Want to catch up on some books you might have missed? The TOR web site has some excellent series going on, one of my favorites being Rereading. It introduces new readers to excellent stories they can fall in love with (and lets them know why they are worth their effort to check out). It also reminds long-time fans why they became fans in the first place, and connects the dots on aspects of the story that only became apparent some volumes later, so you get to experience the foreshadowing you never knew was there. The fact that they keep choosing some of the best series ever written keeps me coming back, if only to get some one else’s take on the plot, characters, and twists these tales offer the reader. This time around the offering is Lois McMaster Bujold’s masterpiece The Vorkosigan Saga, starring Miles himself, and sometimes his mother, and every now and then his cousin. Rereading the Vorkosigan Saga will definitely take you places you didn’t expect to go, but will no doubt enjoy. I hope you like them as much as I do, if you are not already a fan!
BBC Radio 4 is airing the first ever dramatization of Ursula Le Guin’s award winning and groundbreaking The Left Hand of Darkness beginning today at 15:00 UT. That’s right around 11AM EST, or 8AM Pacific, and besides airing in real time it will be available in their Listen Again mode for the next week or three. The one hour program is the first part of two, so make sure to catch them both so you can enjoy the whole story. It won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards as 1969’s best novel (one voted on by fans, one voted on by authors), and I can’t wait to hear it as a radio play. Another of her works is being aired beginning on the 27th of this month on BBC Radio 4Extra; Earthsea will be airing at 18:00 UT, and is a series of 6 episodes, 30 minutes long each. I’m not even going to try to tell you how many awards it won.
I am very sad to know we lost Terry Pratchett, the author who created Disc World and so many wonderful characters and situations. His web site is down at the moment (probably crashed the server from so many hits), but the BBC announcement mentions a few facts that most authors can only dream of. 70 books translated into 37 languages with total sales so far of 70 million books. And that’s not even counting his stories turned into movies, animations, or TV specials. He was brilliant and funny and I will miss his voice in the world.
Archive Dot Org has a great assortment of X-1 episodes which you can listen to online, or download for your own collection. The show was one of the better presentations of science fiction radio plays, built from stories that appeared in Galaxy magazine, written by some of the best authors of the era. This program has been in the public domain for quite a while now, which kind of surprises me, as I would have thought they would want to hold on to it. Here are a few episodes to get you started; there are quite a few more available.
This amazing video has a conversation between Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Arthur C. Clarke. I was alive when this was recorded, and I had actually spoken with Sagan before this point, so I am sorry I missed this historic chat in person. Luckily there were cameras rolling, so I get to enjoy the event all these decades later. Pay attention as three of the most brilliant people the human race have spawned take a few moments to lay out how the universe actually works for the rest of us.
Most of these are classics, meaning more than 50 years old, although some are noticeably more recent; but there are so many excellent books included here that pretty much everyone will find goodies for their ears and brain. The collection of links is from Openculture’s Free Audiobooks Archive, and it includes the works of Issac Asimov, JG Ballard, Frank L. Baum, Jorge Luis Borges, Ray Bradbury, William S. Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur C. Clarke, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Philip K. Dick… and that only takes us through a few of my favorites out of the first four letters of the alphabet. You can stream these in realtime or download them to load into your favorite media player or burn them to disc if you still have a CD player in your vehicle. There are a ton of free radio drama/audio book resources available online, and this one is a great way to get started.