News, Reviews, and Commentary on all forms of science fiction, fantasy, and horror audio. Audiobooks, audio drama, podcasts; we discuss all of it here. Mystery, crime, and noir audio are also fair game.
RadioArchive.cc, that wondrous torrent tracker for public radio programmes, is back online. I was getting worried!
Apparently the site was taken down at the request of the BBC. As one commenter pointed out, it’s a case of the ‘left hand isn’t sure what the right is doing’ – how often have we seen stories like THIS?
But, of all the comments, this was the sentiment I liked most:
Thank you all very much for the hard work you put in to running the site. It’s just a brilliant resource all together, and has brought hours of pleasure to my life. Very glad to have you back.
And to make it tangible I’ve just made a $25 USD donation.
If you haven’t yet checked out RadioArchive.cc, then do, it’s brilliant!
Our good friend, Professor Eric S. Rabkin, is teaching one of the free summer Coursera courses. It’s entitled Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World and all of the required readings, except for two of the novels, are available free online!
Here’s the official description:
Fantasy is a key term both in psychology and in the art and artifice of humanity. The things we make, including our stories, reflect, serve, and often shape our needs and desires. We see this everywhere from fairy tale to kiddie lit to myth; from “Cinderella” to Alice in Wonderland to Superman; from building a fort as a child to building ideal, planned cities as whole societies. Fantasy in ways both entertaining and practical serves our persistent needs and desires and illuminates the human mind. Fantasy expresses itself in many ways, from the comfort we feel in the godlike powers of a fairy godmother to the seductive unease we feel confronting Dracula. From a practical viewpoint, of all the fictional forms that fantasy takes, science fiction, from Frankenstein to Avatar, is the most important in our modern world because it is the only kind that explicitly recognizes the profound ways in which science and technology, those key products of the human mind, shape not only our world but our very hopes and fears. This course will explore Fantasy in general and Science Fiction in specific both as art and as insights into ourselves and our world.
This course comprises ten units. Each will include a significant reading, typically a novel or a selection of shorter works. I will offer video discussions of each of the readings and also of more general topics in art and psychology that those readings help illuminate. Each unit will include online quizzes and ask you to write a brief essay offering your own insights into the reading. In order, the units are:
Grimm — Children’s and Household Tales
Carroll — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
Stoker — Dracula
Shelley — Frankenstein
Hawthorne & Poe — Stories and Poems
Wells — The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, “The Country of the Blind,” “The Star”
Burroughs & Gilman — A Princess of Mars & Herland
Bradbury — The Martian Chronicles
LeGuin — The Left Hand of Darkness
Doctorow — Little Brother
In Unit I, the specific stories are the ones in the Lucy Crane translation (1886) which was published by Dover and is available online through Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5314). In Unit V, the specific readings are: Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” and “The Artist of the Beautiful“; Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Bells,” “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee.” All the readings except Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness will be available online at no charge.
Jerry Stearns, the coordinator for the The Mark Time Awards and Ogle Awards, writes in with this list of the winners for 2011:
The Mark Time Awards are given each year for the Best Science Fiction Audio Theater production, and the Ogle Awards are given for the Best Fantasy or Horror Audio Theater production. These are the 15th Annual Awards, for the 2011 Production Year.
Mark Time Awards
GOLD Brad Lansky and the 4D-Verse
Protophonic
Written by J. D. Venne
Producer, Dieter Zimmermann www.protophonic.net
SILVER My Other Self
Stagestruck Audio Theatre
Written & Produced by Bret Jones
&
Our Fair City, Season 2
HartLife NFP
Written by Clayton Faits & others www.OurFairCity.com
EXCELLENCE IN ADAPTATION
The Martian Chronicles
Colonial Radio Theatre on the Air
Story by Ray Bradbury
Dramatized by Jerry Robbins
Producer, Seth Adam Sher www.colonialradio.com
Logan’s Run – Last Day
Colonial Radio Theatre on the Air
Written by Jason Brock, William F. Nolan & Paul Salamoff
Producer, Seth Adam Sher www.colonialradio.com
SILVER The Strange Case of Springheel’d Jack
Wireless Theatre Company
Written by Gareth Parker, Robert Valentine
Producers, Robert Valentine, Gareth Parker, Mariele Runacre-Temple www.wirelesstheatrecompany.co.uk
—————————————————
The 15th Mark Time Awards will be presented July 5, 2012 at CONvergence, in Bloomington, MN. Representatives from four of the seven production organizations will be present to accept their awards, as will several past winners and four of the five judges.
Mark Time is a character created in 1970 by the Firesign Theatre. Phil Proctor and David Ossman of Firesign will also be attending CONvergence to help celebrate the occasion, along with their wives, Melinda Peterson and Judith Walcutt. Judith is a convention Guest of Honor, too. And they’ll all be participating in events throughout the convention, including the Mark Time Radio Show, just before the Opening Ceremonies.
We encourage you to look up the winners and give them a listen. You’ll find some excellent storytelling.
A recent Hypnobobs podcast features two guests from The Black Dog podcast talking with host Jim Moon about the origins of ALIEN. It’s a lengthy discussion, running 2.5 hours, touching on the many filmic inspirations for the 1979 film written by Dan O’Bannon.
This is the perfect excuse for me to point out something that Moon and guests didn’t – namely the original literary source, perhaps, for all the films they mention and, perhaps, for ALIEN itself. It is a 1939 short story by A.E. van Vogt entitled Black Destroyer (later assembled into a part of a fix-up novel entitled The Voyage Of The Space Beagle).
Check out the original art:
In 1974, Marvel Comics’s Worlds Unknown did an adaptation, with a cover illustrated by Gil Kane:
And then, a couple years after ALIEN was released, somebody at EERIE magazine made the connection:
First published in Tryout, November 1920, The Cats Of Ulthar is an unusual tale by H.P. Lovecraft. It reads more like an old fashioned fairy tale than any other I’ve read. The story features a young boy named Menes who loves cats. Lovecraft probably took that name from the writings of a Greek historian named Diodorus Siculus who related a tale of a legendary Egyptian pharaoh named Menes that he heard from some crocodile-god priests. Menes it was said fled from his own dogs, who attacked him, while hinting. His escape was assisted by a crocodile. But no dogs or crocodiles are mentioned in The Cats Of Ulthar.
The Cats Of Ulthar
By H.P. Lovecraft; Read by James Pontolillo
1 |MP3| – Approx. 9 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: October 19, 2008
|ETEXT|
First published in Tryout, November 1920.
And here’s a |PDF| made from the publication in Fantastic Novels, January 1951.
From the PBS series WonderWorks – All Summer In A Day was first broadcast in 1982 – the uploader of the torrent version (available HERE) says: “I don’t think it’s ever been released on DVD.” I think he or she is right. This is a low budget adaptation and it’s pretty terrific.
On the planet Venus, it rains almost constantly. A classroom full of young children are excited to hear that the rain will stop today, for just one hour. But they are also resentful of a new classmate from Earth, who remembers what it’s like to see the sun.
RadioArchive.cc, that wondrous torrent tracker for public radio programmes, is back online. I was getting worried!
The Cats Of Ulthar