CBC Radio One audio dramatist Joe Mahoney sez:
“Canadia will begin airing April 20th.”
Canadia is a Science Fiction/Comedy series taking over the time-slot for the very popular Afghanada (which is another in-house CBC Radio dramatic series – following a fictional squad of Canadian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan). Not many details on Canadia can be found at this time. But well keep you apprised.
CBC Radio One‘s excellent author focused show Writers & Company had a timely and in-depth interview with P.D. James on Sunday. Best known as a crime writer, James is getting some deserved attention for her novel The Children Of Men because of the current film version.
Writers & Company is hosted by the always insightful Eleanor Wachtel. I’m still dismayed that Writers & Company and Wachtel’s other progamme (The Arts Tonight) still aren’t podcast.
You can listen to this interview via RealAudio HERE (skip ahead to the 38 minute mark).
While I really appreciate that CBC is podcasting, I love it in fact, I am less than thrilled it isn’t podcasting enough. ABC Radio Australia, with a total of budget just short of $100 million, currently has more than 120 different podcasts. CBC has fewer than two dozen English language podcast programmes but has a $1.3 billion budget. Australia, with two-thirds the population of Canada, has 5 times as many podcast from their national public radio service. That’s a wonky disparity. CBC, streaming audio is passé – time for more podcasts!
The chance to plug my favorite CBC podcast twice within the span of two weeks is a rare event. IDEAS does not often offer SFFaudio related programmes, but the latest entry in The Best Of Ideas podcast reveals a slight connection that’s just too good not to mention. The lecture, by none other than Richard Dawkins, is called Queerer Than We Suppose: The Strangeness Of Science.
This lecture was conducted on October 21st 2006 under the auspices of the Beatty Memorial Lecture as conducted at McGill University. The Beatty Memorial Lecture was created in 1952 to honour the legacy of McGill Chancellor Sir Edward Beatty.
You’ll find only tangential Sience Fiction references in the lecture itself |MP3|. Dawkins quotes from Douglas Adams – illustrates how quantum mechanics and its alternative explanations, “Many Worlds Interpretation” and “Copenhagen Interpretation” seem less like Science and more like Science Fiction to us. Indeed, quantum mechanics and natural selection are ripe fodder for Speculative Fiction. For natural selection think of Rudy Rucker’s Ware Tetralogy. For Quantum mechanics you need only think of George Alec Effinger‘s Schrodinger’s Kitten, Robert J. Sawyer‘s Neanderthal Parallax trilogy or any of the multitude of Parallel Universe stories all the way back to Murray Leinster‘s 1933 tale Sidewise In Time. I won’t try to digfest it all for you, check it out for yourself via direct download |MP3|. Or by pasting this feed into your podcatcher:
http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/ideas.xml
CBC Radio One‘s program IDEAS is my favorite Canadian daily radio show, its podcast, The Best Of Ideas is five times too infrequent for me – at just once a week – but it isn’t often enough that I get a chance to talk about it. Thankfully the host, Paul Kennedy, has syndicated his reading Hans Christian Anderson’s Christmas classic The Fir Tree (a Danish fairy storie) in the latest podcast. This is a delightfully melancholic tale that is eminently suitable for listening to after the event of Xmas itself.
I won’t provide a link to a direct download on this one (though you can find it here) because I’d like to try to convince you of keeping The Best Of Ideas in your podcatcher, the show is just that good:
http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/ideas.xml
Joe Mahoney, CBC Radio Producer, Science Fiction writer and blogger appears as a character in Robert J. Sawyer‘s latest novel, Rollback which is being serialized in Analog Science Fiction Magazine. Joe writes:
“Rob mentions my name on pg 107 as the sound engineer in charge of Sounds Like Canada… Don Halifax stands behind me at the controls as his wife is being interviewed. Now that’s really cool. I should point out that the current, real life engineer of Sounds Like Canada is Natasha Aziz. But the interview in Rob’s novel takes place in 2009, so it’s not completely inconceivable that I could engineer the show sometime in 2009. (I used to engineer Sounds Like Canada’s predecessor Morningside from time to time.) Rob also mentions the show Faster Than Light that we attempted to develop a while back for CBC Radio.”
Cool!
Sounds Like Canada, CBC Radio One’s feature morning program has a podcast. The SLC’s “Digital Extra” features stories of what happens off the air. The latest podcast features three podcasters from the Podcasters Across Borders event that happened in June. Tim Campbell was one of the guests (his is a motorcycle podcast, The Twisted Wrist) but he gave a good plug for Science Fiction. Tim writes: “I listen to a lot of SF on podcasts, most notably Slice of SciFi and Escape Pod, and wanted to represent a little bit of the SF podcast world in the interview.”
Download the MP3 direct, or subscribe to the podcast via this feed:
http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/slc.xml