Mike Resnick interview on ERB podcast – Dateline Jasoom

SFFaudio Online Audio / Podcast

Podcast - Dateline Jasoom Dateline Jasoom, a podcast about the imaginative works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, has an interview with legendary SF author Mike Resnick. Mr. Resnick has written over 50 novels, numerous short stories, has edited 45 anthologies, and won 5 Hugos as well as a Nebula award. Mike was an assistant editor in his younger days for the Hugo award-winning fanzine ERB-dom. He talks about that as well as his early novels that were a pastiche of Burroughs that he is now very discomforted about.

Download the show direct |MP3|, or insert this feed into your podcatcher to subscribe:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DatelineJasoom

Review of The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

Science Fiction Audibook Review

Clipper Audiobook - The Algebraist by Iain M. BanksThe Algebraist
By Iain M. Banks; Read by Geoffrey Amis
21 CDs – Approx. 24.25 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Clipper Audio
Published: 2005
ISBN: 9781419353772
Themes: / Science Fiction / Space Epic / Galactic Empires / Aliens / Worm Holes /

This is a space opera on the epic scale. Fassin Taak is a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers. The Nasqueron Dwellers are a very old race, almost as old as the universe itself. They are inhabitants of gas giants all across the universe. Intra-galactic traveling is done by way of wormholes. The Outsiders from beyond the galaxy are sending in military forces and destroying wormholes. The leader of the Mercatoria, the reigning galactic empire, sends Fassin on a quest to find a fabled book. The book is called The Algebraist. As legends have it, it’s a book written by the Dwellers and in it is contained information of a hidden network of wormholes that is held in secret.

The Mercatoria is a corrupt empire headed by the Archimandrite Luseferous. Luseferous is the most evil villain to ever inhabit a galactic empire. Darth Vader couldn’t pack this guy’s lunch. He creates living punching bags out of the heads of his attempted assassins. He can modify the chemical effects of his semen to make courtesans love him or die for him. He’s a false advocate for the official galactic religion. We learn through the course of the book his internalized philosophy that makes his atrocities believable.

This is a long audiobook but it sustains one’s interest through its entirety. The narrator is Geoffrey Amis. Mr. Amis has a fine narrative voice but it doesn’t express a lot of range to differentiate the individual characters. This is a vast canvas with a large cast of characters and this lack of range makes the individual characters harder to remember.

My American bias surfaced into a silly thought. I was thinking how strange it was that the narrator portrays every character in the book with an English accent. Well, the characters aren’t really speaking English in the book but some sort of galactic standard. The author just conveys the dialogue as English as a logical convention. It occurred to me that the many aliens and cultures would have varying accents (as well as languages). I believe it would be impossible to convey alien accents without reference to our own human accents. This would create some rather silly aliens that might be useful in a humorous story, but would undermine a serious work. So the narrator did right to stick to his native accent. I mention my American bias, because if this were read with an American accent it would never have stricken me as strange that all the characters speak with the same accent.

Overall this space opera is a many-layered fugue and Iain Banks pulls out all the stops.

TellTaleWeekly.org has Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Alexander Wilson‘s podcast, The Spoken Alexandria Project, as well as his Tell Tale Weekly webstore, that helps fund it, both have a free unabridged reading of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis!

Grab the three MP3 files |Part 1|Part 2|Part 3| or subscribe to the podcast via this feed and get the entire novella in one MP3 file:

http://www.spokenalex.org/index.xml

Podcast Audio Book - The Metamorphosis by Franz KafkaThe Metamorphosis
By Franz Kafka; Translation by David Wyllie; Read by Alex Wilson
3 MP3 Files – Approx. 2 hours 15 minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: The Spoken Alexandria Project
Podcast: November 16, 2006
From 1915! This is one of the most famous novellas ever written. From 1915!

“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.” So begins the classic existential tale about the traveling salesman who too late realizes what he’s become.

Charity Doctor Who Concert available from BBC Radio Wales

SFFaudio Online Audio

BBC Radio WalesDoctor Who fans take note! A concert of Murray Gold’s Dr Who Music (BBC National Orchestra), hosted by the present incumbent David Tennant, has just broadcast from the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff. It appears to feature a number of interviews and Q&A sessions with David Tennant and Russell T. Davies plus a number of other related audio items. The concert runs about 2.5 hours and is available on BBC Radio Wales ‘listen again‘ service.

Thanks Roy!

