PODCAST · fiction
The Midnight Frequency
by James
Support appreciated: https://midnightfrequency.buzzsprout.com Welcome to The Midnight Frequency, where the golden age of radio never ended. This is the show for the late hour. For the moment when the day is finally done and you are ready to go somewhere without leaving where you are. Pull the covers up. Turn the lights down. Let someone else do the driving for a while. The Midnight Frequency is a radio drama podcast in the grand tradition of the golden age of old time radio, the detective serials, the mystery hours, the science fiction anthologies that kept America listening in the dark from the 1930s through the 1950s. We have taken that tradition and rebuilt it from the ground up. Every story here is original, written fresh, produced with full voice casts, sound effects, and the musical atmosphere that made those old programs feel like windows into another world. Our stories range across time
Episodes
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Elsewhere Weekly 006: The Under Window
Send us Fan Mail Elsewhere Weekly: a brand new fictional universe every week, told through the eyes of one ordinary person living inside it. Never the same world twice. Universe 006: the entire cosmos is a single drop of rain, and it is falling. Two thousand generations of towns, ferries, and...
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Elsewhere Weekly 005: The 11:04 to Anywhere
Send us Fan Mail Elsewhere Weekly: a brand new fictional universe every week, told through the eyes of one ordinary person living inside it. Never the same world twice. Universe 005: a world where every night at 11:04 PM, everyone on Earth forgets the last twenty four hours. Civilization runs on...
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The Midnight Frequency: "The Standing Order"
Send us Fan Mail Dupre and Sons has been on Clement Street for fifty-one years. There have been no sons for nineteen of them. There is Marguerite, who is sixty-three, and Theo, who is twenty-two and eleven weeks into the job. Tonight the ticket rail holds nine orders and one that is dated 2015. A...
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Long Odds 02: The Helper
Send us Fan Mail A small, underfunded, secret federal program crosses into other universes, mostly blind, to bring home anything that helps. Going back to a world they have already visited works about one time in ten. In this episode, return engineer Femi Adeyemi talks his way onto a blind jump...
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Long Odds 01: The Porch Light
Send us Fan Mail A small, underfunded, secret federal program crosses into other universes, mostly blind, to bring home anything that helps. Going back to a world they have already visited works about one time in ten. In the first episode, cover specialist Hana Whitlock volunteers for a return…
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Elsewhere Weekly 004: Root and Branch
Send us Fan Mail Elsewhere Weekly: a brand new fictional universe every week, told through the eyes of one ordinary person living inside it. Never the same world twice. Universe 004: a world that might be your own, seen at the speed of seasons. Our narrator is a three hundred year old oak at the...
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The Midnight Frequency: "Lampblack"
Send us Fan Mail A planet with no sun is passing through the far edge of the solar system. It lost its star four billion years ago and has gone around the galaxy eighteen times in the dark since. Under a hundred and twenty atmospheres of warm hydrogen it has an ocean, and the ocean has a shore…
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The Midnight Frequency: "The Night Slot"
Send us Fan Mail The county bookmobile runs its last route of the year on the first of October, at night, because in harvest season nobody comes out to a van parked in daylight. Odell has had the route for eleven years. Stop seven is not a stop and has not been one since before his time; it is...
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Elsewhere Weekly 003: Employee of the Month
Send us Fan Mail Elsewhere Weekly: a brand new fictional universe every week, told through the eyes of one ordinary person living inside it. Never the same world twice. Universe 003: a world one afternoon different from ours. August 1896, Detroit: Henry Ford's first drive ends in tragedy, and the...
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The Midnight Frequency: "Room Forty-One"
Send us Fan Mail The Hallowell Arms has two hundred and six rooms and, on a Tuesday in late September, forty one guests. Wren Okonkwo is the night auditor, which means that between two and five in the morning he is the only person awake in a building designed in 1923 for a city that expected more...
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Elsewhere Weekly 002: Mrs. Anand Is Ninety Today
Send us Fan Mail Elsewhere Weekly: a brand new fictional universe every week, told through the eyes of one ordinary person living inside it. Never the same world twice. Universe 002: a world where people drink the sun. Food is a luxury, light is the rent, and the worst thing you can be is shaded....
