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EP235: On the Human Plan - 0 views
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I am called Dog the Digger. I am not mighty, neither am I fearsome. Should you require bravos, there are muscle-boys aplenty among the rat-bars of any lowtown on this raddled world. If it is a wizard you want, follow the powder-trails of crushed silicon and wolf's blood to their dark and winking lairs. Scholars can be found in their libraries, taikonauts in their launch bunkers and ship foundries, priests amid the tallow-gleaming depths of their bone-ribbed cathedrals. What I do is dig. For bodies, for treasure, for the rust-pocked hulks of history, for the sheer pleasure of moving what cannot be moved and finding what rots beneath. You may hire me for an afternoon or a month or the entire turning of the year. It makes me no mind whatsoever. As for you, I know what you want. You want a story.
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EP212: Skinhorse Goes to Mars - 0 views
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When I met Skinhorse, my first thought was old. Which was weird. Nobody gets old these days. We all die young, some of us after living a long time, if we're lucky. He was in Piet's Number Seven, a bar-cum-caravanserai in an illegal orbit trailing far enough behind Vesta to be ignorable. Piet's had been instantiated in an old volatiles bladder that had done the Jovian run a few too many times before falling into the surplus circuit. You could store entire cities in Piet's cubage, which made for a somewhat attenuated bar experience. Plus the place had one of those gravity cans - yes, those gravity cans - which meant your drink stayed stuck down long as you were near a Higgs carpet. So there I was annoying myself with three perfectly disrespectable rock jocks, each of us out to fleece the others, when this cadaver starts to stand over me. We're all forever young or forever dead, but this armstrong looked like he'd shaved about half a cent too deep across his whole body, then restored his dermis with spray-on thermal insulation.
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EP211: Carthago Delenda Est - 0 views
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Wren Hex-Yemenni woke early. They had to teach her everything from scratch, and there wasn't time for her to learn anything new before she hit fifty and had to be expired. "Watch it," the other techs told me when I was starting out. "You don't want a Hex on your hands." By then we were monitoring Wren Hepta-Yemenni. She fell into bed with Dorado ambassador 214, though I don't know what he did to deserve it and she didn't even seem sad when he expired. When they torched him she went over with the rest of the delegates, and they bowed or closed their eyes or pressed their tentacles to the floors of their glass cases, and afterwards they toasted him with champagne or liquid nitrogen. Before we expired Hepta, later that year, she smiled at me. "Make sure Octa's not ugly, okay? Just in case-for 215." Wren Octa-Yemenni hates him, so it's not like it matters. Rated PG for political machinations and waiting…
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EP210: The Hastillan Weed - 0 views
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"Since we have so many new faces," I said to the half-dozen volunteers, "I'll start with a tools talk. Safety points for the spade - the most important is that when you're digging, you push with the ball of your foot." I picked up a spade from the pile, and demonstrated by digging up a bluebell growing by the hedge. From the large bells all round the stem, I knew it was a Spanish bluebell, a garden escape that if left unchecked would hybridise with the natives. Too late now, though. You can tell the British bluebell because the flowers are smaller, deeper blue, and they're usually on one side of the stem, so the plant droops under their weight as if bowing down before its foreign conqueror. There's hardly a wood left in England where you'll see only native bluebells. "Or you can use your heel on the spade." I heaved the invader out of the earth and tossed it aside, knowing it would safely rot. "But you should never press down with the middle of your foot. The bones in the arch are delicate, and you can injure yourself."
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EP222: Infestation - 0 views
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They were the usual motley collection of freelance vampire hunters. Two men, wearing combinations of jungle camouflage and leather. Two women, one almost indistinguishable from the men though with a little more style in her leather armour accessories, and the other looking like she was about to assault the south face of a serious mountain. Only her mouth was visible, a small oval of flesh not covered by balaclava, mirror shades, climbing helmet and hood. They had the usual weapons: four or five short wooden stakes in belt loops; snap-holstered handguns of various calibers, all doubtless chambered with Wood-N-Death® low-velocity timber-tipped rounds; big silver-edged bowie or other hunting knife, worn on the hip or strapped to a boot; and crystal vials of holy water hung like small grenades on pocket loops. Protection, likewise, tick the usual boxes. Leather neck and wrist guards; leather and woven-wire reinforced chaps and shoulder pauldrons over the camo; leather gloves with metal knuckle plates; Army or climbing helmets.
