SFFaudio – Page 826 – 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.

More from humourous SF from Mr. Ron’s podcast

Online Audio

Mr. Ron of the Mister Ron’s Basement podcast, inspired by his love of SF and comedy has plenty more fantastic humor fiction in the works. Recently completed is his reading of an obscure 1904 tale that adapts what sounds like an early SETI project finding to fictional effect. Mr. Ron describes it like this: “While the SF aspect of it is a bit primitive, Viele’s story manages
to convey a balance of humor, social commentary, and even poetic
illustration at the end.” Episodes #705, 706, 707, 708 form all four parts of this reading. Get them by subscribing to the podcast or individually, details follow…

The Girl From Mercury
By Herman Knickerbocker Viele; Read by Ron Evry
4 MP3 – Approx. 57 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Mister Ron’s Basement
Podcast: April 2007
Being the Interpretation of Certain Phonic Vibragraphs Recorded by the Long’s Peak Wireless Installation, Now for the First Time Made Public Through the Courtesy of Professor Caducious, Ph.D., Sometime Secretary of the Boulder Branch of the Association for the Advancement of Interplanetary Communication.

You can subscribe to the podcast, and visit the basement daily, via this feed:

http://slapcast.com/rss/revry/index.xml

posted by Jesse Willis

H. G. Wells Month – Gresham College

H.G. Wells Month

Gresham College in central London, U.K., enrolls no students and grants no degrees – it provides lectures free to the public. Students who attend in person get outstanding lectures by prestigious professors. Students who can’t attend in person can watch or listen via Gresham College website! Former professors have included Sir Christopher Wren, the legendary Robert Hooke and more recently Ian Stewart (a mathematician and Science Fiction author). Among the many fascinating lectures archived on the website since 2002 is one by Professor Martin Campbell-Kelly on the subject of the origins of the World Wide Web. Prominent within the lecture is Campbell-Kelly’s thoughts on the role of H.G. Wells’ book The World Brain (1938). The lecture is available in the RealPlayer format and is entitled “From World Brain To World Wide Web.”

posted by Jesse Willis

The Time Traveler Show #17 participates in our H.G. Wells Month

H.G. Wells Month

The Time Traveler Show podcast #17 is all about our author of the month, H.G. Wells! Upfront is the announcement of a new guest-host contest that The Time Traveler is holding. Prizes included, besides the chance to host one of the best podcasts in the podosphere, are SIGNED copies of awesome Charles Stross audiobooks, and an advanced reading copy of Tobias Buckell‘s newest novel! The meat in this chronological sandwich is a reading of H.G. Well’s 1901 short story, The New Accelerator, is read by Bromley native Tim Rowe. Wells too was born and raised in Bromley, a suburb of London, and so that’s why I think this reading is likely to be the most faithfully accented Wells story ever attempted. Even better, Rowe has a melodic professional delivery. Check it out…

The New Accelerator
By H.G. Wells; Read by Tim Rowe
1 MP3 File – [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Time Traveler Show.com
Podcast: April 2007

Subscribe to the podcast to listen for free:

http://www.timetravelershow.com/shows/feed.xml

posted by Jesse Willis

More New Arrivals- Infinivox and Tantor Media

Science Fiction Audiobook Recent Arrivals

We’ve got some more new arrivals. The Tantor titles took the circuitous route to our door, except for Ascent, which came in today. But, by golly, we’re glad to have them!

Second Skin
By Paul J. McAuley; Read by Jared Doreck
1 CD; 64 minutes – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Infinivox
Published: 2007
ISBN: 1884612555

From the cover:
The spy fell toward Proteus in a thin transparent bubble of carbon, wearing a paper suit and trussed up in a cradle of smart cabling like an early Christian martyr. Somewhere down there was Ben Lo’s wife. But he musn’t think of that. If he did…No, he couldn’t remember. Something bad, though. This space opera is part of the author’s Quiet War series.

Ascent
By Jed Mercurio; Read by Todd McLaren
1 MP3 CD or 6 CDs; Approx. 7.5 hrs – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Published: 2007
ISBN: 1400153689(MP3 disc); 9781400103683(CDs)

From the back cover:
Fascinated with the secrets still surrounding the Soviet Union’s race against the Americans to put a man on the moon, Jed Mercurio proposes a compelling scenario: What if the Americans weren’t the first? And with its inscrutable but intriguing hero, Yefgeni Yeremin, a brilliant Soviet cosmonaut, Ascent allows us to imagine what that terrifying journey might have been like.

Yeremin, a Soviet MiG pilot, rises from the privation of a Stalingrad orphanage to the heights of the cosmonaut corps. During the Korean War, as a member of an elite squadron, he shoots down the most American fighter jets—a feat that should make him a national hero, but because the Soviets’ involvement in the war is secret, Yeremin’s victories go unreported. When he is recalled from obscurity to join the race to the moon, he realizes it is his chance for immortality. In hypnotic, deceptively spare prose, Mercurio tells a haunting tale that questions the power of ideology and the nature of fate.

The Sky People
By S.M. Stirling; Read by Todd McLaren
1 MP3 CD or 9 CDs; Approx. 10.5 hrs – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Published: 2006
ISBN: 140015345X(MP3 disc); 9781400103454(CDs)

Dinosaurs and rockets — Cool!

From the back cover:
Marc Vitrac was born in Louisiana in the early 1960’s, about the time the first interplanetary probes delivered the news that Mars and Venus were teeming with life—even human life. At that point, the “Space Race” became the central preoccupation of the great powers of the world.

