Seth – Page 3 – SFFaudio

FREE LISTENS review: A Princess of Mars

Review

Source: Librivox | (14 zipped mp3s)
Length: 7 hr, 26 min
Reader: Mark Nelson
The book: While prospecting for gold in the Wild West, John Carter, formerly of the Confederate Army, is attacked by a band of hostile Apaches. He escapes into a cave, but finds himself mysteriously transported to Mars. On Mars, or as the natives call it, “Barsoom”, he finds several races of intelligent Martians, including the giant six-limbed Tharks and beautiful Dejah Thoris, a princess of the human-like red-skinned Martians.

John Carter’s Barsoom adventures are frankly preposterous, even for Burroughs’ day when people thought there might really be canals on Mars. However, the story has a momentum that propels it too fast to allow the reader to reflect on the inconsistencies of the plot or of the world Burroughs created. The constant cliffhangers and mild titillation gave the book great popularity among several generations of readers, including a number of science fiction writers who cited it as an important early influence. This book is a old-fashioned treat.

Rating: 8/10

The reader: Mark Nelson has a deep, strong voice that sounds like an old school news announcer. His cadence is slow and repetitive, but he changes his inflection enough to keep the reading interesting. He does some light voices, not straying too far from his natural voice into campiness. The recording setup he uses has very little background noise and is clear. Nelson is a reader worth seeking out in other books.

Posted by Seth

FREE LISTENS Top 10 Free Stories

Review

A few weeks ago Jesse posted my list of Best Free Audiobooks. I got a great response for this post, so I thought I’d do another one with my favorite free short stories that I’ve reviewed at Free Listens. Of course such lists are inherently silly, as they depend upon the listmaker’s tastes, current mood, memory, and a host of other little factors that have nothing to do with the quality of the story. So, if you’d rather, here’s a list of 10 really darn good stories (but maybe not the best):

Hope you enjoy these!

Posted by Seth

FREE LISTENS Review: The Lost World

Review

The Lost World
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Source: LibriVox (zipped mp3s)
Length: 8 hr, 22 min
Reader: Mark F. Smith

The book: Not to be confused with the Michael Crichton novel of the same name, Conan Doyle’s The Lost World is an unbelievable adventure, in both senses of “unbelievable”. Like Watson in Conan Doyle’s more famous Sherlock Holmes series, the narrator, Edward Malone, is a tag-along to the real main character of the book, the conceited and quarrelsome Professor Challenger. Malone, a newspaper reporter, accompanies Challenger on an expedition to a plateau in the jungles of South America, where dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts are rumored to live.

Although the premise for the book can now be seen as impossible, Challenger’s assertion of living dinosaurs is met with extreme skepticism by his colleagues in the novel, effectively removing the reader’s ability to criticize it. The story proceeds at a gallop, with new adventures happening every chapter. This book is fast and fun, making it a great light read for the summertime.

Rating: 8/10

The reader: You probably know by now that Mark F. Smith is one of LibriVox’s best readers. He’s done a wide range of books, and I can’t think of any of them that is bad. Smith’s dialog puts the listener into the story and his narration carries a bit of sarcasm at the right places, to help the listener see the wittiness in Conan Doyle’s writing. The recording, as always with Smith, is beautifully done.

Posted by Seth

FREE LISTENS Review: Anthem by Ayn Rand

SFFaudio Review

Anthem
By Ayn Rand
Source: Thought Audio
Length: 2 hr, 12 min
Reader: Michael Scott

The book:Set in the future following a catastrophic war, the society portrayed in Anthem is collectivism taken to the extreme. Individuality has been nearly wiped out. The first person singular is outlawed and forgotten, replacing “I” with “we”. People do not not have names, but designations containing a societal quality combined with a number. Equality 7-2521 is a man who feels the pull of individualism and is punished for it. When in the course of his duties, he discovers an old tunnel from before the wars, he gains a chance to break free.

Rand’s portray of this society has much in common with works produced during the rise of communism, such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World. Unlike these other examples of the sub-genre, I found Rand’s dystopia lacking in realism and therefore less compelling. Anthem‘s society is a city all on its own without any sense of a larger world other than an ill-defined wilderness. Surely other pockets of humanity would have survived even the most horrific war and become a rival society to out-compete the anti-technology society portrayed here.

The other main problem that I have with the book is that the danger it forecasts in collectivism is no longer the pressing spectre it was to Rand, who had lived in Stalinist Russia. In the present, we are more in danger of the opposite, a world of complete individuals with no sense of brotherhood or the collective good. Just as science in Anthem is impossible because no one can become any greater than others, science in a world where every technique or discovery is patented and jealously guarded is equally impossible. Likewise art is equally difficult when the artist or writer is not allowed to be different as when anything mildly derivative runs the danger of a copyright lawsuit. For this reason, I see Anthem not as a story for our time, but as a historical document of the fear that collective society once held.

