StarShipSofa No 346 Suzanne Palmer and Rachel Swirsky

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Fact: Fiction Crawler No 15 by Matthew Sanborn Smith 01:35

Short Fiction: 2014 Hugo Nominee – “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” by Rachel Swirsky 10:20

If you were a dinosaur, my love, then you would be a T-Rex. You’d be a small one, only five feet, ten inches, the same height as human-you. You’d be fragile-boned and you’d walk with as delicate and polite a gait as you could manage on massive talons. Your eyes would gaze gently from beneath your bony brow-ridge.

This narration originally appeared on Apex Magazine and is used with permission.

Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop and attended Clarion West in 2005. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and been nominated for the Hugo Award and World Fantasy Award, among others. “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love” received the Nebula Award for short story in 2013. She is not a dinosaur, nor is she married to one, but she encourages all paleontologists and people in related fields to get on recreating some, because come on, that would be really cool.

Main Fiction: “Shatterdown” by Suzanne Palmer 20:00

Four moons dotted the distant horizon, pale ghosts half-lost in shadow and framed on either side by Cjoi’s heavy black boots propped up against the observation glass. She slouched in her chair, mute earpiece dangling at the base of her neck, her eyes and attention on the gas giant below. Ammonia clouds seethed and spun endless bright rivers of gold across its radiant face, deadly and compelling. Her dive-sphere was rolled toward the oncoming night, engines in stand-by, no interior lights except the tiny blips of critical systems to break the spell.

Suzanne Palmer is a Linux system administrator, writer, and artist who lives in the wild hills of western Massachusetts somewhere amidst the moose and mosquitoes. A lifelong reader of science fiction and fantasy, she started writing on a dare and promptly became addicted to it. She is an alumna and former staff member of the Viable Paradise Writer’s Workshop, and has published stories in Asimov’s, Interzone, and Black Static, among other places. She is currently putting the finishing touches of a novel, set in the same universe as much of her short SF, and is already busily plotting the next. (Stuff will blow up in it, certainly.) She will also be at Worldcon in London in August, and hopes people will say hello.

Narrators: Ibba Armancas and Lynne Thomas

Ibba Armancas is a nomadic screenwriter/director mostly based in Seattle, WA. The trailer for her first feature film is due to release September 2014, and she currently works as Head Writer for a new show by Zombie Orpheus Entertainment (http://zombieorpheus.com/). She regularly makes terrible life choices in pursuit of stories, and is very bad at finding time to work on her website.

You can follow her exploits on Twitter @IbbaArmancas.

Lynne M. Thomas is the former Editor-in-Chief of Apex Magazine (2011-2013). She co-edited the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords, as well as Whedonistas and Chicks Dig Comics. She moderates the Hugo-Award winning SF Squeecast, a monthly SF/F podcast, and contributes to the Verity! Podcast. In her day job, she is the Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University, where she is responsible for the papers of over 60 SF/F authors. You can learn more about her shenanigans at lynnemthomas.com.