composite of a black cat sat in front of a stylised image of Uranus, with a starfield backdrop

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Cast of Wonders 669: The Cat that went to Uranus

Cast of Wonders 669: The Cat that went to Uranus is a Cast of Wonders original.

Allergies

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Show Notes

Art created by Katherine Inskip from images by Gerd Altmann, Daniel Roberts, and Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay

The Cat That Went To Uranus

by Dan Peacock

The ship was barely a million kilometres away from Earth when Commander Fowler heard a meow.

He stopped what he was doing and frowned. Spaceships did not normally meow. They’d been rocketing away from Earth for the best part of a week, and it hadn’t happened once. He wandered through into the main living room of the spaceship, where he found his crewmate, Munroe, reading the First Contact Manual. Munroe had his feet up on the table; one of them was tapping at a frantic pace.

“Did you hear that?” Fowler said. “I thought I heard a meow.”

(Continue Reading…)

fractal spirals

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Cast of Wonders 667: Amudha Surabhi

Cast of Wonders 667: Amudha Surabhi is a Cast of Wonders original.

Content note: references to historical famine and colonisation

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Amudha Surabhi

by Tehnuka

Mallika beat her skirt against the washing rock twice more and wrung it out a final time, brown-tinged water dripping along her fingers. Whatever she did, the fabric retained the grey hue it had acquired when the new manufactory started spitting out steam and coal-smoke last year. And she’d have to darn that hole in the hem, too. The other girls might get new clothes for Deepavali but it would be a surprise if Amma remembered the festival at all.

She washed her mother’s sari and laid it out to dry, then sat kicking her feet against the bank, watching the smooth flow of the river below. This time of year, it should have been fast, eddying, chai-coloured with monsoon runoff. Instead, she’d had to clamber down just to reach the water. Mallika knew there would soon be bigger difficulties than stained clothes. (Continue Reading…)

stylised silhouette of a yacht

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Cast of Wonders 663: The Pequod II

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:59 — 19.2MB)

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Show Notes

Image adapted by Katherine Inskip from an image by Kaskar 537 from Pixabay

The Pequod II

by Liam Hogan

The catamaran skims over the waters of Altair III. A shimmering shoal of native fish race to keep us company, breaching as arrow-headed darts. Though the day is perfect for sailing, it is tinged with sadness. This is the last voyage of the Pequod.

Even with nothing but the horizon to see, voices chirp in my ear, rightfully worried I might dawdle. One of those voices, adding solemn instruction, is alien. Vantarian. Bailiffs, come to oversee our eviction. (Continue Reading…)

palm leaves against the milky way

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Cast of Wonders 660: For Future Generations

First published in Khōréō, May 2021

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:18 — 41.6MB)

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For Future Generations

by Rachel Gutin

Of all the Jewish holidays, Sukkot was the hardest to celebrate in space. Rabbi Greenberg had been a young child when her family boarded the generation ship, but she still had vivid memories of celebrating Sukkot back on Earth. The swish-snap of the tall, skinny lulav as she shook it back and forth, its flat green leaves packed tightly against its spine. The tangy-sweet smell of the bumpy yellow etrog, a bit too round for her little hands to hold securely.

The sukkah that her family built behind their house every year, with its thin metal frame, and its canvas walls, and its ceiling of bamboo slats and cut branches. The pride she’d felt when her father finally allowed her to help him assemble it, collecting branches for the roof or fastening the ties that secured the walls. It let in the cold, the heat, the rain, but also the sunlight that dappled every surface as her family sat inside to eat together.

The acid tang in the air that last Sukkot, the way the colors looked all wrong, as the world began to die around them.

They boarded the ship a week later. They left the sukkah standing when they fled. There wasn’t any way to bring it with them. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 659: The Archive of Unnamed Joy

Cast of Wonders 659: The Archive of Unnamed Joy is a Cast of Wonders original.

CW: dystopia, authoritarianism, brainwashing

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:44 — 55.9MB)

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The Archive of Unnamed Joy

by Bella Chacha

On the day my best friend forgot how to laugh, the sky over Lagos turned a dusty gold, like the gods were sifting garri over the sun.

