Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother out today

SFFaudio News

Cory Doctorow’s got a shiny looking official website for his new commercial audiobook. Little Brother comes out today!

Sez Cory…

“My deal with Random House is that they’re absolutely not allowed to sell the book with DRM on it, which, sadly, means that Audible (the largest audiobook store in the world) won’t carry it — they insist on selling books with DRM, even when authors and publishers don’t want it.”

Listening Library (a division of Random House) has retailer deal with Zipidee, and here’s their Little Brother widget (it won’t show up in the RSS feed so click through to see it):

Link to purchase and download this audiobook without Flash interaction

And…

“The audiobook comes with my own sampling license: once you own it, you’re free to take up to 30 minutes’ worth of material from it and remix and then redistribute it as much as you like, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis, make sure that it’s clear that this is a remix and not the original, and make sure that you tell people where to find the original. This is in addition to all the fair use remixing that you’re allowed to do without my permission (of course!).”

Posted by Jesse Willis

Audible.com PRESS RELEASE details: More CLASSIC SFF is coming

SFFaudio News

Audible FrontiersMere days after we brought you the stories of Audible’s new big Science Fiction and Fantasy audiobook push, we received an official press release with plenty of details you’ll dig! Here are the new facts:

“…We [Audible.com] are also making a concerted effort to bring all-time classics to the listening audience. The Hugo-winning THE BIG TIME by Fritz Leiber is already in the store. Roger Zelazny’s LORD OF LIGHT and THIS IMMORTAL are currently in production. So, too, is Fritz Leiber’s entire LANKHMAR series, featuring Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. And there are more classics to come.”

And this…

“Very soon, we’ll be introducing the first set of titles we’re producing in partnership with HarperCollins’ Eos line: the ACORNA’S CHILDREN series by Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Ann Scarborough; STAR STRIKE, the first book in Ian Douglas’ INHERITANCE trilogy; BAD MONKEYS by Matt Ruff, and HUNTER’S RUN by George RR Martin, Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham.

Also, via our ongoing partnership with Harlequin, we’ve been producing more and more fantasy & paranormal romance titles, by Maria V. Snyder, C. E. Murphy, and others.”

And there’s still more:

“In the near future, we’ll also be bringing a number of great series into audio by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, David Eddings, Dave Duncan, and more.”

Further…

“Also each month, we’ll have an exclusive guest essay by a leading SF&F writer. This column will also serve to highlight a list of titles available at Audible. It will also give us an opportunity to promote titles by the guest columnist. Our lead-off columnist is Ben Bova. In the coming months, our Guest Editors will include Robert J. Sawyer, Kevin J. Anderson, and more.”

And that’s the long and the short of the new information. A lot of people hate DRM with a passion of a burning sun (I’m one of them), and so hearing that so many choice titles are going to be made available exclusively on Audible (which is totally into DRM) is a mixed blessing. The good news is that most every, if not every title on Audible.com is able to be burned to CD.

Clear your schedules folks, we’ve got lots of listening to do!

Posted by Jesse Willis

Recent Arrivals – Joe Haldeman and Robert J. Sawyer

SFFaudio Recent Arrivals

Hot out of the microphones and into SFFaudio’s Audible Accounts, two Science Fiction titles from Audible Frontiers…

First up, a Joe Haldeman story that I first heard about on Prisoners Of Gravity, which is always a source for good Science Fiction!

The Hemingway Hoax by Joe HaldemanThe Hemingway Hoax
By Joe Haldeman; Read by Eric Michael Summerer
Audible Download – 4 Hours 31 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Frontiers
Published: April 2008
The hoax proposed to John Baird by a two-bit con man in a seedy Key West bar was shady but potentially profitable. With little left to lose, the struggling, middle-aged Hemingway scholar agreed to forge a manuscript and pass it off as Papa’s lost masterpiece. But Baird never realized his actions would shatter the history of his own Earth – and others. And now the unsuspecting academic is trapped out of time – propelled through a series of grim parallel worlds and pursued by an interdimensional hitman with a literary license to kill.

