William Shunn sold audio rights to his early story “Colin and Ishmael in the Dark” to Escape Pod. The story first appeared in the September 1993 issue of Science Fiction Age.
Of the story’s genesis, Shunn says it “grew out of a writing exercise in one of my college writing classes. We were supposed to write a page in class of only dialog. I wrote three pages, then set the result aside for a couple of years. When I took it out and read it again, I knew how the story should end and wrote the rest very quickly.”