Mind Webs, a 1970’s radio series created by WHA Radio in Wisconsin, featured dramatized readings of classic sci fi stories by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. You can learn more about the series, and access a complete set of recordings here. Below, we’ve highlighted for you a dramatization of an Ursula K. Le Guin story, “The End.” It’s rare to encounter an audio recording of a Le Guin story online, so we hope you enjoy. “The End” is now added to our collection: 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. And if you’re looking to immerse yourself in Le Guin’s fiction, give her groundbreaking novel The Left Hand of Darknessa try. It won the Hugo and Nebula Awards (the top award for fantasy/sci-fi novels) in 1969.
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As you know if you saw our previous posts featuring Leonard Nimoy’s readings of stories by Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, the late Star Trek icon could — unsurprisingly, perhaps — tell a science-fiction tale with the best of them. It turns out that he could also give masterful readings of science fiction from other eras too, as far back as the earliest works to define the genre, which we’ve discovered after hearing his performance of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, an out-of-print edition recently digitized from cassette tape and posted to Youtube in twoparts.
With this story of Earth invaded from “across the gulf of space” by aliens with “minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,” Wells did much to help give science fiction the form we recognize today. The War of the Worlds came out in book form in 1898, preceded by such similarly speculative and innovative works as The Time Machine and The Invisible Man, and then followed by the likes of The First Men in the Moon and The Shape of Things to Come. (Find most of these works neatly packaged in the HG Wells Classic Collection.) This Leonard Nimoy recording originally came out in 1976, published by the record label Caedmon, known for doing plenty of innovation of their own in the then-yet-unnamed field of audiobooks.
Caedmon put out not just this album and the one with Nimoy reading Bradbury, but others featuring Kurt Vonnegut, Vincent Price, Tennessee Williams, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Sylvia Plath. As much as science-fiction die-hards will enjoy hearing this pairing of Nimoy and Wells here, some will certainly want to track down the actual LP — not just for the collectors’ value, but because it features liner notes by none other than that other vastly influential creator of sci-fi as we know it, Isaac Asimov. It looks like there’s one used copy on Amazon. The reading, we should note, is an abridged version of the original text.
Isaac Asimov’s hugely influential science fiction classic The Foundation Trilogy will soon, it seems, become an HBO series, reaching the same audiences who were won over by the Game of Thrones adaptations. We can expect favorite character arcs to emerge, perhaps distorting the original narrative; we can expect plenty of internet memes and new ripples of influence through successive generations. In fact, if the series becomes a reality, and catches on the way most HBO shows do—either with a mass audience or a later devoted cult following—I think we can expect much renewed interest in the field of “psychohistory,” the futuristic science practiced by the novels’ hero Hari Seldon.
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This is no small thing. Foundation has inspired a great many science fiction writers, from Douglas Adams to George Lucas. But it has also guided the careers of people whose work has more immediate real-world consequences, like economist Paul Krugman and fervent advocate of positive psychology Martin Seligman. “The trilogy really is a unique masterpiece,” writes Krugman,” there has never been anything quite like it.” The fictional science of psychohistory inspired the experimental predictive techniques Seligman developed and described in his book Learned Optimism:
In his impossible-to-put-down Foundation Trilogy—I read it in one thirty-hour burst of adolescent excitement—Asimov invents a great hero for pimply, intellectual kids…. “Wow!” thought this impressionable adolescent…. That “Wow!” has stayed with me all my life.
If you’re thinking that the epic scale of Asimov’s sprawling trilogy—one he explicitly modeled after Edward Gibbon’s multi-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—will prove impossible to realize on the screen, you may be right. On the other hand, Asimov’s prose has lent itself particularly well to an older dramatic medium: the radio play. As we noted in an earlier post on a popular 1973 BBC adaptation of the trilogy, Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card once described the books as “all talk, no action.” This may sound like a disparagement, except, Card went on to say, “Asimov’s talk is action.”
Today, we bring you several different radio adaptations of Asimov’s fiction, and you can hear the many ways his fascinating concepts, translated into equally fascinating, and yes, talky, fiction, have inspired writers, scientists, filmmakers, and “pimply, intellectual kids” alike for decades. At the top of the post, hear the entire, eight-hour BBC adaptation of Foundation from start to finish. You can also stream and download individual episodes on Spotify and at Youtube and the Internet Archive. Below it, we have classic sci-fi radio drama series Dimension X’s dramatizations of “Pebble in the Sky” and “Nightfall,” both from 1951.
