Reviews – Page 115

Review of Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein

SFFaudio Audiobook Review

Rocket Ship Galileo
By Robert A. Heinlein; Read by Spider Robinson
5 CDs, 4 Cassettes or 1 MP3-CD – 5.5 hrs [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2007
ISBN: 9780786162765 (CDs), 9780786147892 (cassettes), 9780786172092(MP3-CD)
Themes: / Science Fiction / Young Adult / Space Travel / Rocket Science / Espionage / Moon /

Ross Jenkins, Art Mueller, and Morrie Abrams are not your average high school students. While other kids are cruising around in their cars playing ball, this trio, known as the Galileo Club, is experimenting with rocket fuels and preparing for their future education at technical colleges.

Robert Heinlein created something new when he started writing his “juvenile” SF novels. He wasn’t the first person to write what publishers would categorize as Young Adult SF but he was the first respected SF author to do so. Not only did it not harm his reputation, it actually enhanced it. Some of these, like Citizen of the Galaxy, The Star Beast, and The Rolling Stones still stand as some of his best books and are considered classics.

His first juvenile, from 1947, was Rocketship Galileo. It’s a tale of three young fellows that have their own amateur rocketry club. When one of their rocket experiments go awry with an explosion, they find that one of the boys’ uncles was injured on the grounds. The injured man is Doctor Donald Morris Cargraves. He’s a scientist with his own background in atomic propulsion. With true do-it-yourself ethos, Cargraves recruits the boys to build their own rocket to the moon. There are incidents of sabotage, which creates the mystery of who is responsible for the sabotage.

Eventually the boys with Cargraves in tow head to the moon. On occasion the story seems to stop for a science lesson. Once they reach the moon, they learn they are not alone. I’ll leave the nature of the co-habitants to the listener. I will say the answer that lies behind the sabotage attempts are less than satisfactory. What seems dated and implausible today was likely just as implausible in 1947 when the book was written. Although this novel is not the best of Heinlein’s juveniles, it is still an enjoyable ride with an optimistic future for mankind.

The book is narrated by SF author Spider Robinson. Spider is a gifted narrator with a flair for voice characterizations. His natural narrator’s voice seems a bit nasally at times, but he still conveys ease, and his pacing is unhurried.

This is not the first paring of Robert Heinlein with Spider Robinson. Spider recently coauthored a book with Mr. Heinlein called Variable Star. Using notes and an unfinished outline, Spider Robinson was chosen by Heinlein’s estate to complete it. The story is said to be reminiscent of one of the master’s juvenile novels circa 1955. The good news doesn’t end there. Robinson was tapped by Blackstone Audio to narrate the audiobook for Variable Star, which has just been released.

posted by The Time Traveler of the Time Traveler Show podcast

Review of Here Today …Gone to Tomorrow edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg

SFFaudio Audiobook Review

Here Today …Gone Tomorrow (Asimov’s All Time Favorite Time Travel Stories)
Edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg; Read by various
4 Cassettes – Approx. 6 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Dercum Audio
Published: 1998
ISBN: 1556562586 [out of print]
Themes: /Science Fiction /Time travel /Anthology /

Stories: “Try and Change the Past” by Fritz Leiber, read by Bill Fantini; “A Loint of Paw” by Isaac Asimov, read by Bill Fantini; “The Long Remembering” by Poul Anderson, read by Nelson Runger; “There Is A Wolf In My Time Machine” by Larry Niven, read by Bill Fantini; “The Light Of Other Days” by Bob Shaw, read by Nelson Runger; “The Kings Wishes” by Robert Sheckley, read by Nelson Runger; “The Little Black Bag” by C.M. Kornbluth, read by Ann Wilcox.

Old school. That’s what this collection of time travel stories is, with all the blessings and baggage that implies. The stories concern mainly white men, with women appearing mostly as henpecking baffles for their claustrophobic concerns, and, in general, the voices presenting the stories are brusque and hairy-chested, like those from a third grade filmstrip on pool safety (and if that simile has any resonance for you, then I think you appreciate what I mean by “old school”). A female voice does narrate C.M. Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag”, but the story is so piquant with elitism and misogyny, it might as well be read by a Victorian-era Harvard College president.

The cover claims the stories were hand selected by Isaac Asimov from his own personal library, and the photo shows the great one with his trademark facial fur and engaging grin in front of a tall shelf packed with his own works.* Happily, his own works do appear in this collection, but only in the delightful – a word to describe almost anything Asimov uttered aloud – introduction he delivers himself, and the brief, forgettable story “A Loint Of Paw” which he does not.

The list of authors is impressive. The stories, however, while enjoyable, are neither essential nor groundbreaking. The best of them, and the only one to offer even a glimpse of the wistful ache that is the primary motivation for the idea of time travel, is Bob Shaw’s “The Light Of Other Days.” I was caught off guard after the relatively bland intellectual exercises of the forgoing stories because this one starts out looking similarly simple and heartless, yet builds to a subtle and profoundly moving finish.

