Tag: audiobook

Moxon’s Master by Ambrose Bierce

SFFaudio Online Audio

Moxon's Master by Ambrose Bierce

I’m not a very good chess player, but I love playing. There’s a an elegance and a simplicity to the basics of it. And from those basic rules an incalculable complexity emerges – one that makes every game different. But I don’t much like playing against a computer. There’s little sense of victory if I win and if I lose I tend to question the point in playing at all. There’s something about pitting a mind against a mind – and most chess programs I’ve played against don’t seem to have one.

Moxon’s Master, by Ambrose Bierce, is about chess. It uses some basic analogies and metaphors – in just the way H.G. Wells does so well to make the implausible sound plausible. Bierce wields facts about plant tropism and Herbert Spencer’s definition of life in a skillful argument for machine intelligence. It’s rather masterful actually!

LibriVoxMoxon’s Master
By Ambrose Bierce; Read by Roger Melin
1 |MP3| – Approx. 28 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: May 2, 2012
First published in the San Francisco Examiner, April 16, 1899.

|PDF|

[Thanks also to Laura Victoria and Barry Eads]

Posted by Jesse Willis

A Thousand Deaths by Jack London

SFFaudio Online Audio

Here’s Julie Hoverson’s reading of Jack London’s A Thousand Deaths, it was the first published story that London was paid for – and it’s Science Fiction. Julie recorded it for us 113 years after it’s first publication (in May 1899) and she did it specifically for your (and my) pleasure. This is a story that really deserves to be heard (and read).

A Thousand Deaths will also be the subject of an upcoming readalong!

Thanks so much Julie!

A Thousand Deaths by Jack LondonA Thousand Deaths
By Jack London; Read by Julie Hoverson
1 |MP3| – Approx. 29 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Provider: Julie Hoverson
Provided: May 23, 2012
First published in The Black Cat, May 1899.

And here’s a print friendly |PDF|.

And to get you in the mood, check out part of one of C. Billadeau’s two gorgeous illustrations of the story:

A snippet of Courtney Billadeau's illustration of Jack London's A Thousand Deaths

Posted by Jesse Willis

Cool Air by H.P. Lovecraft

SFFaudio Online Audio

Cool Air by H.P. Lovecraft

Here’s the subject of our next podcast recording, a specially commissioned reading of Cool Air by H.P. Lovecraft. The narrator is one of my very favourites, Jonathan Davis, who will be on the podcast discussing it with us!

The story itself runs 23 minutes. I think it’s the perfect balm for a hot summer day. Check it:

The unnamed protagonist, an underpaid writer of pulp magazines, lives in an oppressively hot New York city apartment. Luckily he makes friends with his convivial upstairs neighbor, who just so happens to own an air conditioner. What a cool guy!

What could possibly go wrong?

|MP3|
|M4B|

|ETEXT| at WikiSource
|PDF| made from the publication in Strange Tales of the Mysterious and Supernatural

[This recording was made possible by the generosity of readers like you]

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: The Cats Of Ulthar by H.P. Lovecraft

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Cats Of Ulthar by H.P. Lovecraft

Hannes Bok illustration for The Cats Of Ulthar by H.P. Lovecraft

Hannes Bok illustration for The Cats Of Ulthar by H.P. Lovecraft

First published in Tryout, November 1920, The Cats Of Ulthar is an unusual tale by H.P. Lovecraft. It reads more like an old fashioned fairy tale than any other I’ve read. The story features a young boy named Menes who loves cats. Lovecraft probably took that name from the writings of a Greek historian named Diodorus Siculus who related a tale of a legendary Egyptian pharaoh named Menes that he heard from some crocodile-god priests. Menes it was said fled from his own dogs, who attacked him, while hinting. His escape was assisted by a crocodile. But no dogs or crocodiles are mentioned in The Cats Of Ulthar.

LibriVoxThe Cats Of Ulthar
By H.P. Lovecraft; Read by James Pontolillo
1 |MP3| – Approx. 9 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: October 19, 2008
|ETEXT|
First published in Tryout, November 1920.

And here’s a |PDF| made from the publication in Fantastic Novels, January 1951.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Transit Of Earth by Arthur C. Clarke

SFFaudio Online Audio

Here’s a rather timely re-post, one based on a post prompted back in 2006 by an astronomer at the University of Hawaii. Professor Esther M. Hu, pointed me towards this reading of an Arthur C. Clarke classic, one read by Clarke himself!

Listening to it again today, and thinking about the significance of science and history of such an event, and the related event happening today, I found Clarke’s reading of The Transit Of Earth to be an incredibly moving experience.

CAEDMON - The Transit Of Earth by Arthur C. Clarke

Since then I’ve noticed that there was an introduction written for it too, which appeared in the May 1984 issue of Omni. It’s rather timely, considering that Clarke mentions today’s transit of Venus (which will be the last until 2117):

The Transit Of Earth - illustration by Ludek Pesek

Here is that issue of Omni in the |CBR| format.

And here are the scans: |Page 70|Pages 71 and 72|Page 108|Page 110|Page 112|Page 113|Page 116|

CAEDMON - The Transit Of Earth by Arthur C. ClarkeSFFaudio EssentialThe Transit Of Earth
By Arthur C. Clarke; Read by Arthur C. Clarke
1 |MP3| – Approx. 30 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Caedmon
Published: 1975
Product #: TC-1566

[via the still awesome Record Brother blog and hugely resourceful Typnet.net]

Posted by Jesse Willis