Rescue Party, seems to have fans, though to my ears it seems rather like Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s worst story. Clarke is at his most unpolished in this novelette, his first sold story. It has, of course, good ideas, as we came to expect of Clarke, but is none of that deft writing. Perhaps most interestingly it is actually an inversion of the plot of one of Clarke’s best written stories, The Star and thus we could say that Rescue Party has at least a kind of a curiosity value. But that’s may be putting it too harshly, the story is pretty good despite it’s bad and lengthy writing.
That there is a full cast reading of Rescue Party seems overkill. Norm Sherman, who also does the audio production for his other podcast, the Drabblecast, has the main narration duty – perhaps you won’t notice, but I found myself hypnotized by the aspiration preceding Sherman’s every sentence – the characters are voiced by various Escape Pod alumni. And some of them seem to have added vocal distortion – I guess to make them more alieny. There are also sound effects.
Rescue Party
By Sir Arthur C. Clarke; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 1 Hour 15 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Escape Pod
Podcast: June 18, 2013
“The mission was to rescue a fraction of a population – because the Galactic Union hadn’t known that Earth’s Sun had inhabited planets until too late. But they did know it was going Nova!” First published in Astounding, May 1946.
Posted by Jesse Willis