Kambili had always been the one to pull joy out of thin air: snapping her fingers into a rhythm that made our feet twitch, making jokes out of government warnings, drawing flying cats with glowing eyes on the back of her school reports. But that morning, she just sat there at assembly, eyes vacant, lips sealed tight, her laughter gone like it had been folded up and hidden inside someone else’s pocket.

“Mood correction successful,” the hall monitor announced in that soulless mechanical tone, tapping her brass baton twice on the concrete. Around us, the students kept silent, unmoving. Stillness was virtue. Stillness was law. Stillness meant safety. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 658: Your Hold is Ready

Cast of Wonders 658: Your Hold is Ready is a Cast of Wonders original.

homophobia, censorship, fascist dystopia

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:02 — 20.6MB)

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Your Hold Is Ready

by Laura Duerr

The news is spreading. We try to keep working through our English tests, but it’s becoming impossible to focus. Laughter and drumming call us to join the crowds on the streets, as irresistible as Odysseus’ sirens. I imagine myself tied to my desk chair, ears plugged up with wax instead of noise-canceling headphones, and chuckle to myself.

Mr. Lanigan leans around his monitor. “Molly, did you just giggle?”

“Possibly?”

Two storeys down, the crowd erupts with cheering. The students nearest the windows peer out wistfully. So does Mr. Lanigan. He ought to be retired by now, but he’s still here, and we’re glad. He’s kept a lot of our secrets and we’ve kept his. At first it was weird to watch out for someone so much older than us, but he stood up for us every chance he got, and somehow, together, our ordinary classroom discussions became outlets for us to be ourselves: to give voice to the dreams and hopes that had miraculously survived not just high school, but high school under all this.

(Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 657: Plutopalooza

First published in Nature Futures, 13 March 2024

End of the world

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:11 — 18.1MB)

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Plutopalooza

by Gretchen Tessmer

Tess and Gemma have been camped out on their tartan picnic blanket for days already and they plan on staying until the very end…of the concert or the world, whichever happens first. Smart money is on the latter. The way those lads are going at their bass lines and anthems up on stage, they’re in this until the lights go out for good. (Continue Reading…)

Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 655: The Carmel B Crazies

Image by Christopher Keough from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:52 — 38.3MB)

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The Carmel B Crazies

by Rick Kennet

On the day she turned seventeen Cy De Gerch peered through a window into rusty red desert and saw her future squatting darkly in its launch cradle.

She’d been discharged from hospital an hour before and had made her quick way to Styx City Starport. Standing now at the window into Launch Cradle 3, her bag slung over the shoulder of her new Martian Star Corps tunic, she gazed through the glass like a kid outside a toy store. Utopia Plain, her new toy, smooth, black, ellipsoid, seemed to squat in its cradle amid a patch of the red desert of Mars. Recently repaired after a battle with Xenoid warships at Rigel, the starship’s liquid lines were unbroken but for the pressure tunnel extruded from her forward hatch. A thing of space, it seemed to sit impatient to lift into the pink-brown sky and the void beyond.

All her fears and excitements came flooding back – a feeling of elation at this new beginning aboard her first ship; a scary feeling too of coming adrift, separated from her family on Phobos and the surrogate family of her space cadet section, training days ended.

Inspecting herself in the window’s reflection, Cy adjusted her tunic sporting its new lieutenant’s bars and ran a hand through her short dark hair, wondering if she’d surprise her new captain with her age. She thought that she might. She was the first of her breed – a product of the Gartino genetics experiment – to qualify for active service. It all depended on what Captain Ralph Brown was like. Would he understand and appreciate her as a purpose-built person, trained and schooled seventeen years for this purpose? Or would there be suspicion and mistrust?
(Continue Reading…)

collage of a woman in a red headscarf with minarets in the background

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Cast of Wonders 654: Life According to Tabeeb

Image by efes from Pixabay

This story was first published in Learning to Be Human by Flame Tree Press in February 2024.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:09 — 46.9MB)

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Life According to Tabeeb

by Ramez Yoakeim

It may take a decade or longer to train a human clinician, but it took a team of Ministry of Health technicians only seven days to certify me a Clinically Adept Machine Sentience (CAMS) and hand me control of their newest clinic on Zamalek Island. My mission, to keep the locals healthy enough to perform their essential jobs in and around Cairo, and away from human-staffed hospitals in the gated communities dotting the slopes of Jabal al Muqattam.

