science fiction – Page 187

BBC7 for Christmas: Arthur C. Clarke

OnlineAudio

BBC Radio 7’s The 7th Dimension has some 1950s vintage SF short stories up for listening this weekend. The tales are: All The Time in the World and The Parasite. Together they form an Arthur C. Clarke double-bill airing today and tomorrow. They will both be available through the “listen again” service for 7 days following their broadcast.

All The Time In The World
By Arthur C. Clarke; Read by Nicholas Boulton
1 Broadcast – [UNABRIDGED?]
Broadcaster: BBC7 / The 7th Dimension
Broadcast: December 15th 2007 @ at 6.30pm & 00.30am (UK Time)
“A clever tale about some alien art thieves who arrive to plunder Earth.”

The Parasite
By Arthur C. Clarke; Read by Nicholas Boulton
1 Broadcast – [UNABRIDGED?]
Broadcaster: BBC7 / The 7th Dimension
Broadcast: December 16th 2007 at 6.30pm & 00.30am (UK Time)
“A chilling tale about a man who starts having dreams of a monstrous creature from the future.”

Posted by Jesse Willis

audible.com’s big Science Fiction and Fantasy push continues

SFFaudio News

We’ve some exciting news regarding audible.com. Earlier this year we told you about audible’s big push for more Science Fiction and Fantasy. Since then the staff at audible.com have been acquiring new titles and new providers at a serious clip. Now we’ve got more news on that front. Here’s the list of some of the upcoming releases – I’m almost certain these are all ‘exclusive to audible’ titles. Included amongst them are the follow up book to our latest SFFaudio Essential designee!

Macmillian Audiobooks being released exclusively through audible.com:

Escapement
By Jay Lake
Release date: June 2008

Rainbow’s End*
By Vernor Vinge
Release date: December 2007
*this year’s Hugo winner (novel)

Jumper: Griffin’s Story*
By Steven Gould
Release date: January 2008
*the movie comes out Feb 14th

Spin
By Robert Charles Wilson
Release date: Q1 2008

Axis
By Robert Charles Wilson
Release date: Q1 2008

The Ghost Brigades
By John Scalzi
Release date: Q1 2008

Territory
By Emma Bull
Release date: Q1 2008

“In house” produced Audible exclusives:

Saturn Returns (Astropolis Book 1)
By Sean Williams
Release date: soon

Centotaxis*
By Sean Williams
Release date: soon
*a novella related to Saturn Returns (“essentially it’s Book 1.5”)

Posted by Jesse Willis

KFAI’s Xmas Schedule: Paul Levinson, Jeff Green, Tom Lopez, Roger Gregg

SFFaudio Online Audio

Online Audio - Radio Show - Sound Affects A Radio Playground On its next broadcast Sound Affects: A Radio Playground will be airing Paul Levinson’s The Chronology Protection Case. This is the live version as performed at the Museum of Radio and TV in New York. The show can be heard via live streaming on Sundays and is also broadcast on the radio in the Minneapolis/St. Paul. region – 90.3 FM Minneapolis, 106.7 FM St. Paul. Programs are archived on the KFAI website for two weeks after the broadcast.

Radio Drama - The Chronology Protection Case The Chronology Protection Case
By Paul Levinson; Performed by a full cast
Radio Broadcast – [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: KFAI / Sound Affects
Broadcast: December 16th 2007 @ 9:30-10:30 PM (Central Time)
The Chronology Protection Case radio play, a science fiction murder mystery, features Shanahan in the role of Dr. Phil D’Amato, the forensic detective who appears in Levinson’s acclaimed novels, “The Silk Code,” “The Consciousness Plague” and “The Pixel Eye.” When D’Amato is approached by the distraught wife of a missing scientist whose work is embroiled in secrecy, he is plunged into an adventure with a terrifying and powerful force of nature at the heart of a series of mysterious deaths.

The week after, Sunday the 23rd, Sound Affects will air Jeff Green’s Christmas Is Coming to the District of Drudge, one of the “Soundings” stories. Then in 2008 we’ll be hearing a few more of the “Soundings” pieces, interspersed with Roger Gregg’s Big Big Space stories, and a profile of Tom Lopez from ZBS-fame. Lopez is the creator of the extremely popular Ruby the Galactic Gumshoe series! Cool!

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of The Dream-Time by Henry Treece

SFFaudio Review

The Dream-Time
By Henry Treece; Read by Tim Bentinck
2 Cassettes – Approx. 2 Hours 25 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Chivers Audio Books
Published: 1987
ISBN: 0745185894
Themes: / Science Fiction / Young Adult / Prehistorical / Art / Language / Magic /

“The Dream-time is a story of people in the very early morning of humanity, when they were not really used to being people at all, and so everything had a strangeness about it, and nothing was quite certain; not even that the spring would come again next year. They were so near the beginning that they can have had only the fewest and simplest of words with which to talk to each other and share their thoughts and feelings and ideas. And yet we know, from the things to do with their religion and way of life that they left behind them, and from Stone Age people who are alive today, such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari, that they had all kinds of complicated thoughts and fears and longings in their heads and hearts.”
-Postscript to The Dream-Time written by Rosemary Sutcliffe

At the dawn of human existence a young boy named Crookleg has mastery over a new kind of magic. His people, deeply superstitious, curse him for they fear his magic will harm the barley crop and the community. But Crookleg finds himself not agreeing with their opinions. His magic, the ability to make pictures of animals eventually finds him cast out. When he ventures into the dangerous lands beyond his home he finds danger, a new name, starvation and eventually family.

