Retiring as Assistant Editor of Escape Pod

Today is my last day as the Assistant Editor of Escape Pod, after more than six years in the position (and seven with the magazine). I love the work and love the magazine, but I have stretched myself too thin lately, and the time has come for me to retire. I’m excited to hand over my reins to Kevin Wabaunsee, who’s spent the summer learning – and mastering – all the behind-the-scenes machinery of the Assistant Editor of Escape Pod, where he’ll work alongside  Premee Mohamed like I have. With continuing co-Editors Mur Lafferty and Valerie Valdes, and the whole team of Associate Editors, Escape Pod is going to keep flying to awesome places.

If you’re someone who’s listened to a story, submitted work of your own, or been a member of one of my teams – thank you all for making this such a wonderful flight! So many editors complain about the hate mail they receive, but in my experience the “love mail” has outnumbered it 100:1. Thank you all. Keep on reading and listening, and fly safe out there.

For more information, read the official statement on the Escape Pod website.

P.S. By my best guess, I sent about 8,000 personal-feedback rejections during my tenure there. Whew!

2023 Hugo Award Finalist

I’m delighted to announce that I’m a 2023 Hugo Award finalist as a member of the Escape Pod team!

As assistant editor, I’m fortunate enough to be on the masthead alongside co-editors Mur Lafferty & Valerie Valdes, my fellow assistant editor Premee Mohamed, host Tina Connolly, and producers Summer Brooks & Adam Pracht. But flying a spacecraft is a team effort, and our whole crew of associate editors make it all possible.

The 2022 crew included Kevin Wabaunsee, Phoebe Barton, J.M. Coster, Marcus Tsong, Bria Strothers, Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, Sarah Kumari, Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko, Ewen Ma, Ethan Mills, Markus Wessel, Alan Mark Tong, Wil Ralston, Sidd Krishnan, JB Manipal, and Langley Hyde.

Hugo Award voting is open to members of the Chengdu Worldcon, and winners will be announced on October 21.

I do not have any plans to participate in Chengdu Worldcon, and I believe this is true for the rest of the Escape Pod team as well.

Escape Pod Award Nominations 2021

April has been an exciting month for us at Escape Pod, with three major award nominations!

First up, the Escape Pod team has been nominated again as a 2021 Hugo Award finalist in the Best Semiprozine category!

 

Second, another Hugo Award nomination for the team: our co-editors Mur Lafferty & S.B. Divya have been nominated personally for their work in the Best Editor Short Form category!

Third, another Escape Pod team nomination: Best Fiction Podcast at the 2021 Ignyte awards!

Ignyte Award finalist: Escape Pod (Best Fiction Podcast)

For those of you who are here for Benjamin-specific content, the first and third ones have my name on them. But none of these award nominations are an individual effort: this stuff comes from the work of our entire crew. I couldn’t be more proud of our spaceteam.

2020 in Review & Awards Eligibility

Well, that was certainly a year.

2020 in Review? This is not a year any mere human can summarize. But professionally I did well, despite this week’s doxxing. I sold 6 short stories (3 pro, 2 semipro, 1 reprint), and got the AI Cold War novel almost query-ready.  And now that the year is nearly over, let’s list all the public-facing accomplishments and publications.

First, a few words on award eligibility:

  • Nominating for the Hugo Awards? If so, I hope you’ve enjoyed our work at Escape Pod, which is eligible for Best Semiprozine. The co-editors Mur Lafferty & S.B. Divya would make a great choice (as a two-person team) for Best Editor Short Form, too.
  • How about the Nebula Awards? I hope you’ll enjoy my story “Conference of the Birds” in Analog Science Fiction & Fact. The story of Surveillance Hub, a hard-working node in the distributed neural network AI of an oppressive cyberpunk megacorp. Doing its job, tracking intellectual-property thieves, hoping for another round of reinforcement signals from the network’s uppermost levels.
    • Read it for free online (as of 2/16) via Curious Fictions.
    • For the upcoming eligibility season, this story is eligible only for the Nebulas, not the Hugos.1
  • For any award, consider the many excellent original stories Escape Pod published in 2020. If you enjoyed one, let the world know!

