More goodies from the LibriVox audiobook collective… Greylorn was the first published Science Fiction story by Keith Laumer. It went to press in the April 1959 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories. The 41 page novelette gets a reading by veteran amateur narrator Mark F. Smith. Smith may be familiar SFFaudio visitors as he was the reader for LibriVox’s releases of Tarzan Of The Apes and The Mysterious Island. The Keith Laumer blog, a fan blog for the late author, had this to say about Greylorn:
“It’s a typical Laumer story … My impression though is that it’s not one his best stories. It’s pretty cliche. It has a great prologue, a fairly good middle, but the end is pretty bad and not very convincing. Instead of a twist we get a story from the hero, in his old days, how he saved the earth in a not so convincing explanation of the events layed out in the middle of the story and in such a way that the reader is not interested anymore anyhow. There are however many memes in the story which can find it’s way to the subconsciousness of the reader, of which the trade of human flesh is probably the greatest one.”
Mark F. Smith says of it:
“Written in an era when radios used vacuum tubes, the scientific component of the story is quaint and dated. But Laumer makes the centerpiece of his tale the retelling of how, four years out on the voyage, his crew decides it wants to give up and go home when it meets an alien race… that apparently breeds humans in captivity as food animals! Beating the aliens, shanghaiing the crew, finding the colony and saving Mother Earth – just the ingredients for a rattling good yarn!”
Greylorn
By Keith Laumer; Read by Mark F. Smith
Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 2 Hours 11 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: October 24th 2007
Commander Greylorn has a problem. No, actually he has two of them. It’s not enough that the remaining residents of Earth have pinned their last hope of salvation on him and his mission. He has to find a colony that presumedly was established at an unknown star two centuries before and beg their help. But first, he has the small matter of a mutiny on board his starship, and people are trying to kill him!
You can download the MP3s individually, in one big zipped folder or get the entire novel in podcast form via this feed:
http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/greylorn-by-keith-laumer.xml
Posted by Jesse Willis