The Locus Recommended Reading List is a great resource for the best fiction of the year – and we’re over the moon to see Park’s All-Night Ramyun and Snack Emporium, by Seoung Kim, in the limelight. This story aired as part of a Little Wonders duology in Episode 539.
The rocket team also have a story on the list: Andrew Dana Hudson’s The Uncool Hunters which was published in Escape Pod #894
Our next submissions window will be a themed call for Halloween stories. We’re looking for shorter pieces this year, covering a range of genres and themes that would also appeal to the audiences of our sister publications. So, that means…
Terrifying cats!
Kids battling tentacles!
Magic pumpkins!
Creepy space shenanigans!
…and almost anything else you can think of. The key ingredient, as always, is speculative fiction that suits a teen+ audience. We’d like all the stories to have a clear connection to Halloween, whether the festival itself, the traditions of tricks/treating, or just spooky genre tropes.
We’ve got a 3000 word limit on these submissions, but on the plus side we’re also looking to accept several different pieces for our Halloween event. We’ll be open to submissions during the first two weeks of February via our Moksha Portal. Do check our submissions guidelines page as well and remember to anonymise all submissions!
We’re thrilled to share that there are two Cast of Wonders stories on the BSFA 2023 longlist – you can see all the longlisted nominees here on the BSFA page, but for now we’d just like to congratulate Ember Randall (Notes from a Trans-Inclusive Gender Apocalypse) and Angela Liu (The Time Traveler’s Cookbook) on their incredibly well deserved nominations!
We had such a flood of submissions in August/September that we’ve decided to push our Halloween 2024 window back from next month to February 2024. The schedule page has been updated to reflect this.
We’re absolutely thrilled to share that Simons, Far and Near by Ana Gardner, published as Cast of Wonders 485 in February 2022 (and reissued with new commentary as a Staff Pick Cast of Wonders 518), is a finalist for the WSFA small press award! This is one of our favourite stories of 2022, and we’re thrilled to bits that it’s been recognised alongside the other amazing finalists.
You can listen to/read the story on the links above.
Every year in September, Cast of Wonders celebrates Banned Books Week, an annual international event celebrating the freedom to read and raising awareness of the immense social value of free and open access to information.
Joining the editorial team for this year’s call is Cast of Wonders Associate Editor, Simon Pan. Thank you, Simon, for the wonderful theme this year!
In times of conflict, division and change, it is more important than ever to build bridges of understanding. We most commonly encounter the stories of others through news articles or in classrooms, kept at a scholarly or journalistic distance and often biased to favour privileged perspectives. Our own truths may also remain unvoiced and unknown, misunderstood even by those around us.
When it comes to illuminating these truths, stories have a key part to play: they help us to learn and appreciate things from perspectives we might never otherwise consider, and allow us to reshape our own experiences within the transformative lens of fiction. When we share our stories, we guide sparks of kinship and understanding, using narrative and emotion to help others experience a small window into another’s reality.
For Banned Books Week 2023, we want to see stories of discovery, of learning, of misconceptions unraveled, and how stories can serve as a guiding light to help us understand a new perspective, or to teach us valuable lessons when all other methods fail us. What that something is…well, that is up to you!
At Cast of Wonders, we welcome stories that portray the full spectrum of human experience. We don’t challenge stories; we want stories to challenge us! Cast of Wonders looks for stories that evoke a sense of wonder, have deep emotional resonance, and have something unreal about them. We aim for a 12-17 age range: that means sophisticated, non-condescending stories with wide appeal, and without gratuitous or explicit sex, violence, or pervasive obscene language.
Preference for this submission window is under 5,000 words with an absolute limit of 6,000 words. Flash submissions under 1.5k are also very welcome!
Submissions must adhere to Cast of Wonders guidelines. Submissions will be accepted from June 1 to June 14 through our Moksha Portal – we can’t wait to read what you send in!
We’ve decided to push back our Banned Books Week submission window to the second half of May, and our next general submissions window to July.
We will be opening as scheduled in the second half of April to young authors only, i.e. authors under the age of 20 as of the end of April.
See our schedule page and submissions guidelines page for more information.
Presenters: Marguerite Kenner and Alasdair Stuart
Hey folks, welcome to an Escape Artists metacast. I’m Marguerite Kenner. And I’m Alasdair Stuart.
For those of you who have never heard a metacast before, think of this like a mini State of the Union address, a way for us to update you about what’s been happening at EA. The big thing is our news that EA now stands for the Escape Artists Foundation — we’ve become a nonprofit. We want to share with you how we got there, answer some questions, and explain what it means for you. (Continue Reading…)
General Submissions: We’re currently ~80% through Stage 1 for our November general submissions, and hope to be making Stage 2 decisions in early February.
