Podcast of “The Peculiar Gravity of Home” by Beth Cato
Narrated by Wulf Moon
Music track sampled from “Wrapped in Dreams” by Frankum and Frankumjay, used under a Creative Commons license.
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March 2019 issue of FUTURE SF, features nine stories by ten authors from six different countries totaling over 50,000 words of original fiction. From the time of the dinosaurs to the heat death of the universe, from thinking and feeling androids to human consciousness spanning multiple bodies, from cats on the Moon to alien salad dressing that makes plastic digestible and delicious, these tales have something for everyone.
Table of contents
It has been an eventful few months since we launched the inaugural issue. Months filled with the good, the somewhat frustrating, and the tragic.
As the first issue launched, we learned that one of our contributors, Walter Dinjos, passed away mere days earlier....
Hanneke was deeply, madly in love, and she knew it wouldn’t last. Only eight more months, twelve at most. She blinked her magnification on and zoomed in on her partner.
Sun-burned, sea-weathered, handsome Gerben, her Gerben was strolling down the tideline, crows taking to the air at every step, cawing their protest....
Podcast of “Tideline Treasures, or Growing Up Along the Mile-High Dyke” by Tais Teng and Jaap Boekestein
Narrated by Wulf Moon
Music track sampled from “Wrapped in Dreams” by Frankum and Frankumjay, used under a Creative Commons license....
Easy Prey tried to concentrate, but the music made it hard. The sweet-smelling love songs his coworkers preferred left an acid taste in the back of his throat. He would have used a portable facemask for his own music—Prey liked his songs pungent, with a little more rhythmic savagery in them—but Sharp Salt, his boss, had strictly forbade personal music organisms....
It fixed its gaze on the world below.
The flood pressed into the riverbed. The spray webbed within the lightning. The pealing thunder gave premature birth to steam.
It did not control any of these things; it did not possess a single thing in the world....
“Full house,” I said.
I smiled, but the tension of the moment strained across all three of my avatars. My primary avv—the one with the best poker face and thus the one handling the cards—faced Marcy’s primary and studiously ignored every other body in the room....
The job of the Adam is to stand astride the kill gate, waiting for the animal to be driven past. As the cow passes underneath the Adam’s legs, the Adam hits it between the eyes with its right arm, which is a sledgehammer....
Everyone else in the lunar base could continue to fluster and fuss over the lack of aeroships from Earth, but I needed to find Mister White Whiskers forthwith.
“Where have you gotten yourself to, you silly thing?” My brittle, high voice echoed within the narrow duct....
Podcast of “The Peculiar Gravity of Home” by Beth Cato
Narrated by Wulf Moon
Music track sampled from “Wrapped in Dreams” by Frankum and Frankumjay, used under a Creative Commons license.
...
Humanity had been hoping for some transformative, revolutionary technology, but what the aliens left us was a salad dressing recipe.
It used some weird feedstocks, but what came out of the fab looked, smelled, and tasted a lot like Kraft Zesty Italian....
Songs and wartime seem to go hand-in-glove. There are songs urging our troops to vanquish the enemy, songs urging our forces to decimate anyone who stands in their way, songs urging them to act in unison for a common cause. And there are some gentler songs, too....
The ranger was beautiful. Try as I might, I couldn’t reach even to the knee of his exoskeleton. The armor on his chest shone with the blue tinge of tempered steel, although the material wasn’t actually metal but something far stronger....
Purchase this issue
Beth Cato hails from Hanford, California, but currently writes and bakes cookies in a lair west of Phoenix, Arizona. She shares the household with a hockey-loving husband, a numbers-obsessed son, and three feline overlords.
She’s the author of The Clockwork Dagger (a 2015 Locus Award finalist for First Novel) and The Clockwork Crown (an RT Reviewers’ Choice Finalist) from Harper Voyager. Her novella Wings of Sorrow and Bone was a 2016 Nebula nominee. Her new alt-history Blood of Earth trilogy includes Breath of Earth, Call of Fire, and Roar of Sky.
Follow her at BethCato.com and on Twitter at @BethCato.
Also by Beth Cato
Wulf Moon is an Olympic Peninsula writer, artist, and narrator. Moon wrote his first hard SF story when he was fifteen. It won the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards–the same contest that first discovered Stephen King, Peter S. Beagle, John Updike, and a host of iconic names in the Arts. It became his first pro sale in Science World.
His story “Seventh Heaven” was published in Pocket Books’ Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II. A Borg love story. What could be sweeter? His conquistador fantasy story “War Dog” was published by Third Flatiron. It won the Critters Annual Readers’ Poll award for Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Story of 2018. Moon recently won the international Writers of the Future Contest. His story “Super-Duper Moon Girl and the Amazing Moon Dawdler” first appeared in Writers of the Future, Volume 35.
Moon is an approved narrator for Apex Publications, PodCastle, and Escape Pod, and has narrated numerous episodes for Gallery of Curiosities and Third Flatiron. He is podcast director for Future Science Fiction Digest. Enjoy more of his work by visiting www.driftweave.com.
Also by Wulf Moon
Comments on “The Peculiar Gravity of Home Podcast”
April 25, 2019 at 2:21 pm
This was my favorite podcast thus far. Brilliant story. Beth Cato’s writing pulled me right in like I’d opened a black hole (in a good way). Such a fun character voice (brought to life by Mr. Moon) with lots of little similes and wordplay I just laughed out loud. And I was really worried for those dang cats !! Well done guys!
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