The SFFaudio Podcast #195 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Polaris by H.P. Lovecraft
The SFFaudio Podcast #195 – Polaris by H.P. Lovecraft, read by Jim Moon. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the short story (11 Minutes) followed by a discussion of it by Jesse, Tamahome, Jim Moon.
Talked about on today’s show:
The Philosopher (an amateur magazine), is this a Christmas story?, The Festival, Lord Dunsany, The Necronomicon, Lovecraft’s Christianity, religion vs. Tradition, Lovecraft’s relationship to his characters, WWI, eldritch gibbering, fainting fits, Lovecraft loved his snoozing, reincarnation vs. mind transfer, time travel, alternate realities?, neanderthal in North America?, what is the setting?, The Horror Of The Museum, The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, swamps vs. bogs vs. fens, “Eskimos” vs. “Inutos”, dishonorable dirty fighting, The Shadow Out Of Time, Dagon, The Call of Cthulhu, The Tomb, it’s The Outsider in reverse, Atlantis, Athens, Lemuria, the Land of Lomar, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Hyperborea, King Kull, Mu, the Dream Lands, atavism, The Rats In The Walls, “a penchant for strange foods”, Jack London, Carl Jung, race memory, the evolutionary path, dishonorable yellow hordes, the yellow peril, “line up and die”, startings and endings, repeated phraseology, a dunsany-esque story, the Dunsany mode, Edgar Allan Poe, its like an extended prose poem, Silence: A Fable, Shadow: A Parable, Ligea is labyrinthine, “battered by adjectives”, The Highwayman by Lord Dunsany, poetic stories, accessible Dunsany stories, In The Fields We Live, “sinister, whimsical, and beautifully odd”, Victorian magazines, The King Of Elfland’s Daughter, C.S. Lewis, Michael Moorcock, world-building, a consistency of reality, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, lost epochs, “the wisdom of the Zobnarrian Fathers”, “bubble and blaspheme”, the alien outer gods, Lovecraft’s interest in astronomy, Charles Wain (aka the plow, aka the big dipper), mapping the skies, messages and impressions, Arcturus, Cassiopeia, Aldebaran, Philip K. Dick, “the world is alive”, a leering star, astrological time, if the seeing is good…, Lovecraft’s desire to be an astronomer, Lovecraft’s formal education.
Posted by Jesse Willis
The SFFaudio Podcast #195 - AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Polaris by H.P. Lovecraft [ 42:41 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadHighway To Mars: Odile Thomas and Jim Moon discuss Children Of The Stones
A recent Highway To Mars podcast features Odile Thomas (of the Sending A Wave podcast) and Mr Jim Moon (of the Hypnobobs podcast) discussing the 1976 TV serial Children Of The Stones.
The brief official description asks this question:
Is it an updated version of The Prisoner or an early version of Lost or in a class of it’s own?
You could also describe Children Of The Stones as kid’s version of The Wicker Man (except with the whole village doing goofballs) or as a very good episode of Jon Pertwee era Doctor Who (except starring Rog Blake) – but really, however you describe it, Children Of The Stones is a great combination of intelligent storytelling and intelligent characters in a very cool mysterious plot involving all the sort of stuff smart people are into. And thus its a great show for smart kids and smart adults alike.
|MP3|
Posted by Jesse Willis
LibriVox: Polaris by H.P. Lovecraft
Polaris offers many of the features you’ll find in other H.P. Lovecraft short stories. There’s the repeated language – something that turns up at the beginning of the story will echo at the end, like in The Statement Of Randolph Carter. There’s the atavism, and atavistic guilt you see in stories like The Rats In The Walls. There’s the background of racism, as in The Temple or Cool Air. But what sets this story apart is Lovecraft’s love of astronomy. Many stellar bodies get distinctive shout outs in Polaris. And the fact that the main character spends all his free time staring out at the night sky is reflective, or perhaps refractive, of Lovecraft’s own desire to become an astronomer.
And also like many of his other stories, Polaris had its origins in a dream. Here’s a snippet from the Wikipedia entry for Polaris, quoting a Lovecraft letter:
“Several nights ago I had a strange dream of a strange city–a city of many palaces and gilded domes, lying in a hollow betwixt ranges of grey, horrible hills…. I was, as I said, aware of this city visually. I was in it and around it. But certainly I had no corporeal existence.”
Polaris
By H.P. Lovecraft; Read by jpontoli
1 |MP3| – Approx. 10 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: October 19, 2008
First published in The Philosopher, December 1920.
Polaris
By H.P. Lovecraft; Read by Clay Beauchamp
1 |MP3| – Approx. 10.5 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: May 6, 2012
First published in The Philosopher, December 1920.
And here’s a |PDF| made from the publication in Weird Tales.
Posted by Jesse Willis
The SFFaudio Podcast #164 – READALONG: The House On The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
The SFFaudio Podcast #164 – Jesse, Wayne June and Mirko Stauch talk about The House On the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson.
Talked about on today’s show:
Wayne undersold the novel, it’s shockingly interesting, you can really see the influence on Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror In Literature by H.P. Lovecraft, blasphemous hybrid anomalies, “a classic of the first water”, the framing sequence, The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, description of sense experience, the best you can expect from the universe is indifference, cosmic horror, Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, Last And First Men, reading in translation, Chad Pfifer, the readalong concept, getting into the book, Under The Knife by H.G. Wells, the swine beasts, the sister – “she knows he’s fucking nuts”, there’s a lot of going to bed in this book, a very relatable character, Arthur C. Clarke, one of the finest works of Science Fiction ever written, marking the transition from Gothic horror to cosmic horror, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the cover art, the Corben comic book cover, the town (or street) that can’t be found, it’s a kind of haunted house story, compression of time, Einsteinian relativity, Pepper is dead and dust, Brian Stableford, Camille Flammarion, The Night Lands by William Hope Hodgson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Percival Lowell, S.T. Joshi, parallel development, authors write cosmic horror in cosmic horror time, astronomy,
“In the future, when the end of things will arrive on this earth, the event will then pass completely unperceived in the universe. The stars will continue to shine after the extinction of our sun, as they already shone before our existence.”
Enlightenment thinking and the decline of religion – tying your own shoes for eternity, The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, you can’t love anything in this universe, the jade house in the arena, mythological creatures, Kalpas (is Sanskrit for aeons), it’s meta, before this book we’re living in a world run by God and after this book were living in a post God world, deep time, the recluse, are the swine people are the villagers, what book is the recluse reading?, two incommensurable realities, Messrs Tonnison and Berreggnog, haunting, Clarke’s third law, Poltergeist, the door inward, the start as poets but they don’t end that way, the unnamed lover (let’s call her Lenore), The Crawling Chaos (SFFaudio Podcast #138), The Conqueror Worm by Edgar Allan Poe, The House Of Usher, Roger Caillois: “The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality” (from Au Coeur Du Fantastique), reading old literature, C.S. Lewis, a passion for commas, a gripping book (while the character’s mind wanders), a pregnant book.
Posted by Jesse Willis
The SFFaudio Podcast #164 - READALONG: The House On The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson [ 53:43 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadThe Transit Of Earth by Arthur C. Clarke
Here’s a rather timely re-post, one based on a post prompted back in 2006 by an astronomer at the University of Hawaii. Professor Esther M. Hu, pointed me towards this reading of an Arthur C. Clarke classic, one read by Clarke himself!
Listening to it again today, and thinking about the significance of science and history of such an event, and the related event happening today, I found Clarke’s reading of The Transit Of Earth to be an incredibly moving experience.
Since then I’ve noticed that there was an introduction written for it too, which appeared in the May 1984 issue of Omni. It’s rather timely, considering that Clarke mentions today’s transit of Venus (which will be the last until 2117):
Here is that issue of Omni in the |CBR| format.
And here are the scans: |Page 70|Pages 71 and 72|Page 108|Page 110|Page 112|Page 113|Page 116|
The Transit Of Earth
By Arthur C. Clarke; Read by Arthur C. Clarke
1 |MP3| – Approx. 30 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Caedmon
Published: 1975
Product #: TC-1566
[via the still awesome Record Brother blog and hugely resourceful Typnet.net]
Posted by Jesse Willis
BBC ONE (TV): The Sky At Night – Bases On The Moon – a 1963 interview with Arthur C. Clarke
The Sky At Night is a monthly documentary television programme on astronomy produced by the BBC. The show has had the same presenter, Sir Patrick Moore, from its first airing on 24 April 1957. This is the longest-running programme, with the same host, in television history. I discovered it only recently, via torrent, and have become utterly smitten with its sciencey goodness. Here’s the latest broadcast, actually a repeat from 1963 with Arthur C. Clarke!
Here’s the official description:
Many of the early Sky at Night programmes were destroyed or lost from the BBC library. Recently this early and very rare programme from 1963 with Arthur C Clarke, was discovered in an African TV station. Patrick and Arthur were both members of the British Interplanetary Society and here they discuss bases on the Moon and Mars. Arthur C Clarke made very few interviews, so this really is a broadcasting gem- once lost, but now found.
The programme is also available via |TORRENT|.
[Thanks African TV station!]
Posted by Jesse Willis
Campaigns
Advertisement
Feeds and Resources
-
Propaganda
Campaigns
