{"id":18429,"date":"2018-10-22T06:28:08","date_gmt":"2018-10-22T03:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=18429"},"modified":"2018-10-22T06:28:08","modified_gmt":"2018-10-22T03:28:08","slug":"a-bit-of-the-dark-world-in-audio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2018\/10\/22\/a-bit-of-the-dark-world-in-audio\/","title":{"rendered":"“A Bit Of The Dark World” in audio"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the 500th episode of Pseudopod, a complete audio reading of Fritz Leiber’s story “A Bit Of The Dark World”<\/a> (Fantastic<\/em>, February 1962<\/a>). He had written some early stories that drew somewhat on Lovecraft, back in the 1930s and 40s, but without pastiching the master. Today I think of him as a sword & sorcery author linked with the post-Howard Conan<\/em> series, but here the mature Leiber attempts a tale of cosmic horror fit for the know-it-all world of the early 1960s. <\/p>\n

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Leiber had been musing about the nature of writing in changing times for some years, such as in his rip-roaring sci-fi comedy-satire “The Silver Eggheads” (1959<\/a>, expanded as a novel in 1962<\/a>). This features an A.I. science fiction setting in which ‘novel writers’ are machines with names such as the ‘Fiction House Fantasizer’ with Fingertip Credibility Control!). It’s also a little Lovecrafty, as it riffs on the idea of still-living “genetically-enhanced brains taken from the skulls of once-living writers”.<\/p>\n

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Sadly there’s no audiobook version of what appears to be a sci-fi comedy classic, and the OCR on the 1959 novelette version at Archive.org isn’t good enough for text-to-speech<\/a>. Though the novel is, at least, newly available for the Kindle<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the 500th episode of Pseudopod, a complete audio reading of Fritz Leiber’s story “A Bit Of The Dark World” …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lovecraftian-arts","category-podcasts-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18429\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}