romance – Page 11

2nd Completed SFFaudio Challenge title: The Queen Of The Black Coast by Robert E. Howard

SFFaudio Online Audio

SFFaudio’s Make An Audiobook Win An Audiobook Challenge #2 Bill Hollweg of Broken Sea Audio Productions is the second challenger to complete a title in the Second Annual SFFaudio Challenge! Available now is a complete and unabridged reading of Robert E. Howard’s Queen Of The Black Coast read by Bill Hollweg!

This is a significant achievment as Queen Of The Black Coast is one of the world’s most important novelettes:

-There is a hefty page on Wikipedia detailing much about this influential tale.

-It took a stunning 40 issues of Conan: The Barbarian (the Marvel comic) to string out just a few lines in this tale.

-In the original Conan movie, which was not faithful to any particular Conan story, there was one clear aspect that was certainly taken from the end of Queen Of The Black Coast.

–Broken Sea Audio Productions is “doing a full cast audio drama of this and other tales of Conan” – look for the audio drama version in early 2008.

Also, the good folks over at Broken Sea Audio Productions have fenced off a separate page for what they are calling “Hooligan Audiobooks”, there you’ll find all the BSAP single voiced narration tales. If you’ve never tried a Howard story, or never read a Conan tale, have a listen to this unabridged beauty:

Queen Of The Black Coast
By Robert E. Howard; Read by Bill Hollweg
Podcast – [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Broken Sea Audio Thursday
Podcast: November – December 2007
In the seacoast kingdom of Argos, after a brush with the Hyborian legal system, Conan hops aboard a southward bound ship. Off the coasts of Kush the ship is boarded by black corsairs under the Shemitish she-devil, Bêlit. Conan joins her crew, becomes her consort, and for a long time they harry the Hyborian and Stygian ports. During this stage of his career, Conan gains the name of Amra, the Lion, which is to follow him throughout his later life.

Chapter 1 |MP3| Chapter 2 |MP3| Chapter 3 |MP3|Chapters 4 & 5 |MP3|

Subscribe to the podcast feed:

http://brokensea.com/feed

Posted by Jesse Willis

U.K. Audio Drama Podcast: Estalvin’s Legacy

SFFaudio Online Audio

SFFaudio Challenge entrant Paul Campbell (he’s working on Rebels Of The Red Planet) has been podcasting his Science Fiction audio drama series Estalvin’s Legacy since early this summer. This promising series features “Mystery, Adventure, Romance, Disaster and War across Alternate Realities” – all that and a cast of a dozen U.K voice actors! There are three episodes out so far. I’ve listened to the first, it drops you straight into the middle of a cast of complex characters with a backstory that begins to be revealed – very promising! And Estalvin’s Legacy has possibly the best tagline for an audio drama series I’ve ever heard:

“The universe exists – for now.”

Have a listen to the slick promo |MP3| and then check out the series itself…

Estalvin’s Legacy
By Paul W. Campbell; Performed by a full cast
Podcast – [AUDIO DRAMA]
Podcaster: Cossmass Productions
Podcast: Started June 2007
Ranging across the many parallel, and not so parallel, alternate realities of the Cossmass. Things aren’t right in the greater reality know as the Cossmass. It encompasses thousands upon thousands of alternate realities. The stability of the Cossmass has been weakening. The collapse of an entire reality stream is no longer a mere theory. The Kalsorin have an uneasy truce with the La’Shareti. Both have influence across several Reality Clusters. But the Kalsorin are keeping a secret from the La’Shareti that would bring a war that they could not win. In a remote Cluster: Nicolas is older than he looks, and his memory is fading fast. Sarah and Peter have only known each other a short time when Liam appears. Liam has travelled the Cossmass for many years, always keeping out of sight of the Kalsorin. Until now.

Subscribe to the podcast via this feed:

http://cossmass.co.uk/series/estalvinslegacy/feed

Posted by Jesse Willis

Challenger begins podcasting: Queen Of The Black Coast by Robert E. Howard

SFFaudio Online Audio

Are you ready to hear the first ever podcast of a Conan tale? Are you ready for some furious freebooting? What about serious corsairage? Would it bother you if it were buccaneering? Are you truly ready for the blazing prose of the undisputed master of pulp fiction in one of his best loved tales? If the answer is yes to all of these questions then prepare yourself for the first chapter in…

Queen Of The Black Coast
By Robert E. Howard; Read by Bill Hollweg
Podcast – [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Broken Sea Audio Thursday
Podcast: Started November 29th
In the seacoast kingdom of Argos, after a brush with the Hyborian legal system, Conan hops aboard a southward bound ship. Off the coasts of Kush the ship is boarded by black corsairs under the Shemitish she-devil, Bêlit. Conan joins her crew, becomes her consort, and for a long time they harry the Hyborian and Stygian ports. During this stage of his career, Conan gains the name of Amra, the Lion, which is to follow him throughout his later life.
Chapter 1 |MP3|

Subscribe to the podcast feed:

http://brokensea.com/feed

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Local Custom by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

SFFaudio Audiobook Review

Local Custom
By Sharon Lee and Steve Miller; Read by Michael Shanks
1 MP3-CD or 8 CDs – Approx. 10.5 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Buzzy Multimedia
Published: 2005
ISBN: 0979074916 (MP3-CD); 096572557X (CDs)
Themes: / Science Fiction / Romance / Space Opera / Galactic Civilization / Love /

“Each person shall provide his Clan of origin with a child of his blood, who will be raised by the Clan and belong to the Clan, despite whatever may later occur to place the parent beyond the Clan’s authority. And this shall be Law for every person of every Clan.”

