LibriVox: The Iron Heel by Jack London

The Iron Heel, one of the books from our 4th Annual SFFaudio Challenge. It is now complete and available free from LibriVox! Narrator Matt Soar sez:

I have just this afternoon finally finished the last chapter of Jack London’s The Iron Heel. Phew! It’s been quite an experience – begun in Montreal, completed in France, six months in the making.

He actually wrote that two months ago. See, Matt decided to make a planned creative commons release release PUBLIC DOMAIN! Woohoo! It’s on LibriVox and it has now been catalogued!

And, over in the “about” section of Matt’s site, TheIronHeel.net Matt wrote:

The entire expe­ri­ence has been intrigu­ing, if not uncanny: The story, about an over­bear­ing, immoral gov­ern­ment char­ac­ter­ized by decep­tion, tor­ture, and war­mon­ger­ing, against a back­ground of civil­ian exploita­tion and reli­gious zealotry, is mainly remark­able for the fact that it was writ­ten a hun­dred years ago — rather than, say, five.

Per­haps the only aspects of The Iron Heel that really age it are its breath­lessly roman­tic hero­ine, occa­sion­ally pro­saic lan­guage, and the author’s fleet­ing use of dubi­ous terms to describe eth­nic minori­ties. These quib­bles aside, I’m really glad I took the time to record it, and hope you enjoy it too.

The Iron Heel
By Jack London; Read by Matt Soar
26 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 8 Hours 18 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox / TheIronHeel.net
Published: July 16, 2010
Generally considered to be the earliest of the modern dystopian novels, The Iron Heel chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. It is arguably the novel in which Jack London’s socialist views are most explicitly on display. A forerunner of “soft science fiction” novels and stories of the 1960s and 1970s, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes.

Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/rss/4342

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[Thanks a ton Matt!]

Posted by Jesse Willis