A THOUSAND DEATHS

Episode #315 · Written by Jack London · Narrated by Scott Miller

Plucked from the edge of oblivion, a drifting sailor awakens to find that survival has placed him in greater danger than death ever did. What first appears to be an act of salvation becomes a calculated demonstration, and then a lifelong sentence measured in heartbeats that can be stopped and started at another man’s command.

On an isolated island turned private laboratory, science pushes past every moral boundary. Each experiment strips away another certainty about life, identity, and the sanctity of the human body. Memory endures even when breath and pulse do not, and consciousness lingers in the terrible stillness where time should have ended.

As the cycle repeats, fear gives way to grim understanding. Knowledge becomes a weapon, patience a strategy, and escape a problem to be solved with the same ruthless precision as the experiments themselves. In this relentless contest between intellect and instinct, the question is no longer whether death can be defeated, but who will control it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jack London was one of the most dynamic and widely read American writers of the early twentieth century, celebrated for stories of survival, ambition, and the limits of human endurance. Alongside his famous wilderness adventures, he occasionally ventured into bold speculative territory, using emerging scientific ideas as a lens to examine power, cruelty, and the will to resist. In this story, his gift for visceral detail and psychological intensity transforms a scientific thought experiment into a gripping struggle for autonomy and life itself.

LISTEN TO THE STORY

Listen to A Thousand Deaths by Jack London — a vintage science fiction short story of death defied, consciousness preserved, and a man trapped between life and oblivion.

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Each episode features carefully selected stories from the Golden Age of science fiction, professionally narrated. Timeless storytelling the way it was meant to be heard.

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