CyberFiction Pod Casts: What Would Orson Welles Do?

Re-inventing Audio Fiction for the 21st century

Audio Books have for some time now been a godsend for many people with vision impairments and reading disabilities, not to mention enriching the lives of joggers, gym-goers, and people with long commutes; and over time, audio book publishers have cautiously migrated their formats from vinyl records to audio tape to CD to MP3.

Without taking anything away from this accomplishment, we must still recognize that, to date, audio books are simply recordings of the text of the print version of these books. Occasionally, an audio book will use actors and some sound effects for dramatic purposes, but this is rare and actually frowned upon by purists.

In contrast to audio books, over the years, there have been some very interesting adaptations of books (even classics) for new media such as live theater, film and television, not to mention opera and ballet. But, one of the most radical adaptations of a book may still be Orson Welles' Mercury Theater on the Air radio broadcast of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds on October 30, 1938.

It is in that spirit of experimentation that we offer the following podcast.



Voyages of the Veritas (the podcast) 

A Merkury Theater in Cyberspace Production for young adults and their parents

This first ever podcast of an original science fiction serial novel consists of random digital audio segments from the holog of the sailing ship The Veritas and her crew (a family of intrepid seekers after the truth) on their voyages around the world, circa 2078. These glimpses into the future pull back the virtual curtains that disguise the various micro-civilizations into which our world fragments after the Carbon-Age ends and is replaced by the Virtual Age.

Additional Cyberfiction Feature

Linked to the online written transcripts of the holog, which themselves include links to The People's Holopedia, a compendium of political, cultural, and historical events from the past and the future.