mars – Page 21 – SFFaudio

SSS presents: Lost Sorceress Of The Silent Citadel by Michael Moorcock

SFFaudio Online Audio

The latest podcast from Star Ship Sofa is supposed to be pure Space Opera – and it is, if you don’t count my good friend Tony recounting the frightening brush with mortality that precedes Moorcock’s tale (that story is pure Horror). I hope we can all take a lesson from Tony’s incident and get our workplace helmets on before we get too excited about podcasting.

The reading that follows is just what we need after Tony’s tale, an unabridged reading of a 2002 Moorcock novelette called Lost Sorceress Of The Silent Citadel. Its an escapist, fannish, fun on Mars! A Space Opera, a “Planetary Romance”, an ode to Leigh Brackett, read by Mr. Fun himself Steve Eley! Enjoy…

Lost Sorceress Of The Silent Citadel
By Michael Moorcock; Read by Steve Eley
1 |MP3| – Approx. 90 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: StarShipSofa.com
Podcast: December 5th 2007
They came on the Earthling naked, somewhere in the Shifting Desert when Mars’s harsh sunlight beat through thinning atmosphere and the sand was raw glass cutting into bare feet. His skin hung like filthy rags from his bloody flesh. He was starved, filthy, making noises like an animal. He was raving — empty of identity and will. What had the ghosts of those ancient Martians done to him?

Good healing to you Tony!

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

Prisoners Of Gravity, the best damn TV show ever: Have a listen

Online Audio

If you like Science Fiction and you haven’t managed to catch a single episode of Prisoners Of Gravity, I pity you. I really do. The show was awesome. It was produced between 1989 and 1994 for TV Ontario (and syndicated sporadically across North America) – each episode was like an extended blog entry (before there was such a thing). The topics, each episode only had one, focused on a particular theme found in Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and comic books.

The bulk of an individual show would be just ‘talking heads’ – it was an interview format show with multiple celebrity guests of the best kind, mostly SF&F authors. Each guest would talk about the subject at hand with the interviews having been done at conventions, bookstores and the like – but I can’t stress enough just how each show was so narrowly focused on a specific theme in Speculative Fiction. Here’s just a few of the episodes subjects:

Alternate Histories, Religion, War, Dreams, Watchmen (yup a whole show on the Alan Moore comic series), Cyberpunk, World-Building, Death, Vampires, Dinosaurs, Metamorphosis, Mars and many more.

What made the show so endearing, besides the absolutely stunningly cool content, was the unrelentingly geek-o-serious production. The show’s host, played by comedian Rick Green, was supposed to be a frustrated über-geek named Commander Rick, who had, prior to the show starting, fled the earth in his homemade rocket (packed ful of books and comics). Unforunately for the Commander, he crashed into a television satellite, from which he now broadcasts his show. His only companion there is Nan-Cy, the sardonic artificial intelligent computer system that keeps Rick alive and relatively sane.

If this shows sounds interesting, or you’re feeling nostalgic, click on over to my good friend Rachelle Shelkey’s fansite, Signal Loss, and have a peek around. No official DVDs are available, but there’s a message board and episode trading might be doable now with the promulgation of cheap DVD-Rs. I myself am sending Rachelle my entire collection of VHS tape, in the hopes I will be getting some episodes I’ve never seen before. If you have some episodes contact Rachelle! If we can get enough people interested maybe we can get a complete series run!

Now for the audio|MP3|. It is the first 5 minutes from an episode of Prisoners Of Gravity on the subject of Science Fiction Fandom. Enjoy!

posted by Jesse Willis

BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time Podcast tackles Life On Mars

In Our Time is a BBC Radio 4 podcast that covers the “big ideas” of our age. Each week the host, Melvyn Bragg, and three guests investigate the history of the ideas on a topic and debate their application to modern life. On offer this week is the history of Life on Mars |MP3| here’s the description

“For centuries there has been fierce debate about whether there is life on Mars and from the 19th century it was even thought there might be a system of canals on the planet. This insatiable curiosity has been fuelled by writers like H.G. Wells and C.S. Lewis and countless Sci-Fi films about little green men. So what do we know about Mars – its conditions, now and in the past? What is the evidence that there might be water and thus life on Mars? And when might we expect man to walk on its surface?”

