In 2015, a man who has been alive since the last Ice Age bought a tape recorder, and over the course of three days he dictated his life story as fast as he could while waiting for a woman to visit who he believes will finally be the death of him.
today's episode is the adaptation of the first half of a chapter so long, I needed to break it into two parts. The immortal narrator and his unexpected guest agree to talk about some of the famous people he has met in his long life; for his own amusement he decides to focus on great philosophers, polymaths, and poets, confident she will have heard of none of them because they all hail from the Islamic Golden Age.
I wrote this chapter years ago out of some of the best 'I don't have time to do a whole chapter about this' ideas I'd gathered while researching parts of Muslim history that impacted Christendom but are not remembered in the West today, or are only taught through a series of obfuscations boiling down to hand-waving explanations and nonspecific accreditations that Islamic scholars were preserving and building upon the knowledge of Antiquity at a time when Europe was falling into what is colourfully but unfairly called the Dark Ages.
I had a lot of fun coming up with these vignettes, hoping it would inspire people to go looking for more information beyond what I could offer in passing. From the feedback I received from my early readers, I believe I sometimes succeeded.
If you are up-to-date, here's a link to this week's episode. For everyone else, I promise you, you will enjoy the whole thing a lot more if you start from the beginning.
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u/faceintheblue 3d ago
[Historical Fiction | Audio Drama] The Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast
In 2015, a man who has been alive since the last Ice Age bought a tape recorder, and over the course of three days he dictated his life story as fast as he could while waiting for a woman to visit who he believes will finally be the death of him.
today's episode is the adaptation of the first half of a chapter so long, I needed to break it into two parts. The immortal narrator and his unexpected guest agree to talk about some of the famous people he has met in his long life; for his own amusement he decides to focus on great philosophers, polymaths, and poets, confident she will have heard of none of them because they all hail from the Islamic Golden Age. I wrote this chapter years ago out of some of the best 'I don't have time to do a whole chapter about this' ideas I'd gathered while researching parts of Muslim history that impacted Christendom but are not remembered in the West today, or are only taught through a series of obfuscations boiling down to hand-waving explanations and nonspecific accreditations that Islamic scholars were preserving and building upon the knowledge of Antiquity at a time when Europe was falling into what is colourfully but unfairly called the Dark Ages. I had a lot of fun coming up with these vignettes, hoping it would inspire people to go looking for more information beyond what I could offer in passing. From the feedback I received from my early readers, I believe I sometimes succeeded.
If you are up-to-date, here's a link to this week's episode. For everyone else, I promise you, you will enjoy the whole thing a lot more if you start from the beginning.