Evil Robot Monkey first appeared in the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, volume 2. To test a new microphone,¹ I decided to record this because it is darn short.

Here you go. Six minutes of science-fiction.

Sliding his hands over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.

Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like feces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.

The audio version of “Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Based on a work at www.solarisbooks.com.

1. A Blue Snowball mic, which I think I might love [↩]

A friend of mine and fellow writer, D. T. Friedman volunteers at a non-profit organization and needs your help. Specifically, your socks.

SOCK MY PUNKS!

Hi there!

I’m the Resource Coordinator for a non-profit organization that works with homeless and indigent teenagers, as well as teens who are in bad home situations. OxenFree is a really fantastic program that engages at-risk teens through punk rock music, and provides support in a drug-free and alcohol-free environment.

The reason I’m invading blogs today? My job with OxenFree is to receive requests from the phenomenal people who run the program, and to figure out a way to fill them. My current assignment is…SOCKS. And I have to admit, I’m a bit at a loss. Socks are not a large-volume item at clothing centers (people usually just wear them out instead of donating them), and they’re surprisingly expensive. Homeless teenagers, especially hitchhikers, go through socks like you wouldn’t believe. My friend Margie can no longer afford to keep stocking her “free socks” drawer by herself, and asked me if I could try working my magic.

So, would you be willing to help me sock my punks?

If so, thank you in advance! Thank you so much! Any donation is welcome (supplies only, please) at the following address:

OxenFree Donations
4922 E. New York St.
Indianapolis, IN 46201

Toothbrushes, toothpaste, and tampons are also very useful and hard-to-come-by items.

If shipping to Indiana is too expensive, it would totally rock MY socks off if you considered donating to a similar program in your own city. At-risk teens are everywhere. They’re really neat people, and doing tiny things to help them out has an incredible effect.

Thank you so much, again, for your time, attention and consideration!

D. T. Friedman

Because D.T. doesn’t have a website, I’ve offered to let her use the comment thread of this post to answer questions. Meanwhile, pass the word and send socks.

Check out Mike Brotherton’s list of Ten Issues for Hard Science Fiction, complete with handy links.

There are a number of issues that continue to keep coming up in hard science fiction, or any science fiction trying to get the facts right. I just helped my collaborator here a few days ago answer a reporter’s questions on one of these (humans expelled into space without space suits). These things should always be right. There’s no excuse in this day and age. We’ll start with the space expulsion.

• 13:39 I never hear my computer’s fan in NYC. At my parents’ house the same fan is so darn loud. #
• 16:11 I’m frustrated by how often my site is goes off-line for exceeding CPU quotas. Want to suggest another hosting company or fiddle with MySQL? #
• 16:46 I hate customer service that does not pay attention to what I am saying. #
• 19:20 It is raining so hard, the trees in the yard look like they are behind five layers of unlit scrim.Lightning and thunder come simultaneously. #
• 19:44 Seem to have solved CPU issues by installing Super-Cache for WP. Or possibly from getting rid of random photos in sidebar. #