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Submission Guidelines : Escape Pod - 0 views
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a science fiction magazine
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we want that which evokes a sense of wonder, or fun, or simply makes us think about our own world in a new way.
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send fantasy stories to our other sister podcast, PodCastle
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Please do not send simultaneous submissions of a single story to multiple Escape Artists podcasts (Escape Pod, PodCastle, and Pseudopod). When submitting to one Escape Artists podcast, please wait to hear back about it before submitting the same story to another.
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We want short stories between about 2,000 and 6,000 words. The sweet spot’s somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 words
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We will buy longer, but you really have to WOW us.
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We are closed to flash fiction as of 01/10/11.
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above all we’re looking for fun.
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We’re an audio market
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we buy nonexclusive rights
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it doesn’t hurt us if a story has previously appeared in another market
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we encourage new authors to send their work to other markets first, and then send it to us for audio rights after the story has appeared.
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You’re welcome to give us first dibs on anything you like, but consider: if your story’s good enough for us to buy it, it’s probably good enough to sell to another market first. Why not try that, and get two audiences and two checks?
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We’re looking for fiction with strong pacing, well-defined characters, engaging dialogue, and clear action.
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We do not discriminate between previously published and unpublished works.
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You can get away with breaking almost any of these rules if the story is fun enough. What’s fun? We know it when we see it.
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Humor is highly encouraged.
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Upbeat, optimistic stories are encouraged.
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We accept stories in e-mail, in plain text format, at the address submit@escapepod.org.
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we prefer plain text.
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Send it from the e-mail address at which you want us to correspond with you
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On the Subject: line of the message, be sure to include the title of the story.
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we use the e-mail subject to identify the story
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In the body of the message, what we want is as follows: 1. Your name. (Your real name. The story can have a different byline, and we’ll credit that byline in public, but we need to know who’s legally offering us this story and to whom the check should be written.) 2. Your mailing address. (We need this for contract purposes; it will be kept confidential.) 3. A cover statement briefly giving us your publication credits, and in particular telling us whether this story has been published before or adapted into audio. If there’s anything we need to know about available rights, tell us that too. This section is optional, but it’s helpful for us to have this information if we buy your story and want to know more about you for bio purposes. (Note: When we say “briefly,” we mean your top five or six publications. We have literally had people send us resumés that were longer than the story submitted. This only makes us sigh.) 4. The word count of the story, according to your word processing software. 5. The title of the story. 6. The story’s byline. (Optional if it’s the same as your legal name.) 7. The text of the story. Use single spacing, with blank lines between paragraphs and _underscores_ for emphasis.
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one story at a time!
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Once you’ve sent us your story, we will review it and respond to you via e-mail.
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If we decide we’d like it for our podcast, we’ll send you a contract as a PDF file in e-mail. You will sign it and send it back to us via e-mail (after scanning it), fax, or postal mail. Then we’ll pay you via check or PayPal and start producing.
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we may contact you with questions about the story, its background, or pronunciations
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cover letter
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brief bio
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Web site
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we usually can’t give you an accurate timetable of when your story will appear in the podcast.
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If the text of the work is currently available online for free, that’s great! Let us know in your cover letter so we can link to it in the web post if we publish your story.
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The files Escape Pod produces are released under a Creative Commons license. Specifically, we use the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Briefly, this means that the entire world has permission to distribute the podcast for free, provided they give credit for it, don’t try to make money off of it, and don’t change it in any way.
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you retain your copyright and all rights
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Story - asimovs - 0 views
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STEALTH Kristine Kathryn Rusch
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EP313: Playing Doctor : Escape Pod - 0 views
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By Robert T. Jeschonek Read by Josh Roseman
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The problem with having a crush on your mad scientist boss is, every day she doesn’t see how wonderful you really are seems like the end of the world.
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Not Enough Stars In The Night - 0 views
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Not Enough Stars In The Night Original fiction exclusive to Cosmos Online | 9 May 2008 by Brendan DuBois
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shared by Sunny Jackson on 21 Nov 11
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Her Husband's Hands by Adam-Troy Castro | Lightspeed Magazine - 0 views
www.lightspeedmagazine.com/...her-husband%e2%80%99s-hands
Reading Speculative Fiction I've Read ✔ Horror
shared by Sunny Jackson on 21 Nov 11
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and so she wept herself blind and took the hug as the gift it was meant to be.
