The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast - Vintage Sci-Fi Short Stories

Lem was told to guard the still, what he wanted was to go after the Martins. The Martins and The Coys had been feuding for some time and there was nothing better than shootin a Martin. Or was there? That’s next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.

Support the show - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/scottsV

Merch - https://lostscifi.creator-spring.com/

Sign up for our newsletter

https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/266431/102592606683269000/share

Your honest 5 star ratings and positive reviews on Apple Podcasts are really appreciated. Thanks to mxsandy12 for his recent 5 star rating and review, Awesome look into old school sci fi! Love this pod! A perfect pod for people who love the genre! Thanks mxsandy

Todays author on Lost Sci-Fi led an interesting life. He was a popular and prolific author starting his sci-fi career with the short story Isolationist which ran in the April 1950 edition of Fantastic Adventures magazine. Fantastic Adventures got its start in 1939 and was almost cancelled in 1940 but the October issue that year had unexpectedly good sales so the magazine continued until March 1953. Our author sold another 6 stories to Fantastic Adventures in 1950 and 12 more in 1950 which were published in Out of This World Adventures, Startling Stories, Fantastic Adventures and others.

A year later his first novel hit store shelves in 1951 titled The Case of the Little Green Men. It’s believed that the first use of the term Little Green Men in reference to extraterrestrials in a newspaper dates back to 1908. It can be found in the oldest newspaper in Maine the Daily Kennebec Journal. The 1951 novel The Case of the Little Green Men is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats.

A decade would pass before this author would release another novel in 1961. There were 22 novels in the 60s, 35 in the 70s and 10 more in the 1980s. In addition to his almost 70 novels, he wrote almost 200 short stories.

Born Dallas McCord Reynolds on November 11th, 1917, in Corcoran, California, he is best known as Mack Reynolds but like most of his successful contemporaries he had a variety of pen names, including Dallas Ross, Mark Mallory, Clark Collins, Guy McCord, Maxine Reynolds, Bob Belmont, and Todd Harding.

His family moved to Baltimore in 1918 and his father became a member of the Socialist Labor Party or SLP. He joined the Socialist Labor Party while he was still in high school and shortly thereafter began touring the country with his father giving lectures and speeches about SLP. His father Verne La Rue Reynolds was the Socialist Labor Party Presidential Candidate in both 1928 and 1932. After graduation Reynolds began his writing career as a reporter for the Catskill Morning Star and then as editor of the weekly Oneonta News.

He moved back to California and continued his work for the Socialist Labor Party even campaigning with SLP presidential candidate John Aiken in 1940. He attended the U.S. Army Marine Officer's Cadet School and the U.S. Marine Officer's School, joined the U.S. Army Transportation Corps in 1944 and was stationed in the Philippines as a ship's navigator until 1945.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We have an amazing story for you today on the podcast, certainly one of the most fascinating stories we’ve ever heard. This author lived a pretty extraordinary life. He was hired by legendary Hollywood director Alfred Hitchcock to write a screenplay for what would become one of Hitchcock’s greatest movies. It was one of several screenplays written by our featured author. Actors who starred in projects he wrote and developed for the big screen and Television include Richard Chamberlain, F. Murray Abraham, Ben Johnson, Jerry Orbach, Robby Benson, Raquel Welch, Burt Reynolds, Yul Brynner, Tom Skerritt , Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak, Barbara Rush, Walter Matthau, Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, and Suzanne Pleshette. Wow! If You’re a movie buff you may have already guessed that the Hitchcock classic he wrote the screenplay for was, The Birds.

Support the show - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/scottsV

Merch - https://lostscifi.creator-spring.com/

Sign up for our newsletter

https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/266431/102592606683269000/share

Before Hitchcock and Hollywood our author served on a destroyer in the Pacific in the Navy during World War II. We’re just getting started. He wrote more than 139 novels over 53 years! That’s an average of a little more than 2 and a half novels a year for more than half a century.

He was born in East Harlem New York in 1926. Born Salvatore Albert Lombino, he legally changed his name to Evan Hunter in 1952, but before he did, he sold a short science fiction story to If, Worlds of Science Fiction Magazine. In the magazine, which had made its debut two months earlier in March 1952, he is credited with writing “Welcome, Martians!” As S.A. Lombino which as fas I can tell was one of only a handful of times he used his real name. So why the name change? Well, as the story goes an editor once told him his Italian heritage might stop him from achieving great success, so SA Lombino became Evan Hunter.

Oh, and if you think you recognize the name Evan Hunter, you’re probably right. Lombino took a number of jobs in the early 1950’s to pay the bills while attempting to get his writing career off the ground. One of them led to a novel, which became a movie, starring Glenn Ford, Sidney Pointier, Vic Morrow and Anne Francis. He spent 17 days as a teacher at the Bronx Vocational High School in September 1950. That experience led to his 6th novel titled The Blackboard Jungle which became the movie of the same name starring the previously mentioned star studded cast. Lombino, or Hunter had several pen names John Abbott, Curt Cannon, Hunt Collins, Ezra Hannon, Richard Marsten and then there’s the name he used most often, Ed McBain! As McBain he wrote the “87th Precinct” crime series. Once again his novels made their way to Television. In 1961 and 62 NBC aired a police drama called “87th Precinct”. He started writing for television in 1956 with a teleplay for "The Kaiser Aluminum Hour" which aired on NBC in 1956 and 57 and he wrote the story for two episodes of "Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer" a syndicated TV show, two years later in 1958 and 59.