As a whole, this is a decent collection, but not one I’d risk any injury rushing out to acquire. If it falls in your lap, or if you are a rabid fan of old school SF, I’d give it a listen. Otherwise, I think you could easily find something more satisfying to fill your ears with.

[editor’s note – the cover depicted above does not match Kurt’s description. Kurt’s scan of his copy of this audiobook was not available at the time of this post]

Posted by Kurt Dietz

Review of The Shadow Killer by Matthew Scott Hansen

SFFaudio Audiobook Review

The Shadow Killer
By Matthew Scott Hansen; Read by William Dufris
2 MP3 CDs or 12 CDs; Approx. 15 hrs – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Published: 2007
ISBN: 1400153255 (MP3-CDs); 9781400103256 (CDs)
Themes: / Horror / Sasquatch / Paranormal / Indigene / Monster / Mystery / Mythical Creature /

At first I thought to myself. Bigfoot? Really? It just seemed like the sort of thing you might find in the B-movie isle at Blockbuster. In a way, yes, it is, but not in that cheap, cheesy sort of way, where you feel like you’re just a little dirtier, just a little dumber just for watching. No, The Shadow Killer by Matthew Scott Hansen is a novel that takes all the known clichés from this sort of monster/disaster stories and hones in on the razor sharp edges of them. He does this while still keeping the book compulsively fun.

You know how Bigfoot always seems like a really tall guy in a monkey suit? Well, this is not that kind of Bigfoot story. The luxury of Bigfoot in written form, is that Bigfoot can be as big as the author wants him to be. In fact, there is much of the book spent avoiding the specifics of the actual size, allowing the reader/listener to come up with their own idea of how big it is.

This sasquatch is an angry one. The beginning of the story tells of how his tribe, clan, family, kin have been wiped out and killed by a forest fire. He is the lone survivor and is set off on a mission of revenge towards “The Keepers of Fire”, who just turn out to be us humans. He starts wreaking havoc and slowly builds up to a terrorizing rampage. But, since the existence of Bigfoot has never been proven, it’s not exactly easy to catch him, or even figure out what exactly is going on.

This edge-of-your-seat thriller centers around an ensemble cast who each have varying degrees of faith in the actual existence of this giant. There is a retired software engineer, whose life has been in shambles since he actually encountered a different Bigfoot three years prior, while on vacation. No one believed him, of course, and he has been obsessed ever since. There’s a Sheriff’s Detective who gets assigned to the investigation of all the strange occurrences and missing people in the area. There is even a bloodthirsty TV reporter who has aspirations towards the big time, and she too latches on to the story, willing to do anything to get higher ratings. Last, there’s my favorite character; Ben, aging Indian, who has been having dreams about being chased by this enormous beast. He seems to be connected to this animal and begins searching for it, not knowing exactly what will happen when he finds it. The story seems like a bunch of people being eaten and terrorized for the first several chapters, until Ben is introduced. He’s instantly likeable.

The story is relentless. Once it gets going, it does not let up, and while a few of the characters of this book are still standing in the end, no one gets out with out a few battle wounds, both physically and emotionally. These people get run through the wringer and you go through the wringer with them. As the reader, you start to wonder how much more of this they can take. The writing and descriptions of these scenes are of laser intensity. You know within just a few words of meeting a character whether you are going to like that character or hate them, and once you do like or hate a character the rest of the tale only strengthens your feelings in that direction.

For me, the most enjoyable part of listening to this book was the narration by William Dufris. He is a master of capturing the emotion and feeling of a moment, and in such a way that it really plays out in your mind. Where some narrators might perform a little bit, putting some feeling in to the character’s dialogue and descriptions, Dufris turns his reading in to a tour de force.

This book has numerous characters, all with different voices and attitudes. He can make you laugh, cry, cringe and feel out of breath, all with a few simple inflections to his voice. Female characters somehow sound like real women, and there is not one ounce of discomfort or sense of overacting. Dufris does the reading so well, that you forget that you are actually listening to one man doing all of this by himself. All the while making it seem like it is the simplest of actions. Just like most masters of their craft, William Dufris makes his vocation, audiobook narration, look easy.

All in all, this audio book is a highly entertaining listen. Its got a little bit of everything. But, be warned this is adult material. There are verbose detailed sexual situations and gore that place very interesting pictures in your head. Including one scene of murder where the animal can sense that the woman he is killing is “ready to mate”. What follows after, is one of the few times I have ever felt queasy about what I was listening to. That scene is very well written and extremely vivid, but still discomforting. When you think it’s as bad as it is going to get for this woman, it gets even worse, and I’ll just leave it at that.

