Friday, July 25, 2008

Free Classic SF Audio Fiction.

One of the great things about the internet and recent technology is the advent of podcasting, in particular those that feature readings of Science Fiction stories, such as, Escape Pod, StarShipSofa, and of course Beam Me Up - all available for free MP3 download. In many ways, MindWebs foreshadows them. Broadcast on WHA Radio in Wisconsin in the 1970s, each episode featured Michael Hansen reading a classic or contemporary SF short story. These stories were enhanced by music and occasionally special effects and additional readers, but were quite similar to today's podcasts in all other respects.

Among the many great SF writers whose work was dramatized on MindWebs were Alfred Bester, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Arthur C. Clarke, Gordon Dickson, Thomas Disch, Harry Harrison, Henry Kuttner, Richard Matheson, Robert Silverberg, Norman Spinrad, Stanley Weinbaum, and Roger Zelazny.

The good news is that most of these episodes of are available from the Internet Archive in easily downloaded individual MP3s or a 450 meg. zip for the more ambitious. And to make deciding on an individual episode to listen to easier, The OTR Plot Spot has an archive of plot descriptions for MindWebs. So between episodes of today's greats, feel free to take a listen to yesterday's greats.

<Internet Archive selection of Mind Webs episodes>

<OTR Plot Spot Descriptions of Mind Webs episodes>

No comments: