nora at inkstain

I’ve been listening to an enormous pile of podcasts lately. All of them are great. Here’s the roundup, in no particular order:

• Escape Pod: This weekly scifi short story ‘cast has something well-written every week. As a bonus, a lot of the stories are also thought provoking. Steve Eley’s intros are awesome– the geek dad ones are my favorite. I recommend the following stories on it to start you out: Save Me, Plz, Conversations With and About My Electric Toothbrush and The Giving Plague.
• Cory Doctorow’s Craphound.Com: I have a huge geek crush on Cory Doctorow. This is the podcast where he throws up all his audio interviews as well as his fiction. I listened to most of the archives of this in a weekend and then Cory was reading my fanfic to me in my head. I adopted his voice as my inner reading voice for the next couple days. It was eerie. Check out his story Anda’s Game. He also gave one of the most intelligent speeches I’ve ever heard on how science fiction is about the present, and even if you don’t give a damn about anything he’s talking about I think you’d appreciate how absolutely fucking brilliant this guy is. I want to be Cory Doctorow when I grow up. This is my new plan.
• Metamor City: This is part of my inspiration for moving my novel into a magical Albuquerque rather than a scifi future dystopian Albuquerque with magic. This is a fiction podcast set in a city with magic, but the magic is amazingly well thought out and really fits in with the world that’s been created. I guess you should just start with the first episode with this one, though they aren’t really in any particular order– all the stories so far have stood alone, though some of them are released in multiple parts.
• Playing for Keeps: Keepsie Branson lives in a world with superheroes who make her power– no one can take anything that belongs to her– seem rather paltry in comparison. Except when they don’t. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that makes you immediately hate the antagonists like this novel does. The protagonists are pretty great, too, but the heroes in this world are all really huge assholes, and Mur Lafferty does a simply amazing job getting you to want to give them a good smack across the face.
• 7th Son: Seven clones meet each other and have to save the world after a 4 year old kills the president. Great use of ensemble cast in this one and it asks some really interesting questions about human nature.

I’ve always got room to listen to more if you’ve got more recommendations for good podcasts, particularly fiction ones. I don’t really listen to music ones– I like my music and Pandora just fine.