Intelligent design and creationism versus the fossil record, it should be a slam-dunk, until the alien arrives…

Calculating God by Robert J. SawyerCalculating God
By Robert J. Sawyer; Read by Jonathan Davis
Audible Download – 12 Hours and 4 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Frontiers
Published: 2008
An alien walks into a museum and asks if he can see a paleontologist. But the arachnid ET hasn’t come aboard a rowboat with the Pope and Stephen Hawking (although His Holiness does request an audience later). Landing at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the spacefarer, Hollus, asks to compare notes on mass extinctions with resident dino-scientist Thomas Jericho. A shocked Jericho finds that not only does life exist on other planets, but that every civilization in the galaxy has experienced extinction events at precisely the same time. Armed with that disconcerting information (and a little help from a grand unifying theory), the alien informs Jericho, almost dismissively, that the primary goal of modern science is to discover why God has behaved as he has and to determine his methods. BONUS AUDIO: Author Robert J. Sawyer explains how the creationism vs. evolution debate informed the writing of Calculating God.

Posted by Jesse Willis

A Bunch of Interviews at The Agony Column

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Agony Column The Agony Column has a couple of recordings:

SF Poet David Lunde reads poetry at SF in SF. |MP3|

SF in SF Panel with David Lunde, Patricia McKillip, and Terry Bisson. |MP3|

An interview with Patricia McKillip. |MP3|

You can subscribe to the feed at this URL:

http://trashotron.com/agony/indexes/tac_podcast.xml

Posted by Charles Tan

Review of Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold

SFFaudio Review

Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster BujoldDiplomatic Immunity
By Lois McMaster Bujold; Read by Grover Gardner
9 CDs – 11 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9781433213144
Themes: / Science fiction / Space Opera / Military / Diplomacy / Romance / Genetic Engineering / Intrigue /

Blackstone Audio has been publishing the entire Vorkosigan series read by Grover Gardner. There are several volumes out, and we’ve reviewed a couple of them (The Vor Game and Mirror Dance) before this one. I have little to add to the positive assessment of Gardner’s talent that the other reviews of this series have pointed out; I’ll just say that I enjoy his narration of these books very much. He’s got a dry tone that fits Miles Vorkosigan perfectly. A very pleasant listen.

In this particular volume, Miles is called into diplomatic action against the Quaddies, a genetically engineered race that we were introduced to in the novel Falling Free. In that novel, we learn that quaddies are genetically altered humans that have four arms and no legs which is an advantage if you live and work in zero gravity. The only problem? They were treated as slaves by the company that made them, and the novel is largely about their rebellion.

Diplomatic Immunity takes place 300 years after that one, and much has changed, though distrust for “downsiders” remains. Vorkosigan is called in when some citizens are captured and held by the Quaddies at their Graf Station. He meets with the representatives of the Quaddie government, hears their side of the story, then proceeds to uncover the truth while preventing a war.

Miles Vorkosigan is a fine character. He’s got flaws (and plenty of them) yet always manages to succeed despite them. His personality is entertaining, and the plot of this novel, in which Miles is called upon as both diplomat and detective, is just plain fun. Whenever I listen to one of these, I imagine how good a television series this would make. These novels are not meant to be masterpieces of hard science fiction – they are meant to be enjoyed, and enjoy them I do. I can’t wait to hear the next one, though I feel that listening to them in the original print publication order would add even more to the experience, the main reason being that the Miles I hear in this novel is not the same Miles I heard in The Vor Game, I expect due to events in the novels in-between.

Lois McMaster’s Vorkosigan novels have an interesting history on audio. A company named The Reader’s Chair originally came out with enjoyable unabridged versions read in tag team fashion by Michael Hanson and Carol Cowan. Unfortunately, the company didn’t survive. One of the first reviews I wrote when I got into reviewing audio was the Reader’s Chair audio version Falling Free, the Nebula Award winning novel that I spoke of earlier in the review. Click here to see it.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson