Selected science fiction and fantasy titles at 50% off non-member price. On sale at Audible.com through November 14th.
Posted by Moriond
Author: admin
Review of The Red Panda Adventures – Season 1
The Red Panda Adventures – Season One
By Gregg Taylor; Performed by a FULL CAST
12 MP3 Files – Approx. 5.5 Hours [AUDIO DRAMA]
Publisher: DecoderRingTheatre.com / Podiobooks.com
Published: 2005/2006
Themes: / Fantasy / Superheroes / Supervillains / 1930s / Toronto / Secret Identities / Hypnotism /
Flying Squirrel: “We could have two super-power’d loons on our hands.” -Episode 11: Duality
Masks, grapple-guns, static boots, retractable membranes, ring-radios? Check. Supervillains with names like The Golden Claw, The Electric Eel and Diablo? Check. Okay then, tune your podcatcher to ‘pure pulp’ and break out the hockey organ because The Red Panda Adventures – Season One is ready to glide into justice. This first 12 episode season is full of flying kung fu fists, mesmerizing hypnosis, snappy dialog and mystery. Most memorable for me are the characters and the dialogue. Plot lines are reminiscent of comic-book and radio serials from yesteryear but the parlance is all modernistic as filtered through a roaring-twenties speech pattern paradigm. Episode 2: Night Mission and Episode: 7 Red Panda Wanted Dead Or Alive stood-out because these episodes highlighted the interaction between the love-blind hero, Red Panda, and his adoring sidekick The Flying Squirrel. The Panda’s superpowers are a cross between those of The Green Hornet and The Shadow. He’s a master hypnotist, able to cloud the minds of villains. Other fun aspects are the introduction of other superheroes and superhero groups, in a way the whole show reminds me of animated version of The Tick if it were played slightly straighter.
The Red Panda Adventures – Season One is a super-fun diversion delivered in delicious half-hour doses. The only thing better than the production of this fab audio drama series is the vocal talent. I get endless kicks out of the sexual tension between the oblivious Red Panda and his pining sidekick/driver Kit Baxter. Their city, 1930s Toronto, is quieter than many other audio dramas, I hear less foley and fewer sound effects, I like that they aren’t obsessed with putting in the sound of footsteps in every scene – it usually isn’t necessary. Also nice is that from episode one of this series this show really works. This is probably because of the experience gained during the previous Red Panda incarnation (a six episode series set during WWII). Season Two is already underway and I look forward to devouring it too.
Posted by Jesse Willis
Dawn Of Flame by Stanley G. Weinbaum FREE and UNABRIDGED!
Hey cool! Maureen O’Brien has also recorded…
Dawn of Flame
By Stanley G. Weinbaum; Read by Maureen O’Brien
10 Zipped MP3 Files – [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Maria Lectrix
Podcast: April 2006
After a worldwide plague breaks civilization, Joaquin Smith and his sister build an empire up the Mississippi Valley. Who would be brave or foolish enough to stand in their way? Who but a young backwoodsman named Hull Tarvish?
Review of American Gods by Neil Gaiman
American Gods
By Neil Gaiman, read by George Guidall
2 MP3-CD’s/20 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Harper Audio
Published: 2001
ISBN: 060836253
Themes: / Fantasy / Modern fantasy / Mythology / Legend / Americana / Picaresque / Gods /
A storm is coming. From his prison cell, Shadow can feel it bearing down on him, but he has no idea how it shred his already tattered life and cast the pieces into realms both familiar and mythical.
Shadow’s journey across the real and imagined terrain of America is the gravitational mass around which the rest of the novel accretes. We follow him out of prison, to a portentous meeting with his eventual employer Mr. Wednesday, back to his home town, and beyond to a magical carousel in a bizarre roadside attraction, to a small Wisconsin town peopled by a hundred unique, quirky characters, down to little Egypt, across a barren Indian reservation, and even to the geometric center of the contiguous states. His discoveries of the languishing deities brought to this continent and abandoned by assimilating immigrants are our own, and the questions he faces about the nature of human faith and the fulfillment of ourselves in mystical sacrifices are questions we find ourselves struggling to answer.
But Shadow’s story is not the only one. The mercurial Mr. Wednesday also has a tale to tell, as do a half-dozen or so other deities, spirits, leprechauns, and phantasms. Their stories are tough, tender, tragic, uplifting, and ultimately doomed. But even they are not the full measure of this book. There are also newly-minted gods of television, computers, covert operations, and other creations of modern angst. They represent a malevolent opposition to the old gods, and the storm Shadow has foreseen is the clash between the old and new gods in a battle for the devotion of an attention-deficit populace.
American Gods is one of the great novels of modern fantasy, and lands just short of the fence as a great American novel. Much of its power is derived from its complexity: It is composed of religion, adventure, a small-town thriller, a road novel, history, con-games, Native American myth, early American legend, intimate portraits of immigrants finding their small way in a huge new country, and sprawling adventure across the entire face of America. Written by an imported Englishman, it offers both an outsider’s attention to quirky detail and a native’s casual acceptance of all that comprises this slow-simmered stew of a country. Gaiman’s prose is graceful, simple, and his pacing is slow enough to nurture our sympathy, yet brisk enough to remain consistently exciting.
