audiobook – Page 133

LibriVox: Short Science Fiction Collection Vol. 010

SFFaudio Online Audio

Here’s the recently released Short Science Fiction Collection Vol. 010 from LibriVox! I had a chance to listen to most of the stories and I’ve highlighted a few:

1. As Long As You Wish, a cool kind of time travel tale, seems at first to have some volume problems, but it actually doesn’t, it’s a little creative interpretation that will become clear later in the story. The Coming Of The Ice is old, feels old fashioned, but isn’t so dated as to be unreadable. In fact, the story is rather terrific! It feels very much like a H.G. Wells story.

2. The Coming Of The Ice explains the strange and sad fate of a man who undergoes an operation to make him immortal (and sterile). This is a really terrific reading by the English accented Giles Baker (who could have a career in audiobooks ahead of him). The story itself is also significant in another respect – it was the first all new story ever purchased or published in Amazing Stories magazine (the first all-science fiction mag).

3. The Eternal Wall, deals similarly, offering a man another kind of one way trip to the future, this time though, not of his choosing. Speaking of Wells stories, the last tale in this collection is a Wells story – and it feels as close as Herbert George ever came to noir. From the perspective of a noir aficionado, there’s one flaw with it (and with War Of The Worlds for that matter) – in that Wells sets it all up well but he doesn’t have the guts for the all important follow through. But, speaking from a non-noir-loving perspective, it’s a damn fine story – and proves once again that Wells had more original ideas kicking around than almost anybody else before or since. Narrator Gregg Margurite’s setup isn’t perfect, he sounds a little muffled, but his reading voice is very good.

4. The K Factor Also read by Gregg Margurite, with the same setup as with all his recordings, muffled. Margurite has also recorded a full length Harrison Novel Deathworld! Societics is “The applied study of the interaction of individuals in a culture, the interaction of the group generated by these individuals, the equations derived therefrom, and the application of these equations to control one or more factors of this same culture.” It feels as if Harrision had been reading some Isaac Asimov and then Thomas Kuhn had been reading this story.

5. Star Mother while well written, is barely Science Fiction at all, seeing as the events that it reports would be happening mere 2 years after the story was originally published. Unfortunately Janet Moursund’s reading of Star Mother has too many mouse clicks in the recording.

6. Solander’s Radio Tomb is pretty funny, though more than anything else what I took away from it was an even greater fear of legal wills than I already had – if making plans are what make us human then the ability to revoke a plan does also – unfortunately, being dead you aren’t up for revoking much. So ya, I’m afraid of legal wills.

Short Science Fiction Collection Vol. 010
By various; Read by various
10 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 5 Hours 38 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 04, 2009
Science fiction (abbreviated SF or sci-fi with varying punctuation and case) is a broad genre of fiction that often involves sociological and technical speculations based on current or future science and technology. This is a reader-selected collection of short stories that entered the US public domain when their copyright was not renewed.

As Long as You Wish
By John O’Keefe; Read by Sean O’Hara
1 |MP3| – Approx. 10 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 2008
If, somehow, you get trapped in a circular time system . . . how long is the circumference of an infinitely retraced circle? First published in Astounding Science Fiction, June, 1955.

The Coming of the Ice
By G. Peyton Wertenbaker; Read by Giles Baker
1 |MP3| – Approx. 40 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 2008
Strange men these creatures of the hundredth century …
First published in Amazing Stories June 1926, reprinted in Amazing Stories July 1961 with an introduction by Sam Moskowitz.

The Eternal Wall
By Raymond Z. Gallun; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 26 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 2008
A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths … it was death. But Ned Vince lived again—a million years later! From Amazing Stories April 1956, first published in Amazing Stories November 1942.

The K Factor
By Harry Harrison; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 54 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 2008
Speed never hurt anybody—it’s the sudden stop at the end. It’s not how much change that signals danger, but how fast it’s changing…. From Analog December 1960.

Lease To Doomsday
By Lee Archer; Read by Tom Weiss
1 |MP3| – 35 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 2008
The twins were a rare team indeed. They wanted to build a printing plant on a garbage dump. When Muldoon asked them why, their answer was entirely logical: “Because we live here.” From Amazing Stories September 1956.

…Or Your Money Back
By Randall Garrett; Read by Tom Weiss
1 |MP3| – Approx. 51 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 2008
There are lots of things that are considered perfectly acceptable … provided they don’t work. And of course everyone knows they really don’t, which is why they’re acceptable…. From Astounding Science Fiction, September 1959 (published under the David Gordon pseudonym).

Question Of Comfort
By Les Collins; Read by Tom Weiss
1 |MP3| – Approx. 52 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 2008
From Amazing Science Fiction Stories March 1959. The Gravity Gang was a group of geniuses—devoting its brilliance to creating a realistic Solar System for Disneyland. That was the story, anyway. No one would have believed all that stuff about cops and robbers from outer space.

Solander’s Radio Tomb
By Ellis Parker Butler; Read by qqqsimmons
1 |MP3| – 18 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 2008
First published in Amazing Stories June 1927, later in Amazing’s April 1956 issue. “I first met Mr. Remington Solander shortly after I installed my first radio set. I was going in to New York on the 8:15 A.M. train and was sitting with my friend Murchison and, as a matter of course, we were talking radio.”

Star Mother
By Robert F. Young; Read by Janet Moursund
1 |MP3| – Approx. 13 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 2008
A touching story of the most enduring love in all eternity. From Amazing Stories January 1959.

Story Of The Late Mr Elvesham
By H.G. Wells; Read by James Christopher
1 |MP3| – Approx. 38 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
“I set this story down, not expecting it will be believed, but, if possible, to prepare a way of escape for the next victim. He, perhaps, may profit by my misfortune. My own case, I know, is hopeless, and I am now in some measure prepared to meet my fate.”

Podcast feed:

http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/short-science-fiction-collection-010.xml

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper

SFFaudio Review

SFFaudio Essential Little Fuzzy
By H. Beam Piper; Read by Brian Holsopple
5 CDs – 5 Hours 53 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audio Realms
Published: November 2006
ISBN: 9781897304617
Themes: / Science Fiction / Planetary Colonization / Sapience / Law / Mining /

The chartered Zarathustra Company had it all their way. Their charter was for a Class III uninhabited planet, which Zarathustra was, and it meant they owned the planet lock stock and barrel. They exploited it, developed it, and reaped the huge profits from it without interference from the Colonial Government. Then Jack Holloway, a sunstone prospector, appeared on the scene with his family of Fuzzies and the passionate conviction that they were not cute animals but little people…

Little Fuzzy is a novel cherished by a smallish but passionate group of admirers. They seem to love it for its portrayal of the fuzzies themselves. It may be a “furry fandom” book too (but I’m a little afraid to do the research on that). I myself hadn’t heard of the novel, or much of the author, H. Beam Piper, until Little Fuzzy and pretty much everything else written by H. Beam Piper began being posted to Project Gutenberg.

My initial sense of the book was that Little Fuzzy would act as a lens through which historical colonizations could be examined – something like what was done in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word For World Is Forest. But it didn’t work out that way. Piper was not trying to explore historical events as much as what we mean by the word “sapience.” The verdict on the Fuzzies is obvious from the begining, but curiously enough the Fuzzies are still somewhat treated like children even by their human champions. Perhaps this was the only way Piper could easily characterize the right minded human’s benevolence? I wish he were alive so I could ask him about this. For the infantilization of the Fuzzies parallels some attitudes towards the aboriginal peoples facing colonization here on Earth. But like I said, the general focus is on a philosophical examination of the concept of sapience – not colonization.

After some initial trepidation I found myself hanging on the every word of this WONDERFUL audiobook. H. Beam Piper is an amazing storyteller. His homespun folksiness allows him to make grammatically wrong choices, but none that ever misconstrues his intended meaning. For example:

“He dropped into a chair and lit a cigarette. It tasted badly, and after a few puffs he crushed it out.”

