Beginner’s Guide to ars PARADOXICA
An awesome monthly narrative podcast about a physicist from the future named Sally Grissom who accidentally sends herself back in time to the Cold War-which quickly becomes the least of her problems.
Here’s the official summary:
“ars PARADOXICA is a love letter to physics, fiction, and the future. It’s a disorienting journey through spacetime and the Cold War. It’s a tome of secret history you stumbled across in a library in the dead of night.
It’s also a serial audio drama.
When an experiment in a time much like our own goes horribly awry, Dr. Sally Grissom finds herself stranded in the past and entrenched in the activities of a clandestine branch of the US government. Grissom and her team quickly learn that there’s no safety net when toying with the fundamental logic of the universe.”
Well-written asexual female physicist protagonist who is both a genius and a dork
Explorations of time travel mechanisms that are complex and well thought-out
Interesting mysteries with a time-travel twist
Secret ciphers at the end of each episode
Las Vegas road trip for fun and for science
Complex, emotionally-rich characters
Cool fandom (hopefully, that’ll include you soon!)
The head writer is Daniel Manning, and the producer and story editor is Mischa Stanton, who also co-produces The Bright Sessions. The rest of the writing team includes Julian Mundy, Tau Zaman, Eli Barraza, Zach Ehrlich, and Danielle Shemaiah Pointer.
On the performance side, the lead role of Sally Grissom is played by Kristen DiMercurio. Other lead members of the cast include Reyn Beeler (Chet Whickman), Katie Speed (Esther Roberts), Dan Anderson (Hank Cornish), and Robin Gabrielli (Anthony Partridge).
You can learn more about this lovely group of time travel enthusiasts on the writer’s page: here, and on the cast page: here. I’ve linked to their tumblrs/twitters/websites on their respective names if I could find them.
The official website for ars PARADOXICA with different ways to listen to and support the podcast is here. Check it out to read some of the press coverage, subscribe to their charming newsletter, or to listen to their round-table podcast Timelapse about time travel in fiction.
You can also find them on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or email them at arsparadoxica.gmail.com. You can also support them on their Patreon page.
Last but not least, here’s how you can actually listen to ars PARADOXICA. Luckily, there are so many ways to listen to podcasts nowadays that it’s probably on your favorite podcast service already. To quote the writers themselves: “If it’s ars PARADOXICA, it’s probably us.”
It’s currently available on Itunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and directly on their website. A new episode is released on the first day of each month, and patron-only minisodes are released in the middle of the month. Remember to start from episode one, and to listen chronologically from there!
