Cory Doctorow writes plenty of stories which mine the title and themes of old and famous SF stories. Here’s a similar one from Mike Resnick. It is, as typical with Resnick, emotional, literate and sentimental. Those are words applicable only in the positive sense. The story is narrated by the Dunesteef podcast’s hosts, Rish Outfield and Big Anklevich. They don’t do too bad a job with the reading.
Unfortunately, they have added a lot of bed music, and some ridiculously redundant sound effects. I wish people wouldn’t try to turn an unabridged reading into a half-assed audio drama. The text reads:
“I think I’ll light a fire,” I said. “I haven’t used the damned fireplace all winter. I might as well get my money’s worth.”
“It’s not necessary,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”
“It’s no bother,” I said, opening the screen and tossing a couple of logs onto the grate. “Look around while I’m doing it.”
And the Dunesteef version has all that PLUS the added sound effects of a fireplace screen being pulled open and a crackling fire for the rest of the story. Those sounds are placed in our minds when Mike Resnick writes them and the narrator speaks them. We experience those sounds in our heads by merely having them spoken. Added sound effects are not only not needed they actually harm the storytelling!
A Princess Of Earth
By Mike Resnick; Read by Rish Outfield and Big Anklevich
1 |MP3| – Approx. 66 Minutes [UNABRIDGED with sound effects and music]
Podcaster: Dunesteef
Podcast: February 12, 2010
When a man’s wife dies, he is left with little purpose in his life beyond pushing through to the end of each day. Then, in the middle of one of the worst snowstorms of the year, he gets a visitor. A man, stark naked, and freezing out in the snow. What could he possibly be doing here in the man’s backyard in this state? First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December 2004.
Podcast feed: http://dunesteef.libsyn.com/rss
Posted by Jesse Willis
First published as Lieutenant Gullivar Jones: His Vacation, in 1905, this novel is a precursor to, and the likely inspiration for, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s classic A Princess of Mars (1911). Despite my not having heard of it before now the novel has a long history of adaptation. Ace Books reprinted Arnold’s novel in paperback in 1964, retitling it Gulliver of Mars [sic]. A more recent 
