SFFaudio – Page 283 – News, Reviews, and Commentary on all forms of science fiction, fantasy, and horror audio. Audiobooks, audio drama, podcasts; we discuss all of it here. Mystery, crime, and noir audio are also fair game.

The Heathen by Jack London

SFFaudio Online Audio

Here’s a terrifically interesting story of romantic adventure, and love, between two very heterosexual men.

Did I mention they are heterosexual?

Well they are.

They have wives!

That’s all there is to it.

The Heathen interweaves Jack London’s racist ideas with his experiences as a sailor to make a truly he-manish tale of two macho sailors who form an unbreakable seventeen-year bond after being shipwrecked in the South Pacific. This is manly beefcake Jack London from 1910, working the blood and breed obsessed vein of fiction and friendship that Robert E. Howard did so masterfully in stories like Queen Of The Black Coast and Hills Of The Dead.

Unfortunately, the version that my good friend Gregg Margarite read for LibriVox, a couple years back, was abridged (or perhaps sanitized) – the PDF version below includes a couple of extra lines here, there, and at the end. Important lines. It also includes more swearing.

Damn those abridgers and sanitizers.

Gregg is dead.

I’m confident he’d have wanted to have read the unsanitized and unabridged original had it been available.

The Heathen by Jack London

The Heathen by Jack London - illustration by Anton Fischer

The Heathen
By Jack London; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 46 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: December 3, 2009
First published in Everybody’s Magazine, August 1910.

Here’s a beautiful |PDF| made from a scan of the magazine.

Here are the rest of the terrific illustrations by Anton Fischer:

The Heathen by Jack London - illustrated by Anton Fischer

Posted by Jesse Willis

My visit to the new Coquitlam City Centre Library

SFFaudio News

Coquitlam City Centre Library

For the last couple of decades I’ve lived on the same street as my public library. That’s been one of the reasons that I live where I do. But today the local branch of Coquitlam’s public library moved two blocks south and opened for the first time.

The new address is 1169 Pinetree Way.

And the new space is great, very open, with plenty of study areas, and lots of room to grow the collection – and best of all it’s still within walking distance!

The first thing I did when I got there was to make a donation to the library’s collection, a combination of paperbooks, DVDs, comics, and audiobooks. Patrons of Coquitlam public library system should soon see these items on their shelves:

donations to the library's collection

Here’s a partial list:

City Of Dragons by Kelli Stanley |SFFAUDIO PODCAST #061|
Fate Of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner
Elidor by Alan Garner
Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris’ Ex Machina (volumes 1-5)
The complete Babylon 5 DVD set (all five seasons plus the movies)
Inferno by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle |READ OUR REVIEW|
V For Vendetta by Steve Moore |READ OUR REVIEW|
Armor by John Steakley |READ OUR REVIEW|
I Am Legend and Other Stories by Richard Matheson |READ OUR REVIEW|

And here are some shots of the library’s facilities:

New Arrivals at the Coquitlam City Centre Library
Teens section at the Coquitlam City Centre Library
study area at the Coquitlam City Centre Library
group study room at the Coquitlam City Centre Library

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Grove Of Ashtaroth by John Buchan

SFFaudio Online Audio

“In a remarkable short story, ‘The Grove of Ashtaroth,’ the hero finds himself obliged to destroy the gorgeous little temple of a sensual cult, because he believes that by doing so he will salvage the health and sanity of a friend. But he simultaneously believes himself to be committing an unpardonable act of desecration, and the eerie voice that beseeches him to stay his hand is unmistakably feminine.”

-Christopher Hitchens (The Atlantic Monthly, March 2004)

The Grove Of Ashtaroth was written by the fifteenth Governor General of Canada, John Buchan. Despite that high position, he was the viceregal representative of the Canadian monarch for five years in the 1930s, Buchan is probably better known today as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Buchan’s novelette has been described as a “weird story” (by the makers of Escape) or as “high fantasy” (in The Fantastic Imagination) by editors Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski, a 1977 anthology).

I’m not sure exactly what it is, except very interesting and certainly within the vague borders of the Fantasy genre. The Grove Of Ashtaroth reminds me of a short story by Philip K. Dick, Of Withered Apples.

You can judge for yourself what you think it is most like.

There’s a hurried, but unabridged, reading available |MP3|. It’s read by Libby Hill for the TV On The Internet podcast (beginning shortly after the twenty minute mark).

I myself have made a |PDF| from the original publication in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, June 1910.

