The SFFaudio Podcast #146 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG – Eight O’Clock In The Morning by Ray Nelson

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #146 – Eight O’Clock In The Morning by Ray Nelson, read by Gregg Margarite. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the short story (16 Minutes) followed by a discussion of it with Jesse, Gregg Margarite and Ray Nelson himself!

Talked about on today’s show:
This story was suggested by a listener [thanks], Eight O’Clock In The Morning, a terse procedural aspect of the text, Ray is a fan of bare bones writing, alien forks and knives, inspired by flies, a new adaptation of Eight O’Clock In The Morning (on IMDB), John Carpenter’s They Live, occupy wall street, the 1% aren’t just mean, one of the best short story adaptations, Nada = nothing, a traitless character, a modern fable, The Twilight Zone, sowing a distrust of television, “Work Eight Hours, Play Eight Hours, Sleep Eight Hours”, Ray co-wrote The Ganymede Takeover with Philip K. Dick, Gregg likes it, The Ganymede Takeover has been translated 15 times, Ray and Phil are a hit in France, Edgar Allan Poe owes his classical status to Baudelaire, the short story form itself, Again, Dangerous Visions, Hillside School in Berkley, CA, Ray went to school with Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin, France, 1950s, Harlan Ellison, Jean Paul Sarte, book smuggling, Henry Miller, Ray gave Phil acid twice, Philip K. Dick’s acid trips (and flashbacks), answers vs. questions, public and private realities, Ray loves radio theatre, the new audio drama, Tim Heffernan, The Drama Pod, The Cosmic Circle on KPFA, live broadcast, live TV, Saturday Night Live, Your Show Of Shows, Mel Brooks, Woody Allan, Larry Gelbart, the last unsafe TV show was Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, anthology series, The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, Carleton E. Morris, radio drama in Canada, Carleton E. Morris, Prairie Home Companion, appointment radio, X Minus One, Dimension X, Escape, Suspense, I Love A Mystery, BrokenSea’s OTR Swag Cast, The Temple Of The Vampires, Bill Hollweg, The Quantum Door, Gregg gets to be Rod Serling, Jake Sampson: Monster Hunter, Egypt, Texas, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, paperbook publishing is tough, we want ebook and audiobook editions of , iambik.com, $0.30, William Blake, Laser Books, pseudonyms, RayNelson.com, cartoonism, American Window Cleaner Magazine, “Inflate my girl James … the Viagra is kicking in.”, the propeller beanie, Flying Down To Rio, the 1939 Worlds Fair, The World Of Tomorrow, Elektro the smoking robot, Treasure Island, Hitler’s swastika farm at the world’s fair, The Old Beatnik, Herb Caen, how the beatniks got their name, Jack Kerouac, a synchronistic view of the universe, theology, the University Of Chicago, my Edgar Allan Poe drawing, why don’t people draw more often?, every little kid knows how to draw, essay writing, the death of newspapers, the smell of a used bookstore, How To Fuck Like The Stars aka How To Do It, drawing, writing and smuggling pornography, the Wikipedia entry on Ray Nelson, “Push where it gives”, singing black spirituals in a cowboy suit in Paris, Ray “Tex” Nelson aka Tex The Singing Cowboy, Jeffrey Lord’s Richard Blade, Harlequin Books, Slave Of Sarma by Jeffrey Lord (read by Lloyd James), California Ray, Allen Ginsberg, “I wrote verse. I wrote verse and verse as I went along.”, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Howl, the San Fransisco Renaissance, Sex Happy Hippie, Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Marion Zimmer Bradley, I, Lesbian by Lee Chapman (aka Ray Nelson and Marion Zimmer Bradley), copyright, fanzines, the smell of a mimeograph machine, Ray Bradbury, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Weird Tales, H.P. Lovecraft is more like a blogger than a 1950s writer, Farnsworth Wright, Astounding Stories, Pickman’s Model by H.P. Lovecraft, extraterrestrial monsters, cosmic horror, L. Sprague de Camp, H.P. Lovecraft in a dress, flipped his lid, the Fascinators are fascinating, the adaptation of They Live, Frank Armitage, scripting They Live, the sunglasses, the venetian blind glasses, Blade Runner, Total Recall, John Carpenter’s The Thing, The Thing From Another Planet, John W. Campbell, John Carpenter’s music, Roddy Piper doesn’t look like an everyman, the five minute fight scene works great!, Keith David, Seeing Ear Theatre, Tales From The Crypt |READ OUR REVIEW|, Eight O’Clock In The Morning is a kind of Lovecraftian tale, The Lurking Fear, “anything includes everything.”

Eight O'Clock In The Morning by Ray Nelson

They Live - based upon The Story Eight O'Clock In The Morning by Ray Nelson

Got A Light Buddy?
The Children

They Live - Indian poster art

They Live - illustration by Jeremy Wheeler

THEY LIVE poster from Printed In Blood

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Influence of RADIO DRAMA on comics and vice versa

SFFaudio News

EC ComicsThere’s a fascinating article by Kurt Kuersteiner HERE titled “OTR: The Evil Influence Behind EC.” In it Kuersteiner maps some of the many stories swiped from radio drama series and turned into EC Comics.

