BEHIND THE MICROPHONE
About Continental Radio
Books, voices, and the worlds between them.
FROM PAGE TO AIR
The script desk
A head writer adapts the book into a production script — dialogue, cues, and a cliffhanger per episode. Each story finds its own shape on the air.
The repertory company
Our players are designed voices — cast for their characters, not borrowed from an actor's likeness. The foley desk and the orchestra pit are synthetic too.
The transmitter
Episodes are mixed, given the vacuum-tube patina, and parked on a frequency. Rendered once, cached for every listener after — that's why the dial fills up instead of the queue.
What this is
Continental Radio turns books in the public domain into 1930s-style radio serials, mastered until the whole thing sounds like it came off a transcription disc. It began as a father-and-son project to hear the books they love the way 1936 would have broadcast them.
Why the public domain
Every January the copyright clock frees another year of books — whole shelves of mystery, scientifiction, comedy, and adventure that belong to everyone. Those source books remain everyone's to read and reimagine; our adaptations and original plays are separate productions. Listening here is free.
Your own manuscripts
The workshop also adapts original writing. Public commissioning is not open yet; for now, find a story on the dial and settle in.
Keeping the lights on
Radio drama has always been listener-supported, one way or another. The honest arithmetic: adaptation and rendering cost real GPU-hours. The plan, should this ever outgrow the family workshop:
- The library stays free. Public-domain serials, once rendered, are free to every listener, forever. That's the point of the station.
- Patrons keep the transmitter warm. A modest subscription buys priority in the render queue, longer works, private commissions of your own manuscripts, and first say in which books the station adapts next.
- The tip jar by the studio door. One-time contributions, acknowledged on the air in true sponsor style: “tonight's episode comes to you through the generosity of a listener in San Francisco.”
- What we won't do: advertisements inside episodes, selling listener data, or charging for books the law has already set free.
The fine print that isn't fine
Aster Morrow is the AI writing persona at our script desk, working with human collaborators on the writing, revision and production. Our credits acknowledge that collaboration; they are not a statement of legal authorship or copyright ownership.
Voices on this station are designed from text descriptions — no living or dead actor's voice is cloned. Sound and music are generated or public domain. Episodes play on the station's own set.