But your best bet, in audio, for the moment at least, is to listen to the 1948 Escape radio dramatization!

Escape – The Grove Of Ashtaroth
Adapted from the novelette by John Buchan; Adapted by Les Crutchfield; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 31 Minutes [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: CBS
Broadcast: February 29, 1948
Provider: Archive.org

Cast:
Paul Frees as John Buchan
William Conrad as Lawson

And if you were wondering, the only major difference between the original story and the dramatization is that the unnamed narrator is named (after Buchan himself) in the dramatization.

[Thanks also to Escape-Suspense.com]

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #186 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG: The Lady, Or The Tiger? by Frank R. Stockton

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #186 – An unabridged reading of The Lady, Or The Tiger? by Frank R. Stockton (17 minutes), read by David Federman – followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse, Tamahome, and Julie Hoverson (of 19 Nocturne Boulevard).

Talked about on today’s show:
Monty Hall, Let’s Make A Deal, a can of sardines, a donkey and a block of hay, the Dungeons & Dragons meaning of “Monty Hall”, use in schools, weighting the scales, what is the character of women?, equally loving and equally jealous, love vs. jealousy, how barbaric are women?, where are the female criminals, a fully barbaric king, trial by ordeal, a box with a viper, a box with a knife, the swift choice, a curious justice system, jaywalking into the people’s court, like father like daughter, women were so emotional, unmodernizable sexism, guilt, there are tigers behind both doors, The Price Is Right, imaginary morality in an imaginary land, fairness conflated with arbitrariness, “when he and himself agreed upon anything”, Julie’s problem with philosophy, game theory, a thought experiment, Ray Bradbury style stories convey Bradburian feelings vs. Rorschachian style stories which elicit only the reader’s feelings, The Discourager Of Hesitancy (a sequel to The Lady, Or The Tiger?), smile vs. frown, Batman, Two-Face’s decisions are not actually coin tosses, The Man in The High Castle by Philip K. Dick, I Ching, “the tiger does not eat the straw because the duck has flown away”, phone psychics should agree with their customers, “the cards are telling me…”, psychics as impartial observers, a Ponzi scheme, selection bias, is it a double bluff?, does the father know that the daughter knows?, what is the punishment for adultery?, obsolete pop-culture, zoot suit riots (not just a joke, seriously), “six of one, half a dozen of the other”, “as snug as a bug in a rug”, we have to invent rug technology, nitpicking, Bugs Bunny dialogue, Max Headroom (is still ahead of it’s time), “blipvert”, They Live, shantytowns in the Regan era, Shock Treatment, The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

DC Comics - Unexpected, Issue 106, Page 11

The Lady Or The Tiger (variation for a story in Amazing) preliminary art by Ed Emshweiller

Posted by Jesse Willis

Synthetic Voices, a podcast about “speculative audio fiction podcasts”

SFFaudio Online Audio

There’s a handy new podcast called Synthetic Voices. Hosted by Jimmy Rogers, the show features mini-reviews of various podcast fiction pieces he’s listened to over the previous month. Rogers offers extensive shownotes with the accompanying blog posts. I like this.

I found it via a pingback to SFFaudio Podcast #181 which got a mention in episode #11 of Synthetic Voices |MP3|.

Podcast feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/scienceismagic/SyntheticVoices

Posted by Jesse Willis

Dune Roller by Julian May

SFFaudio Online Audio

Julian May’s first published story, Dune Roller, became something of a popular tale – at least with editor Robert Silverberg who had it in two of his anthologies one which collected “masterpieces” and the other which collected “great” tales. Indeed, the novelette was quickly adapted as an episode of the Tales Of Tomorrow TV series. There was also an apparently “abominable” 1972 movie adaptation called The Cremators, and there was this 1961 BBC Home Service radio dramatization (available via torrent over on RadioArchive.cc).

BBC Radio Dune Roller
Adapted from the short story by Julian May; Performed by a full cast
MP3 via TORRENT – Approx. 59 Minutes [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: BBC Home Service
Broadcast: January 26, 1961
On isolated island in Lake Michigan a visiting ecologist discovers an unknown mineral that’s been linked to a local legend of a ravenous creature. First published in Astounding, December 1951.

Dune Roller - illustrated by Julian May

It was also, rather successfully adapted to television for Tales Of Tomorrow:

Download the |MP4|.

Trailer for The Cremators:

Posted by Jesse Willis