The Que?, a new online video show attached to Roddenberry.com, features an interview Walter Koenig in Episode 2. Walter talks about his Big Little Book collection, Star Trek, blogging reviewers (ouch!), and his upcoming gig with Colonial Radio Theatre (BUCK ALICE AND THE ACTOR ROBOT) which is set to record this August! Watch it HERE.
[via The Colonial Radio Theatre Blog]
Posted by Jesse Willis
While enjoying the latest episode of New World Army, I was excited to hear an announcement for a new audio drama that the same team is producing. The Stalker is “is the strange and alarming story of two special agents that apprehend a stalker of an important political official, and how the interrogation uncovers his true identity, but cannot stop the violence that surrounds him.”
It is only 15 minutes long and I listened to it last night. Intriguing. Apocalyptic. X-Files-ish. A solid beginning for a series.
You can go to the site and listen.
Or download the |MP3|.
Posted by Julie D.
Calculating God
By Robert J. Sawyer; Read by Jonathan Davis
Audible Download – 12 hours – [Unabridged]
Publisher: Audible Frontiers
Published: 2008
ISBN: None
Themes: / Science Fiction / Aliens / Paleontology / Religion / Philosophy / Space Travel /
One of the things I enjoy most about reviewing audiobooks is that I get to revisit novels that I’ve read and loved in the past. When these beloved novels are given great readers (not always the case), I can’t wait to get at them. Calculating God is one of those novels, and Jonathan Davis is an excellent narrator, so this audiobook leapt to the top of my TBR list the moment I realized it existed.
Jonathan Davis burst onto the science fiction scene with his stellar narration of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (SFFaudio review here). Since then, in the science fiction genre, he’s been almost exclusively reading Random House’s Star Wars abridgments. He reads them well, but I was thrilled to see him step away from that and narrate another of science fiction’s great novels. He is one of our very best narrators and this is a fine performance. I was rapt the entire time, and even near tears at one moment in the book.
When I read this novel for the first time, I was a bit taken aback. I am a Catholic and I’ve been reading science fiction all of my life. I have never had a problem reconciling science and religion and have been both perplexed and dismayed that Christianity is portrayed so often as being incompatible with science. It’s certainly true that for many Christian churches this conflict is real, but those churches are not Catholic churches, despite the most famous illustration of the conflict being the Catholic treatment of Galileo. I tell everyone who cares that Galileo was an aberration in the history of the Church (not the norm), but still, it was a colossal (though admitted) mistake. But for myself, science and religion are NOT in conflict. I’ve included a link at the bottom of this review to an interview of Brother Guy Consolmagno, a Vatican astronomer that aired on CBC Radio as an illustration of a Catholic’s relationship with science. Robert J. Sawyer is mentioned in the interview as well.
Back to the novel at hand: The reason I was taken aback when I first read this book was that it’s the first novel I’ve ever read in which the aliens believe in God. That in itself makes this book interesting enough to pick up. Imagine – an alien lands on your front doorstep and starts to question your doubts about the existence of God. Most science fiction portrays religion as something that is grown through or evolved past. By the time an alien species is mature enough for stellar travel, surely they have jettisoned religion? There’s no place for such a thing in a rational, scientific universe. Right?
Well, not according to this novel. Sawyer presents, in a very entertaining and interesting way, arguments for and against God’s existence. The main character (Tom Jericho) is a paleontologist who is dying of cancer. An alien (named Hollus) lands near the Royal Ontario Museum and strolls right in, asking to see the fossils. And off the novel goes. Jericho and Hollus spend much of the novel together looking at fossils and discussing various topics that range from the wide, including mass extinctions and evolution, to the intimately personal, like the approaching death of Jericho. I can think of no better way to present these topics than this lively novel, and I’ll recommend it to anyone interested in thinking about these things, no matter which side of the fence they are on.
Sawyer uses science fiction to create circumstances that make us readers think about important ideas in different ways and from different perspectives. That’s exactly the kind of science fiction I love to read, and why I’ll keep coming back to Robert J. Sawyer for more. I’m very happy to have had a chance to revisit this novel, and even happier to be able to award it our SFFaudio Essential designation.
