pairs EP330 The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived EP331 Devour EP332 Overclocking EP333 Asteroid Monte EP334 The Eckener Alternative EP336 The Speed of Time Book Review: “Out of Oz” by Gregory Maguire Three Dragons, Three Tattoos: a review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Part 1 of 2) Three Dragons, Three Tattoos: a review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Part 2 of 2) Film Review: “The Hunger Games” Film Review: “The Secret World of Arrietty” Portrait of a Slayer at Fifteen: the 15th Anniversary Portrait of a Slayer at Fifteen: the 15th Anniversary Portrait of a Slayer at Fifteen: the 15th Anniversary Soundtrack Review: “Once More, With Feeling” The Soundproof Escape Pod Magazine Digest 1, Q1 2012 Part of Escape Artists, Inc Escapepod.org Editor: Mur Lafferty Assistant Editor: Nathaniel Lee Producer: Mat Weller Web Content Editor: Josh Roseman Publisher: Paul Haring Founder: Steve Eley Creative Commons BY-NC-ND All other rights reserved by the authors Letter from the editor Dear Faithful Listeners: We’re back! Some changes in staff early this year caused us to miss some ebook releases, so we’re doing the first six months of they year in digest form to catch up. In this issue, you’ll get most of Quarter One, with stories from Ursula Pflug, Jay Lake, and Ferrett Steinmetz. Our most prolific blogger, Josh Roseman, had an excellent start to the year, with the in-depth retrospective of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, complete with a soundtrack review of Once More, With Feeling, in March. You will note that we are missing a few of the episodes from the first quarter, reflecting we were unable to purchase the ebook rights to a couple of episodes that we released via audio, but don’t forget you can listen to the stories at escapepod.org, for free. Stay tuned, soon we’ll be posting the Second Quarter digest, as it’s nearly June. Then we will have even more news to talk about! Be mighty- Mur Lafferty [email protected] Reveants by Judith Tarr Janie wanted to pet the pterodactyl. “Here’s the auk,” I said. “Look how soft his feathers are. Look at the dodo, isn’t he funny? Don’t you want to give the quagga a carrot?” Janie wouldn’t even dignify that with disgust. It was the pterodactyl or nothing. Janie is four. At four, all or nothing isn’t a philosophy, it’s universal law. A very intelligent four can argue that this is the Greater Metro Revenants’ Zoo, yes? And this is the room where they keep the ones that can be petted, yes? So why can’t a person pet the pterodactyl? No use explaining that everything else was inoculated and immunized and sterilized and rendered safe for children to handle. Everything but the pterodactyl. They’d just made it, and it was supposed to be pettable when they were done, but not yet. There’d been plenty of controversy about putting it on display so soon, but public outcry won out over scientific common sense. So the thing was on display, but behind neoglas inlaid with the injunction: No, I’m Not Ready Yet. Look, But Don’t Touch. Janie reads. I should know. It’s one of the chief points of debate between her father and me. She could read the warning as well as I could. “So why can’t I touch? I want to touch!” She was fast winding up to a tantrum. I could stop it now and risk an injunction for public child abuse, or wait till it became a nuisance and we were both shuffled off the premises. Inside its enclosure, the pterodactyl stretched its wings and opened its beak and hissed. Neoglas is new, about as new as revenants; it’s one-way to sound as well as sight. The pterodactyl couldn’t see us or hear us, which was lucky for Janie. I wished we couldn’t see or hear it, either. It wasn’t particularly ugly, just strange. One whole faction of paleontologists had been thrown out into the cold when the thing came out of its vat warm-blooded and covered with soft silvery-white fur. Without the fur it would have been a leathery lizardlike thing with batwings. With the fur it looked like a white bat with a peculiar, half-avian, half- saurian head, and extremely convincing talons. Janie’s fixation and the thing’s furriness notwithstanding, it didn’t look very pettable. Its eyes were a disturbing shade of red, with pinpoint pupils. I wondered if it was hungry, or if it wanted to stretch its wings and fly. Janie had stopped whining. She was going to howl next. Something bellowed in the bowels of the building. Janie’s mouth snapped shut. “There,” I said. “Look what you did.” If that got me cited, let it. It cut off Janie’s howl before it started. “They’ve got something big down there,” somebody said. “Probably the aurochs,” said somebody else. “Mammoths trumpet like elephants.” “Maybe it’s a T. Rex,” said a kid’s voice. “They don’t have one of those yet,” said the one who knew it all. “They’d need a bigger enclosure than they can afford to build, with a stronger perimeter field. So they’re bringing back later things, because they’re smaller.” “But if they’ve got the mammoths—” “Mammoths don’t have teeth as long as your arm. They don’t eat people.” Janie’s eyes were as big as they can get. I got her out of there before she decided she wanted to howl after all. Ice cream distracted her. So did a pony ride in the zoo’s park—the pony was a Merychippus, a handsome little dun that looked perfectly ponylike except for the pair of vestigial toes flanking each of its hooves. By the time we picked up our picnic and headed for the tables by the mammoths’ pit, I was starting to breathe almost normally. If you haven’t got your kid license yet, you can only imagine you know what it’s like to take the qualifying exam. Studying for it is hell, and the practicum’s a raving bitch. Then when you pass and get the kid, six times out of ten you and your SO are so done for you split, and you get into a whole new brand of bureaucratic balls-up: the custody war. This was Marco’s year to have Janie. It coincided with his decision to take his statutory change-of-lifestyle, which wouldn’t have been quite so bad if he hadn’t decided to become an Atavist. I appealed, of course. How could any public office, even the Bureau of Family Values, consign a four-year-old child to the life of an Ice Age hunter? BFV could, and did. Healthy was one of the words it used. Back to basics. Good for growing minds. And, as the caseworker pointed out to me, it wasn’t as if the Atavists really lived as they did in the Ice Age. There weren’t any major predators in the preserve. My nightmares of sabertoothed cats and direwolves and charging mammoths were just that, nightmares. Even the Atavists’ League couldn’t afford the price of a revenant, let alone a whole ecology full of them, So what was I doing taking Janie to the revenants’ zoo on my monthly visiting day? Maybe I thought it would be a harmless way to spend the day, and she could go back and tell her father that I’d shown her what real atavisms looked like, and he’d get the message while I got points for culturally relevant entertainment of child during custodial visit. I got her back in nine months, but only if I demonstrated that I was still fit to keep her. If I blew it on points, Marco kept her. And she grew up wearing deerskins, with a bone through her nose. To be strictly fair, she hadn’t come out of the preserve this morning looking like a savage. Her hair was longer, and somebody had cornrowed it—not Marco, he didn’t have the patience for anything that persnickety. She was wearing pants I’d bought for her, and a shirt with a hologram on it, one of the Lascaux cave paintings. She’d been clean when she started, too. Ice Age didn’t mean Dirt Age, Marco was fond of pointing out. I couldn’t even complain that she was different. She hadn’t forgotten about cars and buses and taxis. The city didn’t make her whimper and cower. Whatever she was living on in the preserve, she wasn’t turning up her nose at ice cream or fruit juice or, goddess forbid, chocolate. The trouble was, I wanted her to be different. I wanted grounds to get her back permanently. If she’d started grunting and rooting for grubs, I’d have been on the net to BFV so fast, the phosphors would have been spinning. No such luck. The first visiting day, she’d cried when she left Marco, and cried when she left me. The second, she’d said a cool good-bye to Marco and an equally cool one to me. This time, the third, she’d kissed Marco good-bye and taken my hand and said, “I want to ride a pony.” “They don’t have those in the Ice Age?” I’d asked Marco.