Voyage - BBC Radio Drama & The NASA Trilogy - Stephen Baxter

Category: Adults, Full Cast, Radio Productions, Sci-Fi
Language: English
Keywords: Alternate History First Steps Science Fiction The Expanse

Written by Stephen Baxter
Read by Full Cast, Kevin Kenerly
Format: M4B
Bitrate: Variable
Unabridged

Stephen Baxter’s NASA Trilogy & a radio dramatisation of the first book which was broadcast in 1990.

The audiobooks sounded quite sibilant and a little harsh to my ears, so I ran them though desibilator to smooth that out. All three are encoded as FDK VBR 5 chaptered m4b.

I have included two copies of the BBC radio drama. The mp3s are standard stereo but with matrixed pro-logic surround if you have home cinema audio equipment.

The other copy has crossfeed headphone enhancement for a more natural, binaural-like soundscape.

Voyage - A BBC Radio 4 Full-Cast Dramatisation by Dirk Maggs

After the moon, Mars… What if John F. Kennedy survived the assassination attempt and developed the space programme?

President Nixon, with the help of former president JFK, has just green-lit NASA’s first manned expedition to Mars. Aboard the expedition is Natalie York, a geologist who risks everything she loves for the chance to go to space; Phil Stone, former X-15 test pilot; and Ralph Gershon, a Vietnam War hero intent on being the first African American to reach another planet.

Exploring mankind’s ambitions in space, Voyage chronicles the incredible story of what could have been.

Cast:
Natalie York…Laurel Lefkow
Mike Conlig…William Dufris
Gregory Dana…Michael Roberts
Joe Muldoon…Vincent Marzello
Chuck Jones…Frank Lazarus
Jim Dana…Russell Bentley
Ben Priest…William Roberts
Ralph Gershon…Mel Taylor
Phil Stone…Rolf Saxon

Based on the novel by Stephen Baxter
Produced and directed by Dirk Maggs
Music by Wilfredo Acosta

VOYAGE - NARRATED BY KEVIN KENERLY

The space mission of a lifetime

An epic saga of America’s might-have-been, Voyage is a powerful, sweeping novel of how, if President Kennedy had lived, we could have sent a manned mission to Mars in the 1980s.

Imaginatively created from the true lives and real events, Voyage returns to the geniuses of NASA and the excitement of the Saturn rocket and includes historical figures from Neil Armstrong to Ronald Reagan who are interwoven with unforgettable characters whose dreams mirror the promise of a young space program that held the world in thrall.

TITAN - NARRATED BY KEVIN KENERLY

Signs of life have been found on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.

A group of visionaries led by NASA’s Paula Benacerraf plan a daring one-way mission that will cost them everything. Taking nearly a decade, the billion-mile voyage includes a ‘slingshot’ transit of Venus, a catastrophic solar storm, and a constant struggle to keep the ship and crew functioning.

But it is on the icy surface of Titan itself that the true adventure begins. In the orange methane slush, the astronauts will discover the secrets of life’s origins and reach for a human destiny beyond their wildest dreams.

MOONSEED - NARRATED BY KEVIN KENERLY

It started the night Geena and Henry broke up. What was that strange light in the sky? A new star? A comet? Neither. It was the death of Venus.

As if to commemorate the end of NASA’s golden couple, our neighbor planet exploded into a brilliant cloud of dust and debris, showering the Earth with radiation and bizarre particles as big as bacteria - a 10-dimensional superstring nanovirus that literally eats rock, transforming it into liquid, and then into molecule-size black holes that devour the very fabric of space-time.

Feasting on Edinburgh’s primeval basalt, Moonseed is steadily eating its way toward Earth’s core. The death toll rises by the hour, as buildings collapse into streets that flow like water, as hundred-foot tsunamis obliterate Seattle and Vancouver, and as volcanoes sprout like weeds across the planet’s quickly decaying mantle…

Audacious beyond comparison, grand in conception, and gripping in execution, Moonseed is the first modern novel to do justice to the awesome terror and promise implicit in quantum physics. Like all of Baxter’s work, it blazes new paths from which science fiction will surely follow in the years to come, and becomes required listening for anyone wishing to understand the awesome promise - and threat - revealed by modern science.