Woot! Escape Pod has accepted Jaiden’s Weaver for their podcast. I love Escape Pod. It’s my go-to audio fiction source when I’m building puppets so I’m delighted that “Jaiden’s Weaver” is going to appear there.
Originally, this story appeared in Mike Brotherton’s Diamonds in the Sky anthology and you can read the entire story there. Or you can wait and listen to it.
Here’s the teaser.
I was never one of those girls who fell in love with horses. For one thing, on our part of New Oregon they were largely impractical animals. Most of the countryside consisted of forests attached to sheer hills and you wanted to ride something with a little more clinging ability. So from the time I was, well, from the time I can remember I wanted a teddy bear spider more than I wanted to breathe.
The problem is that teddy bear spiders were not cheap, especially not for a pioneer family trying to make a go of it.
Mom and Dad had moved us out of Landington in the first wave of expansion, to take advantage of the homesteading act. Our new place was way out on the eastern side of the Olson mountains where Dad had found this natural level patch about halfway up a forested ridge, so we got sunshine all year round, except for the weeks in spring and autumn when the shadow of our planet’s rings passed over us. Our simple extruded concrete house had nothing going for it except a view of the valley, which faced due south to where the rings were like a giant arch in the sky. Even as a twelve-year-old, angry at being taken away from our livewalls in town to this dead structure, I fell in love with the wild beauty of the trees clinging to the sheer faces of the valley walls.
Awesome. I love that story. It’s also in your volume of collected short stories, yes?
Any idea when the podcast will appear? I have absolutely no sense what the lead time is for this sort of thing.
No idea when it will appear but I’ll definitely link to it.
I loved Jaiden’s Weaver. I look forward to hearing it now too. 🙂