I had a great guest post last month (by Caroline Black), talking about her favourite five podcasts of speculative fiction, which gave me the idea to present others I know about. To match the previous article, I’ll keep it at five too – and I’ll probably add one more next month. This is my pick for today, not in any particular order:
1.Escape Artists’ Podcasts
They are actually a family of podcasts Escape Pod (dedicated to SF), Podcastle (Fantasy) and Pseudopod (Horror), and they present some of the best speculative fiction now on the market. They also won many awards, including Parsec.
The story of Escape Artists itself is an interesting one (read this post on Diabolic Plots for more) and Escape Pod, the one dedicated to SF, is online since 2005 (!) and a reference for anyone in this field. A good list of episodes aired so far is available on their searchable wikipage.
2. The Overcast
This one is a creation of People’s Ink, a writer’s workshop based in Portland, PNW, which also presents a few independent publishing ventures, like literary journals (Typehouse) and other stuff.
For more information and details, have a look at this.
3. Far-Fetched Fables
Far-Fetched Fables is another production by The District of Wonders, and it is the sister podcast of StarShip Sofa (already covered in the previous post about SFF). While the Sofa covers SF, this one is instead devoted to fantasy.
“Do you sometimes wonder how things could be different, should be different? Do you feel the call of the bizarre and surreal? Each week, Nicola Seaton-Clark explores a little further into the rare and mysterious lands which lie just outside our familiar reality, forging paths of wonder, magic and delight!”
4. Gallery of Curiosities
Compared to the previous ones, this one is of more recent creation, but it presents some specific features, like steampunk and historical fantasy, that I do appreciate, and, more in general “stories with strong narratives. We want to be taken on an adventure in a time that never was. We like weird tales, retro-futurism, historical horror, mad science, monsters, machines, clockworks, adventure, surprises, weird westerns, things that shouldn’t work, and especially steampunk. Most of us watched way too much Rod Serling, cheesy Hammer Films, and the local channel’s Creature Feature host as kids.”
They have recently featured a few great stories about the plague (listen to this one, for examples).
5. Beam me Up
Contrary to the others featured above, this podcast focus more specifically about SF- the hard type, and it’s not unfrequent to find sections devoted to NASA’s missions and other scientific achievements together with fiction stories. A great venue to hear them blended together, and a site where many well-known SF writers have been featured (list is here).
Happy listening!
Thank you! I have friends who love podcasts and I passed on your post last month to them. I’ll do the same with this post.
Thank you Cinda!
Thanks for the mention, Steph!
My pleasure 🙂