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PseudoPod 492: The Fisher Queen

“The Fisher Queen” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2014. It is available to read free online at fu-GEN.org. “The Fisher Queen” was on the shortlist for the 2014 Nebula along with Eugie Foster’s last story, “When It Ends, He Catches Her” which ran last year on Pseudopod. It has been translated into Chinese, French, and German. “The Fisher Queen” is set up in the fashion of traditional oral storytelling, where truth and myth blend together. However, it’s about the very real effects of societal, systematic violence against women.

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The Fisher Queen

by Alyssa Wong

My mother was a fish. That’s why I can swim so well, according to my father, who is a plain fisherman with a fisherman’s plain logic, but uncanny flair for the dramatic. And while it’s true that I can cut through the water like a minnow, or a hand dipped over the edge of a speedboat, I personally think it’s because no one can grow up along the Mekong without learning two things: how to swim, and how to avoid the mermaids.

Mermaids, like my father’s favorite storytale version of my mother, are fish. They aren’t people. They are stupid like fish, they eat your garbage like fish, they sell on the open market like fish. Keep your kids out of the water, keep your trash locked up, and if they come close to land, scream a lot and bang pots together until they startle away. They’re pretty basic.

My sisters tried to talk to a mermaid once. It was caught up in one of Dad’s trammel nets, and when they went to check the net out back behind the house, they found this mermaid tangled in it. It was a freshwater one, a bottom-feeder, with long, sparse hair whose color my sisters still argue about to this day. Iris, the oldest, felt bad for it and made May splash some water on its fluttery gills with her red plastic pail. She asked the mermaid if it was okay, what its name was. But it just stared at her with its stupid sideways fish eyes, mouth gaping open and closed with mud trickling out over its whiskers. Then Dad came home and yelled at Iris and May for bringing in the nets too early and touching the mermaid, which probably had sea lice and all kinds of other diseases.

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Pseudopod 428 Replay & The Eugie Award

“When It Ends, He Catches Her” was originally published in Daily Science Fiction in September 2014. Many thanks to Matthew Foster for sharing this story with us and you.

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Eugie Foster

Pseudopod would like to draw your attention to a fantastic announcement this week, the Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction. The Eugie Award will celebrate the best in innovative fiction. This annual award will be presented for the first time in 2016—for works published in 2015—at Dragon Con, the nation’s largest fan-run convention.

The Eugie Award honors stories that are irreplaceable, that inspire, enlighten, and entertain. It will shine the spotlight stories that are beautiful, thoughtful, and passionate. That change us and the field. The recipient will be a story that is unique and will become essential to speculative fiction readers. We look forward to seeing the list of finalists, which will be announced in the not too distant future.

This award reflects what Eugie gave to us. She was inspiring, enlightening, and entertaining. Words fail to convey how much she meant to us as a creator and as a human.

To remember how irreplaceable Eugie is to us all, we are re-running episode 428, “When It Ends, He Catches Her” which includes the Escape Artists memoriam at the end. It was a Nebula finalist along with this week’s story, “The Fisher Queen” by Alyssa Wong. For those of you who are new to the podcast, this is an essential part of the back catalog not to be missed. For those of you who have stuck around these parts, I encourage you to give it another listen.

We look forward to celebrating Eugie and other authors and their unforgettable stories through this new award.

To find out more about and keep track of this new juried award, please check out the award page: http://www.eugiefoster.com/eugieaward

Pseudopod 428: “When It Ends, He Catches Her” by Eugie Foster

“When It Ends, He Catches Her” was originally published in Daily Science Fiction in September 2014. Many thanks to Matthew Foster for sharing this story with us and you.

Eugie Foster was an American short story writer, columnist, and editor. Her stories have been published in a number of magazines and book anthologies, including Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, and Interzone. Her collection of short stories, Returning My Sister’s Face and Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice, was published in 2009. After receiving her master’s degree in psychology, she retired from academia to pen flights of fancy.  She also edited legislation for the Georgia General Assembly, which from time to time she suspected were another venture into flights of fancy. She was also a director for Dragon Con and edited their onsite newsletter, the Daily Dragon.

Eugie received the 2009 Nebula Award for Best Novelette for “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” which you can listen to over on EscapePod. There are over twelve hours of Eugie Foster’s stories and narrations here at Escape Artists. We encourage you to (re) listen to them.

