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Cities in the Sky episodes
- In the Year 2889, by Jules Verne & Michel Verne
An account of a day in the busy life of Mr. Fritz Napoleon Smith, proprietor of the Earth Chronicle, specifically, September 25th, 2889, in the city of Centropolis.
This short story appeared in the February 1889 issue of "The Forum".
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Jules Verne (8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. He has sometimes been called the "father of science fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. His novels are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time. His work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema, as well as for comic books, theater, opera, music and video games.
Verne is considered to be an important author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His literary reputation, which was not so good in the English-speaking world, has improved since the 1980s.
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Although published under the name of Jules Verne, this story is now believed to be mostly, if not entirely, the work of Jules' son, Michel Verne. In any event, many of the topics herein echo Verne's ideas.
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If there's a story you'd like me to narrate, let me know at [email protected].
43 min - Skit-tree Planet, by Murray Leinster
The skit-trees grew in neat rows as far as the eye could see. There were dams and irrigation systems, graded and terraced ground, and large clearings where, it was supposed, the cities in which lived those who planted the skit-trees would have been. But where were they? What had happened to them? Not one artifact, not one shaped rock or piece of metal remained. And why did the radio keep picking up static on a supposedly uninhabited planet?
Wentworth and Haynes, part of the Extra-Solarian Research Institute expedition team, were about to find out...
This short story appeared in the April 1947 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.
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Murray Leinster (June 16, 1896 – June 8, 1975) was a pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an American writer of genre fiction, particularly of science fiction. He wrote and published more than 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.
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If there's a story you'd like me to narrate, let me know at [email protected].
46 min - The Star, by H G Wells
Something had caused Neptune to act erratically as it orbited far out in the solar system. And that something was coming nearer. Would it collide with the Earth? No one knew, although speculation abounded. Closer and closer it came, brightening the night skies across the globe. As the new star passed close to Jupiter, it's direction changed. Where would it end up? And what effect would it have on the Earth?
This short story appeared in the collection "Tales of Space and Time," published by Harper & Brothers in 1900.
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Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) was an English writer. He wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography. Wells' science fiction novels are so well regarded that he has been called the "father of science fiction".
As a futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility and biological engineering before these subjects were common in the genre. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction."
Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work – dubbed "Wells's law." His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907), and the dystopian When the Sleeper Wakes (1910).
Wells was a diabetic and co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association (Diabetes UK) in 1934.
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If there is a story that you'd like me to narrate, let me know at [email protected].
32 min - Introducing Golden Age Fiction
Welcome to Golden Age Fiction.
My name is Paul and in this podcast, I will be introducing you to, and narrating, stories from the golden age of pulp fiction magazines. This is generally considered to be from the last two decades of the 19th century to around the middle of the 20th century.
Evolving from the earlier dime novels and boys' magazines, there were a plethora of these pulp fiction magazines, of varying quality, in a wide selection of genres, printed on cheap pulp paper, appearing on mostly US newsstands, during that period.
Early notable examples of these magazines were The Argosy, Blue Book Magazine, and Adventure. Later came magazines such as Western Story Magazine, Detective Story Magazine, and Love Story Magazine, the three most popular genres. Later still came Weird Tales, Ghost Stories, and Astounding Stories of Super-Science - which is still with us today, although it is now called 'Analog Science Fiction and Fact.'
Many famous writers, some household names, started their careers in these pulp fiction magazines, sometimes writing under pseudonyms to protect their reputations, as fiction writing, especially fantasy and science fiction, was not as well regarded as it is today; writers like Raymond Chandler, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Isaac Asimov.
While I will try to spread the stories evenly over genres, I have a personal preference for science fiction and fantasy, for which I make no apologies.
I plan to release one episode a week with a story of between 30 minutes and 1 hour, but occasionally, I may release an episode with two or more 10- to 15-minute stories. There may also be the odd episode that is longer than an hour.
If I release a story longer than an hour and a half; a novelette, novella, or full novel, it will be serialised into 1-hour installments over consecutive days. I'm not going to make you wait a week for that next chapter.
However, as the saying goes, no plan survives contact with the enemy, this schedule may have to be adjusted as and when life rears its ugly head.
Finally, if there is a particular story that you'd like me to narrate, or a genre you'd like me to include more of, please email me to let me know at [email protected].
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Music: "Mesmerizing Galaxy" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
4 min
About Cities in the Sky
From the publisher's feed
Classic Stories of Science and Fantasy Fiction.
Science fiction and fantasy stories have captivated audiences for as long as stories have been told. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written around 2000…
BCE, is often cited as one of the earliest science fiction, or fantasy fiction, stories, depending who you talk to.
Speculative fiction began to take shape prior to and during the European Enlightenment, encouraged by the new scientific discoveries being made. Thomas More's 1516 book, "Utopia", describes an island nation whose inhabitants have developed a seemingly perfect society. Several books from this period deal with voyages to, or societies living on, the moon; Johannes Kepler's "Somnium", 1634, Francis Godwin's "The Man in the Moone", 1638, and Cyrano de Bergerac's "Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon", 1656. Voltaire's "Micromégas", 1752, suggests that people of other worlds may be more advanced than those of Earth.
Mary Shelley's classic novel "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus", published in 1818, contains the archetypal 'mad scientist' experimenting with advanced technology. Another of her novels, "The Last Man", in 1826, is cited as the first Dystopian story.
Alexander Veltman's novel "The forebears of Kalimeros: Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon", 1836, was the first Russian science fiction novel and the first novel to use time travel, although via a magical hippogriff rather than technological means.
Samuel Butler's 1872 novel "Erewhon" describes machines that could become sentient and replace humans. Edward Everett Hale's "The Brick Moon", published serially in 1869 in The Atlantic Monthly, was the first story to describe an artificial satellite. "The Case of Summerfield" written by William Henry Rhodes and published in 1871 in the Sacramento Union newspaper, introduces the first 'weapon of mass destruction' used by a 'mad scientist' to blackmail the world. Edward Page Mitchell published science fiction short stories in The Sun for more than a decade, from 1874 onwards, dealing with invisibility, faster than light travel, teleportation, time travel, cryogenics, mind transfer, mutants, cyborgs and mechanical brains.
In the 19th Century, Jules Verne and H G Wells represented divergent styles of speculative fiction. Verne's mix of accurate technology and daring romantic adventures could be considered the earliest 'hard' science fiction. Well's more didactic approach skipped over much of the science and technology in order to critique Victorian society, and could be considered the first 'soft' science fiction. Both were commercially successful, and showed that a comfortable living could made writing such stories.
American author L. Frank Baum's book "Tik-Tok of Oz", 1914, contains the first literary appearance of handheld wireless communicators. Jack London's science fiction short stories "The Unparalleled Invasion", published in McClure's in 1910, and "The Red One", published in Cosmopolitan in 1918, contain germ wafare and extraterrestrials, respectively.
Then came the so-called golden age of science fiction from around the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s. Pulp magazines such as Astounding Stories, Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, Galaxy, If Magazine, and Weird Tales filled newstands and helped launch the writing careers of many of the giants of science fiction; household names such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Leigh Brackett, and Frank Herbert. The rich heritage upon which they drew, and to which they contributed, continues to influence modern science fiction and fantasy writers, and will undoubtedly do so far into the future.
Please note that performance of a story is not a condoning, endorsement, or promotion of attitudes, prejudices, biases or opinions therein—particularly of gender and gender roles, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality—that an inhabitant of modern times would find distasteful.
If there's a story that you'd like me to narrate, let me know at [email protected].