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Submissions :: Angry Robot Books - 0 views
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We are not accepting unsolicited manuscripts at this time.
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Beneath Ceaseless Skies : : Submissions Guidelines - 0 views
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"secondary world": some other world that is different from our own primary world in some way
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It could be different in terms of zoology (non-human creatures), ecology (climate), or physical laws (the presence of magic).
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It could be set on Earth but an Earth different from our primary world in terms of time (the historical past) or history (alternate history).
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It could have a "pre-tech" level of technology, or steampunk technology, or magic as technology, or anything else that's not advanced or modern technology.
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the setting should contain some element that is in some way fantastical.
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The inhabitants of this secondary world should have developed their own culture in response to the uniqueness of their world.
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The characters should fit this culture, and the qualities of the secondary world should have some bearing on the plot.
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(You can't publish that story as a first-run or "new" story anywhere else in the world, and you can't have it appear anywhere else, in print or online or as audio, before or for ninety days after we publish it. But after that you can have it reprinted online and/or in a reprint magazine and/or in any reprint anthology, like one of the many Year's Best collections.)
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Our favorite characters are "round characters": ones who grow and change over the course of a story instead of remaining the same.
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Our favorite styles are lush yet still clear.
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We have a preference for limited points-of-view, first-person or third-person, because we find it harder for a story to get deep inside a character's head from an omniscient point-of-view.
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We find present tense occasionally pretentious and second-person point-of-view always annoying.
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We prefer stories that are as original as possible, particularly in the setting.
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We usually find that fairy tale-style or myth-style narratives don't provide a gritty or immediate enough perspective to make us feel the texture of the secondary world or the direness of the protagonist's struggle.
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In addition to fantasy, we also enjoy stories set in other types of secondary world that likewise don't have modern technology, including steampunk, smoke & sorcery, weird West, sixguns & sorcery, etc.
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very dry sense of humor
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We prefer under 10,000 words.
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the longer a story is, the better it must be
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we only want self-standing stories.
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We are not interested in reprints (stories that have previously appeared anywhere in print or online, including on a personal website or blog).
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Multiple Submissions (more than one story submitted at a time): We do NOT accept these.
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Please wait until you have received a reply to your submission before sending another.
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Simultaneous Submissions (stories that are currently under submission to another market): We DO accept these, but ONLY if you state in your cover letter that your submission is simultaneous, and ONLY if you notify us IMMEDIATELY when another market accepts your story.
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For standard acceptances, we pay 5 cents US per word, which is professional rate as defined by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).
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For this payment, we purchase the following rights: First World Serial Rights First World Electronic Rights An Option to buy Non-Exclusive World Anthology Rights An Exclusive Period to buy Limited-Time Exclusive Audio Rights
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We strongly prefer characters who yearn for something, external or internal, and feel driven to attain it.
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(You also can't sell the audio rights to anyone else for ninety days after we publish the story. And if during those ninety days we buy the audio rights from you, you can't have the story appear in audio form anywhere else before or for ninety days after we podcast it. But after that you can resell the audio rights, including to one of the many fiction podcast websites.)
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We also hope that you will let us keep the story in our online archives after ninety days.
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We are a SFWA-qualifying professional market, so any sale to us can be used to qualify the author for membership in SFWA.
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Format your manuscript in Standard Manuscript Format. If you don't know what that is, look it up.
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Include your name, address, and email on the first page, and a running header with your last name, the title, and page number at the top of every subsequent page.
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We do prefer a SHORT cover letter
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Mention the title of your story in case the attachment gets lost.
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Type it into the body of your email.
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If you have prior fiction sales, list the best one or two.
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If you've been to any writing workshops, mention them.
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TELL US if this is a simultaneous submission.
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DO NOT give a synopsis or summary of your story
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Attach your manuscript to an email
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".DOC" or ".RTF"
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DO NOT send a *.DOCX file
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Use the subject line Submission: (the title of your story)
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your subject line MUST include the word "Submission" or our spam filter will delete your email.
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You should receive our email auto-reply within 24 hours after sending your submission.
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Our response times average 3-5 weeks, occasionally as long as 6-7 weeks.
