Hallo friends, and welcome to Stories from the Radio, where we listen to old radio shows and laugh at them for being so old. Today, we are going to listen to something by the golden boy of old time radio, Arch Oboler. He is perhaps best known for his horror series ‘Lights Out’ but dude was pretty prolific in his time. He dabbled in radio, television, fiction, and all those other neat things. Today’s show is called Revolt of the Worms, which is an excellent name for anything. I’m hoping for some nice, golden-age-of-sci-fi-radio type story, but as we have seen time and again, you never can tell with old time radio.
One of the recent bright spots in the world of speculative short fiction publishing is the rebirth of Fantasy Magazine. Yes, Fantasy is back, published under the Psychopomp umbrella with co-editors Arley Sorg and Shingai Njeri Kagunda at the helm. (You can read more about how this all came about at Psychopomp and support the zine by signing up for a subscription.)
“Silence Starved and Swallowed” by Sydney Paige Guerrero from Fantasy 97, the first issue of Fantasy in this incarnation, is a devastating, darkly gleaming story about grief and sadness. Guerrero describes how our inability to put our emotions into words, to communicate our pain and vulnerability to those around us, can devour us entirely: “black holes start with swallowed silence.”
Well, here we are fam, and here it is. The final episode of The Slide. We started listening to this in 2023! Two years, my dudes! So much has happened since then, like seriously, loved ones have passed on and I moved to a new place and I’ve laughed and cried and stuff like that. But like the spirit of Sauron, The Slide endured. Frankly, this story hasn’t panned out like I thought it would. Even though the terrible horrible no-good very bad mud has brain cells and squeaks like a rubber duck, I feel it has not really reached its full potential.
Black speculative poetry works this way too. It’s text that is flexible and immediate. It’s a safe space to explore Afrocentric text rooted in story, song, dance, rhythm that natural flows from my intrinsic self. It’s text that has a lot of hurt, as in pain, and a lot of healing—an acceptance of self, black is beauty, despite what the slave trade, colonialism, racism, social injustice might tell us.
As the world seemed to shift and break around all of us, I found myself drawn to stories about rage, resistance, resilience, and even a bit of love.
In “Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness” in Lightspeed, B. Pladek (who wrote one of my favorite 2024 stories, “The Spindle of Necessity”) spins a darkly funny and crushing story about a future where human-created fiction has been outlawed. Only content produced by “curators,” prompting an AI writing program called RIGHTR, can be shared with school children, and every story has to follow strict guidelines. It’s an idea that cuts uncomfortably close to the bone in today’s world where AI is on the rise, book bannings are becoming legion, and many people seem intent on limiting and controlling the kind of information and fiction that children (and adults) can access.
Pranams to my most dear and queer Strange fam. We are finally at the penultimate episode of this show and I do not know how to process this. I’m scared. I’m hungry. I’m sleepy. LIFE IS SO CONFUSING! I’m not too sure what to expect but as we have seen, literally anything can happen in this story. Anyway,
Let's go!
Let’s start with a completely unreliable recap of our story and cast of characters.
There are the Wilsons who are dead, the mayor Hugh, his inappropriate wife Anna, a handful of assorted professors, an annoying doctor and poor Janet who is being plagued by the mud and the doctor.
This episode was frustrating and hilarious, just like so many things in life. What do the last two episodes have in store for us? Maybe something coherent happens in the story? Maybe an appearance by verbally abusive rocks? Plants that extensively quote things with no reliable source?
Science fiction is part of our world, and is much more than the presence of stories with the furniture (robots, aliens, rocket ships, cyborgs) of the genre. It is the way we respond to changes and technology. It is a palette of reactions and discussions palpable in classrooms, headlines, and news rooms every hour every day.
Looking back, I see that my initial hope for this episode was that the mud would have a heartbeat and a heart that has teeth and crippling anxiety. Some of that hope has become a reality, but at what cost?
