The SFFaudio Podcast #263 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Colour Out Of Space by H.P. Lovecraft

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #263 – The Colour Out Of Space by H.P. Lovecraft, read by Donal Buckley. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the short story (68 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Mirko, and Huan Vu (the director of the movie adaptation, Die Farbe).

Talked about on today’s show:
Arkham Insiders, Die Farbe (aka The Color), The Atlanta Radio Theatre Company adaptation, The H.P.L.H.S., Die Farbe gets a shout-out in the Dark Adventure Radio Theater adaptation, the novella/novelette, Amazing Stories, September 1927, science fiction and horror together, The Whisperer In Darkness, the framing story, American soldiers running away from the colour, unjustified punishment, cosmic horror, pre-WWII Germany, the symbology, the endings, mind control, zombie ants, parasites, the science of The Colour Out Of Space, The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, a pocket spectroscope, how do we see a new color?, discovering a new color, infra-red light, the blind and the colorblind, the black and white, film doing something an audio drama never could, a companion piece to The Whisperer In Darkness, the wasp, Formicula (aka Them!), an explanation for what the colour is, The Voice In The Night by William Hope Hodgson, anthropocentric aliens, an analogy, is The Colour Of Of Space SF?, alien flapjacks, spores, a sentient cloud of gas, “the Horla” (woops I mean the Horta), Star Trek‘s The Devil In The Dark, an alien (in much of SF is really about people), alien aliens, a corrective, John W. Campbell Who Goes There?, The Thing, whose who and whats what, it’s insidious, what will happen when you flood that valley?, Arkham Springs water, fear of radiation, a nuclear contamination story, “the blasted heat” is like Chernobyl, Macbeth, the meteor, dry ice, too creepy for night reading, Lovecraft’s opinion, The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, alien mind control, stealthy listening, the horror in the attic, The White People by Arthur Machen, the comic undercutting in The Dreams In The Witch-House, a mood study, Die Farbe is a wonderful adaptation of The Colour Out Of Space, the changes in the film version, the character names, Robert M. Price, a biblical reading of The Colour Out Of Space, He Am Himself, comets, reproduction, Monsters, cosmic bug spray, expanding your perspective, From Beyond, the running time, the chosen colour, Schindler’s List, you shouldn’t make evil that colour, taupe?, khaki?, a striking contrast, Sin City, color theory, signal colors, Ancient Greece, The Odyssey, “the wine dark sea”, “rosy fingered dawn”, what if my blue is your red?”, science over experience, dark matter/dark energy are placeholder words, science is mostly failure, “not optimistic at all”, if this happened in reality, the way out, The Dream Cycle Stories, going to The Dreamlands, Celephaïs by H.P. Lovecraft, To A Dreamer by H.P. Lovecraft, it’s not horror, The Dream-Quest For Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft, Lovecraft isn’t only horror, the IndieGoGo page for The Dream-Lands, The-Dreamlands.com, Die-Farbe.com, Gary Lovisi, the matchmaker.

"blasted heath" illustrated by H.P. Lovecraft in a letter to F. Lee Baldwin March 27, 1934

The Colour Out Of Space by H.P. Lovecraft

The Colour Out Of Space - illustration by Virgil Finlay

The Colour Out Of Space by H.P. Lovecraft

Die Farbe

The Colour Out Of Space - Illustrated by Jason Eckhart

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Seal Team 13 by Evan Currie

SFFaudio Review

SEAL team 13Seal Team 13
By Evan Currie, Read by Todd Haberkorn
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Publication date: 15 November 2013
[UNABRIDGED] – 9 hours

Themes: / military sci-fi / Navy SEAL / supernatural / horror /

Publisher summary:

It’s been ten years since a mysterious, horrific incident in the South China Sea annihilated a US Navy destroyer and its Navy SEAL team. Only one man survived. Now, the US Navy is determined to put a stop to the new, frightening incidents taking place with alarming frequency. Enter SEAL Team 13, an elite group of soldiers led by sole survivor Harold “Hawk” Masters. Everyone on the team has survived contact with supernatural forces from “the other side.” Will their camaraderie and duty to country be enough to defeat the malevolent undead forces threatening the country? From world-building author Evan Currie, SEAL Team 13 is a dark, riveting, and action-packed tale of military intrigue and supernatural horror.

I hadn’t heard much about this one, but the description convinced me to give it a go. A military group is assembled to take on supernatural occurrences and with my experience with Myke Cole’s Shadow Ops series, which is really only similar in the fact that the military is involved, I thought I couldn’t miss.

Sadly, what started out as a fun romp with the military and monsters turned out to be a cliched and underwhelming frustration.

The Cliches

I don’t outright hate cliches. I think they can be used well and it’s an easy way to get people into the story or characters without having to waste time (i.e. pages) explaining things. The problem I had here was that once you make reference to “it’s like I’m in a movie” one too many times, it starts to pull you out of the immediate story. It’s no longer its own story, it’s someone else’s. And it just plain started to bug me since just about every character had to make mention of being in a bad horror movie.

And I was even impressed that the cliches weren’t so much in the monsters themselves. Obviously there were some monster cliches, but I liked the idea behind the vampires/zombies. Sadly it wasn’t enough.

Why I Was Underwhelmed

One of the big promises I felt that were made early on was that this team was collected to take on the supernatural occurrences in the world. Occurrences is plural right? So, I figured we would get more than one.

Okay, technically there are more than one because of the backstory of the characters, but the team itself only ever takes on one ridiculously long occurrence of the supernatural and that’s the end of this rather short book. Just a couple more would have made this so much better. Let’s see what else they can do. Are they really here for just the one event? It makes the whole idea behind supernatural threats seem much less … erm … threatening.

Longest Drawn Out Fight Scene Ever

This was the kicker. The last bit of the story has these guys throwing just about everything at the “boss” bad guy monster thing. They chase her through the building, then down the road, and it’s always just in the nick of time that she gets away/protagonist gets saved. And then it happens again … and again. I was so done with this scene. There’s tension and then there’s a time when you’ve built up the tension so much it breaks. When nothing has actually occurred in terms of resolution, I just can’t care anymore.

The Narrator

The narrator, Todd Haberkorn, did a good job. He definitely matched the cliches well and did solid work. I can’t say he was my favorite ever, but that may have been the lines he was given to work with as well. It’s hard to say.

Posted by Bryce L.

The SFFaudio Podcast #262 – NEW RELEASES/RECENT ARRIVALS

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #262 – Jesse, Jenny, Tamahome, and Seth talk about NEW RELEASES and RECENT ARRIVALS.

Talked about on today’s show: We help Jesse clear off his desk by discussing books in paper (dead trees and rags), “like e-books but thicker”; Tropic of Serpents by Marie Brennan, second in the Lady Trent series, gorgeously illustrated, Darwin meets dragons; why are illustrations dying out, even in e-books?; Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan features good illustrations; The Raven’s Shadow, third in Elspeth Cooper’s Wild Hunt series; how many print pages in an hour of audio?; more from L.E. Modesitt Jr’s Imager series; John C. Wright’s The Judge of Ages, with allusions to Cordwainer Smith; The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, smarter steampunk?; a tangent on translating page to screen; Tam likes more fantasy in his fantasy; a tangent on Game of Thrones; a tangent on Citizen Brick and the expiration of the LEGO patent; The Revolutions by Felix Gilman; science fiction was once planetary romance; The Prestige; Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year vol. 8 edited by Jonathan Strahan, now published by Solaris, featuring a lot of great stories; and we finally reach audiobooks!; The Scottish Fairy Book, Volume 1; the timeless quality of folktales; Classics Lesson of the Day: Ovid’s a boy, Sappho’s a girl; Steles of the Sky by Elizabeth Bear; we try to puzzle out what a stele is; we praise Bear’s interview on Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy; Elizabeth Bear’s Hammered isn’t romance “because fifty-year-olds never have romance”; Without a Summer, third in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories series, expertly narrated by the author; Dreamwalker by C.S. Friedman doesn’t seem to be your run-of-the-mill urban fantasy (suburban fantasy?); Indexing by Seanan McGuire, urban fantasy with a postmodern twist; mimetic incursion and Jorge Luis Borges’s Averroes’s Search; Night Broken by Patricia Briggs, eighth in her Mercy Thompson series; a tangent on midriff tattoos and names for tattoos on other parts of the body; Jenny has created a new genre, Scientific Near Future Thrillers!; in the future, iPods will be merged into our eyebrows; science and technology don’t evolve quite how we expect; Neil Gaiman discusses the influence of Ballard and other classic SF writers on the Coode Street Podcast; Sleep Donation by Karen Russell; Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux; Boswell is Samuel Johnson’s biographer; Afterparty by Daryl Gregory is blowing up on Goodreads; pre- and post-apocalyptic fiction–no actual apocalypse this time; The End is Nigh, first in the Apocalypse Triptych edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey; the tech gremlins didn’t want us to discuss Dust, the third in Hugh Howey’s Silo series; Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor; The Forever Watch by David Ramirez, Jesse thinks the protagonist has too many jobs; “pause resister”, WTF?; Dark Eden by Chris Beckett, already reviewed here at SFFaudio; we struggle to define Pentecostal; religious opposition to the film adaptation of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass; Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s The Edge of Tomorrow (originally entitled All You Need Is Kill), Groundhog Day meets Fullmetal Jacket, film adaptation features Tom Cruise; Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer, a hardboiled detective story on Mars; Noggin by John Corey Whaley; Decoded by Mai Jia; Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones is a refresh of The Arabian Nights; Frank Herbert’s Direct Descent is about a library planet; novella is the best length for SF; Night Ride and Other Journeys by Charles Beaumont, a “writer’s writer” who wrote for The Twilight Zone; Christopher Moore’s The Serpent of Venice is an irreverent Shakespeare/Poe mashup.

