Between audiobooks (6)

I have written before of my habit of listening to a few episodes of PodCastle or Escape Pod in between audiobooks -- short story palate cleansers between novels. I am still waaaay behind (12 months!) on these podcasts), so I listened to a bunch of Podcastles last week, just after The Forgotten. I listened to these episodes:

Escape Pod 378: Scout, by  Bud Sparhawk. Was does it mean to be human, when you're just a cog in the machine of war?

Escape Pod 379: Concussion, by .Interesting double-story about a football player who is also a fighter in a sci-fi battle. I enjoyed it, but the football parts could have been written better.

Escape Pod 380: Punk Voyager, by Shaenon K. Garrity. A bunch of disaffected youth, who occassionally play in a punk band together, send their style of music into outer space. And the aliens who arrive as a result ... well, they kind of wreak havoc on Earth. Probably my favorite story of this batch.

Escape Pod 384: The Tamarisk Hunter, by Paolo Bacigalupi. The most important resource is not gold or oil. It is water. In this world, a particular breed of animal consumes too much of the stuff, so hunting it seems the right thing to do.

Escape Pod 385: The Very Pulse of the Machine, by Michael Swanwick. An outer-space story along the same wavelength as the movie "Gravity." Is that a spoiler?