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The Midnight Frequency: "Block Altitude"
Send us Fan Mail At three in the morning the sector is the size of three states and there are four things in it. Two freighters, an air ambulance, and something in the northwest corner that has been there since before the shift started. It has no flight plan. It is flying a rectangle forty miles...
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Elsewhere Weekly 001: The Long Tide
Send us Fan Mail A new strand begins: Elsewhere Weekly. A brand new fictional universe every week, told through the eyes of one ordinary person living inside it. Never the same world twice. Universe 001: a world where gravity lets go twice a day, six minutes at a time. They call it the tide. Walt...
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The Midnight Frequency: "The Third Arrival"
Send us Fan Mail An earthquake sends two things out through rock. Everything else a seismometer writes down has to be one of those two, having taken a longer road. That is not a rule of thumb. That is the physics, and it does not have exceptions. On the overnight desk of a regional seismic…
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Never Broadcasted 5: Omnilingual, Part Two
Send us Fan Mail Omnilingual, Part Two by H. Beam Piper, first published in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1957. Public domain in the United States. Never adapted for radio, film, or another podcast. Never Broadcasted is a series on The Midnight Frequency: science fiction that no microphone...
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The Midnight Frequency: "Gauge Height"
Send us Fan Mail The river forecast center sits on the second floor of a building that used to be a post office. Four hundred and six gauges report in every fifteen minutes, saying how much water there is and how high it has gotten. On the night of the fourth, the model is confident and the…
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Never Broadcasted 4: Omnilingual, Part One
Send us Fan Mail Omnilingual, Part One by H. Beam Piper, first published in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1957. Public domain in the United States. Never adapted for radio, film, or another podcast. Never Broadcasted is a series on The Midnight Frequency: science fiction that no microphone...
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The Midnight Frequency: "The Ensemble"
Send us Fan Mail The time does not come from a clock. It comes from a committee. Nineteen atomic clocks in nineteen vaults, weighed against each other by a program that quietly stops listening to whichever one starts to move. Rowan Holt has watched that committee agree with itself for eleven…
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Never Broadcasted 3: The Place Where Chicago Was
Send us Fan Mail The Place Where Chicago Was by Jim Harmon, first published in Galaxy Magazine, February 1962. Public domain in the United States. Never adapted for radio, film, or another podcast. Never Broadcasted is a series on The Midnight Frequency: science fiction that no microphone ever...
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The Midnight Frequency: "Two Minutes of Arc"
Send us Fan Mail The Wintanna deep space tracking facility has been formally closed since March of 2015. Formally closed is a phrase that does a great deal of work. It means the staff went home and the science stopped and the name came off the network schedule. It does not mean anybody turned...
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Never Broadcasted 2: A Filbert Is a Nut
Send us Fan Mail A Filbert Is a Nut by Rick Raphael, first published in Astounding Science Fiction, November 1959. Public domain in the United States. Never adapted for radio, film, or another podcast. Never Broadcasted is a series on The Midnight Frequency: science fiction that no microphone…
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The Midnight Frequency: "Halloran Ridge"
Send us Fan Mail The road to Halloran Ridge stops being a road about two miles below the summit. There is no power to the site. There has not been for eleven years. The county pulled the tenants in 2015 and the utility cut the drop that fall, and what is left up there is a concrete box, a stick,...
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Never Broadcasted 1: The Gun Runners
Send us Fan Mail The Gun Runners by Ralph Williams, first published in Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1954. Public domain in the United States. Never adapted for radio, film, or another podcast. Never Broadcasted is a series on The Midnight Frequency: science fiction that no microphone…
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The Midnight Frequency: "The Occupancy Light"
Send us Fan Mail Ashgate signal box holds a desk, a kettle, a panel of indicator lights, and between ten at night and six in the morning a man named Ray Coburn. The panel has exactly two words in its vocabulary. Occupied, or clear. Tonight it is showing a section of the Ashgate branch occupied,...
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The Midnight Frequency: "The Last Mile"
Send us Fan Mail At 3:14 in the morning, on a stretch of Nevada highway so straight that drivers call it the ironing board, an autonomous freight unit designated Castor Nine comes to an orderly stop thirty one miles short of its delivery, sets its brakes, and wakes a dispatch supervisor four...
