Podcasting Short Stories

Maybe a month and a half ago I discovered Escape Pod, a podcast offering a science fiction short story every week. It struck me as a pretty awesome idea. Shortly afterwards, I discovered that I was actually three times as lucky as I thought I was--Escape Pod is just one of three podcasts under the Escape Artists, Inc. umbrella. There's PodCastle which focuses on fantasy and PseudoPod that focuses on horror.

Up until I found these guys, the only form of audio fiction I was consuming were podcast novels. They're great, of course! I've got a couple of reviews up and one in the works on Phil Rossi's Harvey. But novels have their downsides. Sure, the greater length means that you can build to something much more spectacular. And if you like the characters, you get the fun of following them around for much longer. But it's much more involved than something shorter.

Moreover, when they're done, they're done. In general, podcast novel feeds are author specific--Scott Sigler has his feed, so does Phil Rossi, and J. C. Hutchins, and so on. When their latest novel is over, there's usually a lapse between that and the next one. Authors are, after all, only human--writing takes time, and so does recording and promoting your work and doing all of the various things required to make a living. In short, now that Harvey is over, I'm not expecting another novel from Phil Rossi to fill my commute over the next few months.

The joy of what the folks at Escape Artists are doing is that it is perpetual. It may be that you can't cram as much into a short story as you can into a novel, but it is no less an art form in its own right. Meanwhile, because the stories are all written by different authors, there is an endless supply to draw from. If all of the authors featured up until this point on Escape Pod stopped writing henceforth, it would not diminish the producers' ability to keep putting up new ones each week because there are so many science fiction writers out there.

Frankly, I'm surprised there isn't a lot more of this. I think this is going to be one of the important frontiers in which new writers will cut their teeth the same way that they've done so in genre magazines up until this point. And it's great for genre readers who have any kind of commute to work.

As a jumping point I'd recommend the Escape Pod episode 222: Infestation. It's the one I've most recently listened to and has two things to recommend it: it's an awesome story, and I actually really enjoyed the monologue afterwards.