Hey, Want To Watch A Movie? ZULU

SFFaudio Online Audio

Recorded just last night, and available now, is the Hey Want To Watch A Movie? podcast commentary track for Zulu the 1964 film classic starring Michael Caine. The film, besides being completely awesome, is highly influential – informing such films as Dog Soldiers, Ghosts Of Mars, Gladiator, Starship Troopers and Aliens. If you haven’t already seen Zulu get it and watch it. It’s public domain in the United States. If you’ve already got a copy, press play and listen to our commentary track. It’s kind of informative and kind of fun too.

Hey Want To Watch A Movie? - Zulu (1964)Hey, Want To Watch A Movie? – Zulu
Commentators Christiana Ellis, Mike Meitin, Jesse Willis, Adam Morey, Paul Fischer and Martha Holloway
1 |MP3| – 2 Hours 43 Minutes [FILM COMMENTARY]
Podcaster: Hey, Want To Watch A Movie?
Podcast: August 10th 2008

Subscribe to the podcast feed via this link:

http://watchamovie.libsyn.com/rss

And, don’t forget there are previous commentary tracks for Blade Runner and Galaxy Quest still available too!

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Mysterious Affair At Styles by Agatha Christie being podcast

Aural Noir: Online Audio

Maureen O’Brien, of the Maria Lectrix podcast is reading Agatha Christie! While World War I rages on, an English country town’s peace is broken by murder. So a wounded officer named Hastings asks for help from a Belgian refugee name Poirot! The podcast has just begun (Maureen’s only on Chapter 2). This is pretty exciting stuff my friends…

Here’s the blurb as it appeared on the original 1920 dustjacket:

“This novel was originally written as the result of a bet, that the author, who had previously never written a book could not compose a detective novel in which the reader would not be able to ‘spot’ the murderer, although having access to the same clues as the detective. The author has certainly won her bet, and in addition to a most ingenious plot of the best detective type she has introduced a new type of detective in the shape of a Belgian. This novel has had the unique distinction for a first book of being accepted by the Times as a serial for its weekly edition”.

Mystery Audiobook - The Mysterious Affair At Styles by Agatha ChristieThe Mysterious Affair At Styles
By Agatha Christie; Read by Maureen O’Brien
Podcast – [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Maria Lectrix
Podcast: August 2008 –
Join Hercule Poirot, Hastings and Inspector Japp in Christie’s first published novel! Told in first person, by Hastings, it features many of the elements that have become icons of the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction.” It is set in a large, isolated country manor; there are a half-dozen suspects, most of whom are hiding facts about themselves; the book includes maps of the house, the murder scene and a drawing of a fragment of a will; and there are a number of red herrings and surprise plot twists.

Subscribe to the podcast via this feed:

http://marialectrix.wordpress.com/category/mysteries/feed

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton

SFFaudio Review

Science Fiction Audiobook - The Dreaming Void by Peter F. HamiltonThe Dreaming Void
By Peter F. Hamilton; Read by Toby Longworth
20 CDs – 23 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Audio UK
Published: February 2008
ISBN: 9780230709829
Themes: / Science Fiction / Aliens / Artifact / Nanotechnology / Politics / Singularity / Space Travel /
AD 3580. The Intersolar Commonwealth has spread through the galaxy to over a thousand star systems. It is a culture of rich diversity with a place for everyone. Even death itself has been overcome. But at the centre of the Commonwealth is a massive black hole. This Void is not a natural artefact. Inside there is a strange universe where the laws of physics are very different to those we know. It is slowly consuming the other stars of the galactic core – one day it will devour the entire galaxy. Inigo, a human, has started to dream of a wonderful existence in the Void. He has a following of millions of believers and they now clamour to make a pilgrimage into the Void to live the life they have been shown. Other starfaring species fear their migration will cause the Void to expand again. They are prepared to stop them no matter what the cost. And so the pilgrimage begins…

The Dreaming Void is a very big book and it’s an even bigger audiobook. Peter F. Hamilton’s story is one of the better recent SF stories that I’ve experienced in any form, full of fascinating settings, situations, and ideas. It has many fully realized subplots and varied characters, too many. What could have been at least two brilliant stories, one of the commonwealth dealing with the potentially disastrous consequences of an attempted pilgrimage into the Void, and one of the much more low-key story of Inigo’s dreams, is instead merely a long opening to a longer trilogy.

The main plot(s) of the story are wonderful. It is science fiction as it should be. It takes the imagination to new vistas, mixing newer ideas (the Void, gaiafield, etc) with core traditions of SF (space travel, aliens, etc). Indeed, the basic story is nearly perfect but with all the stretching, it greatly overstays its welcome. Somewhere around the twelve hour mark, listening to The Dreaming Void became a chore. If I had not already committed so much time to the story, I would have quit then.

Final analysis: The Dreaming Void is just too big a novel, filled with many unnecessary subplots and distractions. It is far too easy loose track of the multitude of characters inhabiting this enormous beginning to the “Void Trilogy.” Yet, it is far from a hopeless audiobook. Throughout the epic story, the skill of both author and the reader are quite apparent and each part of the story is interesting. I am still of very mixed opinions about the story. I will look for more stories written by Peter F. Hamilton and more read by Toby Longworth, but only if they are about half this length or shorter. However, the audiobook might well be worth the effort for someone who has a lot of free time and is willing to take notes.

Posted by David Tackett

Aural Noir Review of Fever by Sean Rowe

Aural Noir: Review

As part of our revival of the Aural Noir label, we’ll be re-running some of our classic (offline) Aural Noir posts, including this “vintage” audiobook review which was first posted in December 2005…

Tantor crime audiobook - Fever by Sean RoweFever
By Sean Rowe; Read by William Dufris
5 CDs – Approx 6 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Media
Published: 2005
ISBN: 1400101778
Sample: |MP3|
Themes: / Crime / Heist / Noir / Thriller / Terrorism / Florida / Cuba / Nautical / Family /

Raw, is probably the best one-word sum up of Sean Rowe’s first novel Fever. Rowe’s prose lacks the polish found in novelists like Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard, but he doesn’t lack what it takes to eventually become worthy of hanging out with these masters, especially if he keeps writing like this!

Fever follows a tight knit group of fuck-ups through their attempt to rob thirty million dollars of stashed drug money from an aging cruise ship plying the waters between Miami and Cuba. The crew, on paper at least, looks like it should be able to handle anything. It consists of an ex-FBI agent Matt Shannon, his step brother (an ex-DEA agent named Jack Fontana), an emergency room nurse named Julia, a former Black Panther, and a South American soldier of fortune. Despite their collective skill set these are all losers in almost every way. Shannon’s past is slowly revealed, working backwards we know that he’s an in-debt alcoholic, with a dead wife, missing an index finger and has a step-brother who is a recently paroled felon. When the step-brother frames Shannon in the sinking of a freighter Matt is half-blackmailed into going along, with a vague desire to somehow help his brother. The rest of the crew are nearly as sad, Julia was an orphan who was sexually abused from a young age. And Jack Fontana is dying after serving his sentence. Even the minor characters have their share of problems…. one passage detailing the last job the mercenary took killing Indians in the jungles of South America is brutal, funny and illustrative of just how unlikely this string will be of pulling off this or any job. The malformed love triangle between Shannon, his brother, and Julia pays off in a tasty neo-noir style. In fact love, brotherly and the other kind is probably at the heart of this story. Fever is extremely enjoyable, the dialogue is crisp and fun, the scenes are imaginative and original. A constant surprise awaits in every chapter. None of it goes exactly according to plan and that makes it all the better to follow. The novel’s few problems seem mostly structural, scene transitions aren’t handled as well as I’d like and despite it being a first person perspective we never really get an idea of what’s going on inside the narrator’s head. This could be a deliberate style on the part of Rowe, as both flaws could be thought to pay off in certain ways later in on the book, but I’m thinking a more seasoned novelist might have been better able to give us everything. I eagerly look forward to reading the next Sean Rowe novel!

Read by the always reliable William Dufris, the first person perspective plays into such classics as Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Dufris’ natural timbre doesn’t exactly embody the gravelly voiced loser we imagine as the narrator but his voicing of the rest of the crew is spot on. Men, women, a Colombian drug lord, the string and even minor characters like an aging boxer all sound just like you’d want them to. Tantor Media, an exciting new player in unabridged audiobooks has packaged Fever in a clamshell CD case with leaved pages. The cover is the same as the Little Brown & Co. original and the sound quality is phenomenal. The pricing is extremely reasonable too. I think Tantor is probably the most exciting new big little publisher of the decade!

