science fiction – Page 209

H. G. Wells Month – Review of The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

H.G. Wells Month - SFFaudio Review

The Invisible Man
By H. G. Wells; Read by Alex Foster
13 MP3 or OGG Files – 4 Hours 54 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: 2006
Themes: /Science Fiction / Invisibility /

The narrator, Alex Foster, has a great voice for this tale. It’s a radio voice. There are few, if any, errors. And very importantly, it isn’t an American accent. The story takes place, if I understand my geography correctly, near London, so having an accent from that area is a plus. And yet, the text is very clear, with no misunderstanding, even by an American such as myself.

Interestingly, the description for how invisibility works is strikingly believable. In high school chemistry class, they had you put a certain amount of water in a beaker, put in a Pyrex rod, add a certain amount of a clear liquid, mix it, and boom (well, it was a surprise, anyway), the Pyrex rod that’s in the liquid vanishes. The index of refraction of the water was altered to match that of Pyrex. The Invisible man is invisible because he’s not only transparent, but in index of refraction matches that of air. Yet, Wells doesn’t go so far as to tell you the details on how the thing works, exactly. Just enough to get you going. Masterfully done.

Now, the story has been done again and again in literature. Typically, the rip offs change the man’s character greatly. Sometimes they come up with solutions to his various problems. Problems? Sure, well, he’s only really invisible when he’s naked. That’s a decided disadvantage when it’s winter. And in summer, the bug bites must be terrible. The solution was actually presented in the book, though the author chooses not to have the character use it.

Wells clearly wanted to have the book stand on it’s own. Not a serial like Tarzan. So, the Invisible Man is smart enough to be dangerous, but not smart enough to live forever. Many of the rip off’s, including a TV series, have the Invisible Man with a support network, and enough smarts to do interesting things as a serial.

The original book stands the test of time. Speaking of time. The Librivoxrecording of The Invisible Man is only about five hours long. Keep in mind that reading the text yourself is typically about three times faster. So this is a fairly short piece of entertainment. It’s broken up into fairly short readings. Sometimes three chapters in a single file, but always under about 35 minutes. The chapters must be very short. In any case, it means one can get through a whole scene, and have a convenient break point.

Now, I mostly listen to these things while doing something else. This summer, I’ve listened to several books while gardening. I bought a non-motorized lawn mower so that i can listen while doing that task. Most of my listening time, however, happens during my commute to work. In a break with tradition, I actually found myself speeding up a little during the most exciting parts. (This doesn’t get me to speeding, exactly, as I drive slower than the limit as a fuel conservation measure – which saves me more than an estimated $100 per year). It’s an hour each way, so it’s roughly ten hours a week. Against ten hours a week, a five hour book is pretty easy. The Tarzan books were about eight hours each. And when I listened to those, it was about one per week. Imagine reading fifty books a year.

posted by Stephen Uitti

Mark Nelson narrates 3 more SCIENCE FICTION audiobooks

SFFaudio Online Audio

Mark Nelson is my favorite amateur narrator, he’s a terrific reader, his recording environment is dead-silent and he’s reading great stuff at a champion’s pace. I bring this up because Mark has written in to inform me that he’s recorded three new additions for LibriVox‘s library of FREE SCIENCE FICTION AUDIOBOOKS! One of them was even on our SFFaudio Challenge list. Way to go Mark!

Plague Ship by Andre Norton is a complete novel from 1956, originally published under the Norton’s “Andrew North” pseudonym. Also completed are two H. Beam Piper novellettes: Oomphel In The Sky and Omnilingual. Compiled below are the details for each along with some art…

Plague Ship
By Andre Norton; Read by Mark Nelson
18 Zipped MP3s – Approx. 7 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: March 2007
Lured by its exotic gems, the space trader Solar Queen lands on the little-known planet of Sargol, only to find the ruthless Inter-Solar Company there ahead of them. Adapting quickly to the culture of Sargol’s feline inhabitants, the crew of the Queen beat out their rivals and successfully make a deal with the natives. But soon after takeoff, the Queen’s crew is stricken with a plague, and they are now banned from landing on any inhabited planet. Will the Queen’s crew save themselves, or be condemned to drift forever through space?

