Reviews – Page 128

Review of Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong by Joe DeVito and Brad Stickland

Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong
By Joe DeVito and Brad Stickland; Read by a Full Cast
6 CDs – 6.75 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Full Cast Audio
Published: 2005
ISBN: 1933322497
Themes: / Science Fiction / Horror / Movie making / Gorillas / Dinosaurs /

Full Cast Audio has really perfected their style. The first audio I listened to by them was back in 2002 – I reviewed it for SFSite, and you can find it here. Their Full Cast style of audiobook narration was new to me, I was a little put off by it, though I enjoyed the book (as did my son).

Here we are in 2006, and Full Cast Audio presents Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong, during which I marveled at the expert production. The skillful acting, the flawless editing, and the classic story make this a title not to be missed. Nobody does Full Cast Unabridged narration better than Full Cast Audio.

The story is familiar to nearly all of us. Carl Denham is a recklessly ambitious filmmaker in 1930’s New York City. He gathers a crew and an actress (Ann Darrow) to sail to a secret destination where he can film his masterpiece. The crew finds the mysterious island, where they find King Kong in an adventure that turns dangerous in a big hurry.

I haven’t seen the original King Kong film for many years, and it didn’t have the effect on me that it did on so many others, including Peter Jackson. I have seen Peter Jackson’s version, though. This version of the story is not a novelization of the Peter Jackson script. It is an expansion of the original novelization of Cooper’s original Kong story.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

Review of The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells

The First Men in the Moon
By H.G. Wells, performed by a full cast
2 Tapes, Approx. 2 hours – [AUDIO DRAMA]
Publisher: Alien Voices
Published: 1998
ISBN: 0671872281
Themes: / Science fiction / Aliens / Sociology / Space Travel /

Oars slap against water and thud against wood, waves lap against a small boat bobbing in the ocean, and shore birds scree along the not-too-distant shore. You close your eyes and are transported to another time and place, a sonic virtual reality in which two fisherman sit to either side of you, discussing the catch and the mysterious steel sphere that falls from the sky. Such richly detailed soundscapes draw you into this adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon, and whisk you along from the familiar sounds of earth to the speculative sounds of deep space and the moon.

The acting is uniformly excellent, as well, with Leonard Nimoy and John de Lancie leading a talented cast with their spot-on characterizations of Professor Caver and Mr. Bedford. These two form a buzzing, absent-minded scientist and cool, craven capitalist odd-couple who develop a spaceship built around gravity-blocking shutters and then fly it to the moon. The civilization they discover beneath the moon’s surface is, well, substantially alien. This tale isn’t quite Wells’, but it is told with such ebullience and impressive audio depth that you can’t help liking it. In fact, the genial enthusiasm that suffuses the entire production proves both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of the work: It makes for fun listening, but it winds up blunting some of Wells’ sharper observations about humanity and reason.

On the plus side, this adaptation does an admirable job of streamlining Wells’ sprawling narrative to lead us effectively from the thrill of invention to the uncertainty of exploration, from budding friendship to estrangement, and from difficult first contact to horrifying understanding. But there are several missteps along the way. For one thing, the voyage to the moon has been clumsily appended with a comet rendezvous that cheerily ignores even Newtonian physics and leads to an incomprehensible predicament with the Caverite shutters. What’s more, a staged “revolution” on the moon is utterly unconvincing, and even more disappointing, the Grand Lunar is transformed from a rational genius to a power-mad egomaniac.

But the most important transformation is thematic. Wells’ original compares human terrestrial civilization with the formic lunar one to contrast life as we know it with his vision of a completely rational society. Both have distinct horrors: We have war and poverty, the Lunarites have de-evolved sub-races and casual deactivation of inconvenient units. In this production, the comparison seems more like one between Capitalism and Communism, and it reverses the threat at the end to be something like a Red Scare, which makes no sense when you consider which society has the more demonstrably violent past.

On the whole, this is a fun production and a treat to listen to. Enjoy it for what it is, but do not attempt to substitute it for a reading of the original.

Posted by Kurt Dietz

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

Review of Middle Woman by Orson Scott Card

SFFaudio Review

Middle Woman
By Orson Scott Card; Read by Mary Robinette Kowal
1 MP3 File – 9 Minutes 57 Seconds [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
Published: March 2006
Themes: / Fantasy / Fable / Dragons / 3 Wishes /Immortality /

This is the second “Audio Bonus” from Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show online magazine, the plan appears to be to offer one bonus MP3 story per issue. Cool!

Orson Scott Card’s short fiction is connected to people in ways that other speculative fiction often isn’t. Realistic character psychology always takes the lead over scenarios, but his scenarios always test his characters’ psychologies – it makes for a special completeness rarely found in Speculative Fiction. Combine this with a refinement of prose, where every word is perfectly placed, and you get a little piece of magic in every OSC story. In this case, “Middle Woman” is a fable style fiction, another variation of that old saw “the three wishes”. Originally published under OSC’s pseudonym “Byron Walley”, it takes the idea of moderation, something almost always absent from fables, and runs with it. It reminded me of a kinder, gentler version of Robert Bloch’s classic That Hellbound Train. Interestingly, it also offers a more restive solution to W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw. The setting is Eastern, and given the “middle” of the title I suspect it is working in the ‘middle kingdom’ style of storytelling. Whether I’m right about that or not you’ll have to check it out yourself to decide.

