The Ghosts by Lord Dunsany

SFFaudio Online Audio

I quite like this one. It makes a fit companion to The Hound Of The Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Red Room by H.G. Wells.

The Ghosts begins as straightforward haunted house story, one coming out of the Gothic tradition. Our hero, a skeptic, is staying with his brother at an ancient baronial estate. There, he argues with his brother about the existence of ghosts, and what sorts of evidence for their existence would be acceptable. Then, in order to make his point, he proceeds to induce in himself a ghostly experience by means darkness, drugs, and deprivation.

Are the ghosts he sees real and if so, is his point proved?

The Ghosts by Lord Dunsany - illustrated by Sidney Sime - "Oneleigh"

The Ghosts by Lord Dunsany - illustrated by Sidney Sime - "A Herd Of Black Creatures"

Miette’s Bedtime Story PodcastThe Ghosts
By Lord Dunsany; Read by Miette
1 |MP3| – Approx. 15 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Miette’s Bedtime Story Podcast
Podcast: March 21, 2006
First published in 1908.

LibriVoxThe Ghosts
By Lord Dunsany; Read by William Coon
1 |MP3| – Approx. 12 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: 2006
First published in 1908.

Here’s an illustrated |PDF| made from the publication in The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Hoard Of The Gibbelins by Lord Dunsany

SFFaudio Online Audio

Lord Dunsany’s take on the sword and sorcery sub-genre is high on the Dunsany and low on the Lord (which is itself a very Dunsanian trait).

The Hoard Of The Gibbelins illustration by Sidney Sime

LibriVoxThe Hoard Of The Gibbelins
By Lord Dunsany; Read by Greg Elmensdorp
1 |MP3| – Approx. 10 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: June 24, 2007
The bold knight Alderic seeks the fabled hoard of the Gibbelins. First published in the Jan 25, 1911 issue of The Sketch.

Here’s a |PDF|.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Raft-Builders by Lord Dunsany

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Raft-Builders by Lord Dunsany

Maureen O’Brien, of the Maria Lectrix podcast, reads the prose poem The Raft-Builders by Lord Dunsany:

|MP3|

First published in the December 18, 1909 issue of Saturday Review.

Here’s the entire text:

The Raft-Builders by Lord Dunsany

‘All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships.

When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion’s sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.

They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up.

See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things–small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings–and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.

See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.

For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns.

Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.

There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen’.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #195 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: Polaris by H.P. Lovecraft

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe 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.

Polaris by H.P. Lovecraft

Posted by Jesse Willis

Neil Austin’s Masters Of Fantasy (from Famous Fantastic Mysteries 1947 – 1950) DESKTOP WALLPAPER

SFFaudio News

I made this desktop wallpaper for my new computer’s desktop – that’s what I did yesterday instead of actually unpacking and setting up the computer itself. Click through to get the full size version. The images were drawn by Neil Austin for issues of Famous Fantastic Mysteries from 1947 to 1950.

Masters Of Fantasy Wallpaper

Pictured are H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, Robert W. Chambers, Sydney Fowler Wright, Algernon Blackwood, H.G. Wells, Stephen Vincent Benét, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur Machen, M.P. Shiel, John Taine, Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, Ray Bradbury, Edgar Allan Poe, Olaf Stapledon, and M.R. James.

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: The Highwayman by Lord Dunsany (aka The Highwaymen)

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Highwayman by Lord Dunsany

Sometimes titled The Highwayman, sometimes The Highwaymen, Lord Dunsany’s elegant prose poem is an 1,800 word tale about a scabrous gang of bastard highwaymen. And it has something for almost everyone.

I think, despite the sacrilege and desecration in the story, that my Christian friends will like it – it’s got a lot of that redemption stuff they are big on.

I’m confident that fans of capital punishment will like it – because it certainly doesn’t repudiate legalized killing.

And my friend, Gregg Margarite, who didn’t believe in any of the underlying mythology, liked it enough to read it for LibriVox.

And me?

Yep, I like The Highwayman too.

I like the overarching premise, about friendship, I think it’s heartwarming.

Plus it’s got lot of ghoulish shit in it, and I like that stuff too.

Ronald Clyne illustration of The Highwayman (from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1944)

LibriVoxThe Highwayman
By Lord Dunsany; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 12 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: January 13, 2010
First published in 1908.

Here’s a |PDF| made from the publication in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December, 1944.

And here’s the Sidney H. Sime illustration from the original 1908 publication in The Sword Of Welleran and Other Stories:
The Highwayman - illustration by Sidney H. Sime (1908)

Posted by Jesse Willis