If you’d like to read more of what I published this year, here are my three other original stories that came out in 2020:

  1. The Gentry – Kaleidotrope, July 2020 (contemporary fantasy, 4500 words). The eldritch diner with the portal between worlds was torn down for condos years ago – but there’s one last fairy chevalier stranded in this world, homeless and down on her luck, and she needs a few things from the diner-owners’ son.
  2. Machines in Motion – Hybrid Fiction, Sep 2020 (steampunk, 4200 words). In the war’s endless need for personnel, a Jewish refugee has a chance to become a military engineer, despite the restrictions against her religion and gender. To win her place among the engineers, she’ll need to outmaneuver all the officers and mentors who want to keep her under their control.
    • Not available free online. Contact me for a copy in the format of your choice.
  3. Weights and Measures – Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Nov 2020 (secondary world fantasy, 5200 words). Agnella, senior priestess of the god of trade and justice, has come north to Senvosk to track a stolen relic. But by the time she arrives, the local priest has already been murdered. Agnella has only one local novice to rely on, as a rival god begins his hunt.

And lastly, you can hear my voice hosting five stories (six episodes) of Escape Pod from 2020:

  • Escape Pod 755, “Consolidation” by Langley Hyde
  • Escape Pod 743, “Flash From the Vault: Summer 2020, #2”
  • Escape Pod 734, “Murmuration” by E. Catherine Tobler
  • Escape Pod 726/727, “And Never Mind the Watching Ones” by Keffy R. M. Kehrli
  • Escape Pod 716, “Physics by the Numbers” by Stephen Granade

May 2021 be a better year for us all!

Escape Pod Turns 15

Today is Escape Pod’s 15th birthday! That is approximately 2.5 entire internets. To celebrate, we have a whole host of announcements.

I’ve only been Escape Pod’s assistant editor for about 3 of those years, but it’s glorious and humbling to remember that is a mere 1/5th of the Pod’s lifespan. I’m proud to help helm ths ship ever onward, to the finest heights of science fiction. It’s been such a joy the last few years to get award recognition for our years of work bringing free, listener-supported science fiction stories and readings to the world.

If you want to give a birthday present to Escape Pod AND yourself, pre-order our upcoming print anthology! It’s got stories from Cory Doctorow, Ken Liu, Mary Robinette Kowal, John Scalzi, and more, including nine works of original fiction.

I’ve also heard tell that Escape Pod co-editor Mur Lafferty and publisher Alasdair Stuart are co-writing a new a new adventure for the Zombies, Run! app, coming out this August. Special offers will be available for Escape Artists fans and supporters!

2020 Hugo Award Finalist

So this happened. And by “this,” I mean Escape Pod receiving its second nomination as a Hugo Award finalist.

List of Best Semiprozine finalists in 2020 Hugo Awards

Thank you to all our listeners, readers, and supporters who make all this worth doing! And extra thanks to the rest of the Escape Pod crew. Divya and Mur, our incomparable co-pilots; Adam and Summer who assemble the pieces into magic, Tina and Alasdair whose smooth and sonorous voices help us guide the ship in every week, and most importantly the entire crew of Associate Editors who do the work day in and day out to keep stories read & the pod flying: Kay, Jen, Sandy, Darusha, Ryan, Premee, Kevin, Izzy, James, Phoebe, Jen, Shiv,2 and Karlo!

Escape Taxonomy

Over the weekend, Escape Pod received one of the highest honors possible for a science fiction entity: someone named a species after us.Image and description of Zelomopha effugia

The newest member of the Escape Pod team, Zelomorpha effugia, is a Costa Rican parasitoid wasp. The taxonomic methods used to identify it (and the other newly-described species in this publication3) are new and perhaps controversial. But I, for one, welcome our scientific controversy overlords.