I think Grammar Girl would have a problem with this noting that ‘cigarettes don’t have tongues so they can’t taste well or badly’ – despite this, I think Piper’s Little Fuzzy is some of the most transparent and plainspoken prose that I’ve ever read. Narrator Brian Holsopple doesn’t have a vast range with which to pitch his voice, but he subtly manages to give accent and attitude to every character. His voicing of the entire fuzzy vocabulary (just the one word: “yeek”) is nearly as broad – giving curiosity, understanding, determination and suggestion to every yeek in the book. There was a small editing gaffe on disc 3, a repeated line, and another similar one on disc 5 but otherwise the production was perfect.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher

SFFaudio Review

Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher Proven Guilty
By Jim Butcher; Read by James Marsters
Audible Download – approx. 16 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2009
Themes: / Fantasy / Urban Fantasy / Magic / Chicago / Wizard / Faeries / Vampires / Black Magic

By the time most fantasy series reach their eighth novel, they’re usually showing their age. For proof, one need look no further than Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, in which the eighth book, Path of Daggers, is seen as the beginning of the cycle’s decline, although some would place this event significantly earlier. In any case, Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series certainly doesn’t follow this trend. In fact, Proven Guilty suggests that the series just keeps getting better.

The novel initially follows the series formula: Chicago wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden faces a series of seemingly-disconnected incidents which, as the plot progresses, reveal themselves to be connected in a sinister way. The White Council is on the lookout for black magic; monsters from the big screen are wreaking havoc at a horror fan convention; and Molly Carpenter, daughter of Harry’s good friend Michael, is in some kind of mysterious trouble. Harry must juggle all these fly balls and, as usual, keep himself from getting killed. He’s aided by the usual cast of supporting characters like officer Karin Murphy and the elemental Bob the Skull., and White Court vampire Thomas.

Harry soon discovers that the faerie courts of Summer and Winter have taken an interest in recent events. Perhaps this is why I enjoyed Proven Guilty so much, since it evoked themes from the other faerie-centric novel in the series so far, Summer Knight, which is also one of my favorites. Butcher writes about the fae as if they are both inscrutably beautiful and incalculably terrifying. In general, the Summer Court tends to side with the “powers of good”, while the Winter Court allies itself with “evil”, but faerie politics aren’t quite that simple. Summer can be incredibly crafty and deceptive, while denizens of Winter are prone to occasional acts of kindness and sacrifice.

This moral ambiguity cuts to the heart of the success of Proven Guilty. Themes of morality, self-control, parenthood, and responsibility abound. Butcher’s early novels felt like little more than exciting detective thrillers with a supernatural twist–entertaining, witty, humorous, but lacking any real depth. In later Dresden Files novels, Butcher has cultivated a heightened emotional sensitivity. in Proven Guilty, this manifests most prominently in Harry’s complex relationship with the Carpenter family. Without giving too much away, suffice to say that the execution of a young boy at the hands of the White Council for misuse of magic holds more than a hint of foreshadowing.

James Marsters, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, narrates the novel flawlessly. His hard-boiled narrative style perfectly fits the book’s genre as a detective story, and his dust-dry rendition of Harry Dresden’s dialogue captures the wizard’s lonely character perfectly. Marsters also handles the female characters deftly, avoiding the pitfall of overacting that some other male vice actors fall prey to.

Readers might get away with reading Proven Guilty as a stand-alone novel, since it does a passable job of weaving backstory into the plot in an unobtrusive manner, but it’s worth reading the Dresden Files series from the beginning. Unfortunately, books six and seven (Blood Rites and Dead Beat) haven’t yet received the audio treatment, though they’re schedules for release sometime in the coming months. It’s well worth plodding through those two volumes in print.

Also take a look at SFFaudio’s favorable review of Small Favor, book ten in the series, which I’m immensely looking forward to once I’ve read the intervening White Night.

Posted by Seth Wilson

Review of Daemon by Daniel Suarez

SFFaudio Review

Daemon by Daniel Suarez Daemon
By Daniel Suarez; Read by Jeff Gurner
Audible Download – approx. 16 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audiobooks
Published: 2009
Themes: / Science Fiction / Cyberpunk / Techno-Thriller / Virtual Reality / Online Gaming / Politics /

Daemon‘s success as a self-published novel that crossed over to attain mainstream success is a testament to its cultural relevance, especially among the technorati. Suarez, who moonlights (sunlights?) as a systems analyst, promoted the novel to the movers and shakers in the technology community, Its positive reception even among this tech-savvy elite suggests that Daemon has its finger on the pulse of technological developments and their implications for politics and culture.

