52026057The fifteenth anniversary of the Hugo-nominated science fiction podcast Escape Pod, featuring new and exclusive stories from today’s bestselling writers.

Finalist for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine.

Celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of cutting-edge science fiction from the hit podcast, Escape Pod. Escape Pod has been bringing the finest short fiction to millions of ears all over the world, at the forefront of a new fiction revolution.

This anthology gathers together fifteen stories, including new and exclusive work from writers such as from Cory Doctorow, Ken Liu, Mary Robinette Kowal, T. Kingfisher and more. From editors Mur Laffterty and S.B. Divya comes the science fiction collection of the year, bringing together bestselling authors in celebration of the publishing phenomenon that is, Escape Pod.

Source Format Pages Publisher Genre Publication Date
Publisher Paperback 311 Titan Books Sci-Fi October 20th, 2020

I mean, are you as surprised to see more and more sci-fi in this very blog as I am? I always considered myself too stupid to read sci-fi, no reflection on the rest of the world. This was purely between me and sci-fi. But, here I am, dipping my toe in again, and in a wonderful way through short stories. They won’t scare you with commitment and the dreaded potential decision to DNF, and statistically, the shorter the story, the less chance of coming across words and sentences that befuddle logic into indescribable shapes.

A great anthology of 15 stories, of which, I have to say, I didn’t fully enjoy about 2. So, that’s a win. There was 1 that was a complete masterpiece when it came to pure art in wordery. 1 that was just utterly cute. 1 that was hilarious (it includes a pregnant goat in space) and a whole dozen or so that highlight everything that is wrong in our society.

You say sci-fi, I say: space, aliens/beings, weird and advanced gadgets and weapons, time travel, wormholes, great danger to the Universe, slime, no gravity, no oxygen, stars, advanced civilizations, AI.

Escape Pod delivers it all. If I had to pick one story from the anthology to tell you more about, then it has to be An Advanced Reader’s Picture Book of Comparative Cognition by Ken Liu. Just, holy sheeet what masterful wordery, story and moral. It was truly challenging for me to read, which made it all the more intriguing, but I couldn’t even comprehend how someone could build sentences much like Liu does. He deserves every award going out there.

My darling, my child, my connoisseur of sesquipedalian words and convoluted ideas and meandering sentences and baroque images, while the sun is asleep and the moon somnambulant, while the stars bathe us in their glow from eons ago and light-years away, while you are comfortably nestled in your blankets and I am hunched over my chair by your bed, while we are warm and safe and still for the moment in this bubble of incandescent light cast by the pearl held up by the mermaid lamp, you and I, on this planet spinning and hurtling through the frigid darkness of space at dozens of miles per second, let’s read.

Yeah? See what I mean? *starry eyed*

Some of my short, crude commentary as I read the stories:

“Wow!”

“So good! Funny! Want to explore author’s work more!” (T.Kingfisher is the author by the way)

“Very inventive!” / “Wow! just wow!” / “Bonkers! Fun!” / “Hmm. Not funny or even remotely amusing.” / “Oof! What an ending! Bravo!” / “Amazing story – so much heart!” / “Interesting, well-balanced, point made, brilliant.” / “Wholesome! Marvellous!”

Contributors:

Kameron Hurley, T. Kingfisher, Tim Pratt, Ken Liu,Sarah Gailey, Mur Lafferty, John Scalzi, Beth Cato, Maurice Broaddus, Mary Robinette Kowal, Tobias Buckell, Cory Doctorow, Greg Van Eekhout, Tina Connolly, N. K. Jemisin

You can find out more about Escape Pod here.