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If we post on the BCS Forums that we've replied to all submissions sent before a certain date, but you sent yours before that date, please query us using the email form on our Contact page. We really mean this; it's not necessary to wait.
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All rejections and acceptances will be notified by email.
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Unsolicited Rewrites: We do not accept unsolicited rewrites of stories that we've already rejected. (That is a nearly universal policy among short fiction markets of all genres.)
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we don't take submissions of artwork. But we are interested in names of artists and links to their online portfolios, so that when we are ready to buy art, we can check out their work.
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If you're an artist and would like us to put your name and portfolio on our list to check out the next time we're looking for artwork, feel free to send us your information using our Contact page.
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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5c/Last_and_First_Men.pdf - 0 views
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LAST AND FIRST MEN A STORY OF THE NEAR AND FAR FUTURE by W. Olaf Stapledon
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http://www.asimovs.com/2011_10-11/images/CultWhaleWorship.pdf - 0 views
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http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_1003/art/Vinegarpeace.pdf - 0 views
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http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_1003/art/goingdeep.pdf - 0 views
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Clarkesworld Magazine - Online Science Fiction and Fantasy : podcast - 0 views
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Staying Behindby Ken Liu
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Signals in the Deepby Greg Mellor
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Tricksterby Mari Ness
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Semiramisby Genevieve Valentine
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Wired 14.11: Very Short Stories - 0 views
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6-word science fiction
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Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket. - William Shatner
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Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer? - Eileen Gunn
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Vacuum collision. Orbits diverge. Farewell, love. - David Brin
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Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so. - Joss Whedon
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Automobile warranty expires. So does engine. - Stan Lee
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Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time - Alan Moore
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From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings. - Gregory Maguire
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Kirby had never eaten toes before. - Kevin Smith
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“Cellar?” “Gate to, uh … hell, actually.” - Ronald D. Moore
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Epitaph: Foolish humans, never escaped Earth. - Vernor Vinge
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It cost too much, staying human. - Bruce Sterling
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We kissed. She melted. Mop please! - James Patrick Kelly
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Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses. - Richard Powers
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The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly. - Orson Scott Card
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With bloody hands, I say good-bye. - Frank Miller
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Rained, rained, rained, and never stopped. - Howard Waldrop
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To save humankind he died again. - Ben Bova
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We went solar; sun went nova. - Ken MacLeod
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Epitaph: He shouldn't have fed it. - Brian Herbert
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Batman Sues Batsignal: Demands Trademark Royalties. - Cory Doctorow
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Heaven falls. Details at eleven. - Robert Jordan
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Bush told the truth. Hell froze. - William Gibson
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whorl. Help! I'm caught in a time - Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel
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Nevertheless, he tried a third time. - James P. Blaylock
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Help! Trapped in a text adventure! - Marc Laidlaw
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Thought I was right. I wasn't. - Graeme Gibson
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Bang postponed. Not Big enough. Reboot. - David Brin
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Time Avenger's mistaken! It wasn't me... - David Brin
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Death postponed. Metastasized cells got organized. - David Brin
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Mind of its own. Damn lawnmower. - David Brin
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Singularity postponed. Datum missing. Query Godoogle? - David Brin
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Please, this is everything, I swear. - Orson Scott Card
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I saw, darling, but do lie. - Orson Scott Card
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Osama’s time machine: President Gore concerned. - Charles Stross
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Sum of all fears: AND patented. - Charles Stross
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Clones demand rights: second Emancipation Proclamation. - Paul Di Filippo
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We crossed the border; they killed us. - Howard Waldrop
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H-bombs dropped; we all died. - Howard Waldrop
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Finally, he had no more words. - Gregory Maguire
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There were only six words left. - Gregory Maguire
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Weeping, Bush misheard Cheney’s deathbed advice. - Gregory Maguire
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Corpse parts missing. Doctor buys yacht. - Margaret Atwood
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Starlet sex scandal. Giant squid involved. - Margaret Atwood
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He read his obituary with confusion. - Steven Meretzky
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Time traveler's thought: "What's the password?" - Steven Meretzky
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I win lottery. Sun goes nova. - Steven Meretzky
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Parallel universe. Bush, destitute, joins army. - Steven Meretzky
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Dorothy: "Fuck it, I'll stay here." - Steven Meretzky
