A hungry man climbs downward through Underwoods, where arithmetic briefly holds back the panic.
An empty raisin box opens the episode on a note of ordinary lack, then the story steadily turns that lack into something closer to existential panic.

Michael Hanson
483 episodes listed below
Strange stories, calmly read into the dark.
Mind Webs - Nighttime Radio presents literary science fiction as measured spoken drama, often beginning with an office, beach, lighthouse, apartment, or spacecraft. From there, practical systems fail, private longings take form, and the world tilts into dread.
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Mind Webs - Nighttime Radio is an anthology of short speculative fiction shaped for the ear with a grave, deliberate sense of arrival. The stories often begin in places that seem legible. A guard room has a security panel. A clerk has a terminal. A lighthouse has a foghorn. A meadowed planet has flowers, hills, and gentle animals. Then the ordinary mechanism starts giving the wrong answer, and the wrong answer becomes the story. The series is especially good at making systems feel haunted: housing rules, museum circuitry, scientific manuals, political security, language itself. Its imagination is concrete rather than ornamental. A man weighs a brick dome against the sea because bricks are what he knows. A lonely woman handles a dictionary until words become a body and the pages go blank. A senator runs a track while alarms, crowds, and weapons close the world around him. A sea creature answers a foghorn with the terrible dignity of something older than human memory. The show does not rush these reversals. It waits in the room long enough for procedure, desire, and fear to become indistinguishable. Many episodes carry a dry irony, especially when official language or technical confidence meets something too strange to classify. Others move with a sadder force, finding the end of a town, a species, or a private hope inside a speculative premise. The production is spare enough that the prose remains central. Its best moments feel less like scenes being decorated than like documents being read from a world adjacent to this one. Mind Webs - Nighttime Radio suits listeners drawn to classic science fiction, uncanny literary horror, and philosophical endings that do not soften themselves. It can be eerie, bleak, and very still. It can also be wry, especially when humans bring manuals to mysteries and believe the manuals will be enough. The result is old-fashioned radio storytelling with a cold, durable edge.
Made for: For listeners who like classic speculative fiction, literary radio drama, and uncanny stories that build through atmosphere rather than action. It especially suits patient ears drawn to dread, irony, and philosophical endings.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its austere presentation of high-concept fiction as intimate spoken narrative. Instead of loud sound design or conversational framing, it trusts exact images, procedural detail, and the slow collapse of ordinary logic.
A surreal sci-fi series exploring speculative concepts, dreams, and philosophical what-ifs. Each episode is a cerebral journey into the mind’s deepest questions.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Mind Webs gives speculative short fiction a patient radio voice, preserving both its conceptual puzzles and the human unease inside them.
Mind Webs turns published science-fiction stories into narrated radio performances, with Michael Hanson introducing the work and returning at the close to identify its author and publication history.
A mercury jungle, a toy planet, an endless escalator: bedtime stories for brains that refuse bedtime.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A hungry man climbs downward through Underwoods, where arithmetic briefly holds back the panic.
An empty raisin box opens the episode on a note of ordinary lack, then the story steadily turns that lack into something closer to existential panic.
A borrowed body, a crystal jungle, and a mission racing against returning instincts.
Joseph Green's "Treasure Hunt" sends Soames Chesedony out of an alien tower in a borrowed body, afraid, disoriented, and trying to hold on to himself. The story's strongest idea is simple and nasty: beauty is not decoration here, but a hazard.
A black-hole flight plan turns into a causality puzzle when Probe 3 returns before the Ulysses leaves.
Singularities Make Me Nervous makes a black-hole mission feel less like spectacle than a pressure test on ordinary judgment. George Cox is calculating around stocks while the Ulysses is being readied, carrying memories of cold sleep and altered stars, and then Probe 3 returns…
A spaceman returns to a familiar street and a home that no longer feels like his.
Paul comes back to Earth after six years in space, only to find that home is the most unsettling place of all. The street still has its mottled stone, cracked sidewalk, and scraggly sycamore tree, but the details do not settle him.
A domestic conversation about rejuvenation opens into the horror of life slipping beyond memory.
Edward Macken's The Unremembered begins with an ordinary domestic complaint about stew prices and reckless sporter flibs, then lets that talk darken into a story about what rejuvenation may cost. Timothy and Mrs.
A spare, eerie radio drama where Miss Coates's loneliness grows into ritual and leaves a stark final impression.
Mind Webs lets Greg Baer's Webster settle into a quiet, uncanny portrait of Miss Coates. Her loneliness turns methodical, and the dictionary reading feels less like a habit than a private rite.
A pretty planet turns uneasy as reports, a shaft, and a strange little creature push the crew toward a literal warning.
A pretty world lures a landing party into a controlled, uneasy visit. Captain Killpepper distrusts the landscape before the reports even settle: breathable atmosphere, no dangerous microorganisms, nil bacteria, a clear radar graph, and only one distant metallic mass to explain.
A broadcast-haunted apocalypse turns names and presence into the last things worth knowing.
The episode lets a world slip into darkness while radios and blank screens start speaking in borrowed voices, and the arrival of the ships only deepens the unease.


