dystopia – Page 19

Classic Tales: The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Machine Stops
By E.M. Forster; Read by B.J. Harris
1 | MP3| – [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Classic Tales
Podcast: November 2008

A must-listen reading of the story about the future where people live below the earth’s surface, rarely interact personally, and do all their interaction by machine.

Sound eerily familiar?

I listened to part 1, read by the talented B.J. Harrison, and then took my dog out for a walk so I could be sure of connecting with the real world. If you’re interested, but can’t listen now, download it anyway, because B.J. only leaves two or three episodes up on his feed and then moves his stuff over to Audible.

Check out past episodes here.

Posted by Julie D.

Spider Robinson reads The Persistence Of Vision by John Varley

SFFaudio Online Audio

John Varley’s Hugo and Nebula award winning 1978 novella The Persistence Of Vision is the latest unabridged story to be recorded by Spider Robinson for his Spider On The Web podcast.

Wow! Could your life get any more thrilling than this?

The Persistence Of Vision is the perfect tale for these times. With those bread riots we’ve all got planned for next week and all. Now, all we’ll have to do is let a few of our nuclear power plants do The China Syndrome-thing, get the survivors together, form a few farm collectives, shave off all our body hair, and then paint ourselves a nice shade of purple.

The Persistence Of Vision
By John Varley; Read by Spider Robinson
1 |MP3| – Approx. 2 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Spider On The Web
Podcast: November 2008
Wandering the roads and rails of a future USA, our narrator learns the art of living in a dead economy. Only a mysterious wall on the New Mexico/California border and a collective of the blind-deaf keep his wandering feet from moving on.

And, here are the details for the new Audible Frontiers version (which is done by a different narrator and is minus the sounds of pages turning)…

The Persistence Of Vision
By John Varley; Read by Peter Ganim
Audible Download – 2 Hours 29 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Frontiers
Published: September 2008
Listen to a sample |MP3|
On the surface, this Hugo and Nebula Award-winning classic is about a drifter who comes to stay in a New Mexico commune founded by a group of deaf-blind people. But beneath the story, author John Varley examines deep, universal issues. What is the nature of communication? What does an individual gain – or lose – by subsuming himself to the whole? Can an outsider ever truly “belong”? Varley says that he has had more response to this story than anything he has ever written, that some readers have even told him it changed their lives. Listening to The Persistence of Vision, it is easy to understand why.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Maria Lectrix: The Creature From Cleveland Depths by Fritz Leiber

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Maria Lectrix podcast, and it’s proprietress Maureen O’Brien have finished recording and releasing into the public domain a new/old short story by the immortal/deceased Fritz Leiber!

Says Maureen: “Here is a modern tale of an inner-directed sorcerer and an outer-directed sorcerer’s apprentice … a tale of— THE CREATURE FROM CLEVELAND DEPTHS”

The Creature From Cleveland Depths
By Fritz Leiber; Read by Maureen O’Brien.
8 MP3 Files – Approx. 1 Hour 32 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Maria Lectrix
Podcast: October 2008
Provider: Archive.org
Every time Gusterson dropped a new free idea into the fad-ridden mainstream world of underground cities and cozy crowds, it crystallized into something really strange, and things got out of hand. So he shouldn’t have mentioned the reminder machine….
Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 |MP3| Part 3 |MP3| Part 4 |MP3|
Part 5 |MP3| Part 6 |MP3| Part 7 |MP3| Part 8 |MP3|

Posted by Jesse Willis

New Release – The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley

New Releases

The Status Civilization
By Robert Sheckley; Read by Mark Douglas Nelson
5.5 hrs. – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Wonder Audio
Availiable at Audible and iTunes

Will Barrent has no memory of the murder for which he was convicted. He will now have to live his life sentence on the prison planet Omega. The few that survive there do it by committing crimes. And the more adept the planet inmates are at higher crime, the more they climb their bizarre anti-social ladder. They all must live in a society where drug addiction is mandatory, as is the worship of the Dark One. Barrent’s goal is to find why he was sent to this mad world and to clear his name and return to Earth. But first he must survive – for a life sentence on Omega is usually a short sentence indeed.

Posted by The Time Traveler of the Time Traveler Show

Four on Seven

SFFaudio Online Audio

Four on Seven…

The 7th Dimension
Readings:
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Brave New World

Plus The Scarifyers #2!

The Fall of the House of Usher: Edgar Allan Poe‘s classic tale of gothic horror, a masterpiece of “dramatic irony and structural symbolism” (whew, okay…) and no doubt his most famous work. Suffice it to say that this is one creepy story that seems to exist in some dark phantasmal dream. What is the power that the House has over the Usher Family? Told in 2 parts beginning on Thursday, September 25. Read by Sean Barrett.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Washington Irving‘s spooky tale of two rivals and an encounter with a ghastly horseman with…you guessed it…no head. Am I spoiling too much here? A traditional favorite and hey, just in time for Halloween. Oh, by the way, nothing wrong with the movie versions but the original’s a must read…or a must listen, as the case may be. Told in 3 parts beginning on Sunday, September 28. Read by Martin Jarvis.

Brave New World: Aldous Huxley‘s nightmare vision of a dystopian future. Often compared to Orwell’s 1984, critic Neil Postman contrasts the two: What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one…Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us. Heavy stuff. Told in 10 parts beginning on Monday, September 29. Read by Anton Lesser.

The Scarifyers series continues on BBC 7 with adventure #2, The Devil of Denge Marsh written by Paul Morris. When a government minister melts in Margate, it’s a job for Lionheart and Dunning. Terry Molloy (Dunning) described the series as being like Tin Tin and Dick Barton meet The X-Files. True to form, this one features an encounter with…no, it’s too horrible to tell! Presented in 3 parts beginning on Sunday, September 28. Produced by Cosmic Hobo. Full-cast audioplay. Stars Nicholas Courtney and Terry Molloy. – Trailer #1 – Trailer #2

Note that all BBC 7 programs are available to listen to online for six days via the Listen Again feature.

Posted by RC of RTSF

BBC Radio 3 talks Utopias

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