This delights me beyond words. Ever since I was a child reading Far Side cartoons, the idea of having a species named after something I’ve done was a dream beyond imagining.

Escape Pod: The New Rejectomancy

Good news for all you writers out there: starting immediately (last update February 5, 2019), Escape Pod is changing their rejection letters to a newer, more transparent pattern. Escape Pod rejectomancy is getting easier!

Escape Pod rejection letters will now be explicit and transparent about exactly where your story got in our editorial pipeline. From 2017-2019, the letters contained that information, but to interpret it you needed to read my website. No longer! That means you’re free to stop reading this post right now, its information is no longer necessary. But if you crave a deeper knowledge of rejectomantic arts, dive on in.

If the rejection letter provides no details about who enjoyed your story, that means your story was rejected after initial Associate Editor review. If your story passed any of the following milestones, the rejection letter will tell you whether:

  1. An Associate Editor passed your story up to the Assistant Editor.
  2. The Assistant Editor (me) held it for a second read.
  3. The Assistant Editor passed it to Co-Editors for the final round of consideration.

Associate Editors read each story anonymized4, but the Assistant Editor and Co-Editors can see the author’s name and cover letter.5 This process gives each story an initial read where it must stand on its text alone, while still allowing the cover letter to play a role, especially if the author has experiences relevant to the story.

The new letters also provide approximate statistics about the stages of our pipeline (“about X% of stories reach this level”). We hope this context will be useful, especially for new authors.

Rejection “level” is not an indication of story quality. It only tells you what it says on the proverbial tin: whom in our staff thought it might be a good fit for Escape Pod. The visibility of an issue is not necessarily correlated with its magnitude.

The only exceptions to this formula are three rare cases, all of them self-explanatory. “Violated guidelines” (generally for stories that are too long or too short), “Revise & Resubmit,” and of course “Acceptance.”

Reprints and originals now receive the same rejection letters, but reprints are less likely to receive personal notes.

PERSONAL NOTES

When possible, we try to include personal comments in rejection letters, below the form text. Most personal notes are written by me based on Associate Editor input. In addition, sometimes the Associates write up the a note for me to paste in, and of course the Co-Editors write their own for the final round. The presence (or absence) of a personal note does not reflect how well we thought a story would fit at Escape Pod. Generally, six factors influence this choice:

  1. Who on our staff read your story? (Are they someone more or less inclined to write personals?)
  2. Did we think a comment would help this story or your future stories?
  3. Was our reaction something we could meaningfully condense down to a sentence or two?
  4. Was there something in your cover letter that affected our desire to provide feedback?
  5. How hurried was I while sending out rejection letters?
  6. Was the story a reprint? (Reprints almost never get personal notes, because the story has already achieved its final form.)

As you can see, many of these factors have nothing to do with your story. We offer feedback as often as manageable,6 but we’re not your critique group.

WHAT MAKES A STORY FIT (OR NOT)

If you receive a rejection letter of any kind, we didn’t think your story was a good fit for Escape Pod. This can happen for any combination of the following reasons:

  1. The story didn’t suit our personal tastes.
  2. We found problems with the story.
  3. We’ve seen too many stories like this.
  4. The prose would require too much editing.
  5. The story felt more like fantasy or horror than science fiction.
  6. The style wasn’t a good fit for audio.

This is fiction, not math: subjective taste is our only true yardstick. We encourage everyone to keep trying no matter what flavor of rejection they receive! Many of our authors received several rejections of various types before we bought one of their stories, and many of our staff still receive rejections from other Escape Artists podcasts.

NOTES AND EXCEPTIONS

We try to go through the main queue from oldest to newest, but there’s a lot of jitter. For example, if one of us downloads 10 stories to their Kindle, the next reader might come along ten minutes later and respond to the 11th story.

