Prometheus Unbound: Review of The Syndic by C.M. Kornbluth

SFFaudio Online Audio

Prometheus UnboundHere is a very interesting, but highly ideological, podcast review of (and apology for) Cyril M. Kornbluth and his 1953 novel The Syndic. It is an interesting listen, but as I mentioned, it is extremely narrowly focused – seemingly like a sermon to the adherents of some sort of religion called “libertarianism.” There is no audiobook available at the moment, but Wonder Publishing has an ebook edition available.

|MP3|

Incidentally, Groff Conklin‘s March 1954 Galaxy magazine review of the novel describes The Syndic as “remarkable both for its inconclusiveness and for its surprisingly philosophical depth.”

The Syndic by C.M. Kornbluth

The Syndic by C.M. Kornbluth

The Syndic by C.M. Kornbluth

Posted by Jesse Willis

Everything Is A Remix

SFFaudio Online Audio

Here’s a really terrific project that illustrates, in a very succinct way, the history of creativity. It’s thesis is that there is a fundamental through-line which connects all human creation and that is to copy, modify and mix (or remix) the creations of the past to make something new.

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

One example, not cited in the series so far, is this thread of remixing:

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) -> David Butler’s Just Imagine (1930) -> C.M. Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons (1951) -> Mack Reynolds’ Looking Backward From The Year 2000 (1974) -> Robert A. Heinlein’s For Us, The Living (written in 1938, published 2003) -> Mike Judge’s Idiocracy (2006)

In fact, we recently posted an audiobook reading of C.M. Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons, which took inspiration from the 1930 film Just Imagine. Robert A. Heinlein’s first novel (which went unpublished until 2003) was also a response to this movie. But Just Imagine itself likely took its inspiration from Edward Bellamy’s immensely popular 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward 2000-1887. Science Fiction writer, Mack Reynolds, wrote a couple sequels to Looking Backward but he wasn’t alone – in fact more than a dozen sequels, responses and inspired works followed. The history of Science Fiction is a flowing and knotted tapestry of scientific discovery, theory, ideology, adventure, and drama that cannot be summed up with any simplistic bag with the names like “inspiration” or “genius.”

Posted by Jesse Willis

Recent Arrival: Doc Savage – Python Isle

SFFaudio Recent Arrivals

Science Fiction Audiobook - Doc Savage - Python Isle by Will Murray

Just in from RadioArchives.com:

For over eighty years, the name Doc Savage has meant thrills and excitement to millions of readers worldwide. Now, for the very first time, the Man of Bronze comes to vivid life in “Python Isle”, the first audiobook adventure from RadioArchives.com.

In “Python Isle”, a long-lost pioneer flyer returns to civilization accompanied by an exotic woman who speaks in a lost tongue. From his towering skyscraper headquarters in New York, through a dangerous Zeppelin journey to Cape Town, climaxing on a serpent-haunted island in the forbidden reaches of the Indian Ocean, Doc Savage and his iron comrades race to untangle a weird puzzle so deep that the only clues can be found in the Bible!

Written by Will Murray and produced and directed by Roger Rittner – the same team that brought you “The Adventures of Doc Savage” radio series – “Python Isle” features dramatic narration by Michael McConnohie, cover art by Joe DeVito, and two exclusive interviews with Will Murray on the history of Doc Savage and the discovery of author Lester Dent’s long lost manuscripts.

|CLICK HERE| for more info, including an audio sample!

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

Review of The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson

SFFaudio Review

Fantasy Audiobook - The Broken Sword by Poul AndersonThe Broken Sword
By Poul Anderson; Read by Bronson Pinchot
7 CDs – 8 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2011
ISBN: 9781441786876
Themes: / Fantasy / Vikings / Myth / Battle /

The Viking Age of England offers fertile ground for storytelling. It was a time of strong men, beautiful fair-haired women, and bloody raids for plunder. Christianity was the new religion on the block, striving to make inroads on the old pagan beliefs—and often at the point of a sword. Gods were said to mingle with men and the world lay poised on the edge of Ragnarok, a final battle and fiery conflagration that would end the world.