Also hear two Asimov’s stories “The ‘C’ Chute” and “Hostess”—both produced by Dimension X successor X Minus One. These series, wrote Colin Marshall in a previous post, “showcase American culture at its mid-20th-century finest: forward-looking, temperamentally bold, technologically adept, and saturated with earnestness but for the occasional surprisingly knowing irony or bleak edge of darkness.”
Not to be outdone by these two programs, Mutual Broadcasting System created Exploring Tomorrow, a “science fiction show of science-fictioneers, by science-fictioneers and for science-fictioneers” that ran briefly from 1957 to 1958. Below, they adapt Asimov’s story “The Liar.”
These old-time radio dramas will certainly appeal to the nostalgia of people who were alive to hear them when they first aired. But while their production values will never come close to matching those of HBO, they offer something for younger listeners as well—an opportunity to get lost in Asimov’s complex ideas, and to engage the imagination in ways television doesn’t allow. Whether or not Foundation ever successfully makes it to the small screen, I would love to see Asimov’s fiction—in print, on the radio, on screen, or on the internet—continue to inspire new scientific and social visionaries for generations to come.
When you think of the most astute minds of our time, you might well think of Ray Bradbury’s — but you probably don’t think of him as one of the most astute terrorist minds of our time. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, saw things differently. Collaborative news site MuckRock found that out through files “released to former MuckRocker Inkoo Kang [which] document the decade the Bureau spent trying to determine if Bradbury was, if not a card-carrying Communist, at least a sympathetic ‘fellow traveler.’ ” See snippets of documents here from 1959.
You can view the files themselves, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, at MuckRock. There, the site’s JPat Brown also summarizes the organization’s basis for suspicion against the author: his “membership in the Screen Writer’s Guild, as well as his vocal opposition to McCarthyism, drew particular attention,” as did the use in TheMartian Chronicles of the “repeated theme that earthmen are despoilers and not developers.” Not just Bradbury’s work but the whole of science fiction, which informant Martin Berkeley calls a possibly “lucrative field for the introduction of Communist ideology,” comes in for an indictment.
“Communists have found fertile opportunities for development,” Berkeley says, “for spreading distrust and lack of confidence in America [sic] institutions in the area of Science Fiction writing.” Another, unsurprisingly clearer view of the genre comes from Bradbury himself, quoted disapprovingly in the file from a 1959 Women’s Legislative Action Bulletin. There, he said he uses the medium of science fiction to “try to bring to light some of the current fallacies in human values today” — the one thing, as the author of Fahrenheit 451 must have known full well, that the powers that be least want anybody to do. Get more at MuckRock.
If you haven’t yet seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris but do plan on watching it (find it online here), rest assured that there’s no wrong way to go about it. You can plunge, without preparation, right into its vivid, tormented Soviet sci-fi world of failing high technology, sublime natural forces, and haunting memory. You can do no end of preliminary research on the film, its maker, and its maker’s struggle to adapt the original Stanislaw Lem novel to his own distinctive sensibility. Or you could just precede your screening with “Auteur in Space,” a brief examination of Solaris by well-known cinephile video essayist kogonada. It was made on behalf of The British Film Institute.
“The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb,” the narrator quotes Tarkovsky as writing, going on to cite his criticism of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001“for being too enamored by the spectacle of the genre, for being too exotic, too immaculate.” From then on, the video demonstrates not just what Tarkovsky does to push Solaris out of the shadow of 2oo1, but also to break it out of the standard forms of science fiction and, ultimately, to free it from the strictures of genre itself — to occupy that category we can only call Tarkovsky.
And so the Russian auteur decides to make the space station on which most of the film takes place “look like a broken-down old bus.” He decides “to spend five minutes showing a man in an ordinary car traveling along the highway, and less than two minutes showing his main character traveling through space.” He gives in to his “occupation with the elemental things of Earth.” He comes to “question the limits of science in engaging the mysteries of existence,” ultimately using Solaris to pit science against fiction, “each with their own weight and history and pursuit of truth and knowledge.”
If, indeed, you haven’t yet seen Solaris and watch this video essay, you’ll surely find yourself no longer able to resist the temptation to experience the film as soon as possible. Maybe you’ll pop in the DVD or Blu-Ray, or better yet, maybe you’ll catch a theatrical screening. But if you understandably can’t wait for even a moment, you can watch it free online right now. And find other Tarkovsky films free online here.
As brevity in fiction goes, who can top “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”? That much-referenced six-word story, often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, certainly packs an impressive amount of human drama into its short length. But what about other genres? What would a six-word science- fiction story look like? i09 crowdsourced countless such works in 2014: responses, which tended toward the eschatological, included “The Universe died. He did not,” “New world. Cryogenic failure. Seeds dead,” and “Finally sentient, it switched itself off.”
Not bad, but what would we get if we went to the professionals? Alas, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, prolific author of such respected sci-fi novels as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama, passed away just five years before i09 issued its challenge. Still, we have an idea of the direction his entry might have gone in from of “siseneG,” a story story — a very short story indeed — Clarke sent in to Analog magazine in 1984:
And God said: DELETE lines One to Aleph. LOAD. RUN.
And the Universe ceased to exist.
Then he pondered for a few aeons, sighed, and added: ERASE.
It never had existed.
“This is the only short story I’ve written in ten years or so,” Clarke wrote in the accompanying note. “I think you’ll agree that they don’t come much shorter.” We now know that they can come somewhat shorter, at least 25 words shorter than “siseneG,” but surely we can all agree that Clarke set a high standard for scientific (or perhaps technological-existential) flash fiction decades before the coinage of the term. But then, we always knew the man had a knack for looking ahead.
Last year Jonathan Nolan–screenwriter of Memento and Interstellar and not coincidentally director Christopher Nolan’s brother–announced that he would be developing Isaac Asimov’s legendary Foundation trilogy for HBO as a series. And we assume he’s still doing that, because there’s been nary a peep from the channel since. So far the Internet consensus has been a collective “well, that could be good!” instead of groans, which is a heartening thing these days.
Right from the beginning we know we are in good hands, with the analog drones of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop ushering us into a stereo landscape filled with plummy British accents and atmospheric sound effects. It’s like the best ever episode of Doctor Who without a Tardis, corridors, or the enfeebled cries of a lost companion.
Asimov’s hero in the first book, Hari Seldon, using a science called psychohistory, can see the inevitable collapse of the Galactic Empire in which he lives and sets about trying to change it by setting up an opposition called the Foundation. The novels then jump decades ahead, checking in with this essential conflict, much like Gibbon’s work goes from emperor to emperor, marking the decline of empire and its inevitability. Free of aliens and shoot-em-ups, Foundation is very human despite its galactic scope.
Adapted by Patrick Tull and Mike Stott, the eight part radio series does a good job of presenting the novels as a character-driven drama, and while it is talky (it’s radio after all), it was Orson Scott Card who said of Foundation, it is “all talk, no action — but Asimov’s talk is action.”
It also influenced many future sci-fi writers. No doubt somewhere along the way Douglas Adams was listening to the radio play’s talking encyclopedia and thinking, hmm, what if this had jokes?
And once you get through the trilogy–maybe after an eight-hour flight?–there’s more Asimov radio plays for your listening pleasure on Spotify: Hostess, Pebble in the Sky, and Nightfall.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
We here at Open Culture believe that, as far as science-fiction delivery systems go, you can’t do much better than radio drama. We’ve previously featured quite a range of it, from the classic 1950s series Dimension Xand its successor X Minus Oneto adaptations of such classic works as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and, most recently, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Now we’ve opened up another treasure trove of sci-fi radio in the form of the archives of Mind Webs, originally broadcast on Madison, Wisconsin’s WHA-AM, starting in the 1970s
One old-time radio site describes Mind Webs as“not really audio drama in the strict sense of the definition,” but “readings of science fiction stories by some of the genre’s best writers [ … ] enhanced by music, periodic sound cues, and the occasional character voice.” As the collector who made his recordings of the series available to the Internet Archive puts it, Mind Webs “stands as a testament to not only some of our greatest speculative fiction authors, but just how well simple dialog and music minus major sound effects can convey stories so well.”
Which authors counted as great enough for inclusion into the Mind Webs canon? Some of the names, like Ursula K. LeGuin, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury, you’d expect to find in this archive, but others go farther afield: the series also features stories by the likes of Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, H.P. Lovecraft — writers who, each in their own way, bent the boundaries of all known fiction, science- or otherwise — and even such supposedly traditional storytellers as John Cheever and Roald Dahl who, in these selections, put their own spin on reality.
Listen to enough episodes of Mind Webs, and you may get hooked on the voice and reading style of its host Michael Hanson, a fixture on Wisconsin public radio for something like forty years. Back in 2001, just after wrapping up his career in that sector, Hanson wrote in to the New York Times lamenting the state of public radio, especially its program directors turned into “sycophantic bean counters” and a “pronounced dumbing down of program content.” Mind Webs, which kept on going from the 70s through the 90s, came from a time before all that, and now its smart storytelling has come available for all of us to enjoy.
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must have known full well, that the powers that be least want anybody to do. Get more 
