Friday Radio: The Time Machine (Favorite Story)

Based on the novella by H.G. Wells, originally published in The New Review, 1894-5.

Originally broadcast I know not where, May 28, 1949.

Although it's still having that problem where I can't see a list of the files I've uploaded, I'll go ahead and recommend the free service where I'm hosting the mp3 files: kiwi6.com.

According to Wikipedia, H.G. Wells invented the expression "time machine" in this novel, but was not the first person to write about one. That honor goes to the Spanish author Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau for El anachronópete (1887). Wells himself previously wrote about a machine that travels through time in the short story "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888).

In his 1899 novel When the Sleeper Wakes, Wells wrote again about a 19th century man in the future. But in that novel, the protagonist, Graham, doesn't travel to the future, instead spending more than two centuries in an ageless trance. Wells wrote his dystopian When the Sleeper Wakes in response to Edward Bellamy's utopian 1888 novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887, and so simply borrowed the trance premise from Bellamy.

Yes, here's where I remind you that Thrilling Wonder has an edition of When the Sleeper Wakes, including all fifteen illustrations by H. Lanos from the 1899 first edition. (Read and/or download a preview chapter as a pdf file here.) You can currently get the book from us (thrilling_wonder) on Amazon for only $5.48, plus $3.99 s/h. Own the future today! Look slippy!

Friday Radio: The Country of the Blind (Escape)

Based on the novelette by H.G. Wells, originally published in The Strand, April 1904.

Originally broadcast on CBS, June 27, 1948.

Friday Radio is back... I hope. You see, I've found a new mp3 host, registered for it, logged in, the whole thing. But whenever I upload, it thinks the file is being uploaded by an unregistered user. Fortunately, you don't need to register to upload things, so here's hoping the file works.

And here's where I remind you that Thrilling Wonder has an edition of Wells' novel of 22nd-century monopolist dystopia, When the Sleeper Wakes, including all fifteen illustrations by H. Lanos from the 1899 first edition. (Read and/or download a preview chapter as a pdf file here.) You can currently get the book from us (thrilling_wonder) on Amazon for only $5.48, plus $3.99 s/h. Own the future today! Look slippy!

Thursday Preview: When the Sleeper Wakes

(Click on thumbnail for full-size image. Right-click [or control-click if you have a one-button mouse] and select "Download Linked File" to save jpg file to your computer. Feel free to distribute the unaltered file.)

Yes, I know we've been giving H.G. Wells' 1899 novel of dystopian 22nd-century London away for free here at the Thrilling Wonder Stories site, but if you can't wait to see how it ends, or want an actual copy to hold in your own hands, or just have something against trees, here it is, available now at the Thrilling Wonder Store for only $7.

This is the first in our Thrilling Wonder Stories Origins Series, reprinting works from the early days of science fiction—so early, in fact, that they didn't even call it "science fiction" yet.

From the back cover:

From the author of The Time Machine comes a different kind of futuristic adventure. Near the end of the nineteenth century, Graham falls into an ageless trance. He awakens at the dawn of the twenty-second century. A Council rules the world. They began simply as trustees of a large financial estate, but their snowballing wealth and power, over the course of two centuries, rendered government by the people impotent, irrelevant, and ultimately extinct. But who owns this wealth? Graham finds, to his shock, that he does. The men who first took responsibility for him in his trance left him their fortunes, and he is now the master of the world!

But real power is only his if he can claim it. The Council controls the lives of the people, literally from cradle to grave. They keep the laboring classes trapped in an perpetual cycle of drudgery and dependence. They keep the upper classes satiated with entertainment and the Pleasure Cities. Not happy to have Graham conscious and potentially able to take this power into his own hands, the Council seeks to keep him isolated and ignorant. And a rebel group aims to capture him as a figurehead for their revolution, using the people’s veneration of the Sleeper as a savior to seize the Council’s power for their own. But when Graham, a democrat and liberal in his own time, learns the truth about the future world, he seeks to exercise his power for the people.

To truly be master of the world, Graham must first master his fate—become a leader of people, and defeat those who would sooner kill them than see them free. Timeless as its protagonist, When the Sleeper Wakes is a tale from a century ago about a century hence that enthralls today’s reader with its odyssey of prophetic vision and gripping adventure.