So, if you have a strong stomach, like a monster story with great characters and a great narrator, this audio book does what I feel audio books should do for the listener; it won’t let you stop listening to it. In the 15 hours I spent listening to this novel, I never felt bored and my sense of dread and fear for the characters was omnipresent. Maybe, by the time you finish listening, you’ll believe in Bigfoot too.

posted by Michael Bekemeyer of the Scatterpod podcast

Review of The World Set Free by H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells Month

The World Set Free
By H.G. Wells; Read by Shelly Frasier
1 MP3-CD or 6 CDs – Approx. 6.5 Hrs [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Media
Published: 2002
ISBN: 1400150108 (MP3-CD); 1400100100(CDs)
/ Science Fiction / Atomic Power / Atomic Bombs / War / Utopia / Politics / Futurism / Prophecy / World State /

“Never before in the history of warfare had there been a continuing explosive; indeed, up to the middle of the twentieth century the only explosives known were combustibles whose explosiveness was due entirely to their instantaneousness; and these atomic bombs which science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men who used them.”

The Father of Science Fiction first works are still among our classics. With excellent treatments of alien invasion (The War of the Worlds), space travel (First Men in the Moon), proto-genetic manipulation (The Island of Dr. Moreau), and of course time travel (The Time Machine). In his first decade of a writer he had written these classics as well as The Invisible Man, and The Food of the Gods, as many classic short stories.

Wells continued his writing career for another 40 years. Always remaining a popular author. So what happened to all these books he wrote? What happened to this iconoclast of SF? Why were his later works seldom reprinted and so hard to find? In his day, books like Tono-Bungay and Ann Veronica were huge critical and commercial successes. Thanks to Project Gutenberg and other public domain sites, his more obscure works are now obtainable. Much of his later work does not qualify as SF. But there are a number of his novels that deal with prophecies and future utopias and do qualify as SF.

The World Set Free was one of those future visions. Written and published upon the cusp of World War I, the novel proves that Wells had a gift for prophecy, although many of the details played out in a different way. In the novel the World War would not occur till 1956.

The main impetus of the novel is the advent of atomic power, both as a bomb and as a power source. The atomic bomb has many similarities to the actual bombs, including decaying radiation. Wells’ portrait of a World War would lead to numerous atomic bombs destroying civilization.

Wells had hoped from the ashes of a World War that nationalism would dissolve and a new world state would evolve. He portrays the World War in a horrific way. For one who saw the war as a way to a new world order, he does not handle the horrors of war with kid gloves.

Wells uses a narrative device that this book is written from a far utopian future. And from this far future perspective, it tells of the dark days of the war and then of the end of countries and the beginning of the world state. The tone is scholarly and leaves the listener/reader distanced from the characters.

I believe Wells started to see himself as an educator to the masses. That through his writing, both fiction and non-fiction, he could change the world. Sounds like a maniacal delusion, but he was an extremely popular writer. He was the equivalent to a rock star in terms of cultural popularity, but with the intellectual clout of an author. Unfortunately this didactic charge, he placed on himself, put storytelling subordinate to the message. Despite these flaws, the novel is filled with many thought provoking ideas.

Shelly Frasier narrates the novel. After an introduction, in which she speaks with an American accent, she switches to an English accent for the text of the novel. After getting use to this change, I found her accent and characterization quite good and she turns in a solid performance.

posted byThe Time Traveler of the Time Traveler Show podcast.

Review of The Chief Designer by Andy Duncan

SFFaudio Audiobook Review

The Chief Designer
By Andy Duncan; Read by Jared Doreck
2 CDs – 132 minutes – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Infinivox
Published: 2006
ISBN: 1884612547
Themes: / Science Fiction / Alternate History / Space Flight / History / Ghosts / Heroic Journey /

“Tsiolkovsky,” he said. “Your memory is excellent, Comrade Korolev.” The man who had held the open book before Korolev’s face reversed it and examined it himself. He wore a full-dress officer’s uniform, and two soldiers flanked him. “Exploration of Cosmic Space with Reactive Devices, by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Published 1903.

Though you’d be hard-pressed to spot the fantastic elements this tale is a inspirational and deeply moving for any true Science Fiction fan. I’m not a spiritual person, I think that spirit is bunk and people who believe in spirit are all marks. But in a very deeply emotional sense I can almost understand the need for something like the spiritual when I look up into the deep night. There is nothing more powerful than seeing the immensity of existence and then comparing our thus far pitiful explorations to them. Those persons with the will to embrace the larger goals of space travel, by passing by the little miasma of our insignificant apish little goals, to get a shiny new car, a cell phone or an expensive suit are those worthy of worship. One such man was Sergei Korolev, the “Chief designer” of the secret Soviet space program. This story follows his management of the men who would create the universe’s only known spacefaring species from 1957’s Sputnik forward into what we can only hope would be a bright future. The story spans from World War II, when Korolev was released from a prison camp to design rockets, to 1997 and the Mir space station.

