Wow! It’s hard to beat the combination of great writer and great narrator in a first person perspective tale. That’s exactly what More Than The Sum Of His Parts by Joe Haldeman is: Amazingly written SF delivered by an amazingly talented narrator.
Lightspeed Magazine has it, in its latest issue, and as a podcast. Playboy magazine heralded it as:
“a fictional saga of bionic experimentation.”
I call it a powerful and sympathetic story about a horribly injured steel-worker who gets rebuilt as a cyborg. If you give it a listen I think you’ll be just as riveted to your earphones as I was to mine. It’s comparable, in power, pattern and in quality, to Ted Chiang‘s transcendent masterpiece Understand. Now, if the question is whether it’s better than Understand – I think it’s not – but, that it’s up there, competing in the marketplace of ultra-interestingness isn’t in question! Judge for yourself, More Than The Sum Of His Parts is an absolutely unmissable podcast Science Fiction tale, read by a pro. Seriously now, how can you possibly not download this?
More Than The Sum Of His Parts
By Joe Haldeman; Read by Stefan Rudnicki
1 |MP3| – Approx. 49 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Lightspeed Magazine
Podcast: August 23, 2010
Set in 2058, Doctor Wilson Cheetham, was a quality control engineer in a high orbital aluminum smelter until he was horribly injured in a catastrophic vaporized aluminum accident. His face, throat, mouth, ears, sinuses, eyes, genitals, one arm and one leg have been totally and completely burned away. Amazingly, he’s survived and is being rebuilt by his employers. First published in the May 1985 issue of Playboy magazine.
Posted by Jesse Willis
LightSpeed is awesome. So is Clarkesworld and StarshipSofa. If this is the future of SF short fiction, I think we’re in better shape than we realize.