So far there are seven novels set in the Liaden Universe, though this one isn’t the first published it is chronologically the first to happen. Local Custom is a simple story, a Romeo And Juliet, tale, except with a happy ending and a few more spaceships. Master trader Er Thom yos’Galan is from the planet Liaden, an honour based society of humans. His family, and especially his mother are demanding an heir from Er Thom, as is only right and proper. But Er Thom cannot think of the traditional contract-marriage to some Liaden clan daughter when his true love is back on Terra. Anne Davis, a professor of Liaden studies on Terra had a brief affair with Er Thom years ago. When Er Thom shows up on her doorstep her secret and his duty will embroil them in a galaxy spanning scandal which threatens the honour of clan Korval.

Much of the interest here is in the worldbuilding, Liaden culture is richly imagined and the idea of “melant’i” is fodder for lots of drama. Melant’i, is a conveyed honour, not dissimilar from that created by Jack Vance for The Moon Moth. While the resolution of complex culture clashes makes for good drama, the effect here also makes many long dialogue scenes.This was coupled with a general lack of description – I didn’t know what anybody or anything looked like. The plot, centering around Er Thom’s marital fate, is spread thinly – while the novel never actually bores I kept wondering when something meaty was going to happen – very little did, this is a personal family drama set in a science fiction setting. Sharon Lee and Steve Miller have obviously built themselves an interesting universe here, and I think it’d be one worth visiting again, especially if there is a story in it with a wider-ranging plot. Fans of the series are vehement in their ardor for it.

Some of the exposition is placed at chapter or scene beginnings, mostly notes on Liaden history and cultural norms. This helped the general flow of the telling. Also helpful was Buzzy Multimedia’s engagement of screen actor Michael Shanks for the narration. Shanks appears as Dr. Daniel Jackson on Stargate SG1, but he’s a capable narrator, giving distinction to male and female character alike. There were a few times where I thought I heard Shanks stumble over a word, but generally these were in dialogue, and they may have been deliberate – they certainly didn’t detract from the production. The first three chapters are available for FREE MP3 download on the Buzzy website.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of The Quantum Rose by Catherine Asaro

The Quantum Rose
By Catherine Asaro, read by Anna Fields
1 CD (MP3) – 13 ½ hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks
Published: 2004
ISBN: 0786186232
Themes: / Science fiction / Fantasy / Romance / Space opera / Telepathy /

I’ve always been a big fan of math. I like the chumminess of commuting, associating, and distributing; the edginess of integrating by parts; and the sharp antiseptic sting of differentiating exponentials. In The Quantum Rose, Catherine Asaro brings the robust methodology of a table of cosines to romantic space opera. Like a seasoned mathematics professor, she begins by defining the variables: A fantastically beautiful heroine; her strong, handsome but brutish betrothed; and a mysterious stranger who takes a sudden interest in the heroine. She then lays out the equations for us: fear, mutual need, and strange loyalty between her and the betrothed; fear, mistrust, sexual attraction, and a hidden wound that must be healed between her and the stranger. From there, she manipulates the terms using standard algebraic operations such as nudity, well-meaning ignorance, revenge, treachery, self-sacrifice for the greater good, declarations of undying love, and first time sex so amazing it humbles those of us with decades of experience.

Asaro’s story-solving skills are honed to such an atom-splitting edge that only halfway through the book, she derives the main quantity of interest: True love. Not satisfied with so straightforward a proof, however, she dashes diligently on to lead us through a desperate, if leisurely (and admirably bloodless), rescue of an exiled royal family halfway across the galaxy. It’s all quite rigorous.

Never does Asaro skip a step. In fact, for the elucidation of the reader, she will often review a step several times to ensure we’ve understood each point before moving on to the next. She also provides enlightening chapter headings, which contain both a plain English title and a subtitle composed from quasi-quantum mechanical terms (for those hopelessly muddled by such clever cryptology, I’ll provide a clue: Substitute the word “person” for “particle” in these subtitles, and you’ll crack the code for over half of them). Thus, we are duly apprised of all developments well before they occur in the text. As a final touch, Asaro has defined most of the significant variables to be empaths or telepaths, which means we are never in doubt of what anyone in the story is thinking or feeling unless some misunderstanding is required by the plot.