First published in 1967 The Dream Time was the last novel written by Henry Treece, a specialist in historical fiction. I first encountered Treece in the early 1980s after hearing the entirety The Lord Of The Rings. My uncle, looking for another book to read to me, produced a slim boxed trilogy of paperbacks that were themselves thinner than just The Fellowship Of The Ring alone. But as my uncle read me the story I soon learned that what Treece lacked in wordiness he made up for in craft. Treece was a poet, a surrealist of prose and had a gift for maximizing the value of words by careful selection and placement. Hearing Treece’s Viking Trilogy it felt as deep as The Lord Of The Rings – no small feat. To be fair though The Dream Time isn’t very long at all. At just two hours it feels only just longer than a short novel. The world Treece describes in The Dream Time is one full of primitive beliefs. Its inhabitants have an ultra-limited technology, none can write, little metal exists and communication with neighboring tribes is as dodgy as communicating with animals. The Dream-Time feels as universal and surreal as one can imagine for a history based book. One blogger described the way Treece writes as “Romantic Surreal dreamshock … [Treece’s characters] were human too, he suggests; they understood things differently but their ideas seemed as valid to them as ours seem valid to us.” – and that is a good way to describe it. Narrator Tim Bentinck gives a sympathetic reading, even the villains in The Dream-Time understandable. If you want an artful living breathing history (or in this case prehistory) look to Treece.

Posted by Jesse Willis

New Releases – 5 Classic SF Titles – Wonder Audio

SFFaudio New Releases

Five classic Science Fiction tales. Five more reasons to set up an audible.com or iTunes account.

[editor’s note – These titles below all come from a fellow editor’s audiobook company (Wonder Audiobooks). I’m begging you to give them a try. Its hard to appear purely fannish about these stories (given that I’m such good friends with the publisher) so I’ll just forget about trying to appear altogether unbiased and say these are really terrific listens. Fondly Fahrenheit alone will make you scream for joy. Reet!]

Fondly Fahrenheit & Will You Wait?
By Alfred Bester; Read by Pat Bottino
70 min – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Wonder Audiobooks
Availiable at Audible and
Androids cannot kill! Yet that is the case for James Vandaleur’s rare multiple-aptitude android. Feeling he has no choice, Vandaleur flees the authorities, and finds himself in encompassed in even more horrendous murders. The heat is affecting the man-made servant, but scarier still is what is effecting Vandaleur’s mind. A pyrotechnic tour de forceby one the greatest writer and stylist of science fiction.

Chosen by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America as one of the greatest science fiction stories.

It’s a Good Life
By Jerome Bixby; Read by William Dufris
51 min – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Wonder Audiobooks
Availiable at Audible and
What is more idyllic than a small mid-western agricultural town? Peaksville would sound like a scene right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Except , little Anthony is a monster! What happens when a child is omnipotent, and with his mind he can execute his every desire and petulant whim? Tonight, there’s a birthday party for Dan Hollis at Anthony’s house. It’s a party all the townspeople will remember . . . always!

Another story voted as one of the greatest stories by SFFWA. The story was adapted into a classic Twilight Zone episode.

The Devil on Salvation Bluff
By Jack Vance; Read by Candace Platt
61 min – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Wonder Audiobooks
Availiable at Audible and
On the planet, Glory, missionaries live in a constant unpredictable environment. Sister Mary and her husband, Brother Raymond, try to contend with the flits, which live satyr-like existences. The missionaries are exasperated with this world’s seemingly disregard for cause and effect. The only constant is the clock that they brought with them. And therein lies the problem.

The Game of Rat and Dragon
By Cordwainer Smith; Read by Matthew Wayne Selznick33 min – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Wonder Audiobooks
Availiable at Audible and
Future humanity has found the secret of faster-than-light travel, but it comes with great dangers. To minimize these dangers, man can pilot ships through the up-and-out with cats as their partners. Underhill share his mind with his cat-partner, the Lady May, and must travel to the terrible open places between the stars. Only be working together can they defend themselves and the ship’s passengers against the dragons in the emptiness of space.

The Last of the Deliverers
By Poul Anderson; Read by William Coon
32 min – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Wonder Audiobooks
Availiable at Audible and
A small town in Ohio leads a peaceful Utopian existence in a world after the collapse of the super powers. Their pastoral existence is rattled when an old communist comes to their village. Uncle Jim, the resident old capitalist wages an ideological battle with the traveling guest to the townspeople’s dismay.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Challenger begins podcasting: Rebels of the Red Planet by Charles L. Fontenay

SFFaudio Online Audio

Rebels Of The Red Planet by Charles L. Fontenay Looking for old-fashioned pulpy goodness? Have a look, and a listen to the first chapter |MP3| of the newest SFFaudio Challenger’s podcast:

Rebels Of The Red Planet
By Charles L. Fontenay

The reader is Paul W. Campbell (of the “Cossmass” audio drama series Estalvin’s Legacy).

Rebels Of The Red Planet was first published in 1961 by Ace books. Fontenay was a WWII vet, who was “born in Brazil of a father who was by birth English and by parentage German and French, and of a mother who was by birth American and by parentage American and Scottish.” This mixed background caused him difficulty as he went from enlisted soldier to officer during the war. It seems that the security clearances for his secret work required clear citizenship. When not fighting wars or writing SF Fontenay was a newspaper man.

Here’s the blurb on Rebels Of The Red Planet:

Dark Kensington had been dead for twenty-five years. It was a fact; everyone knew it. Then suddenly he reappeared, youthful, brilliant, ready to take over the Phoenix, the rebel group that worked to overthrow the tyranny that gripped the settlers on Mars.

You can subscribe to the feed via this URL:

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

Posted by Jesse Willis