Tor Books

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Dark Eden by Chris Beckett

SFFaudio Review

Dark Eden by Chris BeckettDark Eden (Dark Eden #1)
By Chris Beckett; Read by Matthew Frow, Jayne Entwistle, Ione Butler, Robert Hook, Heather Wilds, Nicholas Guy Smith, Hannah Curtis, Bruce Mann
Publisher: Random House Audio
Publication Date: 1 April 2014[UNABRIDGED] – 15 hours, 10 minutes
Listen to an excerpt: | MP3 |

Themes: / dark alien world / humanity /  luminescence / space / patois / free love /

Publisher summary:

On the alien, sunless planet they call Eden, the 532 members of the Family shelter beneath the light and warmth of the Forest’s lantern trees. Beyond the Forest lie the mountains of the Snowy Dark and a cold so bitter and a night so profound that no man has ever crossed it.

The Oldest among the Family recount legends of a world where light came from the sky, where men and women made boats that could cross the stars. These ships brought us here, the Oldest say—and the Family must only wait for the travelers to return.

But young John Redlantern will break the laws of Eden, shatter the Family and change history. He will abandon the old ways, venture into the Dark…and discover the truth about their world.

Eden is a planet covered in darkness, hosting an abundance of familiarly alien flora and fauna, inhabited by Earth descended humans. The only light occurs naturally, there is no sun in orbit, and there are only the far away cold stars that shine in the sky.

The human settlement is known as the Family. They have not migrated from first landing. The original settlers of Eden could be counted on one hand; the women could be counted with one finger. Now everyone in the Family speaks in a childish patois riddled with repetition.

Dark Eden focuses on the splintering of the Family as one group breaks away from tradition and heads out into unexplored territory. The original society is built upon a matriarchal democracy. As the story evolves, this deteriorates into an oppressive system of patriarchy, under which we witness the first ever murder.

I struggled with this book. It’s billed as being a coming of age/YA story, but sex is treated rather peculiar. In the local patois, sex is known as a “slip” or to have sex, is to have a “slip” and to get slipped, is to, well you can figure it out. Free love is rampant and often public with mild attempts at modesty. Of course there is the issue of necessary incest. While the folks on Eden know it’s not good to slip your sister, daughter, or mother, I get the impression that such slips do occur. Personally, I feel that the attitudes and practice of sex on Eden is pretty true to how it would happen. Morality and modesty are after all cultural and malleable in definition. But the phrases “baby juice” and “juicy juice” carries an awkward juvenile humor that outweighs social commentary. I never knew if I was supposed to laugh at the sophomoric double entendres or simply overlook them. One minute it feels like I’m reading a cleverly written work of SF, the next moment I feel like I’m deciphering the bathroom stalls back in sixth grade. And the thing is, you can’t have it both ways. Rarely does one find Shakespeare in the outhouse.

The other irritations? The patois got old, very quick. The childish rhyming felt strange when place so near to sexual coupling. It just felt weird, as if puppets were having a sex education discussion with an ongoing demonstration. In places, it just felt a little creepy-creepy dirty-sneaky. I also feel the storytelling would have benefitted with some non-patois segments, or just something to break up its relentless monotony. The result of only employing local dialect is that exposition/description is reduced to unfamiliar forms of expression that fail to yield a smooth reading experience. Lastly, the plot mirrors Watership Down and Lord of the Flies too close for comfort. If you add the local-lingo and odd beasty theme of Miéville’s Railsea, Dark Eden loses all of its alien faraway feel. This doesn’t mean the book is bad, it just suggests a lack of originality.

The audiobook is narrated by Matthew Frow, Jayne Entwistle, Ione Butler, Robert Hook, Heather Wilds, Nicholas Guy Smith, Hannah Curtis, and Bruce Mann. I enjoyed the various narrators, each reading a different character. All readers have a heavy English/UK accent, but it still works, most of the time. I usually don’t care much for multiple narrators, but this production does a nice job.

Posted by Casey Hampton.

Someday by Isaac Asimov

SFFaudio News

Last night I discovered that Someday, a wonderful short story by Isaac Asimov, is PUBLIC DOMAIN.

I’ve posted the |PDF| from the original mag to our PDF PAGE (there’re hundreds more there by the way).

Someday set in a future in which everyone is illiterate (Asimov has another story, The Fun They Had, that has a similar premise). It talks about audio vs. video, robotics, artificial intelligence, creativity, empathy, and it has a terrific twist ending.

I think you’ll treasure it as much as I have over the years.

And here’s an audiobook version:

Part 1 of 3:

Part 2 of 3:

Part 3 of 3:

Posted by Jesse Willis