We launched The Mark Steyn Club six years ago, and I'm truly grateful to all those members across the globe who've signed up to be a part of it - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Cook County to the Cook Islands, West Virginia to the West Midlands. If you've enjoyed our Steyn Club audio adventures, well, so have I - and I'm glad, health issues notwithstanding, that they're back.
So welcome to Part Two of our summer diversion, my variation on a theme of H G Wells: Out of Time. Steyn Club First Weekend Founding Member Josh Passell writes:
Without giving anything away, I think we're in for a tale of all time.
Well, we'll see about that. Out of Time starts as does The Time Machine, with Wells's time-traveller of 1895 setting his sights on a voyage to the year 802,701. Unfortunately, in my version, he falls a little short:
I glanced at the dial. Nineteen-fortysomething. I had assumed we must be in the AD 100,000s or 200,000s by now, not just a dismal half-century on. My chest felt as if it would burst and my ears were ringing with the sounds of time echoing down the millennia. I looked again at my meters. 1977... 1981... I reached up to wipe the sweat from my brow, and knocked my hat off, to leave it for some lucky fellow in 1984. And somehow the loss of millinery cleared my head, and my mind came round to the business of stopping...
1993... 1998... The third millennium arrived, and emboldened me: I told myself that I would never stop! 2002... 2008... And then I felt sicker than ever and with a gust of petulance I resolved to cease forthwith. 2023... 2024...
Among the dramatis personae are three of the cricketers pictured above: E W Hornung, P G Wodehouse and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Joining them in this episode is Rudyard Kipling.
To hear me read the second episode of Out of Time, please click here and log-in. If you missed Part One, you'll find that here.
Tales for Our Time started as an experimental feature we introduced as a bonus for Mark Steyn Club members, and, as you know, I said if it was a total stinkeroo, we'd eighty-six the thing and speak no more about it. But I'm thrilled to say it's proved very popular, and and we now have quite an archive. If you're a Club member and you incline more to the stinkeroo side of things, give it your best in the Comments Section below.
If you seek alternative dystopias, do check out our brace of Orwellian adaptations - Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four - or even a contemporary inversion of a classic, retooled for our wretched times, by yours truly. Whatever your taste, we have plenty of other yarns in all genres over on our Tales for Our Time home page.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to Out of Time but to all our other audio adventures.
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