Rating: 7/10

The Reader: Scott has a deep, announcer-sounding voice that is very pleasant for listening. This stentorian voice, however, is one of the drawbacks as well. Scott speaks with such confidence and power that it is sometimes discordant with the position of the protagonist, who has been trained to see himself as just like everyone else. The steady patterns of his cadence and the radio-quality voice are great assets to make the words very understandable, so only true purists need worry about the incongruity of the voice. Some edits are audible through digital artifacts, but otherwise the audio is professionally produced with very little background noise.

Note: Thought Audio’s books have sometimes been free and other times behind a pay wall. If you would like this book, but find you cannot download it, try the always-free LibriVox version.

Posted by Seth

FREE LISTENS Review: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Review

The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
Source: Librivox
25 Zipped MP3s
Length: 5 hr, 43 min UNABRIDGED
Reader: Nichole Doolin

The book: A young lady, charmed by a young gentleman in London, agrees to take up a job as a governess to his orphaned niece and nephew. After arriving at the country estate where the children live, the governess begins to see figures around the estate that do not seem to fit with any of the servants currently living there. She learns from other servants that the former governess, Miss Jessel, and her lover, Peter Quint, died mysteriously shortly before she was hired. Are the figures she has been seeing the ghosts of this couple or is it all in her mind?

James keeps up this ambiguity throughout the book, constructing dialogues and events that seem diabolical under one viewpoint and another perfectly innocent by another. The book is told from the 1st person perspective of the governess. This narrator is the only one who seems to notice the ghosts and their effects on the children, but we as readers are not sure we can trust this young lady. The degree to which James draws out the governess’s decent into horror is a bit frustrating at times, but really, this is a short book and a classic in psychology.

Rating: 7/10

The reader: Ms. Doolin sounds like a professional. Her reading is polished, using pauses and inflection to great effect. I found it interesting to compare the voice of the narrator from the first chapters where she is bright and innocent to the later where you can hear the suspicion in her voice. The other characters are not given full-fledged voices, but Ms. Doolin alters her diction and pitch enough to let us know who is talking. The recording is clean and noiseless.

Posted by Seth

Five Free Favorites #6

Aural Noir: Online Audio

Some of my favorite science fiction freebies have already been picked for the Five Free Favorites feature. Since SFFaudio has recently added Aural Noir reviews, I decided to choose favorites from that genre instead. So, I reached back into the archive of reviews at Free Listens for the best free stories and books from the noir/crime/mystery genres.

Five Free Favourites

1.
Whose Body?
By Dorothy L. Sayers; Read by Kristin Hughes and Kara Shallenberg
Publisher: LibriVox | 13 Zipped MP3s, 6 hr, 31 min [UNABRIDGED]
Lord Peter Wimsey’s mother has telephoned him to get her son to help out her friend Mr. Thipp. Thipp is apparently in trouble with the police over a dead body wearing nothing but a pince-nez who was found in the bathtub of Thipp’s upper-floor apartment. Meanwhile, the family of Sir Reuben Levy has reported Sir Reuben to be missing. Are the two events connected? Is the body Sir Reuben’s? If not, whose body is it?

2.
“Bullet in the Brain”
By Tobias Wolff; Read by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Publisher: New Yorker Fiction Podcast | 1 MP3, 19 min [UNABRIDGED]
The story, in the beginning, is a harsh portrait of a book critic who has lost the joy of literature and instead sees cliches in every novel he reviews. The man is such an ass, in fact, that he can’t help but smirk and heckle in the middle of a bank robbery, exactly when he should keep his mouth shut. In the second part of the story, the plot takes a major turn and we get to see the humanity of the critic. This contrast of putting a comic figure into a serious situation makes the story both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply profound.

3.
“A Jury of Her Peers”
By Susan Glaspell; read by Cori Samuels
Publisher: LibriVox | 1 MP3, 53 min [UNABRIDGED]
Most mysteries focus on the “who” or sometimes the “how” of a crime. In this story both who and how seem to be apparent from the beginning. The real question is why Minnie Wright would strangle her husband. While the county attorney, the sheriff, and a neighbor search the house for clues, the wives of the sheriff and neighbor are left alone in the kitchen.

4.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Read by John Telfer
Publisher: Audiobooksforfree.com
Distributed by Project Gutenberg | 25 MP3’s (download page) 6 hr, 15 min [UNABRIDGED]
This collection includes some of the best Sherlock Holmes stories. A Scandal in Bohemia offers a tantalizing glimpse into what Holmes in love might look like. The Red-Headed League appears in many anthologies and is a great example of an archetypal Sherlock Holmes mystery. While the solution of The Adventure of the Speckled Band appears improbable, the suspenseful storytelling and spooky atmosphere make it easy to see why this was one of Doyle’s favorites.

5.
“Jack Penny’s New Identity”
By Lee Child; Read by Dick Hill
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Distributed by AudiobookStand | 1 MP3, 37 min [UNABRIDGED]
This story, from the James Patterson-edited collection Thriller, follows factory worker James Penny as he is laid off from his job. Penny rather emphatically cuts off his ties to his old life, catching unfavorable attention from the local police in the process. The direct style of Child’s prose reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men, probably now better known from the movie adaptation. Like that novel, the protagonist is a basically good person who has done something illegal, though without malice.

Posted by Seth