The Liars’ League ‘Infinity & Beyond’ night last Tuesday was a suitably epic affair, with five superb stories and five amazing performances. Tony Bell did a fantastic job with my story, Frozen Futures, elevating every word, and the video is now up on YouTube.
Each of the other four stories was very different, showing just how widely a theme can be interpreted. Wan Shinfah’s London 2025, read by Cliff Chapman, was an expertly timed and controlled story about time-travel disaster tourism. Proxima Centauri, written by Oliver Parkes and read by Greg Page, about the clone crew of an interstellar colony ship, was the most traditionally sci-fi tale and built up slowly to a devastating climax. Alice Franklin’s How to be an Astronaut, read by Gloria Saunders, was a fun meditation on dead-end jobs and childhood dreams, while The Martlet, read by Lois Tucker and written by Abigail Lee, was an elegiac tale about a woman haunted by recurring visions of a heraldic bird, referencing Bede’s description of life as being like a bird flying briefly through the noise and light of a mead hall before disappearing once again into the dark beyond.
