EscapePod. Episode 150.

Freebooter.

By Sylvie Al Thoff. Hello, and welcome to EscapePod, your weekly science fiction podcast. I'm Valerie Valdez, your host for this episode.

Our story this week is Freebooter by Sylvie Altof. This is an Escape Pod original.

Sylvie Altof is a queer transgender woman who works as a writer, editor, elementary teacher,

and jazz banjoist. Her speculative fiction has appeared on recommended reading lists by

Locus and Reactor, and has been published in venues including

Lesbians in Space, Small Wonders, Saros, The Daily Tomorrow, and Luna Station Quarterly.

This is her second story featured in a skate pod.

Sylvie currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas with her wife, musician and teacher Jen Thomas,

their dog, Nomi Malone, and their

layabout cat, pocket. Our narrator, Jess Lewis, is a trans non-binary and pansexual

writer, designer, and voice actor who hails from the hollers of Western North Carolina.

They currently live in the deep south, where they explore futures of liberation and how to get there.

When they're not imagining weird queer clify utopias,

designing future tech or facilitating capacity-building workshops,

they're organizing programming with their local queer community

and the Outer Dark Symposium on the Greater

Weird. Their work has appeared in a range of publications including Solarpunk Magazine,

hyphenpunk, and kaleidotrope. You can visit their website at queerfutures.com and follow them on

Instagram at Mary Noontide. Now get ready for a story about bootleg solidarity gone

wrong because it's story time. Freebooter by Sylvie Althoff

...