StarShipSofa: Science Fiction Audio Podcast

Gigantic

by Steve Aylett

Strange aircraft arrived with the sky that morning, moving blood-slow. And Professor Skychum was forced from the limelight at the very instant his ranted warnings became most poignant. ‘They’re already here

Narration for Gigantic by Gareth Stack

Likely Lad

by Kage Baker

“Alec’s growing up into such a nice boy,” said Mrs. Lewin fondly, pouring out a cup of herbal tea. “So thoughtful. Do you know, he’s doing all his own laundry now? I never have to remind him at all.”

                Lewin grunted acknowledgement, absorbed in his cricket match. It was only a holo of a game played a century earlier—competitive sports had been illegal for decades now—but it was one he had never seen.

This week StarShipSofa announces a new format and a new name. No longer is it the StarShipSofa Podcast, now the good ship Sofa goes by the name of The StarShipSofa Audio Science Fiction Magazine, following in the great traditions of Analog, Asimov and F&SF. Included in this show is poetry and flash fiction as well as a cracking story from Kage Baker.

Narration for Likely Lad by MCL Studios

Peter Watts

Bruce Boston

Laurel Winter

Diane Severson

Julie Davis

Distraction

by Spider Robinson

La Cenerentola

by Gywneth Jones

Act I: The Scholar Gypsies
My first thought, when I saw the sisters, was that they were simply too perfect. They had to be identical twins: about sixteen years old: tall but not too tall, sun-kissed golden skin; rounded and slender limbs, long golden hair, blue eyes. They were walking in step, arm in arm, whispering together; identical even in their graceful movements. One pushed back her hair, the other brushed an insect from her immaculate white shorts. Each gesture seemed a mirror image of the other. Impossibly perfect! Then I saw the mother, strolling along behind (she had to be their mother, the likeness was too close for any other relationship), and I thought perhaps I understood. The older model -or should one say, the original- was a very goodlooking woman; a blonde with long legs, regular features and lightly tanned skin. Her eyes behind her sunglasses were no doubt just as blue. But there were details -lips that were a little narrow, a square jaw, a figure not so exactly proportioned- that added up to something less than flawless beauty.

Narration by Julie Davis

 Graves

Winner of the Nebula for Best Short Story 1993

Winner of the World Fantasy Award 1993

by Joe Haldeman

I have this persistent sleep disorder that makes life difficult for me, but still I want to keep it. Boy, do I want to keep it. It goes back twenty years, to Vietnam. To Graves.

Dead bodies turn from bad to worse real fast in the jungle. You've got a few hours before rigor mortis makes them hard to handle, hard to stuff into a bag. By that time, they start to turn greenish, if they started out white or yellow, where you can see the skin. It's mostly bugs by then, usually ants. Then they go to black and start to smell.

They swell and burst.

Joe Haldeman's latest book The Accidental Time Machine

Narration by James Campanella

And the Deep Blue Sea

By Elizabeth Bear

First published in SCIFICTION, May 2005

The end of the world had come and gone. It turned out not to matter much in the long run.

The mail still had to get through.

Harrie signed yesterday's paperwork, checked the dates against the calendar, contemplated her signature for a moment, and capped her pen. She weighed the metal barrel in her hand and met Dispatch's faded eyes. "What's special about this trip?"

Elizabeth Bear

Narrated by Amy H Sturgis

Shark God Versus Octopus God

by Jeff VanderMeer

A long time ago, when Dakuwaqa the Shark God was young and not so wise, he made all who lived in or near the sea fear him. They feared him for his knives that posed as teeth. They feared him for his relentlessness. They feared him for his speed. They feared him because the bloodlust was buried so deep in him that he loved to fight.

Dakuwaqa could take many shapes, but he enjoyed the shape of shark the best in those early days. It fit him. It fit his aspirations.

Jeff VanderMeer

Narration by Grant Stone

The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter

by Alastair Reynolds

Shortlisted for the BSFA Award Best Short Story 2007

She stopped in sight of Twenty Arch Bridge, laying down her bags to rest her hands from the weight of two hogs’ heads and forty pence worth of beeswax candles. While she paused, Kathrin adjusted the drawstring on her hat, tilting the brim to shade her forehead from the sun. Though the air was still cool, there was a fierce new quality to the light that brought out her freckles.

