#world gone wrong

Currently In My Listen Roster (They might be on hiatus or finished as a series, but I'm not caught up yet.)

Hi Nay: It'll give you one piece of information and then later another piece of information, and then you'll have a moment where you make a connection and realize that such and such character is the character you heard about in the other episode.

World Gone Wrong: Captures the experience of going through a crisis and still having to worry about the mundane aspects of life.

Under the Electric Stars: Quality cyberpunk.

Heinous Investigations: Quality hijinks.

Witchpunk: Also quality cyberpunk.

Mabel: Very avant-garde.

Hymns for the Road: The supernatural threats aren't scary because they're supernatural; they're scary because they're abusive shitheads.

Wolf 359: Season Two has been mining the Season One finale for every bit of Consequences, and I love it.

Hannahpocalypse: It's doing it's own thing, and I will always respect that in a piece of art.

InCo: Come, micro-dose on a haughty prince getting bullied each episode by someone he thinks himself better than.

Red Valley: Every episode has me wanting to immediately listen to the next one to find out what's going on!

The Harbingers: The intrigue! The mystery! The unreliable narrators! This one deserves a massive fan base, and everyone should go listen to it right now.

Eeler's Choice: It has giant eels and B. Narr.

The Kingmaker Histories: Excellent shenanigans. Just loads of fun.

Back Again, Back Again: It's a deconstruction of Magical Teenager Chosen One fantasy.

Tales From the Singing Porch: A nice little unsettling tale each episode.

Project Gnosis: It's like an anime you can solely listen to!

Old Gods of Appalachia: It's an exploration of the awful underbelly of U.S. history.

The Strange Case of Starship Iris: The crew is being covertly recorded, and upon learning this, they began to act differently and say different things.

Two Thousand and Late: Very snappy back and forth dialogue.

Where the Stars Fell: I love the dynamic between the two leads.

Malevolent: Threshold: This is a great follow up to a great series.

Welcome to Night Vale: There are not many shows that can run for as many seasons as WtNV and still get a laugh out of the audience.

The Black Chest: The episodic stories are engaging.

Station 404: Great humor. Bingeing this one cheered me up on a day when I was feeling absolutely awful.

Star Files: This one just started, but I think it's neat.

Welcome to Isaiah: This one just started, but I like that it was inspired by AI psychosis.

Dominus: This one just started, but I'm here for the priest yaoi.

The Lion and the Adder: This one just started, but the lead is delightful.

The Mechadova Engine: This one just started, but the lead's enthusiasm is infectious.

The Disappearances of Lydia Fountayne: This one just started, but the reveal at the end of the pilot has me hooked.

Dustwalker: The characters are conspiring to overthrow the shitty government without the story bending over backwards to try to convince me that they're paragons of saintliness.

Twigs and Hearts: The Fey through the lens of 1950s sitcoms.

On Hiatus/Between Seasons

The Magnus Protocol: A really great follow up to one of the greatest audio dramas out there.

The Gospel of Haven: Gorgeous opening music, a solid story, and fascinating worldbuilding.

Camp Here and There: Toxic yaoi in Ohio!

Killjam XXX: Brilliant satire and action.

Camlann: Really interesting worldbuilding.

Project: Daydream: What if, instead of a character who was a trans woman dying, she was revealed to have superpowers instead?

Ones I Finished That Shouldn't Be Forgotten

The Pasithea Powder: Please listen to this one. It's amazing. Just wonderful intrigue and plot arcs.

The Magnus Archives: If you're somehow reading a post about audio dramas and are unfamiliar with The Magnus Archives, yeah, this is another one of the greats. Please go listen to all 200 episodes. Highlight is the worldbuilding.

Unwell: Just absolutely wonderful. This is another standout audio drama. The character work is the highlight.

Mirrors: It does both it's horror and scifi aspects really well.

The Silt Verses: Wonderfully done satire. Absolutely heartbreaking. This is another one of the greats.

Sheeple Chase: A delightful addition to the Magnus storyverse.

🚗 Welcome back, Keisha’s weird and creepy road trips! Don’t Tell Alice premiered this week with the first new episode of Alice Isn’t Dead since the live episode in 2019. WHAT a comeback. In some ways nothing seems to have changed—Keisha is still driven by curiosity and the urge to protect Alice above all else, but now the mysterious stranger who commissions Keisha insists that this cannot get back to Alice, and Keisha, in her curiosity, finds herself agreeing as she drives into whatever comes after America. Knowing the Night Vale Presents crew, this concept will come with a plate of neat and poignant commentary, and I, like Keisha, cannot resist driving on.

🌲 Happy Earth Day and Arbor Day from World Gone Wrong, and I gotta say…look, I know we all love trees, and the walking trees (especially the method of locomotion, jeez) is so cool, but a cult is a cult. Writer Bob Raymonda is very generous to the society of treehuggers in the Adirondacks. Then again, the real and present danger to national parks and wildlands in the US could very well make someone join a tree cult. Idk, mixed feelings about the implications, but still a really good episode.

🥪 Here comes @midnightburgr with another banger! Krok starts off this episode by saying, “You risked your life for a bit of agency,” and yes, Ava denies this, but isn’t that just the problem with Krok? A bit of agency is everything! Of course the dictator-god-villain of this season has no understanding of freedom. That’s what the diner is for, to bring freedom! Even to the maimed and genetically manipulated monster from Gloria’s very first adventure. I don’t know how the crew is going beat Krok, but I know they’ll do it. As Teta said, “Peace in our time, fuckheads,” and it’s both a fervent wish and a battlecry.