George Guidall’s narration is also excellent. His portrayals are groaning, snippy, kvetching and distinct. He conjures a pantheon of note-perfect Eastern European accents for a group of little-known gods, a crisp con-man’s coarseness for Mr. Wednesday, a mischievous African charm for Anansi, and a quiet desperation for Shadow. The only misstep is Shadow’s wife Laura, whose voice seems too fawningly girlish for the part. The MP3 CD format is the best so far invented, and the sound quality is crisp. Maybe too crisp, as you can clearly hear the edges of many of the edits.
After the multi-threaded end of the story, there is an extended interview with Gaiman which provides a delightful look at the man and the origins of his story. While I found it fascinating to see how such a large collection of ideas coalesced into a single transcendent work, the interview also rubs off just a little of the luster. Overall, though, the entire production is a pleasure from the first ominous chapter to the last. It will make an enviable centerpiece to your audio fiction collection.
Posted by Kurt Dietz
Escape Pod Podcast has a Robert J. Sawyer story!
Escape Pod is proving that it can draw the biggest names in Science Fiction! This week’s story is by Hugo and Nebula award winning Robert J. Sawyer. This is amazing. Is there anything Escape Pod can’t do?
EP078: The Shoulders Of Giants
By Robert J. Sawyer; Read by Stephen Eley
1 MP3 File – [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Escape Pod
Podcast: November 2nd 2006
The Pioneer Spirit was a colonization ship; it wasn’t intended as a diplomatic vessel. When it had left Earth, it had seemed important to get at least some humans off the mother world. Two small-scale nuclear wars—Nuke I and Nuke II, as the media had dubbed them—had already been fought, one in southern Asia, the other in South America. It appeared to be only a matter of time before Nuke III, and that one might be the big one.
SETI had detected nothing from Tau Ceti, at least not by 2051. But Earth itself had only been broadcasting for a century and a half at that point; Tau Ceti might have had a thriving civilization then that hadn’t yet started using radio. But now it was twelve hundred years later. Who knew how advanced the Tau Cetians might be?
H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy as a FREE UNABRIDGED audiobook!
Little Fuzzy is a minor classic of Science Fiction by H. Beam Piper. Thanks to the wondiferous hobby of Maureen O’Brien it is now available in its unabridged entirety as an amateur produced MP3 audiobook. All 17 chapters are available now for free via archive.org.
Little Fuzzy
By H.Beam Piper; Read by Maureen O’Brien
17 Zipped MP3 Files – 6 Hours 45 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
PODCAST: Maria Lectrix
COMPLETED: October 2006
The planet Zarathustra is going through a dry spell. Land-prawns, ecologists, and scared bureaucrats are coming out of the woodwork. But there’s more trouble to come. The cutest little alien critter you’ve ever seen: Little Fuzzy.
The story revolves around determining whether a small furry species discovered on the planet Zarathustra is sapient. Along the way a gentle kind of libertarianism that emphasizes sincerity and honesty is advocated. This is generally considered a “juvenile” novel.
The narrator, Maureen O’Brien, first released each chapter as an instalment on her Maria Lectrix Podcast which she describes as “Six days a week of public domain audiobooks — mystery, history, adventure, devotion — for people with Catholic tastes.” About Little Fuzzy she writes:
“Right now, I’m making an audiobook of H. Beam Piper’s novel Little Fuzzy. It’s in the public domain and on Gutenberg, because Piper didn’t renew copyright. Piper is one of my younger brother’s favorite authors, so I’m really doing it for him. But the funny thing is that I actually am enjoying the book a lot more than I did back in junior high; I guess the legal and corporate maneuvering makes more sense to me now.”
Little Fuzzy is finished, I asked her what else she’d been working on. It seems that Maureen’s been in fandom more than a dozen years, helping out at some conventions and writting for an shared world superhero zine, Vanguard Dossier. She says…
“I record public domain stuff because I am cheap and have time on my hands. Also, it’s nice to give something back to the Internet that’s given so much to me. Back in the BBS days, you were expected to upload a certain amount of material to offset all the files from other people that you were downloading. I think I’ve done that now.”
And has she ever she’s recorded dozens of other stories, novels, poems and plays too!
“I’m afraid my choice of literary works is a bit haphazard, as I usually pick on whim something I like, something I’ve been meaning to read, or something I run across that looks interesting. My original plan was to podcast mostly short stories, short essays, and a few longer works. Instead, novels and epic poems have taken over my podcast.
For quite a while, I was broadcasting something from the works of antebellum New York SF/Fantasy writer Fitz James O’Brien every Monday. Partly this was because I like his stuff and think he’s unfairly neglected. But partly it’s because I had a hard time deciding what to read on Mondays and he narrowed that down quite a lot. But Fitz had a very interesting take on life, and I enjoyed that a lot. He was also amazingly prolific; there are still tons of stories by him that I haven’t done.
I also really enjoyed reading Lord Dunsany, who has been one of my all time favorite authors since I first encountered his stories. When he really gets rolling, his fantasy can veer abruptly from the highest flights of beauty and language to the silliest comedy within a few sentences. He was wonderful to read; and I fully intend to read some more stories by him later this year. I would love to hear someone adapt one of his spooky plays as an audio drama; I think they might work very well.
A lot of the epic poems I’ve podcasted are actually fantasy novels in poetic form. Lucan’s Pharsalia is full of witchcraft and horror, ancient Roman style. Scott’s The Bride of Triermain is pure fantasy, with King Arthur, demigoddesses, bards, phantoms, and all.”
It is all very cool and I’m going to be keeping my ear attuned to Maureen’s passion. I’ve subscribed to her podcast. If you’re interested you too can subscribe by plugging this feed into your podcatcher:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MariaLectrixAudiobookClub/