Our fourth piece of audio fiction for April is “Water in Springtime” written by Kali Wallace and read by Kate Baker.

 

 Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 91 - Water in Springtime by Kali Wallace [47:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (6265)

Our third piece of audio fiction for April is “Autodidact” written by Benjanun Sriduangkaew and read by Kate Baker.

 

 Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 91 - Autodidact by Benjanun Sriduangkaew [46:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (8672)

Our second piece of audio fiction for April is “Passage of Earth” written by Michael Swanwick and read by Kate Baker.

 

 Clarkesworld Magazine 91 - Passage of Earth by Michael Swanwick [52:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (11582)

The ambulance arrived sometime between three and four in the morning. The morgue was quiet then, cool and faintly damp. Hank savored this time of night and the faint shadow of contentment it allowed him, like a cup of bitter coffee, long grown cold, waiting for his occasional sip. He liked being alone and not [...]

On Srisunthorn Station, the corpses of conquered stars are nurtured into ships.
They may become shelters from solar winds, orbitals giving company to lonely planets, mausoleums for the sainted. But long ago an admiral came, bringing a toll of dead and trailing carcasses of worlds. Her armor was hammered out of battle formations and broken alliances, [...]

Our first piece of audio fiction for April is “The Cuckoo” written by Sean Williams and read by Kate Baker.

 

 Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 91 - The Cuckoo by Sean Williams [19:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (8728)

April 1st, 2075, 9:15-9:23am
More than one thousand commuters traveling via d-mat arrive at their destinations wearing red clown noses; they weren’t wearing them when they left. The global matter-transmission network is rebooted, source of the glitch unknown. All the clown noses are destroyed except for three retained by private collectors.
April 1st, 2076, 10pm precisely
One [...]

I woke in the darkness. My mother was leaning over me.
“We have to leave,” she said. Her breath was warm on my face.
The scent of dried flowers and wood-smoke drifted after her. She had spent the night by the fire, singing for a young mother and her sickly child. The child had not survived. Few [...]

I was the only one home when the GPS satellites finally came back online. It was already dark out by then, and it had been snowing all afternoon. I’d been sitting at the kitchen table with my algebra book, trying to concentrate on quadratic equations, and then the handheld beeped and lit up and the [...]

It was close to dawn. The sun was a sliver of brilliance just visible over the mass of canyons on the western horizon. There was no reason why the direction the sun rose in should not be arbitrarily defined as East; the only reason why the sun rose in the West on this planet was [...]