👑 And last of all, from the creators of @thesiltverses, Our Wars Have Ended have publicly posted their first two episodes. I listened to the first, and then I had to take a break because…like holy crap. I almost want to give just like, a list of elements that are presented to us, like a festering charcuterie—the world built on a corpse, the historian whose accent marks him as separate (and to no small effect, given that I think this is a story about colonialism), the ways in which some live in uneasy peace with dead masters and dead slaves and others spurn them and want them dead, the casualness with which their dead Duchess asks her people for a new body that she's happy to pay for—like The Silt Verses, and to some extent Eskew as well, Muna Hussen and Jon Ware are building a story on a society that treats people like things. I am entranced and obsessed. I can't wait for more.

I had SUCH a wonderful time putting together this list for EarBuds Podcast Collective of audio dramas in which the futures are daaaaaark

🎙️ SMARTR - Every episode of this mockumentary about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs will have you howling at the hilarity and groaning at its prescience, but "DR. ROULETTE" is a particularly biting satire of one of our worst systems: healthcare. And as if that wasn't a big enough subject to tackle, this episode is an excellent example of how Smartr balances multiple social criticisms at once; in this case, gig workers.

💤 RED VALLEY - To fully appreciate the winding, decades-sprawling narrative that Red Valley weaves, you need to start with Episode 1, which introduces the central concept of hypersleep. Before you know it, you'll be four seasons deep into this brilliant exploration of wealth, justice, and what it means to spit in the eye of science in order to live forever. Do you want to continue?

📠 WITHIN THE WIRES - The universe of Within the Wires is intricate, spanning across nine distinct seasons and a truly excellent novel. You could start with any season, but I think it’s worth diving in at the start and letting the details of this rich world unfurl slowly - a world that’s off in ways both identifiable and not, and the show does a wonderful job creating a feeling of true dread.

📱 THE TRUTH - There are many episodes of this medium-defining anthology podcast that fit this brief, but - while more abstract than some of the other picks on here -  there’s something particularly chilling about the simplicity of “The Choice”. We’ve all had the experience of receiving a strange automated call, some more sinister than others, but this episode takes that premise and ponders the demands our devices make of us and what choices we make in turn, even when we don’t know the consequences.

🌡️ YOU FEELING THIS? - From another excellent anthology, “Highs in the 130s” imagines a not-so-distant future in which LA is rendered inhabitable due to extreme temperatures. As the main characters do what they can to escape the city, tensions reach a boiling point. It’s entirely too plausible and emits a kind of simmering heat you can feel.

👹 WORLD GONE WRONG - You could jump into any episode of this fictional chat podcast and have a rollicking good time, but it's worth starting with the pilot to get situated in the world of two friends who try to find the lightness in a world that's gone, well, entirely wrong. The truly fun twist of this show is that the world has gone wrong in so many ways - every episode is an unexpected delight of problems.

But alright, I won't leave you in complete despair. If you’re looking for a version of the future that still grapples with the thorny ethics of advancing tech, but will leave you warm and fuzzy, look no further than the sci-fi(ish) romantic comedy, 🤖 LIFE WITH LEO(h).

And if you’d rather have a cathartic primal scream set in our exact present (just with bonus demons), you could check out my new show TWO THOUSAND AND LATE 🔥

1 Breathing Space: This is one of my favorite flavors of sci-fi. It is a series I have been savoring, and I do intend to relisten through at some point - because I listen to podcasts while working, it's easy for me to miss things. I haven't finished the whole series, but Breathing Space is definitely worth coming back to.

2 Monstrous Agonies: Monstrous Agonies was one of the few podcasts I didn't only listen to while on the clock. It is the perfect length for me to put on two episodes while chopping veggies for dinner, and an absolute delight every time.

3 InCo: Another podcast that shone, despite my inability to pick up on all the cool things going on. Another one I look forward to returning to.

4 StarTripper!!: Just thinking about StarTripper!! makes me smile. It is utterly charming.

5 Gastronaut: Incredible premise, executed beautifully. I'll be thinking about this one for a long time.

6 Paired: Paired is a longtime favorite of mine, and was one of a handful of relistens I did this year. I love Pairy. I hope she got to set a deer on fire.

7 Travelling Light: How much do I love Travelling Light? Every morning, I update my podcatcher and decide what to listen to based on that morning update. Travelling Light is the only one that gets downloaded as soon as I see an announcement that it's out. It's the only one that gets bumped to the next pod in the queue when listening.

8 The Green Horizon: Please I need to know where I can find more Irish-made audio dramas, this show fills the Motherfocloir-shaped hole in my life and I'm going to be finished with it soon.

9 Birds Of Empire: This show deserves better than for me to listen to while I'm at work. It's outstanding on several levels.

10 Metropolis: The first few episodes of Metropolis have set a high bar for this series. It is starting off strong, and I'm quite glad to be along for the ride.

11 October Jones & Fish With Legs: I've said this before, but OJ&FWL will fundamentally alter the way you say "mimosa" and that is just the beginning of this show's delights.