Or at least new to me; they have been running The Sarah Jane Adventures: The Glittering Storm over on BBC4 Extra this week, with Liz Sladen doing the reading. I am hoping they have a bunch more from her, so there are still more new adventures even though she is gone. If you missed any of the episodes you can still catch them on their Listen Again service each day, or you can hear the whole thing in one go tomorrow at the first link I gave. Or you could even listen to it live as it aired in London tomorrow. Now if only they offered that service with their TV programming. They have been promising it for years, but there is still no subscription package available for watching the full BBC TV programming outside of the UK in real time that I am aware of. If anyone knows if they now have that service in place, I will be delighted to be wrong about that.
According to this Sci Fi London story, the first three books in C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series are about to be made into full production radio plays. They are calling them movie audios, but it is a full cast production with soundscape, which is the same thing as far as I can tell. I love radio plays, and the series of books, and look forward to being able to listen to them.
It started out with Starship Sofa, a wonderful podcast that had both a news and a Radio Play segment. Later they added Tales to Terrify, with audio stories for the horror fans. They have now launched District of Wonders, which includes both of the aforementioned series as well as two new ones: Protecting Project Pulp with some wonderful gold and silver age SF and Fantasy stories from the pulp magazines, and Crime City Central, which is the same thing from the True Crime type pulps. Whether you prefer the individual sites or the aggregate collection, these are some classic and world class stories you will really want to hear for yourself. And if you like those, don’t forget to check out Holodeck Workshops if you are one of the aspiring writers out there. Thanks to SF Signal for the heads up on this one.
Not long ago I mentioned the Robert A. Heinlein Radio Archives, and a bit before that it was the Ray Bradbury Radio Archive, both part of the new Radio Archives section of the Sci-Fi London web site. They have expanded their collection yet again, this time with classic radio plays from Issac Asimov and Frederik Pohl. The Asimov stories include Pebble In The Sky and Nightfall, the Pohl include Tunnel Under The World and The Map Makers. You can listen to them online, download them for your permanent collection, or if you have an Ubuntu One account you can have them delivered there to enjoy through the cloud. You should also be aware that Sci-Fi London 11, the new incarnation of their annual film festival, runs from March 1st through the 7th. Wish I could be there for it.
On Sunday I mentioned John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There because the latest iteration of the story, in movie format, is being released on disc today. But I thought I should also mention that you can read his stories online, or a number of the ones in the public domain at least. He also did a radio program of science fiction stories called Exploring Tomorrow that you can listen to or download for your favorite portable media player. Campbell was best known as an editor, although a lot of folks now know him as the guy the awards were named after. But he wrote some pretty interesting stuff, and you might enjoy checking it out.
Starting today, a brand new series of radio adventures begin for Tom Baker in Doctor Who: Hornets’ Nest. That is the story arc name, which is comprised of five stories, each an hour long. The first half of the first story, The Stuff of Nightmares, part 1 aired today at 6PM London time, and will air again at Midnight. It will be available at that link to listen to for the next 6 days, with a new episode each weekday evening at the same time for the next two weeks. At least that is the usual arrangement, but I am not taking any chances and will be listening to each episode the day it airs. They are also running two other Sci-Fi programs around it; just before the doctor you can here Married, a science fiction comedy about a bachelor who wakes up in a parallel universe to discover he is married there. And just after the Doctor this week is H. P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, also starting today. You can see the full schedule here, but as I write this there are only 7 hours left to hear episode 1 of married, since that program only runs once a week.