It came to me at the perfect time too. I’ve just been getting into EC comics over the last few months. Having grown up under the censorship of the Comics Code Authority I didn’t really know what I was missing. Now though, reading these pre-code comics, I can now see that my intellectual growth had been greatly stunted.

I’d have been a far smarter person if I’d been able to buy and read comics like these as a kid.

My favourite such tale so far was published in the July/August 1953 issue of Weird Fantasy (issue number 20). It’s called The Automaton. At first it seemed to me like a mashup of a Philip K. Dick’s The Electric Ant, Alfred Bester’s Fondly Fahrenheit and George Orwell’s 1984. But looking at the chronology that can’t be what it is. First off Philip K. Dick was just getting started around then. And while he was a comics reader The Electric Ant wasn’t published until 1969.

And while by 1953 Bester had already been working in comics – he hadn’t yet written Fondly Fahrenheit. So the story is definitely Orwellian and very cool, and certainly like a couple of Dick and Bester tales that were yet to be written. But then again, maybe it was inspired by a radio drama that I’ve not heard yet. Anybody know of one like this?

As it stands The Automaton is set in the futuristic dystopian world of Los Angeles in 2009. Our protagonist is XT-751, a man recounting his story of being sent to a northern labour camp after a suicide attempt. Suicide is illegal in this world because the state owns every person from the cradle to the grave.

I actually have been thinking about The Automaton for months now. And after reading Kuersteiner’s article it somehow gelled into a post. It’s just been something I could’t quite shake. The story is not only extremely thought provoking, and still timely, but also extremely frightening. And maybe a lot of the rest of it is that it is about as far away from superhero comics as you can possibly get. Best of all it’s told in just seven pages – that’s a highly distilled story.

The only credit for The Automaton is for the artist, Joe Orlando, but maybe he wrote it too?

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 1

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 2

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 3

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 4

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 5

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 6

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 7

Posted by Jesse Willis

Commentary: A Challenge – Make an AUDIO DRAMA of The Crystal Crypt by Philip K. Dick

SFFaudio Commentary

The Crystal Crypt - illustration from Planet Stories

Thou knowest what this world needeth. Aye, ye know tis of course more AUDIO DRAMA of the SCIENCE FICTION kind!

I have, here in my possession, a PUBLIC DOMAIN tale that would make for a fine dramatization.

I speake of yon tale, The Crystal Crypt, as penned by one Philip Kindred Dick

Planet Stories January 1954 Header
The Crystal Crypt - description from Planet Stories

Here be’st the original words and art as from the first publication |PDF| in a long forgotten tome (Planet Stories, January 1954).

Who’ll take up this noble quest?

Perhaps you Sir Texaweg of the Fractured Ocean? Are your noble squires across the pond in foggy Kiwi and the ancient land of Eng up to this great challenge?

What of you Suqire Jack of Halifax? ‘Tis been far too long since you took up thy rusty microphone. We sadden at thy silence.

Lord Greenhalgh of the Solar Goat, hast thou returned from Southernmost Kush? Dost though need a Maine challenge?

Surely Lady Hoverjules of the Emerald Keyboard can rise to this? I trust nary a lawsuit will be had when though hast such armor so proofed against missiles as by our blessed Gutenberg hast.

Surely one of the aforementioned gentlepersons, or perhaps another, in a high mountain vale, or in a low county coast, is up to this task

Be thee yet unknighted in the form AD, or well heel’d in it but from some shadowy land whereselse round this scepter’d orb – I ask you prithee, answer my call, for I needth me some dramatic aural Dick.

Suitable honorifics shall, of course, be bestowed to all nobels who take up this quest.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast download numbers in Google Docs

SFFaudio News

SFFaudio MetaDude! We’ve had some serious download numbers for The SFFaudio Podcast. Here’s my accounting from the last 14 Months tracking our podcast downloads as best I’ve been able.

The way our tracking system works I can only see the top 10 URLs downloaded per month (in KBytes). I’ve taken those numbers and plugged them all into a Google Docs spreadsheet. Most months we get numbers on just 9 podcasts (the site itself counts as one URL and of course it takes the lion’s share of the bandwidth). Here are the results.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ap2T2ozxUHzHdDJXemp0YXNlcERHRU51VW5hU203QkE

As you can see our most popular download is still SFFaudio Podcast #105 which has been downloaded a staggering 36,392 times so far!

Our second most popular episode is SFFaudio Podcast #140. It came out in late December 2011 and has garnered 11,206 downloads!

And I think SFFaudio Podcast #122 is the third most popular, with 7,404.

In most cases the actual download numbers are higher than what I’ve recorded, but I don’t know how much higher as I don’t get to see the 10th, 11th or 12th most popular podcast downloaded in a month, nor anything beyond that – so we can just assume they are somewhere below the lowest number recorded and zero.

I’m pretty impressed with the numbers I’m seeing. Good work people!

And Thanks!

Posted by Jesse Willis