utopia – Page 12

In Our Time: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Monday, April 20, 2009 Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time radio show is always thoughtful and informative – a recent show on the topic of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is no exception…

“Melvyn Bragg is joined by David Bradshaw, Michele Barrett and Daniel Pick to discuss the anxieties and ambitions in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World“

Bragg, the host, and his guests approach Brave New World from a very biographical/historical perspective – finding the roots for Huxley’s dystopia/utopia in his engagement with the legacy of H.G. Wells, eugenics, Social Darwinism, and his impressions of the United States (particularly New Mexico and California). All Alphas should have a listen |REALAUDIO|.

[via Anne Is A Man]

Posted by Jesse Willis

BBC Radio 3 talks Utopias

Friday, August 1, 2008Friday, April 8, 2011 Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

The latest issue of the Radio Times offers a peek at next week – On BBC Radio 3 in The Essay timeslot will be a “3 part examination of utopian visions of the future……” entitled The Future’s Not What It Used To Be… quite a number of SF classics are quoted in the Radio Times article, so this should be a worthy listen. Here’s the official description:

“As a child of the 1950s, Richard Foster thought that by now he would be wearing a silver jumpsuit and spending endless hours of leisure zooming around on a personal jet-propelled backpack – all in a world where poverty, sickness and religion had been banished by technology. So what went wrong?”

Part 1 – Broken Dreams
Broadcast: Mon. 4th August 23:00-23:15
Richard investigates two contrasting utopian worlds in novels from the 1880s: caring capitalism in Looking Backward by American author Edward Bellamy and communitarian socialism in William Morris’ News from Nowhere.

Part 2 – Trust Me, I’m A Scientist
Broadcast: Wed. 6th August 23:00-23:15
Richard looks at how, in the 1930s, when capitalism and communism appeared unable to deliver utopia, H.G. Wells in The Shape of Things to Come and Aldous Huxley in Brave New World asked the next big question: can science mend our broken dreams, or will they just become nightmares?

Part 3 – Be Afraid, be very Afraid
Broadcast: Thu. 7th August 23:00-23:15
Richard investigates the threat of nuclear and environmental holocaust, explored in novels such as Neville Shute’s On the Beach and John Christopher’s The Death of Grass. Is the appetite for apocalypse – religious or scientific – now fed by ecological concern and terrorism? Must we always live in fear, or is it a potent political tool?

[Thanks Roy!]

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Thursday, June 26, 2008Friday, August 5, 2011 Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Virtually forgotten for 64 years since it was first serialized, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland is a utopian novel with a feminist bent. It’s extremely readable and plays out as a cross between Thomas More’s Utopia and The Man Who Would Be King. Three male chauvinists, adventurers all, but scientifically bent, hear rumor of a mysterious semi-tropical land composed entirely of women. And off they go. As they approach by airship, guns at the ready, they speculate as to what they’ll find and do when they get there. But, what they discover isn’t at all what they expected. Have a listen to just one chapter and you’ll stay for at least another two.

Herland
By Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Read by various readers
12 Zipped MP3s or podcast – Approx. 5.5 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: June 2008
Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, written by feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society comprised entirely of Aryan women who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order, free of war, conflict and domination. It first appeared as a serial in Perkin’s monthly magazine Forerunner.

Subscribe to podcast via this feed:

http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/herland-by-charlotte-perkins-gilman.xml

Posted by Jesse Willis

CBC Radio One Ideas podcast talks utopian disasters

Wednesday, February 13, 2008 Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Best of Ideas Podcast gets one show uploaded to their server once per week (4 days too few for me), the latest show is called “Utopian Dreams.” It discusses the damage done to the world by utopian idealists.

“The world is strewn with the wreckage of utopian projects. Millions of people have been killed by social engineers who wanted to reshape humanity. The British historian of ideas, John Gray, believes politics is saturated with disguised religious longings. He calls for a new, humane realism.”

Does this Gray guy just sound like a utopian dreamer to you too?

Listen |MP3|, or subscribe to the feed:

http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/ideas.xml

Posted by Jesse Willis

P.S. Free The Adventures Of Apocalypse Al

Utopia by Sir Thomas More and Dystopia from

Thursday, May 31, 2007 admin

SFFaudio Online Audio

Utopia and dystopia go hand in hand, and LibriVox obviously knows this. They’ve got the audiobooks to prove it. One retro Science Fiction story and a proto-Science Fiction book. First up is Sir Thomas More’s foundational Utopia – a book which has probably influenced more SF than even Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Second is a short story from mainstream great E.M. Forster. First published in 1909, it is a dystopia that predicts computers, television, the internet, instant messaging, videoconferencing, google and even pizza delivery – at least sort of. If you’ve got a portable MP3 player be sure to use the handy podcast feeds!

Utopia
By Thomas More; Read by Jenilee
1 Zipped File of MP3s or podcast – Approx. 4 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: May 2007
“This book is all about the fictional country called Utopia. It is a country with an ‘ideal’ form of communism, in which everything really does belong to everybody, everyone does the work they want to, and everyone is alright with that. This country uses gold for chamber pots and prison chains, pearls and diamonds for children’s playthings, and requires that a man and a woman see each other exactly as they are, naked, before getting married. This book gave the word ‘utopia’ the meaning of a perfect society, while the Greek word actually means ‘no place’. Enjoy listening to this story about a country that really is too good to be true.”

Podcast feed:

http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/utopia-by-thomas-more.xml

The Machine Stops
By E. M. Forster; Read by Erin Tavano and Jenilee
3 Zipped MP3s or via podcast – 1 Hour 12 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: May 2007
Almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a ‘cell’, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Most humans welcome this development, as they are skeptical and fearful of first-hand experience. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own. Those who do not accept the deity of the Machine are viewed as ‘unmechanical’ and are threatened with “Homelessness”.

Podcast feed:

http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/the-machine-stops-by-e-m-forster.xml

posted by Jesse Willis

James Patrick Kelly wins Nebula Award for his podcast novella Burn!

Sunday, May 13, 2007 admin

SFFaudio Online Audio

James Patrick Kelly receives a Nebula Award for his novella BURN

Congrats to SF author, and all around cool guy James Patrick Kelly! His novella Burn has just WON the NEBULA AWARD for BEST NOVELLA! That’s him receiving it above. Jim had released Burn as both a paperbook (through Tachyon publications) and as a FREE podcast last year. To make the podcast even more accessible Jim re-jiggered the 17 separate podcasts of the entire novella into just 4 handy-sized MP3s – and it is still completely unabridged! Get them now…

Burn
By James Patrick Kelly; Read by James Patrick Kelly
4 MP3 Files – 5 Hours 49 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: James Patrick Kelly’s Free Reads
Podcast: 2006
Download the novella: Part 1|MP3| Part 2|MP3| Part 3|MP3| Part 4|MP3|*

And don’t forget, you can catch plenty more Jim Kelly short stories on Jim’s Storypod podcast (available exclusively through Audible.com).

*New links to the files on Internet Archive (the originals crashed Jim’s site)

posted by Jesse Willis