Quite short, only 9 minutes, this is ably read by Mary Robinette Kowal who manipulates her voice in all the right ways to lend classic fairy tale reading to this modern fable. In addition to being a terrific narrator, Kowal is a professional puppeteer who also moonlights as speculative fiction author. “Middle Woman” is the Audio Bonus found in Issue Two of the online magazine Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.

DISCLAIMER: Mary Robinette Kowal, when not reading stories aloud is an SFFaudio reviewer.

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

Review of Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

SFFaudio Review

Altered Carbon
By Richard K. Morgan; Read by Todd McLaren
14 CDs or 2 MP3-CDs – 14 Hours 54 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Media
Published: 2005
ISBN: 1400101379 (Retail CDs), 1400131375 (Library CDs), 1400151376 MP3-CDs
Themes: / Science Fiction / Mystery / Cyberpunk / Immortality / Artificial Intelligence / Galactic Civilization / Conciousness Uploading / Hardboiled Fiction / Noir Fiction /

“Fuelled by every crime noir novel I’d ever read, plus swabs of French and Japanese cinema, the work of William Gibson and M. John Harrison, early Poul Anderson and Bob Shaw, and last but not least the colossal impact of Bladerunner, this was my take on future noir. Fast forward to middle of the new millenium, and down where it counts, nothing has changed, because neither have we. Enter Takeshi Kovacs.”
–Richard K. Morgan

Altered Carbon is a stunning debut novel. A near classic, it boils over with solid SF ideas all encased in violent and vivid prose as told in a hardboiled first person narration. Set a few hundred years in the future, humanity has started colonizing the galaxy under the supervision of the United Nations. From one such world comes Takeshi Kovacs, an ex-U.N. Envoy (interplanetary special forces) who’s been brought to Earth in order to work as a private detective for a murdered “Meth”. Meths are the ultra rich, able to afford new cloned bodies so that they can live forever. This is achieved by means of the “cortical stack” technology, a backup harddrive for one’s mind, implanted in the skull shortly after birth. Most people can’t afford to be “re-sleeved” after they die, and so languish in storage for centuries. Convicted criminals have their bodies sold out from under them.

Interplanetary travel is done by way of “needlecast”, a form of faster than light transmission of data. No bodies are transported – visitors from distant planets are re-sleeved in a local body. With these technologies many of society’s values have changed. “Real death” is rare, “organic damage” is far more common. And even real death, the destruction of a cortical stack, isn’t necessarily the end since the ultra rich keep backups. Needlecast transmission of stack’s data on a regular basis makes one virtually immortal. Like working with any fallible system though you just have to remember to backup, and frequently.

Laurens Bancroft, a centuries old tycoon brought Kovacs to Earth in order to investigate his apparent suicide, something the Meth thinks was really a murder – though he can’t say for sure as he was backed up 48 hours before his death. The investigation leads Kovacs into a tangled web of politics, prostitution and power games with stakes as high as an immortal lifespan can offer. Thrown into the mix is a dirty cop, his driven parter, an artifically intelligent hotel, and a whole lot of bloodshed.

Though at first blush this appears to be a straight out neo-cyberpunk novel, it has more depth. The mystery and hardboiled elements are a direct homage to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep with Kovacs in the Philip Marlowe role. Like The Big Sleep, Altered Carbon is complicated and hard to follow, with many characters double and triple-crossing each other. SF elements, like the conciousness uploading, are not particularily new, but Morgan’s take is, and it is well integrated into the plot. One scene which has Kovacs “cross-sleeved” into a female body for investigative purposes illustrates just how wild the concept of this kind of mind swapping can be.

There are several lengthy sex scenes and even more combat scenes. I liked the way they were handled (some of the descriptions were positively Gibsonian) but I grew fatigued at their numerousness and frequency. Another problem was the over-use of “neuro chem” as a cure all for crisis situations. UN Envoy training allows envoys to battle harder and smarter than anyone without such training, so whenever things get rough for Takeshi, and they get rough frequently, he falls back on his “neuro chem.” The problem there is it ends up working like an inexaustible turbo boost – he’s too powerful, too skilled for sustained anxiety on the part of the reader. Like Neo in the second and third Matrix movies, we stop caring. On the other hand, the plot twists delightfully defy expectation and are cleverly rendered. The way the story is told is reminiscent of the best kinds of noir fiction. It is as solid a modern science fiction novel that reads better than any first novel has any right to be.

Tantor sent us the Library bound CD edition, which came in a clamshell stlye plastic case. Durable and easily accessed. Sound quality is near flawless with high recording levels. Narrator Todd McLaren is Takeshi Kovacs, and his reading is cool and smooth like the confident interstellar hard-case he’s portraying. There are at least a half dozen female roles he’s equally adroit with, some of which required breathy libidinousness, some irate rage. I look forward to an encore performances in the sequel, Broken Angels.

Incidentally, Tantor Media snapped up all four of the Richard K. Morgan novels released so far, you can check them out HERE along with more than a dozen other Science Fiction and Fantasy titles available so far. Tantor is becoming a solid source for SF&F audio goodness.

Posted by Jesse Willis