Bewildering Stories Editorial

by Jerry Wright

We Get Letters...

One of the very cool things about this extremely low paying job (negative cash-flow, kiddies) is that I do get interesting letters and packages. I just got four books from TokyoPop (a noted publisher of Japanese stuff like manga, and so forth) to be reviewed sometime in October. They are aimed at the 10-14 year old market and should do right well. And they seemed to be based on some popular anime I've never heard of, like Scrapped Princess. Hmmm.

And of course Mike Leier just finished and uploaded his third audio adventure of Rick Vargo, coming in at a hefty 38 megabytes. No fun for dialup. Which is how he sent it. And then, right on the heels of that, we get an invitation to review another audio bit of goodness from an outfit called "Silent Universe" at http://www.silentuniverse.com. These are some major audio productions, extremely professional. And while the stereo super-hi-res CD quality version costs $2.49 to download, the lo-res mono version is free. And frankly, while the story is quite listenable in lo-res, two things come to mind. One is that these guys need to be supported, and two, it's only $2.49. And... Maybe if you are on dialup, you could send them an extra buck and they could send it to you on a CD. I don't know at present.

At this point, they have two episodes available for your IPod or other mp3 player, with episode three coming up shortly.

One of the things that boggles my mind is that while the heavy duty version is huge, they were able to compress the lo-res version down to 6.7 megabytes. We need to learn THAT trick.

I haven't had a chance to listen to any but a bit of the story, so I'll give you a more detailed review next issue. One thing that makes SU different is that the forum and emails allow the listeners input into the story. So "interactive?" well, something like that.

Speaking of letters, I got an interesting missive from Bob of the Blevins, aka Adventure Books. He is looking for comments from "the real world" (as much as SF fans can be considered the real world) in regards to Global Warming. The comments will collected and edited into a book for 2007.

Bob tells me he is looking for all sorts of viewpoints. If you are doing your part for reducing your carbon output, or you doubt that man's contribution makes that much difference, head on over to Adventure Books, and voice your opinion. Yeah, I know it is www.discountebooks.net but that isn't MY fault.