Alastair Reynolds

Narration by Diane Severson

First appeared Interzone #209

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate

by Ted Chiang

Shortlisted for the BSFA Award Best Short Story 2007

O MIGHTY CALIPH AND Commander of the Faithful, I am humbled to be in the splendor of your presence; a man can hope for no greater blessing as long as he lives. The story I have to tell is truly a strange one, and were the entirety to be tattooed at the corner of one's eye, the marvel of its presentation would not exceed that of the events recounted, for it is a warning to those who would be warned and a lesson to those who would learn.

Ted Chiang

Narration by James Campanella

BSFA Best Short Story Shortlist 2007

The Gift Of Joy

by Ian Whates

Shortlisted for the BSFA Award Best Short Story 2007

Conrad sauntered into Lacey’s bar and took his accustomed place on one of the high stools, which settled with a disconcerting lurch.  He wriggled in an effort to find a more stable base, causing the stool’s feet to scrape against the mock-wood beneath with teeth-jarring effect.  Roach glanced up to favour him with a sour look that bisected a smile and a grimace – his customary form of greeting.

Ian Whates

Narrated by Alex Foster

Story first appeared in TQR

BSFA Best Short Story Shortlist 2007

Lighting Out

by Ken MacLeod

Shortlisted for the BSFA Award Best Short Story 2007

Mother had got into the walls again. Constance Mukgatle kept an eye on her while scrabbling at the back of her desk drawer for the Norton. Her fingers closed around the grip and the trigger. She withdrew the piece slowly, nudging the drawer farther open with the heel of her hand. Then she whipped out the bell-muzzled device and levelled it at the face that had sketched itself in ripples in the paint of her study.

Ken MacLeod

disLocations

NewCon Press

BSFA Best Short Story Shortlist 2007

Terminal

by Chaz Brenchley

Shortlisted for the BSFA Award Best Short Story 2007

unspeakable journeys

into and out of the light

He stood on the Tower of Souls, and watched her fly.

Say it another way, he stood on the high-stacked bodies of his Upshot kind, but that was nothing: filing. Bureaucracy. Paranoia.

It was the locals, the natives, the dirigibles - she called them dirigistes, but that was ironic - who had built and named this height, who gave a value to these discards. Black discs, each one identical, each one uniquely coded: each one the residue of a human passing through. A carbon footprint, she liked to say.

Chaz Brenchley

disLocations

NewCon Press

BSFA Best Short Story Shortlist 2007

Buffalo

by John Kessel

Hugo and Nebula nominee 1992 Winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the Locus poll in 1992

In April of 1934 H.G. Wells traveled to the United States, where he visited Washington, D.C. and met with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Wells, 68 years old, hoped the New Deal might herald a revolutionary change in the U.S. economy, a step forward in an "Open Conspiracy" of rational thinkers that would culminate in a world socialist state.  For forty years he'd subordinated every scrap of his artistic ambition to promoting this vision.  But by 1934 Wells's optimism, along with his energy for saving the world, was waning.

John Kessel

Due out in April 2008 John Kessel’s The Baum Plan For Financial Independence and Other Stories

Narration by James Campanella

Infinity Syrup

by Laurel Winter

First published in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1992

Fay was Zen shopping, something she had learned when she worked swing shift in card assembly at IBM.  The effort of plugging six components into the right holes on four hundred cards had always left her too tired to think.

Too tired to think, but too wired to sleep. So she usually stopped at a twenty four hour grocery on her way home and let her hands do the shopping for her. Hands reaching mindlessly, plucking items off the shelves. And she was always surprised to find when she got home and unpacked the paper bags that she had exactly what she needed.

Laurel Winter

Narrated by Diane Severson

Letters To The Future

by Olaf Stapledon

To my Great Grandson in early manhood.

Sir,

If ever you come upon this letter, forgive its preglacial dialect, and have patience to spell out its meaning. How gladly would I address you in whatever speech lives in your ears! The thoughts which follow must, I know, reach you only as dead and fragile specimens; but today they live. They flit among us dazzlingly and elusively, and we fight about them; for some of us fear them as the plague and would exterminate them, while others prize them as the light of our world.

