BMU # 429 is now online with the Halloween themed program

Well this is episode 429 of Beam Me Up and being that it is the last program of this October, I am going for our annual Halloween show.

The first item presented is a great piece of music from none other than the vocal group Manhattan Transfer doing Twilight Zone.  Nope, not that one by Golden Earring but one more closely attuned to the TV show of the same name.

Next a very unusual and wonderful short tale from Deborah Walker that combines a rural church in the English country side and quantum mechanics!


Colin Davies has graciously let me play Happy Halloween again.  This is a crystalWizard production and between the two of them, they turn out a great story.

Beam Me Up Episode 285 - Watts & Davies

Welcome to the program this week. This is episode 285. I had started out with the idea that I would run just the second half of this week’s story: The Things, by Peter Watts, then go on to the blog for news. But then I remembered the excellent Halloween story that I ran last year from the very talented author Colin P. Davies called appropriately enough Happy Halloween.

In Part 2 of The Things, the creature comes to realize the horror of just the type of beings he is dealing with. Horrifying creations that violently react when faced with anything that changes. Creatures that never change, born and die with the same shape and can not imagine anything different. Important information yes, discovered at great cost and quite possibly much much to late.

In our second story, Happy Halloween by Colin P. Davies, many strange happenings have started to happen in Dan’s world. Unnatural happenings, dangerous happenings. Since his mother had left, Dan’s world had become bleak but now it seemed that some mysterious force was trying to do more that make life miserable, no now something wanted him dead. Happy Halloween is read by CrystalWizard and produced by Cyberstudios and I will guarantee that you will be hard pressed to find a better Halloween story this month.

And that is it! All stories this week and nothing more. Just things that go bump in the night. Enjoy!

Colin Davies' brings us up to speed on new works!

Colin wants to let his readers know that he will again be gracing our podcast very soon indeed! The new five part series (another Pestworld story!) that has already been sent to CrystalWizard at Cyber Studios Online and we will premiere them as soon as they are ready. Just to give you a Colin p. Davies fix, here is a list of his newest releases. Look for them!

I have a few new stories appearing soon:

• Henry Jumps a Shark (Bewildering Stories, September), my take on where reality TV may go.
• The Booby-Trapped Boy (M Brane SF, September), set on Mars and in the same 'universe' as The Certainty Principle, Good and Faithful Servant and Dolls.
• Stippleback (Jupiter Magazine, Autumn), one of my few alien stories.
• Land of Fire and Ashes (Abyss and Apex, 2011), a man tormented by fire.
• Talking of Dolls, this is about to reappear in The Immersion Book of SF (Imminently)
  

Chris Davies wins UK's Countdown

Now here is something you just have to appreciate! It seems Colin Davies son has been doing quite well for himself in other venues. And who better to bring us up to speed is Colin himself in a recent note to me:

• My son Chris (the one who composed and played the Pestworld theme) has been taking part in a TV quiz show called Countdown, which is hugely popular in the UK. It's a game of math skill and word knowledge on Channel 4.
• The news is that Chris won the current series on 18th December and became champion. The win carries quite a lot of status and has attracted the interest of our local and one national paper.
• Although the show is available online from C4, it is blocked in the US. However a number of clips are available on youtube at:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUNfnFG5SwA
• and the whole final can be seen at:
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COQ_o0WgI8c

Congrats Chris and excellent news Colin...

New Pestworld Links!!!!

Anyone that is following the podcast knows that we have been doing material by Colin P. Davies over the past year. We started off with stories from his excellent collection Tall Tales on the Iron Horse and as of late we have been doing a specially rewritten Pestworld series. The series is wildly entertaining, plus Colin has been been adding to the the Pestworld milieu with new creatures, more topography in Pestworld and expanding on the wildly funny "reference" Pest and Pestilence"

To keep track of all the additions, Colin has added a page to his regular home page colinpdavies.com with a Pestworld page here.

As Mr. Davies puts it:

• This includes Pests and Pestilence, links to the show and scripts and the obligatory map.

Check it out!