Oomphel In The Sky
By H. Beam Piper; Read by Mark Nelson
4 Zipped MP3s – Approx. 2 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: March 2007
Natives of the distant planet of Kwannon believe that their world is about to end, and in preparing for the apocalypse, may be unnecessarily bringing about their own demise. The planetary government can’t overcome its own bureaucracy to help them, and the military is overwhelmed. Can a single newsman change the course of a whole people, and save their world.
http://librivox.org/oomphel-in-the-sky-by-h-beam-piper/

Omnilingual
By H. Beam Piper; Read by Mark Nelson
5 Zipped MP3s – Approx. 2 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: March 2007
An expedition to Mars discovers the remains of an advanced civilization, which died out many thousands of years ago. They recovered books and documents left behind, and are puzzled by their contents. Would the team find their “Rosetta Stone” that would allow them to unlock the Martian language, and learn the secrets of this long-dead race?

posted by Jesse Willis

More Damn Dirty Apes! Planet Of The Apes audiobook

Online Audio

Hunter Goatley‘s site also has an abridged reading of the original novel of Planet Of The Apes by Pierre Boulle. It was originally published in 1963 in French as La Planète Des Singes. “Singe” translates to both “ape” and “monkey.” Translator Xan Fielding called it Monkey Planet. In the English-language POTA films, the apes are insulted when called “monkeys,” but in this reading no distinction is made, the term “singes” is used interchangeably with both “apes” and “monkeys.” This abridged reading regrettably dispenses with the framing story, which offers one of the twists that people who’ve only seen the films could still have enjoyed. Despite this, the audiobook is worth hearing, it falls into the tradition of A Strange Manuscript Found In A Copper Cylinder, in which dystopian society acts as social commentary.

posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Jeffrey Combs Reads H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West Re-Animator

SFFaudio Review

Jeffrey Combs Reads H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West Re-Animator
By H.P. Lovecraft; Read by Jeffrey Combs
1 CD – 72 Minutes [ABRIDGED]
Publisher: Beyond-Books.com
Published: 1999
UPC: 619981033428
Themes: / Science Fiction / Horror / Death / Immortality / Zombies / WWI / 1900s / 1910s / 1920s /

“Human it could not have been — it is not in man to make such sounds.”

The “Herbert West, Reanimator” serial is a cycle of six ghoulish tales inspired by Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. This audiobook is an abridged reading of that serial. We first meet the titular Herbert West as a third-year medical student attending New England’s Miskatonic University in 1904. We are introduced to West by an unnamed companion, a fellow student at M.U., who like a Watson to his Sherlock Holmes, narrates the adventures of his fascinating ~~fiend~~ friend. West is the inventor of an extraordinary reagent, one that when injected into the body of a recently deceased person, cause rudimentary living functions to return. West seeks to perfect his reagent, but in order to do this he must find freshly deceased bodies. The six seperate episodes recount the various grusome attempts by West and his bizzarely-loyal companion to do just this. One minor wrinkle, most of the subjects that undergo the “re-animation” process become violent, incommunicative and don’t typically and retain their ‘higher’ mental faculties.

Jeffrey Combs Reads H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West Re-Animator will make you become, like West, utterly fascinated by the desire to know what will happen in the next experiment. What will the dead have to say? Can death truly be conquered? As the unnamed narrator puts it – “I, myself, still held some curious notions about the traditional ‘soul’ of man, and felt an awe at the secrets that might be told by one returning from the dead.” The prose is rich, fast and pregnant with that special adjectival allure that only Lovecraft knew the formula for. Though it appears that Lovecraft himself was not overly-fond of this serial, it makes for a straightforward introduction to his work and I found it appealingly nefariousness.

The abridgement here is relatively minor, and even, I am surprised to say, forgiveable. It appears to have been done to try to smooth out the connectity of the six seperate stories that make up the entire Re-Animator cycle or possibly to make the entire set of tales fit onto just one CD. The original stories offered a recap of the previous instalment’s events, reading them back to back like this, it makes sense that those sections would be disposable. Either way, it is forgivable. Far more disheartening than the abridgement is the addition of sound effects. The sounds are intermittent, completely redundant and nearly ruin the atmosphere the text naturally generates in a reader. Horror stories, if they are well written, generate a mood by words alone. I’d like to say this is just a case of gilding the lily, but that makes it sounds like it was merely superfluous to add in sound effects, and I don’t want to say that. In fact it is far worse than that – the added effects will sometimes completely break the spell that Lovecraft’s words and Combs’ reading of them are weaving together – the sound effects bring the listener out of the story. This is a major flaw.

On the bright side, the reading itself is excellent. Jeffrey Combs is probably best known for his role as Herbert West in the Re-Animator films. You’d probably also recognize his voice and mannerisms from his supporting work. Were he better known I have no doubt he’d have many a stand-up comedian doing impersonations of his unique vocal cadance. Combs has been all over Science Fiction on TV, he even played two recurring characters on the same episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine at one point! His reading is of course dead-on. He knows this material well and revels in the loquacious language of H.P. Lovecraft.

Recommended, but with reservations.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Ida by Tim Callahan

SFFaudio Audiobook Review

ed.’s note: New reviewer Stephen Uitti and his review come to us via his blog, predelusional.

Ida
By Tim Callahan; Read by Tim Callahan
32 MP3 Files – Approx. 12 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Podiobooks.com
Published: 2006
Themes: / Science Fiction / Hard SF / Space Travel / Asteroid Mining / Economics / Politics / Sex /

Each of the 32 mp3 audio files of this podcast novel has an introduction and epilogue. There are few introductions and epilogues that I’ll actually listen to. But Timothy’s is particularly annoying. He apologizes for his Philadelphia accent before you even get to hear him read. Guys – if you’re presenting a show, let the audience decide if they like it themselves. Don’t make us pity you for being too stupid to get someone else to read your book. Don’t go the other way either. Don’t hype it up. It is OK to promote some other work.

After the first chapter, the introductions also have a summary of what has gone on before. Maybe some people couldn’t remember what happened last month in the original serial. But now the entire book is available. I don’t have patience for the repetition so I skipped most of the introductions and epilogues. The guts of the each new chapter starts after a bit of music, and my iPod Shuffle was able to get me there via fast forward most of the time. Skipping epilogues is easy enough, since Callahan says that’s the end. Just skip to the next track. Since I skipped all that material, there was much less than twelve hours of material. There’s a bonus. After the novel is finished, Callahan offers in a short story entitled Balance. Balance takes place well after the events in Ida. Really, Ida is a prequel. It’s the backing story to Balance. Like his introduction to Ida, Timothy apologizes for his short story. Jeez. For the record, I liked Balance more. As a short story it has much faster pacing. Remember that reading a book to yourself is something like three times faster than hearing it aloud. So, short stories with very fast pacing work better in audio format. And yet, Balance is long enough to give you the idea that several events take place. The events in the story are believable. And no laws of physics are broken in the building of the plot.

That reminds me. The worst parts of Ida have to do with laws of physics. They aren’t broken like faster than light travel. It’s more like having a character survive an acceleration of ten or twenty thousand miles per hour in a few seconds time. That’s a minimum of 50 gravities. Ouch. A little more explanation could salvage the suspension of disbelief, and therefore the plot. This means a lot to me. But maybe you don’t care. Ida is real hard Science Fiction. It’d be nice to have someone check the science and do some math here and here. It wouldn’t take much. Really.

The work had sufficient interest to make it worthwhile. Rich characters, character growth, character interaction, believable responses and plot development. You can identify with the characters. Pick favorites and root for them. Suspense. And the end of the story is not simply telegraphed. There are plenty of surprises in the middle. And the flaws – mostly physics gaffs – are not nearly as bad as those in typical Hollywood movies. And they’re all fixable.

Is there sex? Yes. Is there violence? Yes. Is there swearing? Yes. Is the swearing pointless? Yes. This story would have been consumable by my ten year old, but because of pointless swearing, it isn’t. Will you like it? It depends on how much you like the good parts, and how tolerant you are to the flaws. It has lots of both.

posted by Stephen Uitti

Review of Vortex Blaster by E.E. "Doc" Smith

SFFaudio Audiobook Review

Vortex Blaster
By E.E. “Doc” Smith; Read by Reed McColm
1 MP3-CD or 6 CDs – Approx. 7.5 hrs [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Books in Motion
Published: 2007
ISBN: 159607793X (MP3-CD); 1596077921 (CDs)
Themes: / Science Fiction / Aliens / Atomic Power / Galactic Civilizations /

I was pleasantly surprised listening to this new audiobook. My past experience with Smith’s books has been less than stellar. On more than one occasion, I’ve cast his novels down unfinished in favor of something else. E. E. “Doc” Smith is one of the most revered names in SF. So I’ve always thought I must be missing something. Anybody who knows my tastes or my podcast knows that I love old SF (as well as new). I’ve always found his overly heroic heroes and his wimpy, fainting females hard to care about. So when I received this new title, my expectations were not the highest.

Neil “Storm” Cloud is the main protagonist and the “Vortex Blaster” of the title. Uncontrolled atomic vortexes have been appearing on planets throughout the galaxy. The vortexes contain radiation and wildly incalescent temperatures. They only grow larger over time and threaten to destroy any worlds they appear upon. Think of them as nuclear tornadoes that never dissipate. Luckily, Cloud has a unique gift—a computational mind that is capable of astonishingly complex mathematics. As the novel opens we find out that he’s been working, without results, on a project to figure out how to stop the vortexes. He has just lost his wife and kids to one of these atomic infernos. Nearly suicidal and distraught, he leaves the project when he has a sudden inspiration on how to stop the phenomena. He has to be in the center of the vortex and has to set off a duodec explosion equal to the energy of the nuclear storm. And because of his unique computational mind, he’s the only man that can do it—and thus becomes the Vortex Blaster. Cloud’s new ability makes him very much in demand. He’s soon traveling across the galaxy to put out the worst vortexes until he finds himself set upon by space pirates, warring aliens, and a mad scientist.

If this all sounds rather pulpy and fun— it is. Vortex Blaster mixes ripsnorting adventure with a jaw-dropping sense of wonder. No one would accuse “Doc” Smith of being a great prose stylist. But if you’re picking up an audiobook called Vortex Blaster, you’re probably not reading it for the style. Actually, Smith is a much better writer than I’d previously thought. “Storm” Cloud is a seasoned, sometimes cynical protagonist. In the second half of the novel he meets Joan, a telepathic genius, and romance ensues. Joan is resourceful and smart – no young, thin beauty. Each of his aliens have unique characteristics too. The entire novel is leavened with wit and humor to contrapose the serious tone.

You may wonder if this title is part of his famous “Lensman” series. It is definitely a stand-alone novel but it is set in the same universe as the Lensman stories. Vortex Blaster is tangentially related, but can be enjoyed without reading any of the other books in the series.

As narrator for this title, Reed McColm handles the vast array of human and especially alien characters with unerring deftness. He nails the aliens individual eccentricities through voice and accents. He handles the narration for several “Doc” Smith’s audiobooks that are published by Books in Motion. Mr. McColm’s talents are a perfect fit to E.E. “Doc” Smith’s super science space epics.

posted by The Time Traveler of the Time Traveler Show