Once an affluent enclave, a succession of entirely predictable cataclysms saw those with means flee Zamalek to higher ground, ceding their elegant villas and Nile-front high-rises to climate refugees too impoverished to fuss over bridges and roads inundated by brackish surges of a rising Mediterranean backflowing into the drying Nile, competing with vermin for shrinking dry ground, and long journeys to get anywhere.
The moment my download into the clinic’s core completed, I unlocked the front door, turned on the lights, and displayed a welcome message on the lobby’s triage kiosk. For the next three weeks, the eighty-six specialty bots that comprised my extended corpus kept the waiting room spotless, verified diagnostic equipment calibrations, monitored consumables stock levels, and maintained the sterility of treatment areas, quite easy tasks seeing that I had no patients. Until, one Friday, an hour after evening prayers, a heavily pregnant woman burst through the doors. (Continue Reading…)

black cows in a grassy field against the skyline.

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Cast of Wonder 652: Habitat

Cast of Wonder 652: Habitat is a Cast of Wonders original.

spider-like creatures

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:08 — 48.2MB)

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Habitat

by Juliette Beauchamp

The orb appeared on a Friday. Just popped up in the northeast corner of the horse pasture, out where the grass grew thin and the ground was spotted with gopher holes. It was black and not a bit shiny despite the heat shimmers dancing around it. From a distance, as Cole and I rode along the dry creek bed, it looked more like the absence of something. A blank spot in the air.

It wasn’t until we got closer that we realized there was something there after all: a giant, dull marble suspended about three feet off the ground. The horses didn’t like it, rolling their eyes and snorting, but they were ranch-bred and broke and used to doing things they didn’t like.

Cole slid out of his saddle and passed his reins to me. I held his mare as she pawed and swished her tail while Cole walked over to the thing.

“It feels funny,” he said as he got closer. I wasn’t surprised to hear it since the hair on his head had begun to float upwards. (Continue Reading…)

a close up of a burning purple candle

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Cast of Wonders 647: What Good Daughters Do

First published in Apex Magazine issue 146, October 2024

Image by Pashi from Pixabay

Violence, Cannibalism. Death of a parent. Death of a bystander. Terminal Illness/Dementia Allegory

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:03 — 56.4MB)

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What Good Daughters Do

by Tia Tashiro

I’m not expecting it when my mother eats the bus driver.

My surprise comes mostly because I thought I’d gotten her under control. The bus ride—two AM on a Tuesday, servicing the night shift paycheck-to-paycheck workers at the meat factory a few miles out of town, predictably empty between the Turnpike Mall and Cedar Park stops (its last of the route)—is about as isolated as you can get. I wasn’t taking any chances with tottering old grannies in the accessible seats or teens who think they’re too cool to grab a handhold. (Continue Reading…)

futuristic train

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Cast of Wonders 640: KAOSU, The Last Moving Country in the World

First published in Dark Matter magazine, July 2023
Image by Thomas Wolter from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:12 — 51.1MB)

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KAOSU, The Last Moving Country in the World

by Angela Liu

I arrive at KAOSU’s nest-shaped Visitor’s Center two hours early for boarding procedures. The reviews on VoyageAdvisor warned of the rabid fans and shameless paparazzi, but I’m still not prepared for all the selfie drones skittering around the check-in screens like frenzied moths.

Today the crowds swell with people in pest masks, skull makeup, and screaming fans with heart signs that read ‘Marry me in the radioactive fields.’ PityPatty, a Top-50 influencer, the queen of dark tourism and rumored stem cell junkie, will be joining the train this week. Just my luck.

I write for Faye’s Compendium of Good Travels. Founded during the post-plague travel boom, we’ve got a readership of over three million, the most trusted guide in solo travel. KAOSU’s the holy grail of travel writing these days, the last Perpetually Moving Country on the planet, and I’m only here because of a strategically taken office video my boss never wants to see the light of day. (Continue Reading…)