Andy Duncan is not someone I’d read anything of prior, but his work here is remarkable. If this wasn’t supposed to be Alternate History, and it is very subtle if it is even that, I’d have said the story of Koralev’s life history was massaged to provide a more ballistic plot. Though Koralev was sent to the Gulag, as depicted in the opening sentences of this novella, the reason for his departure from it didn’t happen, in real life, for the reasons stated in the story.

Michael Swanwick called The Chief Designer, “A portrayal … of the single most positive enterprise of the twentieth century”, and he is right, but too limiting, Koralev’s genius, along with men like Wernher von Braun was to expand the meaning of humanity from mere animal to demi-god. Before these men, their vision and action, we were just animals with tools and language, afterwards we became creatures capable of refining the metal of the crust of the planet upon which we were born, shaping it into cylinders filled with explosives and sending our representatives to other worlds. The Chief Designer is a portrayal of the single most important enterprise in human history! Koralev is in a very real sense our real life Titan, our very real and historical Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humanity.

The Chief Designer is winner of the 2002 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Southeastern Science Fiction Achievement Award, a 2003 Nebula Award finalist and a 2002 Hugo Award finalist. Today we can add SFFaudio Essential to its many achievements.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Storm Front by Jim Butcher

SFFaudio Audiobook Review

Editor’s Note: Let’s give a big hand to our newest reviewer, Michael Bekemeyer. When Michael isn’t writing screenplays and shooting pictures, he writes and reads his own stories on his podcast, Scatterpod.

Storm Front: Book 1 of the Dresden Files
By Jim Butcher; Read by James Marsters
1 MP3 Disc or 8 CDs – Approx. 10.5 hrs [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Buzzy Multimedia
Published: 2004
ISBN: 0965725561(MP3 disc); 0965725502(CDs)
Themes: / Fantasy / Mystery / Magic / Private Detective / Wizard / Noir /

Fans of the Dresden series of books will probably recognize this title as the first in the widely successful series authored by Jim Butcher. Those of you who have been living under a rock somewhere, like I have, might only have known this as a TV series on the Sci-Fi Channel. Either way, once introduced to the world of Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, you are most likely to find yourself under his spell and wanting more.

If first impressions count the most, you might not think much of Harry Dresden. He is the classic underdog; a private investigator complete with a sagaciously dry sense of humor, a cat called Mr., a car that breaks down more than it runs and oh, yes, magical powers. That’s right, he’s a wizard and a P.I. and therein lies the charm of this series.

The story starts like a lot of detective stories. The unlikely hero is hired by a seemingly normal client, who is trying to find her missing husband and the mystery that is woven is tight and spellbinding, as well as thoughtful and told in first person. So we, the reader (or listener) find things out as Dresden does and are never allowed the luxury of knowing what’s going on before he does.

Sounds pretty cut and dry, I know, but as the mystery unfolds we are introduced to a holistically inventive cast of characters that includes vampires, demons, giant scorpions, a dark wizard, prostitutes, fairies, drug dealers, gangsters, a nymphomaniac and even a peeping-pizza-delivery-guy-Tom. Each of these characters adds to the story and texture of the Dresden universe with richly orchestrated layers of darkness, humor and a never-ending sense of impending doom. And, since being underestimated is part of Dresden’s charm, we find that he has more than just a few card tricks up his sleeve.

The story is narrated by James Marsters, who you will most certainly know as Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series. His dry reading of the text does an excellent job of expressing the internal monologue of Harry Dresden. Since the story in first person, from the perspective of the main character, Marsters does not do a lot of voices, or interpretation of the characters. I think, as an actor, he may have been more inclined to capture the dramatic truth of the moment as opposed to using animated voices to tell the tale. So, it feels like we are gathered around a campfire while Dresden is personally recounting the details of the story for us.

The production value of this audio book is high, with rich sound that is full and easy to listen to. However, there were a few minor things that stood out to me. At times the reading sounded rushed. For instance, there are several times when the narrator almost flubs a line and doesn’t stop to correct himself. Also, there were several times when the background noise and page turns really jumped out at me. I know it may sound a bit picky to mention such things, but the beauty of listening to a story in audio form, is that the listener can enter the audible world of the story. Even the slightest glitch can instantly kill the mood.

All in all, I highly recommend this audiobook. I am happy to say that the hiccups in the production do not deteriorate the stellar performance and storytelling that you will find in Storm Front, Dresden Book 1. So, if you haven’t already found yourself under Dresden’s spell, this audio presentation by Buzzy Multimedia is a fine place to start.

posted by Michael Bekemeyer of the Scatterpod podcast