LibriVox – Page 27

LibriVox: Mountain Man by Robert E. Howard

Aural Noir: Online Audio

Robert E. Howard’s Breckinridge Elkins stories are humorous tall tales about a mighty naive but mighty muscled country boy. This one, the very first, starts off a little like Winnie The Pooh, but fear not, all Howard’s usual themes are in there. There’s a bit of a difference though, even though you’ve got a barbaric he-man battling civilized folk the story differs from a CONAN tale in that it’s set in the then contemporary world (1934) and also because it’s told in first person by an unreliable narrator.

The audiobook’s narrator, RK Wilcox, on the other hand, is a very reliable narrator, as you’ll hear in this solid reading of Mountain Man.

Mountain Man by Robert E. Howard

Mountain Man
By Robert E. Howard; Read by RK Wilcox
1 |MP3| – Approx. 35 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: May 25, 2008
|ETEXT|
Introducing the famous Breckinridge Elkins of Hardrock County, suh-the first and foremost What-a-Man of 1934! He was raised on b’ar meat and panther milk – and strong men hunt a hideout when it’s his night to howl! First published in Action Stories, March-April 1934.

Here’s a |PDF| from the original publication in Action Stories.

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: What Was It? by Fitz-James O’Brien

SFFaudio Online Audio

I’ve posted about this story before. It’s worth posting about again and again. What’s new now is this reading, which is PUBLIC DOMAIN, and therefore extremely handy. Included also, for the first time, is some really stunning art!

I’ve also added a PDF, for handy printing!

What Was It? by Fitz-James O'Brien

"In Five Minutes We Had A Plaster Mold Of The Creature"

What Was It? by Fitz-James O'Brien - illustration from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1949

What Was It? by Fitz-James O'Brien - from A Stable For Nightmares, 1896

What Was It?
By Fitz-James O’Brien; Read by Peter Yearsley
1 |MP3| – Approx. 35 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: May 2006
|ETEXT|
One of the earliest known examples of invisibility in fiction is What Was It? by Fitz-James O’Brien – He’s been called “the most important figure after Poe and before Lovecraft” and this story serves as a kind of a bridge between the supernatural and the scientific, between the likes of de Maupassant’s The Horla and Wells’ The Invisible Man.
First published in Harper’s Magazine, March 1859.

Here’s a |PDF| complied from the Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1949 publication.

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: The Good Neighbors by Edgar Pangborn

SFFaudio Online Audio

LibriVox A first contact story and a mystery story! When a massive alien, the size of a city, enters Earth’s atmosphere fighter jets are scrambled to meet it. The alien seems to be in search of something – but what it is won’t turn out to be what we expect. Here’s part of the description of the alien:

She had a head, drawn back most of the time into the bloated mass of the body but thrusting forward now and then on a short neck not more than three hundred feet in length. When she did that the blunt turtle-like head could be observed, the gaping, toothless, suffering mouth from which the thunder came, and the soft-shining purple eyes that searched the ground but found nothing answering her need. The skin-color was mud-brown with some dull iridescence and many peculiar marks resembling weals or blisters. Along the belly some observers saw half a mile of paired protuberances that looked like teats.

The Good Neighbors by Edgar Pangborn - illustrated by Wood

The Good Neighbors
By Edgar Pangborn; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 12 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 21, 2009
|ETEXT|
You can’t blame an alien for a little inconvenience—as long as he makes up for it! First published in Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1960.

And here is a |PDF| made from the original publication in Galaxy.

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: Under The Knife by H.G. Wells

SFFaudio Online Audio

Under The Knife by H.G. Wells

Here’s an interesting story by the always pioneering H.G. Wells – it’s Horror of sorts – or as close as the master of SF can come to it – it features an out of body experience, a near death experience, and astral projection!

Under The Knife by H.G. Wells - Editorial Introduction by Hugo Gernsback

Under The Knife by H.G. Wells - Illustration from Amazing Stories

Under The Knife (aka Slip Under the Knife)
By H.G. Wells; Read by William Coon
1 |MP3| – Approx. 35 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: January 07, 2007
A patient, under surgery, relates his sense experiences as careens around the physical universe in a celestial journey. First published in The New Review, January 1896.

Here’s a |PDF| made from the March 1927 issue of Amazing Stories.

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood

SFFaudio Online Audio

Set in the Canadian wilderness, The Wendigo, one of the two very highly regarded Algernon Blackwood novellas (the other being The Willows). This story is credited as being the first major fictional work to introduce the titular creature into the public consciousness.

Having heard this audiobook version I think it would make an incredibly affective audio drama. According to my researches there actually was one, recorded for CBC Radio’s 1970s radio drama series Theatre 10:30, but I’ve not been able to track down a copy.

The audiobook narrator, Amy Gramour, does a very serviceable job telling the tale – though to my ear some of her pronunciation sounds a bit off. But, that may be simply the regional accent as Gramour reports her accent as being “Mainly a South of Boston Massachusetts accent with a Northern Maine influence.”

Here’s a turly choice line, from near the end of the story:

“The legend is picturesque enough,” observed the doctor after one of the longer pauses, speaking to break it rather than because he had anything to say, “for the Wendigo is simply the Call of the Wild personified, which some natures hear to their own destruction.”

The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood
An amazingly potent tale... H.P. Lovecraft

The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood - from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1944

The above illustrations come from the June 1944 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

The Wendigo
By Algernon Blackwood; Read by Amy Gramour
3 Zipped MP3 Files – Approx. 2 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: May 11, 2011
|ETEXT|
A hunting party, in the Canadian wilderness, separates to track moose, and one member is abducted by the Wendigo of legend. First published in the 1910 collection The Lost Valley And Other Stories.

Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 |MP3| Part 3 |MP3|

Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/rss/5449

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

[Thanks also to WYSIWYG and TriciaG]

Posted by Jesse Willis

CBC: Ideas: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, and its author Stephen Greenblatt, are the subject of the latest CBC Ideas podcast. The Swerve is the story of the recovery of a lost epic Roman poem, by Titus Lucretius Carus, titled On The Nature Of Things – Greenblat makes the case for it being a work that changed the world, made it modern, by bringing ancient philosophy into an age ready for enlightenment. It’s an absolutely fascinating discussion. Host Paul Kennedy, as usual, shows that Canadian tax dollars can be used incredibly well when put in the right hands.

The poem in question is available as a LibriVox audiobook HERE.

And The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is available from Recorded Books (narrated by Edoardo Ballerini).

Here’s the book’s description:

Renowned historian Stephen Greenblatt’s works shoot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. With The Swerve, Greenblatt transports listeners to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature Of Things from certain oblivion.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic by Lucretius – a beautiful poem containing the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

The copying and translation of this ancient book – the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age – fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare, and even Thomas Jefferson.

Here’s the |MP3|

Podcast feed: http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/ideas.xml

Posted by Jesse Willis