Audible.com has published a few more of Robert J. Sawyer’s novels: The Neanderthal Trilogy is there (Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids). They also have his Nebula winning novel The Terminal Experiment, published by Recorded Books. We reviewed it back in 2003.
Robert J. Sawyer’s Calculating God page: LINK
A link to a CBC interview of Brother Guy Consolmagno, Vatican Astronomer: LINK
Posted by Scott D. Danielson
The Tangle Box
By Terry Brooks; Read by Dick Hill
10 CDs – 12 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9781423350392
Everything should have been quiet and pleasant for Ben Holiday, former Chicago lawyer become sovereign of the Magic Kingdom of Landover. But it wasn’t.
This is the fourth Magic Kingdom of Landover novel, the first being Magic Kingdom For Sale: SOLD!. Brilliance has all three previous books available too, with the fifth, Witches’ Brew forthcoming.
Black Lightning
By John Saul; Read by Phil Gigante
11 CDs – 13 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9781423355816
For five years Seattle journalist Anne Jeffers has pursued the horrifying story of a sadistic serial killer’s bloody reign, capture, trial, and appeal – crusading to keep the wheels of justice churning toward the electric chair. Now the day of execution has come. A convicted killer will meet his end. Anne believes her long nightmare is over. But she’s dead wrong. . . .
Within days, a similar murder stuns the city. As the butcher stalks his next victims, creeping ever closer to her, Anne is seized by an icy unease, a haunting sense of connection to these unspeakable crimes. And, relentlessly, she hears the eerie echo of the dead man’s last words to her: “Today won’t end it. How will you feel, Anne? When I’m dead, and it all starts again, how will you feel?”
Blood Noir
By Laurell K. Hamilton; Read by Cynthia Holloway
11 CDs – 13 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9781597378956
Jason Schuyler is a werewolf. He’s also one of Anita Blake’s best friends, and sometimes her lover. And right now he needs her – not to be a vampire hunter, or a federal marshal, or a necromancer, or even for her rank in the werewolf pack, but because his father is dying. He needs Anita because she’s a pretty woman who loves him, who can make him look like an everyday guy, who agrees to go home with him and help him say good-bye to the abusive father he never loved. The fact that Jason is about as much an everyday guy as Anita is a pretty woman is something they figure they can keep under wraps for a couple of days in a small town. How hard can that be?
Really, by now, Anita Blake should know better.
Marmee Noir, ancient mother of all vampires, picks this weekend to make a move. Somehow she has cut the connection that binds Anita and Jean-Claude, leaving Jean-Claude unable to sense what is happening. Dangerous even as she sleeps, buried in darkness for a thousand years somewhere beneath the old country of Europe, Marmee Noir reaches out toward power. She has attacked Anita before, but never like this. In Anita she senses what she needs to make her enemies tremble…
Brilliance has published a whole lot of unabridged Laurell K. Hamilton.
Bloodfever
By Karen Marie Moning; Read by Joyce Bean
8 CDs – 9 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9781423341932
MacKayla Lane’s ordinary life underwent a complete makeover when she landed on Ireland’s shores and was plunged into a world of deadly sorcery and ancient secrets.
In her fight to stay alive, Mac must find the Sinsar Dubh – a million-year-old book of the blackest magic imaginable, which holds the key to power over both the world of the Fae and of Man. Pursued by Fae assassins, surrounded by mysterious figures she knows she cannot trust, Mac finds herself torn between two deadly and irresistible men: V’lane, the insatiable Fae who can turn sensual arousal into an obsession for any woman, and the ever-inscrutable Jericho Barrons, a man as alluring as he is mysterious.
For centuries the shadowy realm of the Fae has coexisted with that of humans. Now the walls between the two are coming down, and Mac is the only thing that stands between them….
Posted by Scott D. Danielson
The Book Show interviews Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book). |MP3|
You can subscribe to the podcast at this feed: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/bsw.xml
Posted by Charles Tan
Dead Robot Society interviews Rob Rogers (Devil’s Cape). |MP3|
You can subscribe to the feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/deadrobotssociety
Posted by Charles Tan