Escape Pod and the Science Fiction Community

Escape Pod has been such a part of my life for the past couple of months that I feel guilty not blogging about it until now. 

It's a Science Fiction short story podcast.  It's produced--and usually narrated--by Steve Eley, who started podcasting three years ago as a hobby.  Most of the stories have been previously published in established markets.  Eley buys one time rights for the podcast, produces it with professional quality narration and sound editing, and then releases it for free.  In addition to reading the story, he provides an intro--talking about what's on his mind that week and how it relates to the story--and an outro that includes user feedback from the Escape Pod forums on the story from a couple of weeks ago.

I burned a bunch of episodes to disk and started listening to them as I walked around the city or rode trains.  Now I play them whenever I'm in my little purple car.  One burned disk provides me with dozens of hours of free entertainment.  (I still haven't sprung for my own iPod.  It feels like an extravagance, when my $35 mp3 diskman works just fine--and I suppose I could use the Asus Eee as an iPod surrogate in the car, too, saving myself the even the cost of a CDR.)

I haven't jumped into the forums myself yet, although I look forward to doing so once I've caught up to the most recent stories.  The greatest pleasure of discovering this project so far along is having 150 episodes to catch up on.   I'm listening to them at the rate of two or three a day.

What's really encouraging is what Escape Pod means for genre fiction. 

I wrote a few months ago about the depressing sales figures for the major Science Fiction magazines.  When you aspire to write for a magazine that sells only a few thousand copies a month (down to about a fifth of their peak, in many cases), it tends to make you doubt the legitimacy of your life goals.  But I haven't been able to let go of the delusion that writing stories can be entertaining, even important.  After all, some people make a living writing fiction.  Not short stories, maybe.  But there's, what, three or four novelists making a go of it, right?  The odds may be worse than achieving rock-stardom, but it's the doing that's important, after all.  Right?  Isn't that right?

Well, the download counts on some of these podcasts blow those magazine sales figures out of the water.  Sometimes by a factor of 10 or more!  Now, granted, Eley's audience aren't paying for those downloads.  And he's only paying his authors $100 for a story.  As he says in one of his metacasts, this isn't rent money, it's beer money. 

But.  Each of those downloads represents someone who has listened to the story (probably), and become, at the least, a passive part of the community that has sprung up around these stories.  And that means, at least, that these stories matter to a decently-sized chunk of people. 

And maybe some of those listeners will fall in love with an author's work and, you know, go down to their awesome local genre-fiction shop and buy a book. 

Stranger things have happened.

In many cases I find the intros, outros, and reader feedback to be as interesting as the stories themselves.  They add tremendous value, and they generate a feeling of participation, discussion, and community.  It's like sitting among people who are real fans of this stuff and learning about their tastes and opinions, seeing how they match up with yours, where you agree and disagree.  It's a conversation about literature, and when's the last time you've had one of those outside of an academic setting?  When's the last time you had one for fun? 

I'd like it if he devoted a little more time to these discussions, especially the in the outros.  People who get bored by them could just skip to the next story, after all.  While those who wanted to see how our reaction to a story compared to other fans' can linger and listen.  (I suppose I could linger over these discussions in the forums.  But I can't web-surf in my car!)

Eley funds the project--and his authors--with sponsors in part, but mostly through donations.  I'll be making one soon in hopes that this doesn't go away.  Things look good so far.  He's expanded his efforts to create a horror podcast, Pseudopod, and a fantasy podcast called PodCastle which is launching April 1st. 

So if you haven't been a podcast listener before (I wasn't) this is a good place to start.  Self-selecting communities are one of the biggest pleasures of the internet, and with Escape Pod Steve Eley has created a great one.