For Drabblecast Bsides Premium Subscribers this week, we bring you the classic 1972 Full Cast radio production of The Peoria Plague. Don’t worry, it’s just a fictional audio drama!
This week’s Drabblecast explores unrequited love and how relationships, like anything in life, are susceptible to change. We bring you a full cast production of David D. Levine’s space opera story “Love in the Balance,” read to you by Mike Boris, Lauren Synger, Veronica Giguere, Adam Pracht, David Levine and Norm Sherman.
Theo opened his eyes and stared out the window. Beyond the glass loomed the fog of endless night, and bulbous shapes drifting. Here and there a spotlight picked out the sigil of one or another House on a pennant or tail fin. The red bat of the Unknown Regalia… the silver spoon-and-circle of Theo’s own Guided Musings… and there, the gilded fish of the Pulp Revenants. Angrily, Theo twisted the brass and crystal handle beneath the worn sill, and wooden slats snapped shut over the view.
How dare Kyrie summon the zombies again— on this day of all days, and upon the Musings of all Houses? How dare she?
This week on the Drabblecast, something a little different! “Wholesale Solution” is a full cast radio play set in a dystopic science fiction universe where nothing is as it seems.
We are inside a holding cell containing CLAY ORTS, a tech programmer, a small cubicle-style structure. He’s with CAMPBELL DOYLE, a man with a salesman voice. There is a momentary piece of ambiance as both sit in silence. Campbell takes a deep breathe. It’s the calm before the storm.
You couldn’t describe a rath. You couldn’t even look at one for more than a few seconds before you started getting a migraine aura. Rovers were just blots of shadow. The breeder was massive, armored, and had no recognizable features, save for its hideous, drooling, ragged edged maw. Irizarry didn’t know if it had eyes, or even needed them…
“Hostile movement! Well inside the perimeter! Well inside!” I stripped off my Immersive Response goggles as adrenaline surged through me. The virtual cityscape I’d been about to raze disappeared, replaced by our monitoring room’s many views of SesCo’s mining operations. On one screen, the red phosphorescent tracery of an intruder skated across a terrain map, a hot blip like blood spattering its way toward Pit 8.
Looking away from the light that showed the Charles Dexter Ward was no longer entirely dead was as hard as opening a rusted zipper. But Cynthia did it, and didn’t let herself look back She pulled Hester a little further down the corridor and said, “Now we really need to know how she killed him. And whether it’ll work a second time…”
Six weeks into her involuntary tenure on Faraday Station, Cynthia Feuerwerker needed a job. She could no longer afford to be choosy about it, either; her oxygen tax was due, and you didn’t have to be a medical doctor to understand the difficulties inherent in trying to breathe vacuum.
You didn’t have to be, but Cynthia was one. Or had been, until the allegations of malpractice and unlicensed experimentation began to catch up with her. As they had done, here at Faraday, six weeks ago…
Oddly-accented cryptozoologist Connor Choadsworth once again embarks on a quest to find mythical beasts, this time in the deep jungles of Kenya “In Search of the Brain-Eating Nandi Bear.”
“The Nandi… a magical bear… a brain-eating bear…”
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Drabblecast B-Sides 15 – In Search of the Brain-Eating Nandi Bear
Kyle lifted another lightsaber. “Want one? They’re not as random or clumsy as a flamethrower.”
“Sh*t. The geek is strong in this one. Sure, Jedi me.”
Kyle tossed it to her with a grin. Hang on Grandpa. We’re coming…
Norm starts this week’s Drabblecast starts with a bbardle about Phantom Claus, to get us in the Halloween spirit. The two part Horror World 2025 is concluded. We rejoin Ben to see if he is any closer to rescuing his grandfather from bedeviled robo-zombies.
It started in the cemetery, like these things usually do. Everyone knows being in a cemetery after dark’s a bad idea, which is exactly why Kyle had begged his grandpa to take him…
This episode of Drabblecast is a Halloween Special where our (g)host Norm gives us suggestions on how to simultaneously celebrate Breast Cancer Awareness Month (and Halloween). He also provides information on Phantom Claws, the ghost of a vengeful murdered Santa. The feature story follows Kyle on an escapism holiday to Horror World, an amusement park with violent sentient robot zombies and android wolf men.
While the rest a’ the country had turned away from the biorevolution, we Best Virginians had become magicians. We had learned how to use the tiniest creatures to change the world in the biggest, most beautiful ways…
You couldn’t describe a rath. You couldn’t even look at one for more than a few seconds before you started getting a migraine aura. Rovers were just blots of shadow. The breeder was massive, armored, and had no recognizable features, save for its hideous, drooling, ragged edged maw. Irizarry didn’t know if it had eyes, or even needed them…
To start, my pet has no roots and only two limbs. Her bark is soft and spongy. A domed leafless flower grows from her trunk. She’s small; standing a mere four branches high and makes odd gibbering sounds when I draw close..
Recorded live at Balticon, Science Fiction convention May 28, 2010
“Squidges?” This was a term I hadn’t heard before. I was used to Maine brother colloquialisms, they had adopted a vocabulary largely unique to themselves, but this went beyond even that…
Norm rewards forum participant Wonko by reading his Drabble about an unwilling exposure to the majesty of nature. Rish Outfield and Big Ankelvitch, narrators of the Dunesteef podcast, assist Norm in telling Thomas Canfield’s story, “Squidges.” In it, an unsuspecting patron of eccentric auto-mechanics learns about the unseen gremlins plaguing cars the world round. Feedback from Frank Key’s surreal sci-fi piece, #90 “Far Far Away,” demonstrates the magnetic qualities of magnetic love monkeys to fans of the Drabblecast.