I chose this story because it’s unusual. A story written by a writer, about a writer getting a little help from a bizarre source.

Writing stories was hard work—unless Fred had a typewriter like "Reggie" that could write by itself! Nonsense? Fred agreed until he met—The Plagiarist From Rigel IV By Evan Hunter...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, featuring sci-fi short stories from the 1940s, 50s and 60s with a few from the 1930s and one from 1899. In this episode we’ll tell you who we are, how we got started and why we’re doing the Lost Sci-Fi Podcast and it will be the only episode that does not include at least one lost sci-fi short story.

Hi I’m Scott Miller audiobook narrator and your host for the Lost Sci-Fi Podcast. I’ve been narrating audiobooks for almost a decade and last year I discovered these amazing sci-fi short stories and wondered why the vast majority of them have never been available as audiobooks. The answer is probably that they haven’t been viewed as profitable since most of them are less than an hour long. To me this is a passion project, something I love to do and I want to share these stories with you at the lowest possible price. You can’t beat free so even though these audiobooks are available for sale, I decided to include at least one lost sci-fi short story in every episode of our podcast. I say at least one because some of the stories are less than 20 minutes long. When we have an episode with a story under 20 minutes we’ll include another short story. You can listen to any episode you want, in any order you want because you’ll hear the whole story or stories in every episode. So what kind of stories will you hear? Aliens, Asteroids, Space Ships, Space travelers, Time Travelers, Robots, Criminals, Scientists, Space Pirates, Space Colonies, Castaways and more. When you consider that these stories were written 60 to 100 years ago or more you’ll be amazed that these writers were, in some ways, actually predicting the future.

Episode #1 features Philip K Dick and in later episodes you’ll hear from Ray Bradbury, Alan E. Nourse and hundreds of authors you’ve never even heard of. All with fascinating stories to tell, most of which have never been recorded before and most of them have never been available as audiobooks. We hope you enjoy the lost sci-fi podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today on the lost sci-fi podcast we’ll feature an author born in Colorado Springs, Colorado on June 20th, 1911. Our featured author is a pretty talented guy. He studied writing at the University of Colorado in Boulder and drawing, painting and lithography at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. His art was so good that some of his paintings of Indian ceremonial dances are part of the permanent collection at the Denver Art Museum. Keeping true to his Colorado roots he worked as an assistant curator of the Colorado State Historical Museum during the 1940s.

Support the show - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/scottsV

Merch - https://lostscifi.creator-spring.com/

Sign up for our newsletter

https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/266431/102592606683269000/share

He was also talented in the literary arts, having written over 200 stories and articles, poems, essays and one novel. In 1948 he published a chapbook, The Sphinx Child. What is a chapbook you ask? It’s a small collection of poems.

From Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy in April 1955 enjoy this lost sci-fi short story written by Stanley Mullen. Earthmen had never ventured into the vast unknown beyond the galaxy. But now a survey was ordered and a ship sent out. So Braun went on—The Voyage Of Vanishing Men...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The author of today’s short sci-fi story had an interesting life. Born on August 11th 1928 in Des Moines Iowa, after graduating high school he went to Rutgers University, two years in the Navy, then on to the University of Pennsylvania to become a Doctor. He helped pay for his medical degree by writing science fiction for magazines. In a 1952 issue of Other Worlds he said he started reading science fiction while at Rutgers and was reading sci-fi like a man possessed. Saying he ended up being the most incurable type of science fiction addict, the kind that has to write it as well as read it!

Support the show - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/scottsV

Merch - https://lostscifi.creator-spring.com/

Sign up for our newsletter

https://dashboard.mailerlite.com/forms/266431/102592606683269000/share

He wrote more than 30 short stories and more than a dozen novels. If dating, getting married, college, medical school, the US Navy, writing for science fiction magazines and publishing his first novel weren’t enough in the first 5 years of the 1950’s, he also found the time to make 4 appearances on television as an actor, including one during the 8 year run of the The Philco Television Playhouse.

And if that wasn’t enough, the Good Doctor had a column in Good Housekeeping Magazine. In 1965 he wrote a nonfiction book titled “Intern” under the pseudonym Doctor X.

His legal name? Alan Edward Nourse. He’s perhaps better known as Alan E. Nourse.

In the first episode of the Lost Sci-Fi podcast we mentioned that Philip K. Dicks Sci-Fi Novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” became the movie Blade Runner. But did you know that the movie got its name, not the content, the name and name only from the 1974 novel written by Alan E Nourse The Blade Runner? 3 minutes and 7 seconds after the credits for Blade Runner start you’ll see these words on the screen, With Thanks to Alan E Nourse for the use of the title Blade Runner. It really is 3 minutes and 7 seconds, yea, I’m weird like that.

Matt had to destroy the rocket because it was a symbol of evil that had brought economic disaster. But must he also destroy—the future? From Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy in March 1954 - The Fifty-Fourth of July written by Alan E Nourse...

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.