BBC Radio Science Fiction Season - 22 Feb-13 March !!

[Praxis]

Hurrah!

*claps handses*

 

Although it's billed as on Radio 4, there are programmes showing up on Radio 3 and BBC 7, too.
Included in the line-up are 'The Time Machine', 'Rendezvous with Rama', 'State of the Art' and some less well known plays like 'Alpha' and 'Omega'.
Sigh.  Sometimes it really is worth the license fee.

I just finished listening to the Time Machine, which was not half-bad, and am now counting down the hours till 'The State of the Art' airs. 

For a full list of what will be airing, go to:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/scifiseason/

**Disclaimer: Officially, BBC and BBC iPlayer broadcasts are only available from within the UK and only for 7 days after broadcast.  I'm fairly sure that there are ways round this - not that anyone should try as it leeches from one of the best media organisations in the world and we should be grateful, etc. etc.

I especially don't think that people should look at sites like, for hypothetical example, Radio Archive
http://radioarchive.cc/index.php , where long-lost and archived BBC shows often *cough* show up. **

[Praxis]

Okay, well I realise that this hasn't garnered a lot of responses.  Ahem.

But the dramatisation of The State of The Art was.....sublime.  I'd forgotten how good the story was.
Science-fiction-y but in quite a down to earth way (while also including god-like powerful machine intelligences and interplanetary cultural/moral comment).

Do I get a Zathras prize if I am the only one who contributes to a thread?

[Zathras]

You had the pleasure of hearing those stories!

I totally missed this thread, I don't know how.  Hopefully there is still some glimmer of hope that I can hear them...

[Praxis]

Well pretty much everything on Radio 4, 7 and 3 is listenagainable for 1 week after broadcast.

One of the serials is available in podcast form (think it is Planet B), so can be gotten from anywhere on the globe.

[Loz]

Just listened to Rendezvous with Rama part one. It reminds me of the early Nineties when they used to broadcast old episodes of things like Journey Into Space! on Radio 4 in the evenings...

[stePH]

Just listened to Rendezvous with Rama part one.

Don't they have any good stories?

[Loz]

Rendezvous is okay, it's the other ones that are dodgy.

[Praxis]

Don't they have any good stories?

No. 
No, they don't.

[stePH]

Rendezvous is okay, it's the other ones that are dodgy.

I just never got what was so awesome about Rendezvous with Rama.  The story boils down to "astronauts explore alien artifact, learn nothing, and go home."  The sequels were even worse.

[Loz]

Artifact novels are always a very acquired taste beyond what you like or don't like in the genre they inhabit. Oddly I find that I generally quite like sci-fi ones but the few times that I come across them in horror they bore me, mainly because of the overwrought melodrama of the central character's internal monologue, maybe I've just been unlucky.

[Praxis]

Artifact novels are always a very acquired taste beyond what you like or don't like in the genre they inhabit. Oddly I find that I generally quite like sci-fi ones but the few times that I come across them in horror they bore me, mainly because of the overwrought melodrama of the central character's internal monologue, maybe I've just been unlucky.

I suppose in that way the Rama stories (at least the first one and a half) are about 'A Thing' that arrives from somewhere else.  A bit like Excession, where

*SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER*

The ship itself doesn't do that much, the story is about the various interests and species that realise the ship is there, and their reactions to it.

*SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER*