Fiction podcasts the next big thing – for listeners sick of image saturation and writers fed up of scripting low-budget movies. Facebook and Hollywood are all ears

• Eighty-one years after The War of the Worlds, audio fiction is having a moment, and top-tier actors are in on it, like Rami Malek in survival podcast Blackout
• Some production houses script stories with an eye to their screen potential; others, such as Spotify’s Gimlet, are focused on exploiting audio’s potential