Reading Recommendation: Podcasts

December 9th 2009 at 7:11 am

I don’t know how many of you out there are listening to science fiction podcasts.  I’ve been listening to audiobooks for years, particularly on long drives. or long weekends in the garden.  When the narration is done well, it’s great entertainment.   So podcasts wasn’t much of a jump.  Here are the ones I listen to:

Escape Pod is great for short fiction – the last two I chose were about 45 minute programs, and about 40 minutes of them were fiction.  That’s perfect for my current winter workout at the gym.   The two shorts that I’ve liked the most in the last month or so are “Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store” by Robin Sloan, which is a lovely fable that’s very, very timely, and “His Master’s Voice,” by  Hannu Rajaniemi, which appealed to the dog-lover in me.  I’m not suggesting they are the best on Escape Pod – they put out more stories than I have time to listen to – but I think these are both worth your time.

For SF news and discussion,  I like the Sofanauts over at Starship Sofa and I like Adventures in Science Fiction Publishing (By Shaun Farrell). I’ve been on the Sofanauts, which was fun, and harder than I thought it would be.  I guess audio is a little like pictures – you come out sounding different than you think.  But it was really fun, and it prodded me into getting good headphones and getting set up for Skype, which I’ve since had other reasons to use.

For a pretty full audio magazine, I like StarShip Sofa itself.  Tony C. Smith, the producer, has a voice and an accent that’s easy to listen to and each episode usually includes a short story, a piece of flash fiction, a poem (yeah for all venues that do poetry) and rather a lot of friendly chat and commentary.   These are usually long, and my favorite places to listen to them are long drives, long outside chores (I keep weeding until the podcast is done) and housecleaning.

We also have a local podcast in the Seattle area called SeattleGeekly that covers sf, gaming, and a pretty wide range of other stuff that appeals to many of us technology/sf types over here in the Emerald City.

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