Summary: Welcome to the first episode of Last Short Story. Several years ago members of Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus founded Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth, a reading group that took on the seemingly impossible task of reading every single new short story published in the science fiction and fantasy genres with a view to broadening their knowledge of the field, and discovering exciting new writers and works of fiction. Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth has been running for several years and its become increasingly clear that the one thing the group hasn't fostered is actual discussion between group members and the community at large on short fiction. Given that discussing great new short fiction was arguably the point of the group, that seemed a problem. And then a proposal arose. A podcast would be started where, each month, a rotating roster of Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth participants would discuss a single issue of a magazine or a collection or an anthology, something that everyone had read and was ready to discuss. That proposal was warmly endorsed and plans were set in motion to debut the new podcast in 2013. A fine plan, except that some of the group members (i.e. Jonathan) were eager to get underway, and so the idea of launching the new podcast with a pre-season arose. Two members of Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth, Ian Mond and Jonathan Strahan, would record a series of episodes, refining the format and getting things started, between August and December. The podcast proper would then launch in January 2013. This is the first of the pre-season episodes. Here Ian and Jonathan discuss the August 2012 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. The contents of the issue are: NOVELETTES “Weep for Day” by Indrapramit Das “Heaven’s touch” by Jason Sanford “Joining the High Flyers” by Ian Creasey “The Bernoulli War” by Gord Sellar SHORT STORIES “Beautiful Boys” by Theodora Goss “View Through the Window” by Ted Reynolds “Starsong” by Aliette de Bodard “Stamps” by Bruce McAllister POETRY “My House of the Future” by G.O. Clark “The Big Bang’s Backstory” by Marion Boyer “Cassandra Moments from ‘The Official Guide to Time Travel’” by Robert Frazier “The Music of a Dead World” by Bruce Boston DEPARTMENTS Editorial: The 2012 Dell Magazines Award by Sheila Williams Reflections: Big Endians/Little Endians by Robert Silverberg Next Issue On Books by Paul Di Filippo The SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss Coming up in the next podcast, for those who like to read along is Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's new YA dystopian science fiction anthology, After
