Jesse Willis – Page 408

Video trailer of X-Minus One OTR

SFFaudio News

X-Minus One video It isn’t often that we direct you towards video, SFFaudio is above that de rigeur tripe, but this vid just might be worth a look. X-Minus One fan Jason Pichonsky has animated a trailer of several X-Minus One stories!

There was an odd byproduct of seeing the video – it was strange enough to see someone else’s visualizations of familiar stories that we’re designed to be heard – the images are compelling but I kept trying to navigate away from the site – and when I did, to my repeated astonishment, the images disappeared from my mind every time! It is almost as if a video, once seen, drives out imagination. Check it out for yourself, we aren’t hosting the original YouTube video, but you can view it HERE.

[via Zombie Astronaut]

posted by Jesse Willis

BBC7 has C.L. Moore’s Shambleau

Online Audio

BBC Radio 7 has an new project Saturday, a reading of C.L. Moore’s classic Shambleau! The story was produced by Gemma Jenkins as a commission for the 7th Dimension. This is the most famous of Moore’s famous pulp adventure Northwest Smith stories. Shambleau was Moore’s first professional sale, it first appeared in the November, 1933 issue of Weird Tales and the sale netted her a cool $100.00. The hero of the story is Northwest Smith, a spaceship pilot and smuggler, who’ll remind you of both Indiana Jones and Han Solo both. Smith lives in a future in which humanity has colonized the solar system. The relationship of the planetary primitives, on these planets, to the earth colonists, is analogous to the situation between the Native Indians of the Americas or the Aboriginies of Australia to European colonials. Smith is a ruthless, self-serving, and cynical anti-hero with a core of goodness. “Shambleau” mixes themes of sexuality and addiction during Smith’s encounter with a strange female alien. Details follow…

Shambleau
By C.L. Moore; Read by; Read by Elizabeth McGovern
3 Radio Broadcasts – Approx. 90 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Broadcaster: BBC 7 / 7th Dimension
Broadcast: Saturday April 21st, 28th and May 5th at 6.30pm and 12.30am
“An adventure set on Mars, bounty-hunter Northwest Smith lands himself in trouble when he comes to the aid of a beautiful young woman who is being attacked by an angry mob.“

NOTE: Those outside the UK can get all of the above using the BBC7 Listen Again service for up to 6 days following the broadcasts.

posted by Jesse Willis

H.G. Wells Month: Exclusive reading of The Crystal Egg by H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells Month

Paul Cole of the Beam Me Up radio show/podcast, has recorded a special H.G. Wells month short story, just for us (and all his podcast subscribers). This special reading won’t be going on the air at WRFR but it’s already in the feed for the show’s podcast right now. Here’s how Paul describes the story:

Here is a classic treat for listeners who enjoy the classic Science Fiction of the masters. In this podcast only version of Beam Me Up – we have on tap, The Crystal Egg written by Herbert George Wells. The story tells of a shop owner, named Mr. Cave, who finds a strange crystal egg that serves as a window into the planet Mars. The story was written the same year in which Wells was serializing The War of the Worlds in Pearson’s Magazine, a year before it was published as a novel. Because of the vaguely similar descriptions of the Martians and their machines, “The Crystal Egg” is often considered a prequel to The War of the Worlds, though there is no clear foreshadowing of the events that transpire in the novel.

The Crystal Egg
By H.G. Wells; Read by Paul Cole
1 MP3 – 51 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Beam Me Up
Podcast: April 19th 2007

Subscribe to the podcast via this feed:

http://beameup.podomatic.com/rss2.xml

posted by Jesse Willis

2 versions of A Pail Of Air up on Zombie Astronaut

Online Audio

The Zombie Astronaut has again posted up two adaptations of the same script, this time its Fritz Leiber‘s classic short story A Pail Of Air.

Alfred and Effie live on an Earth that has been knocked off it’s orbit and is drifting without the warmth and light of the Sun. The last radio station went off the air a year before their son, Bud was born. They survive in an apartment building, slowly burning what coal they can find to keep warm and keep the air from freezing. Then one day when Bud went out to get a pail of frozen air, he saw a light moving through the building across the way…

WNBC X-Minus One |MP3|
WMUK Special Projects Future Tense |MP3|

Posted by Jesse Willis

H.G. Wells Month: Wired For Books: Interview with Anthony West (son of H.G. Wells)

H.G. Wells Month

Wired For Books is the interview archive for CBS Radio personality Don Swaim. Among the many vintage interviews Swaim has posted there is one with Anthony West, son of H.G. Wells. West talks with Swaim about West’s biography of his father, H.G. Wells: Aspects of a Life. West discusses H.G. Wells’s place in the annals of literary history along with his father’s notorious womanizing in this 1984 interview. You can listen via |MP3|.

posted by Jesse Willis

2 versions of Cold Equations up on Zombie Astronaut

Online Audio

The Zombie Astronaut has just posted up two adaptations of the same script. And though they the script is flawed, audio drama fans shouldn’t pass-up this opportunity to listen to two dramatizations of an iconic story, let alone one with an identical script. Compare and contrast:

Cold Equation was adapted for both NBC’s X-Minus One and WMUK’s Future Tense (based on the short story The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin). The story was first published in the August 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine. The script for both productions was by George Lefferts. He not only fundamentally changed one of the characters (perhaps in a bid to make an unpalatable idea less so), he also changed the name of the radio drama, dropping the “s” from the original story’s title. Both these decisions make the drama less powerful than it should be. The ideas presented in The Cold Equations are supposed to be hard, are supposed to be frustrating. The removal of the “s” from the title also ignores the brutal truth that there is more than one kind of calculation going on in this story. This tale is not just a physics lesson, it is also a philosophical treatise…

What’s one little rule?

H amount of fuel will power a ship with a mass M safely to its destination.

H amount of fuel will not power a ship with a mass of M plus X safely to its destination.

She was 5’2 with brown curly hair and her name was X in an equation that would have to be balanced.

WNBC X-Minus One |MP3| August 25th 1955
WMUK Special Projects Future Tense |MP3| June 22nd 1973

posted by Jesse Willis