Four McElroys narrate a wizard battle-royale tournament across elimination trials on Octave Ziggurat.

A continuous Fabula Ultima actual-play campaign following one party through the world of Perpetua.

An ensemble cast plays teen superheroes through Masks: A New Generation campaigns and guest one-shots.

A recurring cast plays full Pathfinder 2E, Shadowdark, and Pendragon campaigns session by session.

A Dungeon World actual-play campaign following three comedians battling villain Callum Blackhammer.
Mind Webs - Nighttime Radio presents Thomas M.
Joseph Green’s “Treasure Hunt” follows Professor Soames Chesedony after his companions revive him from legally completed euthanasia and transfer his mind into a wheeled alien body.
Mind Webs - Nighttime Radio presents Larry Niven's "Singularities Make Me Nervous," a science-fiction story about George Cox returning from a 26-year space mission to his own past.
Mind Webs - Nighttime Radio presents Robert Silverberg's 1957 science-fiction story "Look Homeward Spaceman," in which Paul Robinson returns after six years in space to find a younger duplicate of himself at his family's house.
Mind Webs - Nighttime Radio presents Edward Macken’s 1965 science-fiction story “The Unremembered,” set in a future of automated food production and rejuvenation clinics.
This episode features a reading of the science fiction short story 'Young Girl at an Open Half Door' by Fred Saberhagen, originally published in 1968, beginning with a narrator arriving at an institute at night.
This episode presents a science fiction story titled 'Apartment Hunting' by Harvey and Audrey Bilker, edited by Roger Elwood and published by Pocketbooks.
This episode features Ursula Le Guin's short story 'The End' from the anthology Orbit 6, exploring themes of longing and reflection by the sea.
This episode features a reading from Josephine Saxton's story 'Nature Boy' about a character named Arthur observing his mother's unusual behavior involving honey and bitters.
Miss Coates lives alone with her Bible and her dictionary.
A surreal sci-fi series exploring speculative concepts, dreams, and philosophical what-ifs.
Paradise makes Killpepper uneasy.
The episode opens with an ad for Ottawa's advanced hospital, then shifts to Philip K.
A classic sci-fi story about a rocket crew forced to land on a jungle planet.
A surreal sci-fi series exploring speculative concepts and philosophical what-ifs through narrative storytelling.
A sci-fi story about a scientist analyzing data to recommend a critical course of action to a council.
Smoke rises from three places at once, and every radio and television set starts speaking with the voices of beings from the Crab Nebula.
Explorer Alfred Dixon tests a new silent disintegrator weapon on an alien planet while checking signal stations.
A classic sci-fi story about a crew forced to land on a jungle planet for repairs.
A dramatic reading of Ray Bradbury's classic sci-fi story 'The Veldt' about a virtual reality nursery.
A reading of a dystopian sci-fi short story about a man stuck in traffic in a polluted world.
A reading of Robert Sheckley's sci-fi story 'The Petrified World' about a man haunted by a recurring dream.
A surreal sci-fi episode exploring beauty and aging through a character's introspection in a motel room.
A surreal sci-fi series exploring speculative concepts through narrative fiction, with this episode featuring Marion Zimmer Bradley's story about a city girl's encounter with butterflies.
A surreal sci-fi series exploring speculative concepts and philosophical questions through narrative fiction.
In a surreal sci-fi narrative, a poet liberates Mallow and other dreamers from a sentient city that has enslaved human minds for centuries.
In a speculative future, Hal Page throws a lavish final party after receiving a notice to repay his massive 300-year debt to society.
A surreal sci-fi series exploring speculative concepts and philosophical what-ifs through fictional narratives.
A personal injury lawyer advertisement for accident victims in Texas.
A surreal sci-fi series exploring speculative concepts, dreams, and philosophical what-ifs through narrative storytelling.
This episode features a reading of Avram Davidson's science fiction story 'Or All the Seas with Oysters' from The Hugo Winters anthology edited by Isaac Asimov, beginning with a scene in a bike shop where Oscar recognizes a customer.
This episode explores the concept that experiences bring more lasting joy than material possessions, using AutoCamp as an example of meaningful outdoor experiences.
A man is forcibly branded in a dark room beneath a courthouse and left without explanation.
A surreal sci-fi series exploring speculative concepts, dreams, and philosophical what-ifs.
A surreal sci-fi series exploring speculative concepts and philosophical what-ifs through short stories.
This episode features a reading of Philip K.
This episode explores themes of imprisonment and dehumanization through a science fiction story about survivors from an interstellar liner being treated as animals by a survey ship crew.
This episode of Mind Webs features the science fiction short story 'Phoenix' by Ted White and Marion Zimmer Bradley from the anthology 'The Best from Amazing Stories'.
This episode features the short story 'Paradise Regained' by Cogswell Thomas from the 1973 book 'Saving Worlds', presented as part of the speculative fiction series Mind Webs.