The Power of Podcasts

I love podcasts. I really really do. They’re the greatest thing to happen to the internet since email. They allow regular people to express their creativity through media that was, until recently, completely dominated by corporately owned media outlets. There are really talented people producing and distributing thousands of hours of quality entertainment at no cost to their audience. It’s entertainment as a hobby! Who’d of thunk it.

I’m a fan of most types of podcasts, and I like to try a bit of everything (plenty of space on the ‘ol iPod for variety), but I have to admit that audio podcasts will always have a special place in my heart. They remind me of a simpler time in my childhood, listening to the CBC as they had a discussion about some obscure yet inexplicably interesting curiosity. Besides, I consume most of my podcasts while walking to work nowadays, and watching video dramatically increases my chances of being smooshed by a Mack truck while crossing Talbot St.

Getting even more specific, my favorite type of audio podcast is those that focus on a narrative of some kind. These shows remind me of story time in elementary school, and I have always loved story time. Now, when it comes to stories in podcast form, nothing even compares to Escape Pod, one of the best podcasts I’ve ever stuck in my ears. Escape Pod consists of a weekly reading of a sci-fi short story, and includes in it’s enteries some of the top writers in the genre. I’ve been a faithful listener for about a year now, maybe more, and the show has yet to disappoint. Even when they tell a story that I don’t particularly like in the end, I still have a good time on the journey. The show has introduced me to some truly great writers and some even greater stories as well.

All this leads me to this story on io9.com (a comprehensive, if sometimes snarky, sci-fi blog). Despite my extreme nerdy-ness, I’m still pretty new to the world of modern sci-fi writing, so the list of Hugo winners in this article was full of unfamiliar names and titles. That is, until I came across the Best Short Story category. “Tideline” by Elizabeth Bear was a story most familiar to me as a remarkable episode of Escape Pod from a few months ago. I really enjoyed it at the time and can say now with a good deal of certainty that it indeed deserves to win the Hugo. I guess it’s all thanks to podcasting that I can now have a nearly completely uninformed opinion about a prestigious literary award.

So please, if you enjoy podcasts or sci-fi, please give Escape Pod a try. I highly recommend “Tideline” as a fine place to start, but you really can’t go wrong with almost any episode in their archives. And if you don’t like what you hear one week, next week will be an entirely new story to explore.