Author: Jesse Willis

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley (read by Bryan Cranston)

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Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley (read by Bryan Cranston – an ad for Breaking Bad)

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

More audiobooks as ads please!

[via Cynical-C]

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Unnamable by H.P. Lovecraft (read by Leeman Kessler)

SFFaudio Online Audio

Narrator Leeman Kessler’s reading of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Unnamable is, at first, marred by an unnecessary and obtrusive sound bed. Then later it is ruined by a series of noises that interfere with Lovecraft’s words.

There’s a reason why sidewalks don’t have hurdles built into them. It’s the same reason why commercial audiobook companies don’t add bed music and sound effects to audiobooks. They get in the way.

Posted by Jesse Willis

In The Abyss by H.G. Wells

SFFaudio Online Audio

In The Abyss by H.G. Wells

A very good reading of one of H.G. Wells’ long neglected stories, In The Abyss, is now available from LibriVox. James Christopher narrates this pioneering tale of first contact with a submarine civilization and he does it with the skill that comes from more than five years of contributions to LibriVox!

Those who’ve read H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth will appreciate the Well’s description of what sounds like Deep Ones:

“Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its little nostrils. In the position of the ears were two huge gill-covers, and out of these floated a branching tree of coralline filaments, almost like the tree-like gills that very young rays and sharks possess. But the humanity of the face was not the most extraordinary thing about the creature. It was a biped; its almost globular body was poised on a tripod of two frog-like legs and a long, thick tail, and its fore limbs, which grotesquely caricatured the human hand, much as a frog’s do, carried a long shaft of bone, tipped with copper. The colour of the creature was variegated; its head, hands, and legs were purple; but its skin, which hung loosely upon it, even as clothes might do, was a phosphorescent grey.”

LibriVoxIn The Abyss
By H.G. Wells; Read by James Christopher
1 |MP3| – Approx. 36 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: July 3, 2013
“To this he was being towed, as a balloon might be towed by men out of the open country into a town. He approached it very slowly, and very slowly the dim irradiation was gathered together into more definite shapes.” First published in Pearson’s Magazine, August 1, 1896.

Here’s an illustrated |PDF| made from the printing in the Amazing Stories, September 1926. And here’s the |PDF| made from the illustrated first printing in Pearson’s Magazine, August 1896.

In The Abyss by H.G. Wells - illustration by Frank R. Paul

Here’s an illustration from an early French translation:
In The Abyss by H.G. Wells

Posted by Jesse Willis

Fishhead by Irvin S. Cobb

SFFaudio Online Audio

Fishhead by Irvin S. Cobb

Fishhead by Irvin S. Cobb - illustrated by Virgil Finlay

First published in The Cavalier, January 11, 1913, Fishhead (aka Blood-Brother Of The Swamp Cats) is something of an ancestor to H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

In a letter published the same year, a 22-year-old H.P. Lovecraft, wrote, regarding Irvin S. Cobb’s short story Fishhead:

“It is the belief of the writer that very few short stories of equal merit have been published anywhere during recent years.”

Later, when composing his long essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft described Fishhead as:

“banefully effective in its portrayal of unnatural affinities between a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of an isolated lake, which at the last revenge their biped kinsman’s murder.”

I’m very impressed by it, and so, after gently twisting my friend John Feaster‘s arm, here is his 23 minute unabridged narration of Fishhead by Irvin S. Cobb |MP3|.

You’re welcome.

And, here are two PDFs of it. First an easy reading version |PDF| and second an illustrated version from Famous Fantastic Mysteries |PDF|!

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Coming Of The Ice by G. Peyton Wertenbaker

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Coming Of The Ice - illustrated by Frank R. Paul

I posted about this story, as part of a larger LibriVox collection, back in 2009. Then, I described it thusly:

The Coming Of The Ice explains the strange and sad fate of a man who undergoes an operation to make him immortal (and sterile).

I had somehow forgotten about it. But, as I heard someone describe it recently I was reminded of it, tracked it down again, and enjoyed it wholly afresh today.

The Coming Of The Ice deserves to be far better known. Not only is it a really terrific story, but the narration, by Giles Baker, is absolutely outstanding too!

Sam Moskowitz, in his introduction to the 1961 reprint of The Coming Of The Ice wrote the following about it:

One of the gravest editorial problems faced by the editors of AMAZING STORIES when they launched its first issue, dated April, 1926, was the problem of finding or developing authors who could write the type of story they needed. As a stop-gap, the first two issues of AMAZING STORIES were devoted entirely to reprints. But reprints were to constitute a declining portion of the publication’s contents for the following four years. The first new story the magazine bought was Coming Of The Ice, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker, which appeared in its third issue. Wertenbaker was not technically a newcomer to science fiction, since he had sold his first story to Gernsback’s SCIENCE AND INVENTION, The Man From the Atom, in 1923 when he was only 16! Now, at the ripe old age of 19, he was appearing in the world’s first truely complete science fiction magazine. The scope of his imagination was truly impressive and, despite the author’s youth, Coming of
the Ice builds to a climax of considerable power.

Back in 1926 the editorial introduction, presumably by Hugo Gernsback himself, said this about The Coming Of The Ice:

This powerful and tragic story by the author of “The Man From The Atom” tells of a man who acquired terrestrial immortality – tells of a world many centuries hence – a time when everything is changed. This one man remains as a relic of the 20th century, He is alone with strangely developed human beings, the product of ages of evolution. Climactic changes are taking place. The world begins to grow cold. New York is almost in the Arctic region and Italy is covered with snow all the year around. In spite of their enormous intellectual development, all human beings must perish. Our hero alone can withstand the intense cold. He wanted eternal life – and he got it – eternal life, purely intellectual. What does he do with all his years? And how does he enjoy them?, Read this powerful story.

LibriVoxThe Coming Of The Ice
By G. Peyton Wertenbaker; Read by Giles Baker
1 |MP3| – Approx. 40 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 4, 2009
“Strange men, these creatures of the hundredth century, men with huge brains and tiny, shriveled bodies, atrophied limbs, and slow, ponderous movements on their little conveyances … it was then that I was forced to produced my tattered old paper, proving my identity and my story.” First published in Amazing Stories, June 1926.

|ETEXT|

Here are two PDF versions:

Amazing Stories, June 1926 |PDF|
Amazing Stories, July 1961 |PDF|

[Thanks also to David T. and Carlo!]

Posted by Jesse Willis