Anna Fields adds to the proceedings by reading the text out loud for us. As an intriguing counterpoint to Asaro’s linear clarity, Fields adds a note of mystery by using female character voices that are quite similar to one another and by occasionally using the voice of one lead male to deliver the dialog spoken by another. The drunken mutter she maintains for the most prominent male throughout the entire length of the book also tends to soften the hard edges of understanding that sometimes seem too prominent for comfort.

The most exciting aspect of this audio book, however, is the medium it is recorded on. That MP3 technology allows nearly 14 hours of spoken text to be recorded on a single, handy CD is like a divine response to listeners’ prayers. There is only one nicely packaged jewel box to open–no snarling tapes nor floppy CD sleeves that produce obligingly but accept only grudgingly, the sound quality is excellent, and the production is clean. Maybe someday I will have the opportunity to actually enjoy an audio book in this format.

Posted by Kurt Dietz

Review of To Say Nothing Of The Dog by Connie Willis

To Say Nothing Of The Dog – Or How We Found The Bishop’s Birdstump At Last
By Connie Willis; Read by Steven Crossley
15 cassettes – 21.25 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Recorded Books
Published: 2000
ISBN 0788755498
Themes: Science Fiction / Time-travel / Comedy / Romance / Mystery / 19th Century /England / Near Future /

The story involves Coventry Cathedral (old, new and burned down), pen wipers, a breach in the space-time continuum, boating on the Thames, evolution, and bulldogs.
– Connie Willis in a Science Fiction Weekly Interview

For such a stunningly popular Science Fiction author Connie Willis has some very unusual obsessions: Churches, England, a neurotic lead character and cats. But then again if you take away the churches and the England all you’ve got left is Robert A. Heinlein, so don’t complain. Now before I get all reviewing let me first say that the Science Fiction elements in this novel are truly paper thin. The closest we come to real SF meat is the many characters thinking about time travel paradoxes and how to prevent them. The plot resolution, without giving anything away, centers around the reason time travel works the way it does in these Connie Willis time travel books and that revelation felt not just un-science fictiony but also down-right un-scientific. But on the other hand it has a neatly tied up happy ending, and we all need a nice happy ending now and then.

This is the third time travel story set in a near future where an Oxford history don named Dunworthy sends his undergraduates back in time to visit historical English churches. But unlike Fire Watch and Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog is also a romantic comedy and a mystery. Instead of sending his students to WWII London (as in Fire Watch), or Middle Ages England (as in Doomsday Book), Dunworthy sends them to 19th century Oxford for a little R&R, and while they are there would they “mind finding the bishop’s birdstump?” – whatever that is. Now don’t get me wrong, I actually enjoyed this novel, quite a lot in fact! It’s just that Willis is such a very strange writer…. her characters, for example, they think a lot, no strike that. They think way too much. They are always overthinking every possibility of what could go wrong and then thinking it again just for luck, which is truly infuriating. Thankfully, this characteristic is slightly less apparent in this novel than it was in Doomsday Book and this book benefits from that slight reduction. No doubt this was due in part to the first person perspective. Keep writing first person Connie!

The mystery element is also rather weak. Are we really supposed to care what happened to the bishop’s birdstump? We don’t even find out what the damn thing is until about two thirds of the way through the book! What really saves this novel from becoming utterly unlistenable is the author’s attention to light humor and the characters. These are nice people, and the situations they are in are for the most part quite cute. The romantic angle is also sweet, and the text is rife with evidence that Willis really researches the heck out of the settings she writes about. I don’t recall ever laughing out loud, though many sections were quite amusing, or ever being so caught up in the romance that I couldn’t stop listening if I needed to, though I did like the way that all played out – it snuck up on me. What I liked most about To Say Nothing Of The Dog – Or How We Found The Bishop’s Birdstump At Last was the literary references included. There are characters who act like they’re in a P.G. Wodehouse Jeeves and Wooster story, the mystery element is obviously quite Dorothy L. Sayers inspired and Willis even named the novel after the biggest influence, Jerome K. Jerome’s Victorian comic novel Three Men In A Boat – To Say Nothing Of The Dog! Narrator Steven Crossley has the prototypical English accent you associate with Masterpiece Theater and costume drama. He’s called upon to stretch only a little with this one, playing mostly upper and middle class English gentlefolk from the 21st and 19th centuries. Nicely done too. Recorded Books has chosen some neat art for the cover, depicting an hourglass and a bulldog. As usual the packaging is absolutely top notch, you won’t find a more durable or attractive case for an audiobook from another publisher.

So with such a mixed review can I recommend this book? Absolutely I can, for of all Connie Willis’ weirdness, she is as gosh darned friendly and smart as you and me, just maybe a little smarter and definitely a little weirder, and I would never ever hesitate to recommend a novel that can trace its origins back to one line in Robert A. Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel. To Say Nothing Of The Dog – Or How We Found The Bishop’s Birdstump At Last is recommended as a tonic for the weary traveler, or just as a lighthearted vacation from Hard SF.

Posted by Jesse Willis