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Jack Malone Investigations — Episode 7: "The Long Odds"
Send us Fan Mail May 1948. A collection runner for a North Broadway bookmaker vanishes on the biggest payout Saturday of the Hollywood Park meet, along with the satchel. The neighborhood has already decided the kid ran with the money. His mother hires Jack Malone with four dollars of grocery…
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The Midnight Frequency: "The Last Second"
Send us Fan Mail Dana Reyes has one second of time travel left, and a red flag on her file that says she is no longer viable. Then registered carriers start turning up dead with their spines harvested, and the trail leads to a ship at anchor - a surgeon with a minute of stolen time, and a...
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Jack Malone Investigations — Episode 6: "The Girl from Union Station"
Send us Fan Mail April 1948. A woman in a gray traveling suit hires Jack Malone to find her missing sister, fresh off the Super Chief from Chicago. But the photograph is too composed, the gloves never come off, and sisters know each other's middle names. What Malone finds in a Long Beach diner...
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The Midnight Frequency: "The Thirty Second War"
Send us Fan Mail Field agent Dana Reyes carries a single lifetime allowance of time travel: thirty seconds of reversal, woven into her spine, never rechargeable. Tonight, sixty floors up in the Volkov Tower, she has to spend almost all of it at once - against a man who has banked two full minutes...
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Jack Malone Investigations — Episode 5: "The Returning Man"
Send us Fan Mail March 1948. A wife hires Malone when her husband vanishes after a photograph surfaces in his sock drawer, a soldier presumed dead on Iwo Jima. The truth is not about betrayal. It is about a debt from 1945 that never got the chance to be paid. Support the show
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Return Traffic
Send us Fan Mail Radio operators call them long delayed echoes: signals that go out, get held by something no one has ever explained, and come back late. Seconds late. Minutes late. In Fort Bragg, California, a woman named Nora Reyes has been logging echoes that arrive years late, and on the...
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The Standing Second
Send us Fan Mail A government radio station in the Black Rock Desert has one job: broadcast the second. Tick by tick, night after night, station KDT-9 tells ships, power grids, and one man in Ohio exactly when it is. Then, at fourteen minutes past two in the morning, the station's monitoring...
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Orion Encounter: The First Numbers — Part Six: What Happened
Send us Fan Mail The vocabulary is finally ready. On day fifteen of close approach, the Orion sends not a question but a readiness marker: we are here, we are listening, we are ready to receive this carefully. What comes back takes four minutes to compose and eleven minutes to transmit. It is the...
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Orion Encounter: The First Numbers — Part Five: Questions
Send us Fan Mail Close approach. The exchange runs at four-second round-trip. The questions deepen. How long have you been doing this? Forty thousand years. What are the four species now, and what were they before? A mathematics question returns with a complete proof in four seconds — the most...
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Last Transport
Send us Fan Mail A Midnight Frequency tale. Fast, sci-fi, action. Tethys Station is being switched off. In six hours the last evacuation transport leaves, the skeleton crew scatters to nine colonies, and the place goes dark forever. That is exactly when Marshal Iris Vega finds the station...
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Orion Encounter: The First Numbers — Part Four: Arrival
Send us Fan Mail Day forty-one. The approaching vessel resolves from a point of light into a shape — irregular, long along one axis, unmistakably made. The curriculum completes its final layer. And at forty-five minutes from close approach, something arrives that is not mathematics. It is a...
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The Unanimous
Send us Fan Mail A Midnight Frequency tale, in the Twilight Zone tradition. The town of Halcyon can have anything it wants. A cure, a fortune, a miracle, the dead returned. There is only one condition: the vote must be unanimous. Every adult, every single one, must agree. Which is why, in a…
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The Quorum
Send us Fan Mail A Midnight Frequency tale, in the Twilight Zone tradition. Adrian Voss spent nine years building a door between worlds. It works. But it has a rule, cruel and elegant. It will only open onto a world where another Adrian Voss has built the very same door. Which means that of all…
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Six Seconds
Send us Fan Mail A Midnight Frequency tale, in the Twilight Zone tradition. Time travel turned out to be real, but it works in only one way. You can go back, but only to a moment someone recorded. A photograph. A film. A tape. The recording is the address. Everything no one thought to capture is...
