Hello and welcome to the Travelcast, episode 385.

The Travel Cast is a weekly audio fiction magazine that brings strange stories

by strange authors to strange listeners such as yourself.

I'm your host Norm Sherman.

This week we bring you an original travel cast commission story by Rachel K., called The Insmith of the South.

I think you're going to love it.

Rachel did a great job of exploring the idea of authenticity with this story, which is an

interesting angle to look at when thinking about Lovecraft for a couple of reasons.

One, Lovecraft's body of work has spawned an unbelievable amount of mythos inspired writing from other authors,

ranging from derivative fanfic pastiche to full-blown

awesome sauce like the travel cast's own epic mythos inspired Lewis Carroll

HP Lovecraft space opera series written by Elizabeth Bear and Sero Manette.

Stories, Mongous, Bousjam, and the wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward.

Those are episodes 170, 202, and 254, if you haven't heard them already, and want to check them out.

Easily some of our most popular stories.

So here we are, well over a century later, and imitation and authenticity are as much a part of Lovecraft's mythos as giant

squid-headed monstrosities from the deep, an open source fiction universe.

Come play with us, Danny. Also relevant to the question of what is real and what is fake,

and is particularly ironic in light of our story this week,

is that if Lovecraft had one consistent thread to all of his writing, it was the

Gnostic view that understanding the true nature of the world around you is to be

destroyed by it. The laws of reality are anything but absolute, and that knowledge transforms the

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