It’s time to highlight another week of storytelling in Voice by the staff and volunteers at the Seanchai Library. This week, all tales come from the Halls of Story, Fantasy Faire, 2018, unless otherwise indicated.
Sunday, April 22nd, 18:00: Mrs Piggle-Wiggle
Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle lives in an upside-down house and smells like cookies. She was even married to a pirate once. Most of all, she knows everything about children. She can cure them of any ailment. Patsy hates baths. Hubert never puts anything away. Allen eats v-e-r-y slowly. Mrs Piggle-Wiggle has a treatment for all of them.
The incomparable Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle loves children good or bad and never scolds but has positive cures for Answer-Backers, Never-Want-to-Go-to-Bedders, and other boys and girls with strange habits.
Join Caledonia Skytower at the Golden Horseshoe in Magicland Park, as she reads from Betty MacDonald tales of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.
Monday, April 23rd 19:00: The Crucible of Time
Gyro Muggins reads the fix-up by John Brunner. First published as two-part story which appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, it’s an ambitious tale of alien intelligence which grew to a series of six linked tales pushed as a single novel in 1983.
Far off in space is an alien race which is so much like us, yet so un-alike. From the birth of their earliest civilisation through to their attainment of star flight as their star system passes through the galaxy, we follow their development through the ages.
Aquatic by nature, this race presents some significant challenges well outside the realms of anything encountered by humanity. But they are also driven by all too familiar hopes, fears, desires, needs, wants, prejudices, impact of religious ideologies, and the quest for knowledge we have experienced in the growth of our own civilisation.
Charting six periods of time, each a thousand years after the previous, the six stories focus on the efforts of a group of individuals in each era as they face one or more challenges, their success in overcoming these challenges inevitably leading them towards a greater understanding of their planet’s plight, and ultimately, the ability to deal with that plight and the survival of their civilisation.
Tuesday, April 24th 19:00: National Lampoon’s Doon
In a distant galaxy, far, far away, a plot is brewing as vast and elaborate as the Empire itself…
Evil powers plot to harvest the wild pools of beer that grow only on the savage, sugar-swept world of Doon, take control of the native pretzel population, and turn the plucky little orb into the lounge-planet of the universe!
And only one man, Pall Agamemnides, heir to a dukedom can stop the galaxy-wide web of conspiracy and intrigue that is being fomented, and bring an end to the threat facing Soon.
Although reliant on a knowledge of both Frank Herbert’s sprawling story of Dune and Herbert’s often heady and flowery prose, Ellis Weiner’s tongue-in-cheek Doon is a masterpiece, offering a perfect parody of Herbert’s novel and brilliantly and accurately mimicking his prose.
Join Corwyn Allen as he resumes his reading.
Wednesday, April 25th 19:00: A Selected View of George R.R. Marti
With Aoife Lorefield.
Thursday, April 25th 19:00: Monsters and Myths: Fafnir
With Shandon Loring. Also presented in Kitely (hop://grid.kitely.com:8002/Seanchai/144/129/29).
Please check with the Seanchai Library’s blog for updates and for additions or changes to the week’s schedule.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 