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Episode 8 – The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived

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You can check out this week’s short story for free at Escape Pod or Orson Scott Card’s Intergalatic Medicine Show. Nimbus Magnifica now with more short fiction bite sized goodness!

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Episode 7 – Neuromancer

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This is the episode you guys all voted for! In our battle of the 1985 poll, Neuromancer, came out the victor. Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Neuromancer led the path for the term cyberpunk as we entered a world where internet was constantly our reality.

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Episode 6 – Love Minus Eighty

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Sorry about the post-holiday delay, but we are back with vengeance and with a 70+ minute episode for your enjoyment. We are joined by the amazing Jennifer Burnell, of Gleeful Podcast fame, as we discuss the awesome sci-fi tale, based off a Hugo winning short story, Love Minus Eighty. Listen and enjoy!

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Episode 4 – A Princess of Mars

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In episode 4 we discuss the sci-fi classic, A Princess of Mars, first in the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. We are joined with an interview by the author of The Six-Gun Tarot, R.S. Belcher.

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Don’t forget to vote in our January poll!

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Viewer Choice Poll – January (Updated)

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The first viewer book choice! I love a good theme and if you average our birth-years (Ed, Tiffany, Gabby, and Shaira) you get 1985. For this first viewer choice poll we will be choosing between Hugo and Nebula award nominated works from that year. You can vote for up to 4 of the books in the poll below and at the end of October, the top 5 books will move onto a second poll. The second poll will last until the end of the November and that is when the winning book will be decided! Now I know you are busy and don’t have time to be looking up the descriptions of each of the books. So I took the liberty of copying the Amazon descriptions below the poll:

Update:
The final five books have been selected and you can vote once more in our more focused poll!

The Postman by David Brin
He was a survivor–a wanderer who traded tales for food and shelter in the dark and savage aftermath of a devastating war. Fate touches him one chill winter’s day when he borrows the jacket of a long-dead postal worker to protect himself from the cold. The old, worn uniform still has power as a symbol of hope, and with it he begins to weave his greatest tale, of a nation on the road to recovery.

Blood Music by Greg Bear
In the tradition of the greatest cyberpunk novels, Blood Music explores the imminent destruction of mankind and the fear of mass destruction by technological advancements. Blood Music follows present-day events in which the fears concerning the nuclear annihilation of the world subsided after the Cold War and the fear of chemical warfare spilled over into the empty void of nuclear fear. An amazing breakthrough in genetic engineering made by Vergil Ulam is considered too dangerous for further research, but rather than destroy his work, he injects himself with his creation and walks out of his lab, unaware of just quite how his actions will change the world. Author Greg Bear’s treatment of the traditional tale of scientific hubris is both suspenseful and a compelling portrait of a new intelligence emerging amongst us, irrevocably changing our world.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race’s next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn’t make the cut—young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender’s skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.

Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender’s two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.

Dinner at Deviant’s Palace by Tim Powers
In the twenty-second century, the City of Angels is a tragic shell of its former self, having long ago been ruined and reshaped by nuclear disaster. Before he was in a band in Ellay, Gregorio Rivas was a redeemer, rescuing lost souls trapped in the Jaybirds cult of the powerful maniac Norton Jaybush. Rivas had hoped those days were behind him, but a desperate entreaty from a powerful official is pulling him back into the game. The rewards will be plentiful if he can wrest Urania, the official’s daughter and Gregorio’s first love, from Jaybush’s sinister clutches. To do so, the redeemer reborn must face blood-sucking hemogoblins and other monstrosities on his way to discovering the ultimate secrets of this neo-Californian civilization.

Neuromancer by William Gibson
The Matrix is a world within the world, a global consensus- hallucination, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace . . .

Case had been the sharpest data-thief in the business, until vengeful former employees crippled his nervous system. But now a new and very mysterious employer recruits him for a last-chance run. The target: an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence orbiting Earth in service of the sinister Tessier-Ashpool business clan. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case embarks on an adventure that ups the ante on an entire genre of fiction.

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September Programming Changes

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Hello fellow listeners of the Cloud!

First off, I want to apologize. I had said that we were going to record episode 2 of the show on September 15th about The Six-Gun Tarot. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen events both Gabby and Shaira cannot make that day. The next week Tiffany is out of town as well. So the next time we can all get together is September the 29th.

You’re all like oh man that sucks no new episodes for ANOTHER two weeks. You might be right, but I called Tiffany and I decided that she and I were going to do a second episode on the 15th as we had originally planned. Not about The Six-Gun Tarot, we are saving that discussion for the 29th, but we are going to cover the newest Hugo award winning short story, Mono No Aware by Ken Liu.

You can read the story for free here:
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/mono-no-aware/

You can listen to the story for free here:
http://escapepod.org/2013/08/06/ep407-mono-no-aware/

You can also buy the story in its collection here:
The Future is Japanese
The Future is Japanese

Once again, I apologize for the change in programming, but ultimately it will lead to two episodes this month so maybe that it part makes up for it.

Thanks again for your time,
Your faithful captain of the dragon-powered starship,
Ed