Narrated by MCL at MCL Studios, Milton Keynes

By The Falls

by Harry Harrison

Nebula nominee 1970

It was the rich damp grass, slippery as soap, covering the path, that caused .Carter to keep slipping and falling, not the steepness of the hill. The front of his raincoat was wet and his knees were muddy long before be reached the summit. And with each step forward and upward the continuous roar of sound grew louder. He was hot and tired by the time he reached the top of the ridge--yet he instantly forgot his discomfort as he looked out across the wide bay.

Harry Harrison

Narrated by Grant Stone

Going Through Changes

by Pat Murphy

THE WIND tugged at Gretchen's raincoat as she stepped out of the restaurant. Halfway down the block, a sudden gust neatly flipped her umbrella inside out and drenched her with a blast of cold rain. She ran for the nearest shelter - a tattered awning over a door sandwiched between a pawnshop and a used-clothes store.

Pat Murphy website

Summer – Kick Ass Mystic Ninjas

We See Things Differently

by Bruce Sterling

This was the jahiliyah -- the land of ignorance. This was America. The Great Satan, the Arsenal of Imperialism, the Bankroller of Zionism, the Bastion of Neo-Colonialism. The home of Hollywood and blonde sluts in black nylon. The land of rocket-equipped F-15s that slashed across God's sky, in godless pride. The land of nuclear-powered global navies, with cannon that fired shells as large as cars.

The Crystal Spheres

by David Brin

It was just a lucky chance that I had been defrosted when I was-the very year that far probe 992573-aa4 reported back that it had found a good star with a shattered crystal sphere. I was one of only twelve deep-spacers alive-warm at the time, so naturally I got to take part in the adventure.

The Second Coming of Jasmine Fitzgerald

by Peter Watts

What’s wrong with this picture? Not much at first glance. Blood pools in a pattern, entirely consistent with the victim…

THROUGH THE SHAVING MIRROR

by Michael Moorcock

“HAS ANYONE noticed,” Monsignor Cornelius spoke urgently hoping to divert Sir Perkin Float, on his third bottle of claret, from developing that familiar litany about discovering Chaos Math years before Mandelbrot, thus being cheated of his place in history and his video royalties, “how cats can turn off time?  With a suitable lens, of course.”

A SLOW SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE SURREALIST SPORTING CLUB

by Michael Moorcock

I HAPPENED TO be sitting in the snug of the Strangers’ Bar at the Surrealist Sporting Club on a rainy Saturday night, enjoying a well mixed Existential Fizz (2 pts Vortex Water to 1 pt Sweet Gin) and desperate to meet a diverting visitor,  when Death slipped unostentatiously into the big chair opposite, warming his bones at the fire and remarking on the unseasonable weather.

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LOST SORCERESS OF THE SILENT CITADEL 

by Michael Moorcock

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Homage to Leigh Brackett  

They came on the Earthling naked, somewhere in the Shifting Desert when Mars’s harsh sunlight beat through thinning atmosphere and the sand was raw glass cutting into bare feet.  His skin hung like filthy rags from his bloody flesh.  He was starved, filthy, making noises like an animal.   He was raving -- empty of identity and will.  What had the ghosts of those ancient Martians done to him?  

Narrated by Steve Eley Escape Pod

Michael Moorcock's London Bone kicks off the first of our StarShipSofa Presents. This is the first of five stories by Michael Moorcock. A man in some area's called the Cartographer of the Multiverse. StarShipSofa calls him a damn fine fellow.

LONDON BONE 

by Michael Moorcock

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For Ronnie Scott  
 

l. 

MY NAME IS Raymond Gold and I’m a well-known dealer. I was born too many years ago in Upper Street, Islington.   Everybody reckons me in the London markets and I have a good reputation in Manchester and  the provinces.  I have bought and sold, been the middleman, an agent, an art representative, a professional mentor, a tour guide, a spiritual bridge-builder. These days I call myself a  cultural speculator.

Narrated by MCL at MCL Studios, Milton Keynes