My daughter CatGirl decided to join me in my quest to read the Hugo nominees before they are voted on at WorldCon in Montreal(!) in August. To be fair, she probably won’t read all of the novels, novellas and novelletes, but she did listen to the five of stories nominated for Best Short Story. Escape Pod, the Science Fiction podcast, made this all too easy. I enjoyed the stories on long bike rides, and CatGirl listened while doing her math homework.

Families that multitask together…maintain solid FaceBook ties well into the 21st century?

I should warn you–this is a longish episode, running just under an hour. The focus of the episode is on these five stories. We introduce each story with a short excerpt before launching into a discussion of what it was about the stories that did or didn’t appeal to each of us. We do all this without giving away any spoilers. We also vote for our favorites.

Can I just say for a moment that I have the absolutely coolest daughter in the world?

We now return you to our scheduled program.

Mind on Fire readers may like several of these, since, like many great SF stories, they touch on grand ideas and on religious and philosophical themes.

One more thing: until August, all five stories are available as podcast and online text for free!

• “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” by Kij Johnson read listen
• “Article of Faith” by Mike Resnick read listen
• “Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal read listen
• “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang read listen
• “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled” by Michael Swanwick read listen

If you read/listen to any of these, CatGirl and I would love to hear from you! Maybe we can even create spoiler-filled posts so we can discuss some of the great ideas in these stories to our heart’s content!

If you have problems listening to the podcast, here is an alternate download option.

[podcast]http://www.mindonfire.com/kiku/MindonFirePodcast-Episode004.mp3[/podcast]