Reviews – Page 41

Review of The Crack in Space by Philip K. Dick

SFFaudio Review

The Crack in Space
By Philip K. Dick; Performed by Benjamin L. Darcie
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
[UNABRIDGED] – 7 hours

Themes: / racism / politics / alternate worlds / parallel universes /

Publisher summary:

When a repairman accidentally discovers a parallel universe, everyone sees it as an opportunity, whether as a way to ease Earth’s overcrowding, set up a personal kingdom, or hide an inconvenient mistress. But when a civilization is found already living there, the people on this side of the crack are sent scrambling to discover their motives. Will these parallel humans come in peace, or are they just as corrupt and ill-intentioned as the people of this world?

Philip K. Dick’s The Crack in Space was published in 1966, however the novel has its genesis in the short story Prominent Author which debuted in the May 1954 issue of IF: Worlds Of Science Fiction. This story has been featured previously on the SFFaudio website and is available as a PDF.

The focus of this story is a futuristic teleportation device known as a Jiffi-scuttler which is a product of the Terran Development company. In the short story, a prototype of the device is defective, which while works as a teleportation device, also serves as a sort of gateway into alternate times and/or realities. I recommend reading the short story first before tackling the novel as some of the key concepts are introduced which took some time to get used to in the full length novel.

The Crack in Space take places in the year 2080 and is interesting to read today as the focal character Jim Briskin is in the midst of a political campaign to become the first black president of the United States. This campaign takes place at a time that the country is still very much racially divided, with the population divided between “Cols” and “Caucs,” terms which are abbreviated forms of the words “Coloreds” and “Caucasians.” Due to the overpopulation, a large number of people (mostly “Cols,”) are kept in a state of cryogenic sleep while waiting for a time when the economy turns around and a solution to the overpopulation problem is found. These people are referred to as “bibs.”

The narration is handled by Benjamin L. Darcie who does a great job with the material. Benjamin also handles narration for Philip K. Dick’s A Maze of Death as well as has narrated a variety of other crime, sci-fi/fantasy, and horror titles. In addition to acting and film, Ben Darcie is also the beer editor for West Michigan’s REVUE magazine and known for the Beer Tasting Classes he hosts at breweries around Grand Rapids. I recommend the audiobook of The Crack in Space as a very interesting read with a contrasting mid-60’s view of the future given the current state of politics in the United States.

Posted by Dan VK

Review of She Returns from War by Lee Collins

SFFaudio Review

She Returns from War (Cora Oglesby #2)
By Lee Collins; Performed by Alison Larkin
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
[UNABRIDGED] – 10 hours

Themes: / western / fantasy / skin walkers / vampires /

Publisher summary:

Four years after the horrific events in Leadville, a young visitor from England, Victoria Dawes, sets into motion a series of events that will lead Cora and herself out into the New Mexico desert. They are in pursuit of Anaba, a Navajo witch bent on taking revenge for the atrocities committed against her people.

In this follow-up to The Dead of Winter, Lee Collins gives us a second installment of his “Cora Oglesby” saga. She Returns From War tells the story of Victoria Dawes, an English woman finding her grit in the American West. Lee Collins has improved his writing but not nearly enough to make this tale snap with electricity. Collins does a great job in the early portion of this novel. The wheels don’t completely fall off until midway through chapter three. The first three chapters are quite good. I hope that Collins continues improving and polishing his craft. If he does, I might be able to write a positive review of his work some day. But that day is not today.

Collins is clumsy with the female characters in his charge. Either the women are two-dimensional drunks, classic western prostitutes, or prissy high-society types. He also includes a stereotypical Native American woman character who is a “skin walker” trying to reap revenge on the white man. My issue isn’t with the choice of characters that Collins employs within his storytelling. My problem is that Collins fails to provide his characters with enough depth and substance that his characters deserve. As a result, we encounter a story jammed with cardboard cutouts lacking all sense of meaning.

Alison Larkin is the Narrator. She uses an English accent for the most part since the story is inferred as Victoria’s story. Larkin changes accents when doing American characters and I had a real issue here. While the English accent works quite nicely for the character of Victoria, Larkin butchers all other accents in an over-the-top cartoonish rendition of cowboy-drawl gone bad. If you can look beyond this, Larkin isn’t a half bad reader, though she would do well to back down the level of dramatic inflection. There is a musical score that plays at the beginning and end of each audio CD. Every time I heard this, I kept thinking it sounded like a second-rate retread of the Titanic soundtrack with a not so haunting female vocalist in the background lamenting some long lost love. If any of you ever find yourself in the position of choosing music to go in these spots in an audio production, please remember that less is truly more. All that is needed is a simple single instrument that reflects the tone of the story where it is broken by the physical limits of the CD.