Daemon opens with the death of game developer Matthew Sobol, acclaimed developer of multiplayer games such as first-person shooter Over the Rhine and RPG The Gate, which bears a strong resemblance to World Of Warcraft. Some successful entrepreneurs leave money to their kids when they die, others give it all away to charity. Not Sobol. His legacy is the book’s eponymous daemon, a background process which through distributed computing has spread itself across the net and continues to carry out the developer’s will through a series of intricate commands. The capabilities of this daemon, and Sobol’s talent as a developer of artificial intelligence, become apparent when the police raid Sobol’s mansion in Thousand Oaks, California, and find themselves outclassed by a network of elaborate automated booby-traps, including an almost-sentient Humvee.

The novel pans cinematically between several characters who, in one way or another, become embroiled in the daemon’s plot, which ultimately proves to be global in scale. Dramatis personae include police detectives, government agents, a gamer, a laid-off fashion reporter, a white-hat hacker, ad a convict. It’s not clear from the outset whether these characters will become heroes or villains as the story progresses, and even when battle lines are more firmly drawn most of them still defy simple caricature, exhibiting complex motives and emotions.

The real show-stopper, of course, is the daemon itself, who possesses a high degree of intelligence and resourcefulness despite residing in lines of code. The novel’s conceit still demands the willing suspension of disbelief, but the concept and the technical specifics are so finely conceived and executed that the reader is left with a small but nagging suspicion that somewhere, sometime in a future that may be all too near, Daemon could become a reality. Suarez achieves this feat by investigating the wider political, economic, and social implications of a self-aware autonomous computer system.

The living Matthew Sobol embedded many elements of his daemon into his multiplayer games, and several characters venture into these online worlds in search of clues. These scenes are among the strongest in the book, and they carry favorable resonances with both the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and the simulator in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Like the virtual reality elements in these novels, the online gaming sequences in Daemon succeed because they maintain a strong causal relationship to events in the “real” world.

The action battle sequences in Daemon are high-octane, and like all good action sequences they manage to incorporate the book’s themes rather than standing as mere set pieces. For the most part, the protagonists are fighting against computer-controlled contraptions. Nevertheless, I felt that these ultimately visceral and superficial scenes occupy too much space in the novel, and detract from the book’s otherwise deep and intellectually stimulating themes. Paramount Pictures has optioned the movie rights for Daemon, and I shudder to think that the cultural significance of this novel may be boiled away, leaving only two hours of car chases.

The pacing of Daemon also leaves something to be desired. Suarez has revealed that a sequel is in the works, and the book’s cliffhanger ending promises an exciting continuation to the story. Lots of loose ends also remain dangling free, mostly in the arc of character development. The novel’s ending was certainly climactic, but it somehow failed to provide satisfactory closure. As I’ve said in other reviews, even books in a multi-volume series need to retain a high level of internal cohesion.

Jef Gurner’s narration for Daemon is spot-on. His performance is varied enough that each character’s unique identity extends into the aural sphere. Through some tricks of distortion, Penguin Audio has turned the dialogue of the daemon itself into a performance worthy of classic cinematic computerized villains.

Fans of cyberpunk in particular should consider Daemon essential reading, but any science fiction fan looking for an intriguing and visionary techno-thriller should add this audiobook to their summer reading list. The novel’s fascinating themes make it worth slogging through some scenes of gratuitous violence and tugging in vein on a few loose plot threads. Daemon is an impressive debut novel by Daniel Suarez, hopefully presaging an illustrious writing career.

Posted by Seth Wilson

Review of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

SFFaudio Review

Slaughterhouse-Five
By Kurt Vonnegut; Read by Ethan Hawke
5 CDs – 6 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2009
ISBN: 9781433269691
Themes: / Science Fiction (or maybe not) / World War II / Time Travel / War / Aliens / Mind /

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

During World War II, author Kurt Vonnegut was taken prisoner by the Germans and held captive in the city of Dresden, which was later reduced to flaming rubble during a harrowing fire-bombing by American forces. According to Vonnegut, the city was a gorgeous center of art, architecture, and fine civilian life; its value as a military target was negligible. “What I’ve said about the firebombing of Dresden is that not one person got out of a concentration camp a microsecond earlier, not one German deserted his defensive position a microsecond earlier,” Vonnegut said.

Somewhere between 25,000 and 120,000 civilians (the upper figure is an early estimate, which has since been revised downward to 25,000-40,000) were killed in the inferno of incendiary and high explosive bombs. As such, Dresden remains a controversial, dark chapter of America’s involvement in the war.

Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut’s look back on this dreadful event. It’s not a traditional biography, but a modified account of his own experiences as seen through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, a tall, awkward, disconnected dreamer who is drafted into the army and thrust into combat. Pilgrim is a pathetic soul with the appearance of a “filthy flamingo,” involved in tragic events beyond his control.

Captured during the Battle of the Bulge, Pilgrim and 100 other soldiers are shipped to Dresden to serve as prison-labor. At night they sleep in a storage-cave beneath a slaughterhouse amidst the butchered carcasses of animals, and it’s this arrangement that allows them to survive the attack. After the firebombing, they emerge the next morning to find the once-beautiful Dresden so utterly destroyed that it resembles the surface of the moon.

A part of me feels guilty for reviewing Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five on a science fiction/fantasy Web site. The connections of this classic anti-war novel to the science fiction genre are tenuous, but it attains this designation (in some circles) due to the presence of the Tralfamadorians, a race of aliens that capture Pilgrim and bring him back to their planet for examination. During his months on Tralfamadore, Pilgrim is placed in a sort of zoo, his body and mind laid bare to the curious aliens.

The Tralfamadorians may be simply the imagination of an unwell, traumatized mind. Pilgrim is emotionally unbalanced, suffers a head injury after the war, and reads voraciously of the novels of science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, one of whose novels concerns an alien abduction that sounds suspiciously like Pilgrim’s own experiences on Trafalmadore. But the Tralfamadorians—real or not—allow Vonnegut to explore the concept of time and our place in it, which is the larger theme of the novel. The Tralfamadorians can see in four dimensions and have no concept of time; life just is, and human existence is a series of events and happenings with no beginnings and ends. Events simply occur; wars are fought, we are powerless to stop them and it’s ridiculous to think we can. Free will is a farce.

Pilgrim’s time among the Tralfamadorians allows him to experience his life in this fourth dimension, moving his mind back and forth to the past and future, seemingly at will. He is able to see his own death, and relive events from his childhood, his marriage, and his career as an optometrist. But Pilgrim’s wandering, time-traveling mind returns again and again to the terrible events of Dresden, an experience so powerful that his mind is unable to make sense of it. It just is, and all he can do with the rest of life is to try and look upon the good times in his life, the moments of joy, and not linger too long over the blackened, shrunken bodies, or a fellow American and friend executed for salvaging a teapot from the ruins.

Actor Ethan Hawke (of Dead Poets Society and Hamlet fame) serves as the narrator and does a nice job reading with an understated, dispassionate voice that perfectly fits the tone of the novel. This Blackstone Audio production also includes an unexpected and enlightening 10-minute interview with Vonnegut on the final disc. Here Vonnegut reveals that Pilgrim’s character was based on a real person, Edward Crone, an American who died in Dresden. “He just didn’t understand the war at all, what was going on, and of course there was nothing to understand—he was right,” Vonnegut says.

Posted by Brian Murphy

LibriVox: The Stars, My Brothers by Edmund Hamilton

SFFaudio Online Audio

My favourite new LibriVox up-and-comer is Gregg Margarite. I’m totally loving his reading of Harry Harrison’s Deathworld. After I finish that I’ll be turning my attention to this…

Edmond Hamilton (1904 – 1977) had a career that began as a regular and frequent contributor to Weird Tales magazine. The first hardcover publication of Science Fiction stories was a Hamilton compilation, and he and E.E. “Doc” Smith are credited with the creation of the Space Opera type of story. He worked for DC Comics authoring many stories for their Superman and Batman characters. Hamilton was also married to fellow author Leigh Brackett.

Published in the May, 1962 issue of Amazing Stories The Stars, My Brothers gives us a re-animated astronaut plucked from a century in the past and presented with an alien world where the line between humans and animals is blurred.

The Stars, My Brothers
By Edmond Hamilton; Read by Gregg Margarite
2 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 83 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: April 26, 2009
“He was afraid—not of the present or the future, but of the past. He was afraid of the thing tagged Reed Kieran, that stiff blind voiceless thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon, companion to dead worlds and silent space.”

Podcast feed:
http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/the-stars-my-brothers-by-edmond-hamilton.xml

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Posted by Jesse Willis