Now, in 1988, Marc has been assigned to Jamestown, the US-Commonwealth base on Venus, near the great Venusian city of Kartahown. Set in a countryside swarming with sabertooths and dinosaurs, Jamestown is home to a small band of American and allied scientist-adventurers.

But there are flies in this ointment—and not only the Venusian dragonflies, with their yard-wide wings. The biologists studying Venus’s life are puzzled by the way it not only resembles that on Earth, but is virtually identical to it. The EastBloc has its own base at Cosmograd, in the highlands to the south, and relations are frosty. And attractive young geologist Cynthia Whitlock seems impervious to Marc’s Cajun charm.

Extravagant and effervescent, The Sky People is alternate-history SF adventure at its best.

Fangland
By John Marks; Read by Ellen Archer and others
2 MP3 CDs or 10 CDs; Approx. 12.5 hrs – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Published: 2007
ISBN: 140015359X(MP3 discs); 1400103592(CDs)

From the back cover:
In the annals of business trips gone horribly wrong, Evangeline Harker’s journey to Romania on behalf of her employer, the popular television newsmagazine The Hour, deserves pride of place. Sent to Transylvania to scout out a possible story on a notorious Eastern European crime boss named Ion Torgu, she has found the true nature of Torgu’s activities to be far more monstrous than anything her young journalist’s mind could have imagined. The fact that her employer clearly won’t get the segment it was hoping for is soon the very least of her concerns.

The Shadow Killer
By Matthew Scott Hansen; Read by William Dufris
2 MP3 CDs or 12 CDs; Approx. 15 hrs – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Published: 2007
ISBN: 1400153255(MP3 discs); 9781400103256(CDs)

From the website:
Bigfoot wants revenge! Just as Jaws terrified people right out of the water, The Shadowkiller will keep readers out of the woods…for good.

The legend continues: The Story of Bigfoot is among the most enduring legends of all time. Sightings are reported every day, and scientists such as Jan Goodall have proclaimed their belief that it exists. The Shadowkiller is reminiscent of early Stephen King—a good, old-fashioned ghost story. This scary, funny, gory tale will make even the most hardcore skeptics think twice before going camping.

posted by The Time Traveler of the Time Traveler Show

Review of The Chief Designer by Andy Duncan

SFFaudio Audiobook Review

The Chief Designer
By Andy Duncan; Read by Jared Doreck
2 CDs – 132 minutes – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Infinivox
Published: 2006
ISBN: 1884612547
Themes: / Science Fiction / Alternate History / Space Flight / History / Ghosts / Heroic Journey /

“Tsiolkovsky,” he said. “Your memory is excellent, Comrade Korolev.” The man who had held the open book before Korolev’s face reversed it and examined it himself. He wore a full-dress officer’s uniform, and two soldiers flanked him. “Exploration of Cosmic Space with Reactive Devices, by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Published 1903.

Though you’d be hard-pressed to spot the fantastic elements this tale is a inspirational and deeply moving for any true Science Fiction fan. I’m not a spiritual person, I think that spirit is bunk and people who believe in spirit are all marks. But in a very deeply emotional sense I can almost understand the need for something like the spiritual when I look up into the deep night. There is nothing more powerful than seeing the immensity of existence and then comparing our thus far pitiful explorations to them. Those persons with the will to embrace the larger goals of space travel, by passing by the little miasma of our insignificant apish little goals, to get a shiny new car, a cell phone or an expensive suit are those worthy of worship. One such man was Sergei Korolev, the “Chief designer” of the secret Soviet space program. This story follows his management of the men who would create the universe’s only known spacefaring species from 1957’s Sputnik forward into what we can only hope would be a bright future. The story spans from World War II, when Korolev was released from a prison camp to design rockets, to 1997 and the Mir space station.

Andy Duncan is not someone I’d read anything of prior, but his work here is remarkable. If this wasn’t supposed to be Alternate History, and it is very subtle if it is even that, I’d have said the story of Koralev’s life history was massaged to provide a more ballistic plot. Though Koralev was sent to the Gulag, as depicted in the opening sentences of this novella, the reason for his departure from it didn’t happen, in real life, for the reasons stated in the story.

Michael Swanwick called The Chief Designer, “A portrayal … of the single most positive enterprise of the twentieth century”, and he is right, but too limiting, Koralev’s genius, along with men like Wernher von Braun was to expand the meaning of humanity from mere animal to demi-god. Before these men, their vision and action, we were just animals with tools and language, afterwards we became creatures capable of refining the metal of the crust of the planet upon which we were born, shaping it into cylinders filled with explosives and sending our representatives to other worlds. The Chief Designer is a portrayal of the single most important enterprise in human history! Koralev is in a very real sense our real life Titan, our very real and historical Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humanity.

The Chief Designer is winner of the 2002 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Southeastern Science Fiction Achievement Award, a 2003 Nebula Award finalist and a 2002 Hugo Award finalist. Today we can add SFFaudio Essential to its many achievements.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Canadia: 2056’s 2nd Episode airing now!

SFFaudio OnlineAudio

Canadia: 2056 episode 2 is airing across Canada this morning starting at 11:30 am. Check out the Streaming Radio Map for CBC Radio One.

Here’s the official CBC Radio hotsheet description:

“Tune in this morning for Episode Two of Canadia 2056, a spacey – in
every sense of the word – new comedy series starring Matt Watts from Steve the First and Steve the Second. It’s all about Canada’s only publicly-funded spacecraft, the Canadia – sent to help the U-S space armada against an alien threat. This week, the Captain begins to suspect that there’s a saboteur aboard his ship – and Anderson plots his escape. Canadia 2056, this morning at 11:30 (noon Newfoundland time) on CBC Radio One.”

posted by Jesse Willis