Seasonal/Holiday submissions: We’ll be opening to submissions again in the first half of February, seasonal/holiday submissions. This is to cover Halloween 2023, Christmas/Winter Holidays 2023, and any other special event that you have a story that you think would be a good fit for!
Full guidelines are here: https://www.castofwonders.org/submissions/
We look forward to reading your stories!
We’re now in the last few days of voting in the final round of our flash fiction contest, and the competition is fierce!
If you’re a forum member, you can read and vote on the finalists here (and if you’re not a forum member, why not join up, introduce yourself, and join in on the fun?).
The three winning stories will be published here in early 2023!
There’ve been some changes backstage in the last month, and two of our very talented and hard-working staff members have stepped up to join the editorial team at Cast of Wonders. Cup Jacob and Alicia Caporaso have both shown their skills as associate editors in the slushpile; their careful and supportive critiques and advice have helped shape many of our published pieces, and helped the team provide what we hope are useful and fair rejection letters. They’ve got to grips with all the nuts and bolts of the production process, and have taken the lead on several smaller submission windows. Now, it’s time to give them a moment in the spotlight to introduce themselves in their own words.
First up is Alicia Caporaso, who has been with the team for the last five years.
Hello! My name is Alicia Caporaso, and I am so happy to take on the role of Assistant Editor at Cast of Wonders. I first learned about Escape Artists around 2008 through listening to the French-language Science Fiction and Fantasy Podcast Utopod, which, on Science Fiction blogs, was repeatedly and favorably compared to EscapePod. I had to check it out, and have been listening to EscapePod, Podcastle, PseudoPod, and Cast of Wonders ever since (that’s a lot of stories!). I was one of the winners of the first Podcastle Flash Fiction Contest in 2010 with my story The Water Sprite, and I still have my original Podcastle t-shirt that I won! In 2017 I applied to be an Associate Editor with Cast of Wonders and have loved every minute of reading stories submitted to us. I was honored to guest edit Banned Books Week 2022, which gave me an excellent introduction to the behind-the-scenes process of editing our podcast. I am blown away by the diversity and creativity of our authors. We have a true community of storytellers here.
I am a marine archaeologist with undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Engineering, a Master’s degree in Anthropology, and a Ph.D. in Oceanography (I love it when authors incorporate science into stories!). I work as a marine scientist for the U.S. federal government in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. My office is in New Orleans, but I work from Minnesota (yay remote work!). My two little Louisiana Swamp Monsters – they look like dogs, but you know – just experienced their first snow, and I can’t say that they like it yet. We are looking forward to getting to know the speculative fiction community here and I can’t wait to go to my first CONvergence!
And here’s Cup Jacob, with his thoughts about YA fiction and working with Cast of Wonders.
Young Adult Fiction is some of the most impactful literature because we read them at the age we started reading for ourselves. By this I mean we chose to read these stories instead of having an adult decide what we might like.
I wasn’t the nicest of kids and I would get into a lot of trouble in grade school. Detention where I went to school meant having our play hours replaced with library time. And I loved it! I started with the encyclopedias, then I discovered our school’s huge collection of Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Three Investigators Mysteries. I eventually started going to the library outside of detention hours.
Soon after, I discovered the used book stores and with my student allowance savings I discovered Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, Ursula LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, while high school literature classes introduced Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind and Ceres Alabado’s Kangkong 1896.
For some condescending reason, many adults consider young adult literature as easy reading. I don’t see anything wrong with that. This ease in reading is often achieved by a musicality of language and a tightness of structure that many so-called adult stories aspire for. It harkens back to our early civilizations where stories are oral, they are recited to an audience, and they provoke conversation after, building community.
Nowadays, I am often stuck doing things I would rather not be doing and podcasts have helped make those times worth living. It seems that long commute hours and chores have replaced detention of my childhood, while podcasts like Cast of Wonders make these hours not just liveable but wonderful.
I look forward to more stories with you.
We’ve just updated our submissions schedule for the remainder of the year and the first half of 2023. More opportunities may be announced in due course, and all dates are subject to potential change.
The portal for flash fiction contest entries has now closed, and the team will be announcing the schedule for the contest groups soon! If you don’t already have an account on the EA forum (where the stories will be posted), now’s a great time to grab one!
Some stories take a while to find the right voice, but we hope you’re happy with what they bring to our episodes. We’ve got a flood of new pieces just around the corner, in the run-up to Banned Books Week. Expect the next episode to drop next weekend, with several more hot on its heels.
We are SO excited about our stories for Banned Books Week this year. Watch this space at the end of the month…