Aside from skin walkers and vampires, there’s not much new in the way of dark things that need to be killed. We do encounter mysterious wolf-like things at the very beginning but these are only with us for a short while.

If you are contemplating giving Lee Collins a go, start here and see how you like his style. I think Collins is at his best in the first three chapters. If you like this story, then maybe take a gander at his first try The Dead of Winter… Though if’in it was up tuh me, I’d stop dead-in-my-tracks here. It’s all downhill beyond this point.

Posted by Casey Hampton.

Review of Brick By Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson and Bill Breen

SFFaudio Review

Brick By Brick: How LEGO Rewrote The Rules Of Innovation And Conquered The Global Toy Industry
By David Robertson and Bill Breen; Read by Thomas Vincent Kelly
Approx. 10 Hours 23 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 9780449806524
Themes: / Non-Fiction / Business / LEGO / STAR WARS / Denmark / Copyfight /

Sample |MP3|

I’m not one for business books, and this is explicitly a business book. The closest I’ve come to one, in the last decade, was Joseph Finder’s corporate espionage thriller Paranoia. On the other hand, I really am one for LEGO and Brick By Brick: How LEGO Rewrote The Rules Of Innovation And Conquered The Global Toy Industry is an audiobook about The LEGO Group.

Most of the book is about the recent history of LEGO, how it became unprofitable, and how it, through controlled innovation, recovered from that unprofitably. Along the way there is a fair amount about the company’s history – and even more importantly about the philosophy behind the “system” of The LEGO Group’s core product, the LEGO bricks themselves.

I started with LEGO in the mid-1970s, and barring a few pieces (lost, vacuumed, and stolen) along the way I still have much of it. But, similar to many other AFOLs (adult fans of LEGO) I experienced a decline in interest in LEGO as I entered my teens. As a kid I appreciated that LEGO allowed you to build your own toys, as a tween I programmed my own robotic LEGO creations (LEGO LOGO for Apple II) – but shortly thereafter the corporation seemed somehow go off track – creating products that were less LEGO sytem than LEGO branded toys. That is until around the mid-1990s. And that’s about when my re-invigoration of interest in LEGO started. No coincidence there, as this was also about the same time as the company’s financial revival. It seemed that the more I got more into LEGO the more the company became financially viable – but, of course, it was actually the reverse.

Indeed, Brick By Brick is essentially Robertson and Breen trying to figure out how the company works, where it went wrong, and how it recovered. In doing this they have looked at a number of failed projects, how they came to fail, how the company reorganized itself and how, with help from both adult LEGO fans and child LEGO fans they learned to operate without patent protection.

One of the more interesting comparisons between companies that Robertson and Breen make is that of LEGO to Apple. The parallels between the companies’ aesthetic philosophies (and cult like devotion by their customers) are many. I myself am a committed Apple iPhone user, not because I buy into the ecosystem, but rather because of the sculptured discipline of the technology. Likewise, though Megablocks and other LEGO competitors are making bricks that are 100% compatible with (and cheaper) than LEGO I am scrupulously careful to weed out MEGABLOCKS and other “fake lego” from my collection. The iPhone’s competitors aren’t really competitors, and the LEGO system’s competitors aren’t really competitors.

Back to the book, David Robertson and Bill Breen talk about a number of LEGO lines that I like, particularly the CITY, SPACE, and CASTLE lines but they also explain the thinking behind popular licensed IPs like STAR WARS, INDIANA JONES, and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. Several chapters cover the creation of the successful BIONCLE line (originally conceived as a line called “VOODOO HEADS”), the innovative board game division (that sneakily gets moms to buy more LEGO), and the massively expensive failure of the LEGO UNIVERSE project (an ambitious project aimed at disrupting LEGO’s own core market). And that last one is one of the most fascinating sections of Brick By Brick. By trying to make the experience perfect, by trying to produce a graphically rich massively multiplayer online game without bugs, then charging a whopping $40 to start playing it LEGO screwed up royally. The failure of the LEGO Universe project is all the more ironic in that a lone computer game programmer, Markus “Notch” Persson, came to create a sucessful kind of digital competitor to LEGO system, in the form of Minecraft. Peterson’s success, using almost no resources and no money, make the error of LEGO hierarchy all the clearer. But in an even more ironic move LEGO has since produced a Minecraft set!