Review of Singularity by Bill DeSmedt

Podibook Review

Podcast - The SingularitySingularity
By Bill DeSmedt; Read by Bill DeSmedt
47 MP3 Files – 20 Hours 24 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Podiobooks.com
Published: 2006
Themes: / Science Fiction / Hard SF / Tunguska Event / Black Holes / Time Travel / Near Future/ Cloak & Dagger / Quantum Physics / Soviet Union /

June 30th, 1908 – In the remote Tunguska region of Siberia, the most violent cosmic collision in recorded history flattened ancient forests over an area half the size of Rhode Island. Yet after a hundred years of international scientific research the cause of this impact remains a mystery.

Several people told me Singularity was worth listening to. But of course I figured they we’re probably wrong, I’m not easy to please. But because it was FREE I told myself to give it a chance. I have to say I was astounded! After a longish introduction, more of a history lesson, the real story takes off. And boy, does it! Like a Nelson DeMille novel with Saturn V booster strapped to it! This is incisive Hard SF set in a near future with plenty of action, some very cool ideas and even a bit of romance. The plot orbits around the mystery of the 1908 Tunguska Event. The action intertwines cloak and dagger with quantum physics in a tidal dance. I’m no physics major, but the scientific explanations were clear and compelling. You know a story’s good when you end up looking up some of the ideas. The tale is fleshed out through a large cast of central characters: Jonathan Knox, a consultant to elite government agencies, is the engaging lead protagonist. Knox has a knack with finding patterns in giant fields of data – a trait attributable to a voyage his mind went on once. Marianna Bonaventure, his soon to be lover, is a federal government agent on the trail of a missing materials scientist. Physicist Jack Adler is on the same trail as Knox and Marianna, but he doesn’t know it yet. Together, and apart they are in a race that may have been predetermined as unwinnable before it started, only the laws of causality know. Opposing them is a set of rationally motivated villains – with the weight of an multi-billion dollar corporate empire behind them. Leading them is, Arkady Grigoriyevich, who spends most of his time aboard a converted mega-yacht, that is now a floating laboratory. DeSmedt packs about a dozen terrific SF ideas into his tale. Also included in the podcast feed is an informative question and answer bonus MP3 file with the author himself. I am eagerly awaiting the follow-up novel, cleverly titled, Duality.

I tend to enjoy audiobooks narrated by authors, as they know exactly when and where to pause, what words to accentuate and how to pronounce the character names. But DeSmedt was not a perfect narrator, in fact at the start he sounded nervous. I was worried, but gradually as the chapters flowed the anxiety faded, and by the end I he was reading like a professional. Maybe his female voices need a bit more practice, but I swear, all those Russian accents were perfect.

I downloaded Singularity from Podiobooks.com for free, but when I did I could only get the first half of the novel. It was being released piecemeal, chapter by chapter, as podcasts. I have heard many people enjoy this delivery style; and it probably works for serial adventures or short story collections but I don’t like it for novels. I quickly listened to the first 20 chapters of the book in quick succession only to then have to wait for a whole month to finish it. Next time I visit podiobooks.com I’ll be making sure the serialization is completed before starting another novel. Another issue, selecting the next podcast once a chapter was finished was a real bitch. I drive a standard transmission automobile and my iPod is stuck into a faraway cigarette lighter. Every time a chapter of Singularity ended I would be made to reach over to rip my iPod out of the transmitter/charger and then hold on to it and the steering wheel while trying to navigate the menu to figure out which chapter was next. The podcasts delivery system would have been far better if I could have started and the ended the story in the same file, in other words what I needed was one big podcast, the novel in one file.

Escape Pod collections for sale from PodDisc.com

SFFaudio News

WOW! I’ve got to get my hands on these…

PodDisc.com - Escape Pod Collections 1, 2 & 3

Starting at: $25.00
ESCAPE POD: Collections 1 to 3
May 12, 2005 to November 8, 2006

Escape Pod is the world’s first audio science fiction magazine. Hosted by Stephen Eley, each week Escape Pod delivers science fiction and fantasy short stories from today’s best authors, read by a team of talented narrators.

Now, for a special price, you can own the entire history of Escape Pod! This three-CD set collects the first eighteen months of Escape Pod — over forty-five hours of science fiction and fantasy short stories, flash fiction, reviews, and bonuses in high-quality MP3 format.
For a complete listing of stories, please see the separate product descriptions:

* Escape Pod Collection 1
* Escape Pod Collection 2
* Escape Pod Collection 3

Custom Message: Make it personal! For another couple of dollars, you can add your own message of up to 60 characters to the bottom of the CD. It’s a great way to let a gift recipient know that you’re thinking of them. (Your message will be printed to all three CDs.)

To get yourself some click on over to the brand new webstore PodDisc.com!