Having just finished listening to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I thought that I’d follow it up with @Jonprevans recommendation ‘The Machine Stops’; a short story which is just as prominent today, perhaps even moreso, as when it was written 100 years ago in 1909. It tells a story way ahead of its time, referring to technology we take advantage of today, like video chat. Interestingly though, despite being written at such a time it almost serves as a real life premonition of how we seemingly rely totally on ‘the machine’. It’s hard not to relate this to the mass panic amongst gMail users yesterday who couldn’t access their mail for a few hours.
As the story is now in the public domain, it’s accessible for free to read online. Services like Project Guttenberg offer a range as well as services like Scribd; which I recently used to read The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. However, I found it listed on Librivox; a site devoted to recording public domain books as audiobooks through a method of crowd sourcing. Members of the community are able to read, and upload a chapter of a book. This offers a service that is much better than previous services which used synthetic computer voices recordings of public domain material. I still haven’t listened to Dracula, or Frankenstein which I downloaded as synthetic recordings last summer. However, both are featured on Librivox (although Frankenstein is still in the process of being recorded). You can download chapters as individual files, but Librivox also allows you to download them as part of podcasts, or be alerted when new chapters of a book have been added to the project.