In my view the only thing missing from Brick By Brick is talk about the very successful, collectible Minifigures line (now up to Series 10). To my ears Minifigs get very short shrift in Brick By Brick. I’d love to hear a two or three hour audiobook about that alone.

There’s very little to say about narrator. Thomas Vincent Kelly is a relatively new narrator, his reading is clear and precise, like the LEGO system. The occasional Danish place-name pronunciation, and the names of the LEGO products themselves are the only real narrative challenges. Kelly delivers.

David Robertson: The Story of LEGO from BrightSightGroup on Vimeo.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Redshirts by John Scalzi

SFFaudio Review

Redshirts
By John Scalzi; Performed by Wil Wheaton
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: 11 June 2013
[UNABRIDGED] – 8 hours

Themes: / Star Trek / humor / space /

Publisher summary:

Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It’s a prestige posting, and Andrew is even more thrilled to be assigned to the ship’s xenobiology laboratory, with the chance to serve on “Away Missions” alongside the starship’s famous senior officers. Life couldn’t be better . . . until Andrew begins to realize that (1) every Away Mission involves some kind of lethal confrontation with alien forces, (2) the ship’s captain, its chief science officer, and the handsome Lieutenant Kerensky always survive these confrontations, and (3) sadly, at least one low-ranked crew member is invariably killed. Unsurprisingly, the savvier members belowdecks avoid Away Missions at all costs. Then Andrew stumbles on information that completely transforms his and his colleagues’ understanding of what the starship Intrepid really is . . . and offers them a crazy, high-risk chance to save their own lives.

A John Scalzi book making fun of Star Trek? Read by Wil Wheaton? YES PLEASE! I had heard some mixed things about this book (and the audio in particular coming in). That didn’t really deter me, I just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Things sort of converged where I got the chance to review it for this site and it was the alternate July pick for the Sword & Laser book club.

This book really cracked me up. I found myself going between chuckling to myself and bursting out into embarrassing fits of laughter. Thank goodness no one was around to see it. And you won’t tell people about it, will you internet?

In the book, Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union. Oh so he’s an Ensign in Starfleet on the Enterprise? Got it. The book extrapolates on the ridiculousness of sending Kirk, Spock, Mccoy and Ensign Timmy, in his bright red shirt, down to the dangerous planet on an away mission. One of them dies. Guess which one?

The original series was before my time (I’m a Next Gen/DS9 Trekker), and I’ve only really watched the movies and very few episodes, but the meme of being the Redshirt on an away mission is well known to just about everyone at this point. The book gets pretty Meta, but I found it to be an enjoyable book, even if it loses a bit of steam as it goes along. The main story was very enjoyable and the three Codas were alright. I liked the first one the most. The second two were OK, but I don’t think either added too much to the story.

This is the second audio book I’ve listened to that is Narrated by Wil Wheaton (The other being Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.) I really enjoy him as a narrator, especially for a book like this. I couldn’t think of a more perfect reader for a Star Trek Parody book.

That said, this book does suffer what I like to call “Unabridgedness”. That’s where the author does something that in print would likely be ignored or read differently (like an image, or specially printed text) that is a bit painful to listen to.

I won’t say the particular issue with this book so as not to plant it in your head (like it had been in mine before listening). Maybe you won’t notice :)

Despite that, I think this is great to listen to in an audiobook, and I especially enjoy the way Mr. Wheaton reads sarcastic statements (of which this book has many). Oh, and he does a great drunk voice!

It’s a quick read (~8 hours for the normal speed audiobook), and the perfect summer/vacation book.

Review by Rob Zak.

