This Flash Fiction contest is 3 Minute Futures, and they are looking for someone to write a short, powerful story. The world renowned science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson will select the winner, and Star Trek actress Gates McFadden will direct the To the Best of Our Knowledge productions into a finished radio play, with the help of LA’s Ensemble Studio Theatre. The competition runs until March 1st, 2014, be sure to Submit Your Entry before then! Thanks to Boing Boing for the heads up on that one… and just how many of you actually remember Gerald McBoingBoing, the namesake for that site?
Just two years after Orson Welles terrified America by presenting a modified version of H.G. Wells classic War Of The Worlds as if it was a documentary, the two ended up together in a studio in San Antonio, Texas, for an interview session. Since I couldn’t sit in for it, or even knew it had happened until quite recently, you can imagine how thrilled I was to learn it existed. Listening to it made me grin from ear to ear, so I just had to share this with you. Thanks to the amazing folks at TOR for making me aware of this, in the article they put together in honor of H.G.s birthday.
I love Radio Plays and Audio Books, and wanted to mention these for anyone who does not already know of them. Escape Pod is a podcast that delivers a weekly free Sci-Fi audio story, and has been doing so since 2005. It is so successful at it that it is listed as a qualifying professional sale at the SFWA. In addition it has generated two spinoffs, Pseudopod for Horror fiction, and PodCastle for Fantasy fiction. You can subscribe to their podcasts, download the MP3 files from their sites, or got to the Escape Pod Archives searchable collection at Wikipedia.
In honor of the 5oth anniversary, the folks at Future Publishing are hosting a competition for AudioGO, formerly BBC Audiobooks, and they are giving away 50 Doctor Who audio presentations, 25 CDs and 25 digital downloads. These are actually Audiobooks, with a single person reading a novelization, Radio Plays, with a full cast, sound effects, interlude music, and the whole nine yards, Soundtracks from the original TV series with narration to fill in the missing visuals, and several other formats. Some of the soundtracks are from episodes that have only survived in audio form, with the full original cast. They have literally hundreds of them, they have been doing Doctor Who audio stories from the beginning and are still cranking them out. To get and idea what kind of things they involve, you can download the free sampler and listen to 45 minutes worth of excerpts from all the different kinds of programs they produce. The only bad news for this contest is it is only open to residents of the UK (if I was reading the rules correctly), but even if you don’t live there you should grab the free sampler and check out some of the amazing stories you can collect.
BBC Radio 4 starts a new radio play with Terry Pratchett’s Eric tomorrow. They have broken the story into four parts, with part one airing at 2300 GMT on Wednesday, March 6th. If you want to get an idea of what you can expect, listen to the clip and try not to hurt yourself laughing. Terry Pratchett’s stories are always funny as hell, and BBC Radio does a first class job of rendering them in Radio Play format. And if you haven’t grabbed the Discworld App for the iPad yet, here is a little teaser for you…
BBC Radio 4 Extra always runs some great radio plays; this week alone you can hear Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Systers and a series of short Sci-Fi stories turned into audio books on Brian Aldus Presents. If you hit their Schedule for this week you can hit Monday and start from the beginning, as they let you listen to shows for the next six days after they air. Coming up on Saturday there is a program called Alexander Armstrong’s Radio Heroes, which will include classic episodes of radio dramas like Journey Into Space and Judge Dredd for your enjoyment. I spend an average of 7 hours a week listening to programs on this service, it always has some fun and interesting science fiction and fantasy.