Posted by Jesse Willis

Five Free Favourites #4

SFFaudio Online Audio

My name is Anne and I have been invited to write this guest post. Today I’ll be handing you Five of my Favorite Free podcasts. You can find more about the podcasts I like, on my podcast review blog “Anne Is A Man.” There you’ll see, I have a preference for history podcasts, so this is what I want to share with you today: my five hot history tips…

Five Free Favourites

Oh, and by the way, I am a man; the man called Anne – can you imagine? That has a history in itself. I am of Dutch origin, but even among that peculiar people Annes are mostly women. Just not me, and not my grand dad, whom I was named after. Stubborn, contrary people, from the north. I do not live there anymore, however. Nowadays I live in Israel. Israelis pronounce my name as Anna and there are no other men named Anna in Israel, I can assure you. It doesn’t get any better. So, after a life of explanations, I called my blog Anne is a Man!

1.
Webcasts BerkeleyHistory 5
My all time favorite History Podcast is a lecture series from Berkeley. They deliver it twice a year and publish it as a podcast. If you write a nice email to the GSI’s, they’ll share the power point with you and you can see the visuals, but without them, the lectures are no less intriguing. The course is called History 5 and consists of near 30 lectures telling European History from the Renaissance until today, or 1989 – as close as historians dare to venture to the present. If you take up the course you will either run into Professor Thomas Laqueur, the man who can hysterically giggle, or into Professor Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Peggy for short, who sounds like an American version of McGonnagall from Harry Potter – fair, but rigid and distant. Then again, this lecture she begins with: “I apologize for always talking about sex so much. I know it is nothing you are interested in, but in any case […] it would be an appropriate introduction to Freud.” And here you’ll hear stories of Freud and the nineteenth century in Europe, you wouldn’t believe.

Recommended |MP3|

2.
BBC Radio 4 Podcast In Our TimeIn Our Time
The second podcast is also an institutionalized production: BBC’s In Our Time. This radio programme is led by a member of the house of Lords, no less, Melvyn Bragg. He is accompanied each issue by three specialists from the field, to discuss a subject in this ongoing series about the history of thought. Right after the broadcast, the recording is put on-line as a podcast, but is removed the next week. If you want to listen from the archive, it can only be done in stream. There is a veritable multitude of streams I could point to, really, very nearly all of them are top notch history, philosophy and elite entertainment. But since I have to choose, let me point you to the issue about King Lear. This will not only relate to Shakespeare’s drama, but also to the folk tale of King Leir, that lay the basis to the story but was radically altered by the Renaissance playwright, with magnificent consequences, for drama, surprise and added depth to the plot.

Recommended: |RealAudio| (stream)
Podcast feed: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/iot/rss.xml

3.
Historyzine: The History PodcastHistoryzine
So far so good with the podcasts that are not true podcasts, but recordings that were delivered as podcast on the side. Let’s move to the true, intended, amateur, dedicated podcasts and start with Historyzine. This history podcast is made by the Englishman Jim Mowatt, who has a preference for reenactments of historical battles and who uses the Historyzine podcast as a series to recount the ins and outs of the Spanish War of Succession – a power struggle in Europe that allegedly was about the throne of Spain, but deep down was about hegemony and confronted France’s Louis XIV with the English and the Dutch among others. Here is the first installment, I guess you can take it from there.

Recommended: |MP3|
Podcast feed: http://historyzine.com/feed/

4.
Binge Thinking HistoryBinge Thinking History Podcast
Another Brit to make a great history podcast in his spare time is Tony Cocks, of the Binge Thinking History Podcast. In nine podcasts he has covered two subjects so far. The first are the British roots of the American constitution and the second was the Battle of Britain. The last is the part of World War II of which Churchill said: ‘never so many owed so much to so few.’ But lately some debunking has been going on about this phrase. After Tony has talked us through the battle, he delivered an excellent episode, summing it all up and drawing the conclusions. Listen to find out whether he debunks the myth of the Battle of Britain with its few heroes as well.

Recommended |MP3|
Podcast feed: http://bingethinkinghistory.libsyn.com/rss

5.
The German Cultural History PodcastThe German Cultural History podcast
The last recommendation is one for the history die-hards. The German Cultural History podcast (and its related blog) is made by by an enthusiastic academic, who doesn’t care too much about sound quality and post-production. He just dives head-first into the subject and gets to the point. His breadth and depth are amazing and what he manages to put in in his approx 30 minute installments has got to be the definitive picture of Medieval German Culture. But you have to be ready to bear with him. Not only with the substandard sound, also with the tangents he takes on in his enthusiasm, especially when it is about the roots of the German language. Once, you open up for it, you really get something. In my opinion, sometime the less polished material, the rawer material, has a more accurate content or strikes as more genuine. The best episode (so far) is the one where the host takes us to Iceland, to Snorri Sturluson, to find the roots of Germanic paganism.

Recommended: |MP3|
Podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GermanCulturalHistory

Posted by Anne of the Anne Is A Man blog