The workflow can vary if I or one of the Co-Editors plucks a story from the queue. This skips a story over one or more of the early tiers. This is rare, is not usually faster than the usual pipeline, and doesn’t necessarily affect the ultimate odds of acceptance. You will probably never notice from the outside.

Special submission calls aren’t under my management. For example, Black Future Month followed a generally similar workflow, but only had three tiers, and used the same rejection letter for all three.

This is an explanation, not a contract. This process was different in the past, and will surely change again someday.

2018 in Review & Awards Eligibility

Another year is coming to a close, and much to show for it, ups and downs and every direction. I finished the first draft of a new novel, and worked on more short stories than I can shake a metaphor at. I made the Campbell Award longlist! I lost a Hugo award with the rest of the amazing Escape Pod team, and took part as we won and rejected a Parsec award. My final submission to Writers of the Future became a finalist, but I withdrew my story over ethical concerns. I sold 4 original stories, but two of those sales fell through when the magazines closed.

I had five original stories come out in 2018. In chronological order:

  1. Toward Lands Uncharted – Mind Candy, Feb 2018 (secondary world fantasy, 4900 words). A diplomat and spy must try to save her nation and its very history from their conqueror’s Sykes-Picot border magic.
  2. Where the Anchor Lies – Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Feb 2018 (science fantasy, 4000 words). A general visits the grave of the sentient battleship she loved, to use it as a political tool.
  3. The Seeds We Plant – Compelling SF special issue, Sep 2018 (science fiction, 2200 words). When a colony ship suffers a brutal accident, the pilot must reply on his emotional-control neuroprosthesis to save his cargo.
    • Not available free online. Contact me for a copy in the format of your choice.
  4. Elegy of Carbon – The Internet Is Where The Robots Live Now, Nov 2018 (science fiction, 4100 words). In the waning days of the solar system, a mining AI must find a new way to fulfill the purpose it loves.7
    • Not available free online. Contact me for a copy in the format of your choice.
  5. The Hammer’s Prayer – Diabolical Plots, Dec 2018 (contemporary fantasy, 3300 words). A golem hides away in ugly places, to help him resist the compulsion to share his gift of animation.8
    • If you only have time to read one story, this is the one I recommend.

I didn’t have much time for nonfiction this year, but I did publish:

  1. The chapter “What’s Possible with Cyborgs and Cybernetics” in Putting the Science in Fiction (Writer’s Digest Books). I’m also quite proud of my associated writing-prompts post, “Machines, You, and Other Synonyms.”
    • Putting the Science in Fiction – a collection of 59 essays by scientists and other experts, designed to help authors write with authenticity – is eligible for the Hugo award for Best Related Work .
  2. Twelve new entries in the #NeuroThursday Twitter feature.

If you’re in a position to nominate for awards of any kind, I hope you’ll consider not only these fine works, but the whole team over at Escape Pod. We work hard every week to bring you the finest in audio fiction, and we’ll be eligible once again for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. We also published a lot of awesome stories, so take a look back at that list and see if one of them feels worthy of your love too!

Escape Pod Rejectomancy Update

As of today, I’ve made a small change to how we at Escape Pod choose our rejection letters.

In short, rejection letter type now reflects where the story got in our editorial pipeline. The criteria for Tiers 1&2 have been updated, so that now:

  • Tier 1: Rejected by Associate Editor (first reader)
  • Tier 2: Rejected by Assistant Editor (me)
  • Tier 3: Rejected during Assistant Editor Second Pass
  • Tier 4: Rejected by Co-Editors

Note that, as a result, we will be sending more Tier 1’s than in the past. We have tweaked its text accordingly.

Now more than ever, tier is not an estimate of story quality. “Who detected that the story wouldn’t be a fit for Escape Pod” is not highly correlated with the (subjective) question of “how close the story came to fitting.”

If you miss having some subjective opinion in your rejection letter, fear not! We continue to provide personalized rejections whenever possible for original story submissions.

If you want to learn more, including how to identify which tier you received, check out my full Submissions and Rejetomany post.