Review of Hard Magic by Larry Correia

SFFaudio Review

Hard Magic (Grimnoir Chronicles #1)
By Larry Correia; Performed by Bronson Pinchot
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
[UNABRIDGED] 16 hrs on 14 CDs
ISBN: 978-1469280493

Themes: / 1930’s / guns / secret organizations / magic / urban fantasy /

Publisher summary:

Jake Sullivan is a war hero, a private eye — and an ex-con. He’s free because he has a magical talent and the Feds need his help in apprehending criminals with their own magical abilities. But the last operation Jake was sent on went completely wrong, and Delilah Jones, an old friend in happier times, had too much magical muscle with her for the Feds to handle, even with Jake’s help. It got worse. Jake found out that not only have the Feds been lying to him, but there was a secret war being waged by opposing forces of magic-users. Worse still, he had attracted the attention of one side’s ruthless leaders — who were of the opinion that Jake was far too dangerous to be permitted to live .

Hard Magic reeks of cool in the best possible way, especially when read by Bronson Pinchot. Yup, the Perfect Strangers actor is one of the coolest narrators I’ve ever listened to.

Speaking of cool. Jake Sullivan. Jake freaking Sullivan. He’s easily the coolest character I’ve ever read. He’s a slow-witted meathead, at least it would appear on the surface, and you would think I would hate him, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Not only is he actually a very smart guy, but he works hard and keeps his word. And you probably don’t want him to keep his word, it usually doesn’t bode well for people.

This brings me to something I really enjoyed about this book. Correia’s magic system in this book is excellent. It’s extremely well thought out, but even better is that people can also use it in more ways than it appears. Jake is one of those who has figured out a way to use his magic differently, he’s figured out that manipulating things so that he can easily lift them or move them is just a small portion of what his magic can do. It allows him to manipulate gravity much the same as a certain character in The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson.

I’ve heard a lot about Larry Correia and never anything less than positive. Already he was on my list of authors to read, but I’ve obviously taken my sweet time getting there. Let me tell you, I waited far too long.

Hard Magic takes place around the time of the Great Depression. It’s the early 1930’s and things are not going well for people. However, there are oakies, gangsters, pin stripes, and everything cool about this time period. There are also secret organizations, some good and some bad, and there’s more to the magic than it first appears.

I won’t waste your time anymore. This was such a great read, with great characters and a great narrator in Bronson Pinchot, even though it did take some time to warm up to him. His slow drawl for Jake Sullivan was just pure genius. But beware, this may just make you cooler.

4.5 out of 5 Stars (very highly recommended)

Posted by Bryce L.

Review of Joyland by Stephen King

SFFaudio Review

Joyland
By Stephen King; Read by Michael Kelly
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication Date: June 2013
ISBN: 9781442359918
[UNABRIDGED] – 7 discs

Themes: / crime / noir / amusement parks /

Publisher summary:

Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever. Joyland is a brand-new novel and has never previously been published.

I’d like to think of myself as an experienced Stephen King reader. I’ve read about 25 of his books, but that’s only about a 3rd of what he’s written.

At first I found myself wondering if I had the author right. I kept waiting for horrible things to happen: evil clowns, monsters, Randall Flagg. You know, a Stephen King book. There are carnies, but no evil clowns. That’s probably not fair on my part, he has written a variety of things over the years, and not all of it is horror. Still it’s what he’s best known for, and it can be a bit surprising when evil isn’t lurking around every corner.

That isn’t to say this book doesn’t have some spookiness and a sense of the fantastical going on. Joyland is about a 21 year old college student named Devin Jones, recently ditched by his girlfriend who takes a summer job working at an amusement park in North Carolina called Joyland in the 1970s. One of Joyland’s biggest attractions is the Horror House, said to be haunted by the ghost of a girl who was murdered during the ride a few years past. That sounds more like the Stephen King we all know, right?

During his job interview, he meets the resident “psychic” who gives him a prediction about his future. He’s skeptical, because surely, it’s all just an act for the show, right? What follows is a time that Devin will never forget, and a story I greatly enjoyed. It’s actually quite heart warming in places. It’s really a book about people more than anything.

It’s certainly not one of his scariest books, but it’s one of the best of his I’ve read. It’s certainly more The Shawshank Redemption than It. At only 283 pages/7.5 hours it’s much shorter than Mr. King’s usual fare as well, but I’d definitely recommend it as a quick read.

The book is narrated by Michael Kelly who is probably better known as an actor than as an audiobook reader. This is the first book I’ve listened to with him. Unsurprisingly he speaks in a clear manner, with good inflection. He does a few accents for some of the characters, but not all.

Review by Rob Zak.