Sci-Fi – The Drabblecast

My name is… John. I am… I have a wife and a daughter. They are visiting me today. Their names– Alice. And Anna. I can see, sort of. Everything is blurry. I am submerged in a coffin, a clear coffin with green water. There’s a tube in my mouth so that I can breathe, machine-like. […]

This episode of the Drabblecast presents Jimmy’s Roadside Cafe by Ramsey Shehadeh. It’s a tale about running a shanty café off I-95, in a post-apocalyptic, plague-ridden America. Jimmy cobbles together the shanty between the guardrails of the highway, where he assists passersby. Scavenged goods, hard truths, or a place to rest, Jimmy’s kindness becomes an […]

“You are accused of stealing the intellectual property of Einstein, Dirac and Heisenberg.” The middle-aged speaker waved his finger at Professor Hillabin, more in the manner of a prosecutor than a judge. This episode of the Drabblecast illustrates the folly of bureaucracy. In the drabble, one by one an entire classroom of students are promoted […]

I step out of a porter booth in the overheated Los Angeles station and reach up to peel off my winter coat. That’s when I realize something’s wrong with my hand — it feels numb and prickly, and the fingers aren’t quite responding the way they’re supposed to. Weird. I don’t recall circulatory problems being […]

My new occupant is larger than Carson was. I was made for her, within a certain tolerance for the inevitable changes in human specifications that come with age, changes in health, and abundance or scarcity… This episode of the Drabblecast is all about Mechs, aside from the beat poetry that it begins and ends with. […]

You know, I’ve heard my share of disembodied voices.  I’m accustomed to their fickle, sometimes bizarre demands.  But tonight’s voice is different, clear as gin and utterly compelling.  I must listen… This episode of the Drabblecast concerns time and inter-dimensional travel. In the drabble, a being hurriedly fleeing its own dimension accidentally merges with a […]

Translating… Appendix 820 of The Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field Guide. This series of audio files was created by TreeFrog7. It has been automatically translated into text In this episode of the Drabblecast, heavily pregnant jungle explorer TreeFrog7 keeps a recorded diary of data she and her husband are collecting for the Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field […]

It was my turn to wear the mask, but my egg-sister Linney wouldn’t give it up. She’d been wearing the mask all morning, set on Smile, and it was a test day, too. Everyone thought she was so pleased and relaxed and Earthy… This episode of the Drabblecast opens with the announcement of the 2011 […]

In the place where I was born, stones had been used to mark boundaries for four hundred years. We harrowed stones up in fields, turned them up in roadcuts. We built the foundations of houses from stones, dug around and between them. We made stone walls, and our greatest poet wrote poems about those walls […]

I don’t know if this is the same tape as last time, because They keep moving things around and stealing them. I don’t know who does it. It may be the staff here, or my own family when they come to visit, or the aliens, but somebody’s always doing it — taking my glasses, my […]

Another child was born in the great Mother, excreted from the tube protruding from the Nursery ceiling. It landed with a wet thud on the organic bedding underneath. Papa shuffled over to the birthing tube and picked the baby up in his wizened hands. He stuck two fingers in the baby’s mouth to clear the […]

The six of them meet for the first time in front of the sagging clapboard house where Everett Montrose was born. All are tired, with hollows under their eyes from driving or riding buses for days. Even so, they greet each other with shy, relieved smiles. Few words are said; most seem unsure of how […]

“You don’t have to talk like that to us, mister,” I said. “We know town-speak just fine.” The man with the hat put it back on his head and smiled with a hint of embarrassment. “Sorry, folks. Sometimes it helps, you know, smooth the way.” That man with the computer was lurking by the corner […]

It is three thousand light years to the Vatican. Once, I believed that space could have no power over faith, just as I believed that the heavens declared the glory of God’s handiwork. Now I have seen that handiwork, and my faith is sorely troubled. I stare at the crucifix that hangs on the cabin […]

Now if we, like those characters in recent movies, discovered specific clues in the world around us suggesting that we do in fact live in a simulation, we would of course consider those clues carefully to see what they say about how we should live our lives. — Robin Hanson Norm begins this episode of […]

Another of the Drabblecast’s vaunted Trifecta series. Three short stories, each with a unique twist. The episode begins with an interview of author J.R. Hamantaschen, Norm runs fingers through his troubled mind, learning of the seeds from which his horrors spring. The theme of this Trifecta: getting the boot – stories of rejection and alienation. […]

I passed the sign that read Warning: Shark Zone. The sun was setting, lighting up the tops of the condos sticking out of the water. They had been swallowed by the swollen ocean, when it spilled over, like everything else: the skyscrapers, the cars, the fast food joints, the schools and supermarkets and liquor stores… […]

I take time-lapse photographs of an orange. The result is always the same. First I remove the previous orange from the spike in front of the black velvet backdrop and replace it with a new orange. I set an incandescent spotlight out of frame as a light source… Episode Sponsor: You Shall Never Know Security […]

“Planning to live forever, Tiktok?” The words cut through the bar’s chatter and gab and silenced them. The silence reached out to touch infinity and then, “I believe you’re talking to me?” a mech said…

My earliest fear, the one I remember anyways, was of great pulp magazine robots with hot water heater bodies and vacuum tube eyes. My brother forbade me to touch his precious magazines, so I wouldn’t. I’d stare and stare at the covers through; hourglassed damsels in diaphanous gowns draped over thick slab altars, and the […]

A Trifecta is comprised of three similarly themed stories selected by The Drabblecast’s editors. Now for some raucous scary fun! Love means never letting go. And biting..

Here is the first joke of Betty L. Duncan. Why do the three-eyed aliens bank on the moon? Because there is not enough sun to go around. Press the blue button when you have finished laughing…

The first sign was the chief engineers frowning and going into huddles at odd moments. And then Black Alice began to feel it herself, the way Vinnie was… she didn’t have a word for it because she’d never felt anything like it before. She would have said balky, but that couldn’t be right. It couldn’t. […]

The ship had no name of her own, so her human crew called her the Lavinia Whateley. As far as anyone could tell, she didn’t mind. At least, her long grasping vanes curled—affectionately? — when the chief engineers patted her bulkheads and called her “Vinnie,” and she ceremoniously tracked the footsteps of each crew member […]

It all had a beginning in the original cosmic explosion, whatever that was, and it’ll all have an end when all the stars run down. The sun will last twenty billion years and maybe the dwarfs will last a hundred billion for all the good they are. But just give us a trillion years and […]