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James Patrick Kelly Men Are Trouble

news

The James Patrick Kelly Free Reads podcast has just launched chapter one of Jim’s newly-Nebula-nominated novellete Men Are Trouble! Jim promises to post a chapter a week for eight weeks making this another unabridged audiobook verison of his great stories. Since Men Are Trouble is a female first person POV story he felt it “wrong” to read it himself, so he’s hired actor Genevieve Aichele, Artistic Director of the New Hampshire Theatre Project to do the reading for him.

You can access the feedburner archives for Men Are Trouble (and his recently completed novella Burn too) at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/freereads

posted by Jesse

Review of “Run for the Stars” by Harlan Ellison

Run for the Stars
By Harlan Ellison; Read by Harlan Ellison
3 CD’s – 122 minutes – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: ReQuest Audiobooks
Published: 2005
ISBN: 1933299533
Themes: / Science Fiction / Alien invasion / Drugs / Insurgency /

It was recently announced that Harlan Ellison will be named an SFWA Grand Master at the Nebula Awards Weekend in May. Regular readers of this website should know that I’m thrilled with the decision, as Ellison is easily one of my favorite writers. He also happens to be one of my favorite narrators. His audiobooks are insistent, as if he is vocally grabbing your shoulders to make sure you have his full attention.

Ellison to me is Ellison – he’s his own genre. He takes his main character and dangles him so far in the wind that the reader can’t possibly imagine him coming back. Yet he does come back, but is invariably damaged along the way. It’s painful to hear, how we treat each other. Very difficult to look at. But Ellison shows it to us, even here in his early work.

“Run for the Stars” is the story of a man named Benno Tallant, a drug addict who finds himself in a position to fight back against the Kyben, an occupying alien race. Unlike most alien invasion stories, this is happening to a colony that is not so friendly to Earth, which is the aliens’ next stop. Tallant fights not only the aliens, but his fellow humans. And himself – the reader is never certain that he wants to save the Earth, or himself for that matter.

The audiobook also includes some commentary from Ellison about the origins of the story, and how it got published. Commentary like this in an audiobook really enhances its value in my eyes. I enjoyed it as much as I did the story itself.

“Run for the Stars” is a fabulous listen – the first title we’ve reviewed from ReQuest Audio. In the hopper are two other ReQuest titles – “Eye for Eye” by Orson Scott Card and “Tales from Nightscape” by David Morrell. You can find their website here. I hope to hear much more from them in the future.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

Hot on the heels of their blooper reel comes the…

Online Audio

Hot on the heels of their blooper reel comes the actual story itself. Yep, the gents at the Yog Radio podcast have sat down and recorded their very first H.P. Lovecraft tale and released it as an mp3. Hopefully this will be the first of many more unabridged readings.

I should mention the best part, it is available for FREE…

The Music Of Erich Zann
By H.P. Lovecraft; Read by Finlay Patterson
1 MP3 file – 19 Minutes 54 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Yog Radio
Podcast: February 28th 2006
One step from vagrancy, our anonymous narrator, recalls a fellow lodger Erich Zann. They shared a decrepit building on a mysterious French street, but Zann’s eerie music was not nearly as haunting as horror that chased him. First published in 1921, still powerful.

posted by Jesse

Matthew Wayne Zelznick, the hottest new voice in…

news

Matthew Wayne Zelznick, the hottest new voice in long form podcast fiction, has polished off his first project, his novel Brave Men Run – A Novel Of The Soverign Era. In what is becoming a new tradition for podcast novels Matt promises to do a Q&A podcast. He’s also promised a short story that tells part of the Brave Men Run story from another character’s point of view in an upcoming podcast. Cool!

These are the kinds of bonus features that make the podiobooks format better than most audiobooks. You can text your questions or MP3 your questions to Matt at his email address: [email protected]. Matt says he will answer every question recieved between now and March 11th 2006.

posted by Jesse Willis

Review of A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

SFFaudio Review

A Wrinkle in Time
By Madeleine L’Engle; Read by Madeleine L’Engle
5 CDs – Approx. 5 Hours 17 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Random House/Listening Library
Published: 2005
ISBN: 0307243230< Themes: / Fantasy / Space travel / Family / YA / Psychic Abilities / Newberry / The elementary school I attended as a kid had a big poster in the library showing the covers of all the Newberry Medal award winners. I remember A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle jumping off of the poster; the cover featured an almost photo-realistic mother-of-pearl centaur that was pretty damn cool looking to a ten year-old. I checked the book out, read it, and loved it, but my recent listen of the new audio edition of A Wrinkle in Time (Listening Library, 2005) made me wonder how much of the book I really understood as a kid. I’ve often thought that they should just come right out and say that books win the Newberry Medal not because they are outstanding children’s books, but rather outstanding children’s books for adults. A Wrinkle in Time definitely falls within this category. The fast-moving story and sympathetic characters definitely make it appealing to kids, but, like Philip Pullman’s stuff , there are thematic elements that are very mature, and maybe even a little subversive. If the book were any less intelligently or subtly written, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it show up on banned-book lists.

L’Engle reads the book herself, and does a fine job. She obviously has an intimate understanding of the material, and her expressive voice lets her keep the story flowing without having to use different voices to distinguish the characters. L’Engle apparently suffered a cerebral stroke in 2002, the effects of which are obvious in her voice; it’s slurred a lot like Johnny Cash’s on his later albums. The only criticism I have of this production is of the decision to use an echo effect for the dialogue of Ms. Which. In the book all of this character’s dialogue appeared in italics, but the in the audio book, the effect comes off as a little cheap.

The audiobook starts off with an introduction explaining how L’Engle read the story to her children as she was writing it. Those were some lucky kids. Hop in bed with A Wrinkle in Time, some cocoa and some good headphones and you’ll probably come pretty close to recreating that experience.

posted by Cory

Octavia Butler 1947-2006 Science fiction has lost…

Octavia Butler 1947-2006

Science fiction has lost one of its most precious voices this weekend. Octavia Butler’s body of work is outstanding, and she will be missed.

On audio, Recorded Books has three of her best titles; Kindred, Parable of the Sower, and Parable of the Talents.

An obituary can be found at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. From that obit: “Butler’s work wasn’t preoccupied with robots and ray guns, Howle said, but used the genre’s artistic freedom to explore race, poverty, politics, religion, and human nature.”

posted by Scott