we dare you to miss it.

May 22nd, 2006

1959.jpg

It has recently come to my attention that some of you have not been listening to Welcome to Mars, the 12-part story of science and science fantasy in the formative years of 1947 to 1959.

Well, it’s ended and you can download them all now and listen to them in a single six-hour stretch.

The story starts in 1947 — the year the Sound Barrier was broken, the year the transistor was invented, and the year a “flying saucer” crashed in in Roswell, New Mexico, only to have the Army deny its own report days later.

It goes through the most interesting parts of the next twelve years: MK-ULTRA and Aldous Huxley, crescents skipping across the sky “like a saucer would if you skipped it across a pond”, Wilhelm Reich (kicked out of Nazi Germany for his experiments on human sexuality) and Wernher Von Braun (SS officer and proud US leader), Forbidden Planet and Plan Nine from Outer Space, telepathic submarines, fictions described as true, and truths hidden in fiction.



« Previously: ‘goldensmell’ as globalization

Next: shave everywhere »
  • jimmy

    this is mad cool. i’m only half way through part one, but i can already see (hear?) that this will make up a heavy percentage of my listening over the next couple of weeks. it’s scratching me right where i itch.
    one thing, though:
    would it be shamelessly american of me to suggest that this is begging to be a soundtrack to some sort of video counterpart? you know, like some sort of free-form animation cut with some mixed period stock footage for emphasis? I’m not suggesting it needs it, i just think it would be a nice treatment.
    hmmm,.. you know, now that i think of it, i’m not sure if that idea is as much a byproduct of my tv-rich american up-bringing, or that i smoked too much weed and watched “The Wall” too many times as a kid.

  • http://joshua.swingpad.com/ Joshua

    It would be like an unusually coherent Emergency Broadcast Network video. And I’m all for that.