If you have not yet done so; I suggest you subscribe to Escape Pod, the weekly science-fiction podcast magazine. It is in my opinion the finest source of short fiction on the Internet. I believe Escape Pod is a very important project, so important that I am prepared to donate my own money to aid their cause. So important that I want you to subscribe and hear how good it is for yourself.
Traditionally the market for science-fiction is dominated by three art-forms: These are the big special-effects movie; the long-running high-concept series and the novel. There used to be a market for short stores, however subscriptions to the magazines that publish short fiction are at an all-time low, and books of anthologies are sold by fewer bookstores.
And as a result, the SF shelves of bookstores are becoming unfriendly places for new authors. Shelves that may once have contained rows of speculative fiction, now contain spin-off books: Novels based on movies or video-game concept, endless cod-Tolkienesque fantasies, trolls, wizards and space-marines repeating endless and tedious cliches.
This is a crisis of the imagination. The human imagination is what defines us as a species; without the ability to speculate, plan and wonder what might be we would still be living in caves. We can see many of the recent tragedies as failures of imagination; for example who imagined that a major city in the richest country of the world might be flooded; clearly a less outlandish concept than alien life.
What I am trying to say is that our imagination needs exercise, and the usual sources of SF are no longer stretching our minds… we need something new:
Earlier this year, Steve Eley started Escape Pod; He had a big idea - he would find the best writers of short fiction and actually pay them to have their stories read out. He decided to go further, each story would be read by a guest narrator who would also be paid for their time.
Steve’s budgets are not big, and the first ten or so episodes were self-financed. But it made a difference, any author can give a text away, but it is a substantially better thing to be paid for your writing, even if the fee is modest. At a time when everybody else is was amateur, he can rightly claim to have been one of the first professionals.
I know I am not the only person who thinks so: Bestselling novelist Cory Doctrow recently discovered Escape Pod and has offered a story.
Escape pod can be found on every single podcast directory in the known universe.