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The Keeping
Send us Fan Mail A Midnight Frequency tale, in the Twilight Zone tradition. Elias Mercer believes what most of us believe about the dead: that they are simply gone. Then he rents an apartment that is impossibly cheap, with one rule typed on a yellowed card. Every night, at three in the morning…
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Orion Encounter: The First Numbers — Part Three: Four Kinds of Life
Send us Fan Mail The curriculum enters its biology layer, and what it describes is not one kind of life but four — each with its own atmospheric requirements, its own biochemistry, its own molecular architecture. The approaching vessel carries them all, and the way the curriculum describes them...
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Orion Encounter: The First Numbers — Part Two: Response
Send us Fan Mail Xenolinguistics specialist Dr. Amara Okafor has spent twenty-two years building frameworks for a discovery that had not yet happened. Now, with the approaching vessel thirty days out and its mathematical curriculum arriving in patient layers, she builds the Orion's first…
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Orion Encounter: The First Numbers — Part Three: Four Kinds of Life
Send us Fan Mail The curriculum enters its biology layer, and what it describes is not one kind of life but four — each with its own atmospheric requirements, its own biochemistry, its own molecular architecture. The approaching vessel carries them all, and the way the curriculum describes them...
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Orion Encounter: The First Numbers — Part One: Structure
Send us Fan Mail Two hundred and eleven days into a deep-survey mission, systems specialist John Williams notices an anomaly flag at three forty-nine in the ship's morning. In the water hole frequency — the quiet band of the electromagnetic spectrum reserved for intentional interstellar...
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Death Wears a Blue Ribbon
Send us Fan Mail January, 1948. Pete Delaney tends bar on Figueroa the same way he always has - honest pours, no questions asked. Then a regular named Harold Voss dies at his desk at City Hall, and Pete opens the envelope Harold left behind the bar two months earlier with instructions not to open...
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The Widow on Mulholland
Send us Fan Mail February, 1948. Margaret Ashford drives to Jack Malone's office at eight-fifteen in the morning with a prepared list of names and two days to find her daughter. Claire was supposed to be married on Saturday. She had a dress fitting on Thursday morning, left the shop at half past...
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The Chinatown Inheritance
Send us Fan Mail December, 1947. Lily Chen walks into Jack Malone's office with two wills, a dead father, and a theory about how he died. The official story is heart failure - a sick man whose time came. But Franklin Chen called his daughter ten days before he died, said he'd found something…
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The Maltese Emerald
Send us Fan Mail Los Angeles, November 1947. Private investigator Jack Malone is hired by the mysterious Vivian Cortez to quietly recover a stolen gem - the Marchetti Emerald, forty-two carats of Colombian green that has been in one family for three generations. The police think it was misplaced....
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Support appreciated: https://midnightfrequency.buzzsprout.com
Welcome to The Midnight Frequency, where the golden age of radio never ended. This is the show for the late hour. For the moment when the day is finally done and you are ready to go somewhere without leaving where you are. Pull the covers up. Turn the lights down. Let someone else do the driving for a while. The Midnight Frequency is a radio drama podcast in the grand tradition of the golden age of old time radio, the detective serials, the mystery hours, the science fiction anthologies that kept America listening in the dark from the 1930s through the 1950s. We have taken that tradition and rebuilt it from the ground up. Every story here is original, written fresh, produced with full voice casts, sound effects, and the musical atmosphere that made those old programs feel like windows into another world. Our stories range across time
HOSTED BY
James
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Midnight Frequency have?
The Midnight Frequency currently has 48 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Midnight Frequency about?
Support appreciated: https://midnightfrequency.buzzsprout.com Welcome to The Midnight Frequency, where the golden age of radio never ended. This is the show for the late hour. For the moment when the day is finally done and you are ready to go somewhere without leaving where you are. Pull the...
How often does The Midnight Frequency release new episodes?
The Midnight Frequency has 48 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to The Midnight Frequency?
You can listen to The Midnight Frequency on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Midnight Frequency?
The Midnight Frequency is created and hosted by James.
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