What We Saw From The Ruined House…
Whew, well, we’re back. 2025 just keeps throwin’ hooks left and right. I was struck a couple of days ago by the lunar eclipse rendering our constant celestial partner a certain Marsypan costume, and felt extra impulse to get these missives back on a more regular track. We don’t actually have all that much left of the narrative, though Herbert George will make it feel longer than that. I’m not precisely sure when the phrase “info dump” was brought about, but we do have just a bit of this coming up, and I’ve done what my feeble faculties can in rendering it palatable for audio.
What I’m saying is, there might be a reason that previous audio endeavors uh…overlook some bits of text. Not that the subject matter is boring or anything like that, it’s quite inventive, but it’s one thing to read at one’s leisure and another to sit and listen to an audio play.
Regardless, we get to learn a lot more about our Martian blobbies, and their hideous tastes concerning a variety of abashed late Victorian aghastments.
And really, they’re still quite the little creeps, even today. The narrative style, however, lends to the reader the fore-knowledge that everything is going to be OK. Just lie back, and think of England, or something, even if HG has been hinting that England has changed…
I couldn’t help but to put another film reel in the narration, if only for my own benefit. I love a scientific lecture as much as the next guy, but it is a bit difficult to put pizzaz into it.
Regardless, we carry on.
We do get to see the Martian Handling Machine in action, with all the implications of Martian telepathy it brings with it, descriptions of the OTHER Martian life-form that is used for <SPOILERS>, and we hear the first labeling of the Red Weed. I’m loving Well’s extraterrestrial details set up here, world-building-wise. You get a certain sense for the everyday affairs of Mars, and it really makes me wish he had visited the Red Planet in another later work. Not that others haven’t tried. Those works are fun, but there is just that original something which is missing when working in another’s world. Not that it wouldn’t be fun to try…
Soon this audio series will come to a close. If you’re enjoying it, and you happen to desire other (royalty-free, public domain) works that you’d like to hear from Flapjack Central, drop a line and let me know! Despite my grousing (and at times, swearing) I have great fun putting these together.
But now let’s check in on the Narrator, trapped with a member of the Clergy really getting on his nerves, whilst the Martians start building stuff and things just outside his hidey-hole…
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