She’s also been a finalist for the Hugo, Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press, and British Science Fiction Association awards. Foster died at Emory University Hospital on September 27, 2014 from respiratory failure, a complication of treatments for Large B-Cell Lymphoma. The day Foster died, Daily Science Fiction published her last story, “When it Ends, He Catches Her.” This story was short listed for the Nebula Award.

Check out all her fiction showcased on Escape Artists here: http://escape-artists.wikia.com/wiki/Eugie_Foster

Your reader – Tina Connolly is the author of the Ironskin trilogy from Tor Books, and the Seriously Wicked series, from Tor Teen. Ironskin, her first fantasy novel, was a Nebula finalist. Her stories have appeared in Women Destroy SF, Lightspeed, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and many more. Her narrations have appeared in audiobooks and podcasts including Podcastle, Pseudopod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, John Joseph Adams’ The End is Nigh series, and more. She runs the Parsec-winning flash fiction podcast Toasted Cake. SERIOUSLY WICKED for Tor Teen will be released May 5, 2015.

Music in the outro is “Cylinder Nine” by Chris Zabriskie, from the Free Music Archive.

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“The dim shadows were kinder to the theater’s dilapidation. A single candle to aid the dirty sheen of the moon through the rent beams of the ancient roof, easier to overlook the worn and warped floorboards, the tattered curtains, the mildew-ridden walls. Easier as well to overlook the dingy skirt with its hem all ragged, once purest white and fine, and her shoes, almost fallen to pieces, the toes cracked and painstakingly re-wrapped with hoarded strips of linen. Once, not long ago, Aisa wouldn’t have given this place a first glance, would never have deigned to be seen here in this most ruinous of venues. But times changed. Everything changed.

Aisa pirouetted on one long leg, arms circling her body like gently folded wings. Her muscles gathered and uncoiled in a graceful leap, suspending her in the air with limbs outflung, until gravity summoned her back down. The stained, wooden boards creaked beneath her, but she didn’t hear them. She heard only the music in her head, the familiar stanzas from countless rehearsals and performances of Snowbird’s Lament. She could hum the complex orchestral score by rote, just as she knew every step by heart.

Act II, scene III: the finale. It was supposed to be a duet, her as Makira, the warlord’s cursed daughter, and Balege as Ono, her doomed lover, in a frenzied last dance of tragedy undone, hope restored, rebirth. But when the Magistrate had closed down the last theaters, Balege had disappeared in the resultant riots and protests.”

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PseudoPod 491: The Second Act

PseudoPod 491: The Second Act is a PseudoPod original.

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Show Notes

“It’s important to remember that not everything in life can or should be understood.”

The Second Act

by Nicolas Escobar

He was wearing a torn up jacket and soggy blue jeans. Corralled beneath a frayed baseball cap, his hair spilled out in all directions. Both arms clutched a thin yellow book to his chest. He held it tight, as if at any moment someone might snatch it from him. Wild eyed, he slammed the book down in front of me but left his hand on top.

“I’d like to exchange this please” he said.

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PseudoPod 490: Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown

PseudoPod 490: Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown is a PseudoPod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:17 — 27.8MB)

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Show Notes

“As an adult human being, I’m an odd misfit, but I was truly a ghoulish child—small and rail thin with a large, square face capable of making the most hideous expressions (usually only for my own amusement in the bathroom mirror). I’m sure my dark humor and morbid bent are due in no small measure to an older brother who delighted in telling me scary stories almost every night of my early childhood. My brother pathologically despised me when we were kids and actively (and creatively) fed my fears and doubts when he wasn’t physically causing me discomfort or pain. My earliest memories are filled with his threats, creepy lies and bizarre, improvised stories. Many years later, they still haunt my imagination, and I wrote “Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown” with these childhood memories in mind.”

Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown

by Jon Padgett

I was seven years old the first time my brother tried to kill me.

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PseudoPod 489: The Devil In Rutledge County

“The Devil In Rutledge County” first appeared in LORE Vol. 2, #4, December 2013.

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The Devil In Rutledge County

by Victoria Hoke

It was my fault. It happened ’cause I prayed to the Devil.

Of course I prayed to God first. I prayed every night since I realized Pa was a drunk. Not a joker or a hothead or a layabout — a drunk. I prayed God would make him quit drinking. I prayed God would turn him back to the easy-laughing man who took us fishing on Saturdays.

I prayed whenever I heard Pa retching in the backyard at dawn.

I prayed whenever the constable’s boys dragged him home at midnight.

I prayed when Essie got bit on the heel by a copperhead, and Pa was face-down in bed, and there was only one other person we could turn to.

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PseudoPod 488: A Thing Of Terrible Beauty

“A Thing of Terrible Beauty” first appeared in Fantastic Stories of Imagination, April 1963.

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A Thing Of Terrible Beauty

by Roger Zelazny

How like a god of the Epicureans is the audience, at a time like this! Powerless to alter the course of events, yet better informed than the characters, they might rise to their feet and cry out, “Do not!”—but the blinding of Oedipus would still ensue, and the inevitable knot in Jocasta’s scarlet would stop her breathing still.

But no one rises, of course. They know better. They, too, are inevitably secured by the strange bonds of the tragedy. The gods can only observe and know, they cannot alter circumstance, nor wrestle with ananke.

My host is already anticipating the thing he calls “catharsis.” My search has carried me far, and my choice was a good one. Phillip Devers lives in the theater like a worm lives in an apple, a paralytic in an iron lung. It is his world.

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PseudoPod 487: Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Nyarlathotep

This story was first published in the anthology Future Lovecraft in 2011.

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Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Nyarlathotep

by Nick Mamatas

Newspace was a lot like old space. Well, posters of old space stacked atop one another and constantly shuffled and re-shuffled. In the little waffle-iron spacecraft was the thunderous Niagara, any number of mansions on emerald hills, all piled up in a corner with Escheresque staircases going downwise and anti-spinward, marmalade skies and airships in the shape of giant, open-mouthed fish, the Pyramids of Egypt poking out from every horizon, and long, dark hallways in blue-and-purple neon everywhere, absolutely everywhere, as this is what the New Ones thought VR would look like, back when they were all children.

And the New Ones had fun playing like children. As it turns out, virtually all problems faced by Humanity, save the million-year war with the Old Ones, were resource problems. No Old Ones, no resources, no problems. Virtually no problems, anyway, which is an awful pun, it’s true. So, the New Ones spent their days naked and immortal, writing songs no fleshy ear could comprehend, inventing new languages to describe disembodied emotional states, engaging in virtual nucleic exchange and reproducing wildly to the humming databases, with beings unheard of and indescribable.

The waffle iron was busy, too. Zipping around space and whatnot, eating dark matter and printing copies of itself, in case something happened to it. And oh, yes, something was happening to it. Naturally, the poor little waffle iron didn’t quite understand that the something happening was the drive to laze-lathe meteoroids into replicas of itself. Oh, and then, within the guts of the waffle iron, ghosts started showing up everywhere, upsetting and terrifying the New Ones with their googly eyes and their siren howls. And they loved to eat the New Ones. Beautiful, tow-headed, pink children with cloth diapers and bows in their wispy hair. Lovely children with rich, brown skin and smiles to light up a room. Obnoxious children who sat on the couch all day, pretending to kill with their minds for fun. Children who flailed their hands about and slammed their heads against the wall because they saw the wrong kind of penny. Ghosts were indiscriminate—the ugly and the exquisite both were consumed, leaving naught but wrinkled husks behind.

You have to realize that words like eyes and children, and even husks, make little sense; it’s being dumbed down for you and the quaint bag of chemical reactions you keep in that bone bowl. We’re talking a density matrix, here. So, when a character is introduced, as one is about to be, understand that you’d be just as accurate, were you to imagine her as a blurry, yellow ball of light floating around in a black field, instead of as a person. Which is to say, you’d be much more accurate, after all.

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PseudoPod 486: Hinterlands

“Hinterlands” originally appeared in Omni Magazine, October 1981

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:49 — 33.0MB)

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Hinterlands

by William Gibson

When Hiro hit the switch, I was dreaming of Paris, dreaming of wet, dark streets in winter. The pain came oscillating up from the floor of my skull, exploding behind my eyes in wall of blue neon; I jackknifed up out of the mesh hammock, screaming. I always scream; I make a point of it. Feedback raged in my skull. The pain switch is an auxiliary circuit in the bonephone implant, patched directly into the pain centers, just the thing for cutting through a surrogate’s barbiturate fog. It took a few seconds for my life to fall together, icebergs of biography looming through the fog: who I was, where I was, what I was doing there, who was waking me.

Hiro’s voice came crackling into my head through the bone-conduction implant. “Damn, Toby. Know what it does to my ears, you scream like that?”