Subscribe to the podcast:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/radio4/inourtime/rss.xml

posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Strawberry Automatic by T. Ray Gordon

Science Fiction Audiobook Review

Strawberry Automatic
By T. Ray Gordon, Full Cast Production by Richard Sellers
1 CD – 78 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Apex Audio Theatre
Published: 2005
Themes: / Science Fiction / Androids / Terraforming Mars /

The Automatics are androids, and trained fighting machines. When they fought for their own rights, they were, of course, declared non-personal non grata and the ones that could left Earth for other parts of the Solar System colonies. Strawberry Automatic is tall with flaming red hair, beautiful and deadly as they come. On Mars there is a company running the terraforming operation. Naturally someone wants to speed up the process using illegal nukes, and someone else wants to stop them.

I say “of course” and “naturally” because as I listened to this CD I had no trouble keeping slightly ahead of the story line. I kept thinking “This is a 1950s sci-fi story.” On his CD sales website, producer and narrator Richard Sellers says that T. Ray Gordon wrote 72 original manuscripts during the 1950s, which have never been published until now. So I was right. And as seems to be the cliché with pulp and radio writers, he was alcoholic and killed himself in 1961.

As a story Strawberry Automatic is a fairly good sci-fi adventure. As a script it relies too much on narration, some of which could have been written into dialogue or eliminated to keep the story moving faster. This might have made the script longer, though, and it appears they had decided to keep it to one CD. The production values are high, as the producer works as a voiceover artist and knows his trade. He also narrates the story. The acting is quite good, and it shows that Sellers knows his community of good performers. They just need someone to help them develop the script a bit before moving on.

The production values and the fact that it was not a story that had ever been produced before garnered it an Honorable Mention for the 10th Annual Mark Time Awards for Science Fiction Audio this year. Click here for more info.

The first of Gordon’s stories made for audio by Apex Audio Theatre, Inhumanity Quest, was also produced by Richard Sellers, and it shares many of the qualities mentioned here regarding the story, the production quality, and the performances.

I liked the production a little better the second time I heard it, as I could listen a bit more critically. It is well done. But I don’t know if I could listen to 72 of this kind of tale.

Reviewed by Jerry Stearns, Great Northern Audio Theatre

UK Radio Programme Welcome To Mars available as a podcast

Online Audio

Welcome To Mars (1947-1959) is a fascinating collection of non-fiction oddments about the fantastic futuristic world of the fifties. Presenter Ken Hollings in a live twelve-part series reflects on the “fantasy of science” in the early years of the American Century.

“Between 1947 and 1959, the future was written about, discussed and analysed with such confidence that it became a tangible presence. This is a story of weird science, strange events and even stranger beliefs, set in an age when the possibilities for human development seemed almost limitless.”

The show is broadcast live on Wednesdays at 3.30pm GMT on Resonance FM (104.4 FM) in the UK and podcast to the world via XML feed:

http://www.simonsound.co.uk/podcasts/marspodcast.xml

Episodes released so far:

Part 1: 1947: Rebuilding Lemuria |MP3|
Part 2: 1948-49: Flying Saucers over America |MP3|
Part 3: 1950: Cheapness and Splendour |MP3|
Part 4: 1951: Absolute Elsewhere |MP3|
Part 5: 1952: Red Planet |MP3|
Part 6: 1953: Other Tongues, Other Flesh |MP3|
Part 7: 1954: Meet The Monsters |MP3|
Part 8:
Part 9:
Part 10:
Part 11:
Part 12:

posted by Jesse Willis