Poul Anderson drew on the best of this wild and poetic age, stirred it up with myth and fantasy, and the result was his 1954 novel The Broken Sword. Its like has rarely been matched in the annals of fantasy literature.

I’ve read The Broken Sword previously and knew what a wonderful book it was, but TV and film actor Bronson Pinchot’s narration in this new Blackstone Audio, Inc. production added a new dimension to the novel. I had first heard Pinchot in a reading of Stephen King’s Eyes of the Dragon. While he was wonderful there he ups his game in The Broken Sword, reading with a spite and fury in his voice that perfectly matches the book’s unrelenting grimness and battle fury. Pinchot breathes life into beautiful maidens and proud warriors, deep-throated trolls, and ancient elven warrior-kings whose voices are like winds sighing through treeless leaves.

Oddly enough there is exactly one sound effect in the entire recording—an echo effect used to convey the cold, cruel laughter of Odin—and it’s on the final disc. It was cool but rather jarring, considering it’s on the last disc and there’s no precursor. But on to the tale.

In The Broken Sword the land of Faerie exists alongside the lands of men, invisible save to those with the witch sight. Faerie is a land of bright castles and achingly lovely elves, of the gods of Odin and Tyr, the giants of Jotunheim, black-eyed trolls, and other, fouler monsters.

Pride and ambition touches off the events of The Broken Sword. Orm the Strong is the fifth son of Ketil Asmundsson and thus low in the totem pole of inheritance. Rather than accept a smaller share of wealth Orm seeks his own fortune by going a–viking. On one of his raids he kills a husband and his sons, burning their hall to the ground. The man’s mother, a witch, escapes and swears revenge: She bestows a curse that Orm’s eldest son will be fostered beyond the world of men, while he in turn will foster a wolf that will one day rend him.

The elf-earl Imric travels to the lands of men and sets the witch’s curse in motion. Imric takes Orm’s unbaptized infant son Skafloc and replaces him with Valgard, a changeling, whom Imric himself has fathered by raping a captive troll woman. Valgard’s dark ancestry is evident when he bites his unknowing mother’s breast and grows restless and violent in Orm’s care. Skafloc, raised among the elves, is fair haired and fair of spirit, though equally mighty and otherwise a mirror image of his dark changeling “brother.”

After he discovers his true half troll, half-elf heritage, Valgard embarks on a mission of revenge, killing several members of his foster family. Aided with an army of trolls he then launches a war of annihilation on the elven lands of Alfheim. Skafloc and the elves are beaten back by the initial assaults and all seems lost. Only by going on a quest to reforge a powerful ancient weapon—the eponymous broken sword, a weapon of terrible demonic power that demands blood each time it is drawn and ultimately turns on its wielder—can Skafloc save Alfheim and avenge his family.

Though The Broken Sword seems largely forgotten these days it remains influential. The elf Imric for example reveals the clear stylistic (and thematic) influence The Broken Sword had on subsequent authors like Michael Moorcock. Moorcock (a big fan of the book, who once wrote thatThe Broken Sword “knocked The Lord of the Rings into a cocked hat”) based his Melniboneans heavily on Anderson’s elves. Imric is (largely) Elric of Melnibone, not only in similarity of name, but in appearance and even character. Anderson’s Elves are darker than those in The Lord of the Rings (though I would point out that Tolkien’s elves closely resembled Anderson’s in his source material; see the prideful warrior Feanor from The Silmarillion). They are haughty, prideful, shun the sunlight, and if not malicious are certainly mischievous. These traits have their roots in Norse myth, which both Tolkien and Anderson drew upon.

Everything about the book is wonderfully northern. Characters mingle soaring verse with common speech in conversation. Anderson weaves old northern vocabulary into the tale, evocative words like “Fetch,” “Fey,” and “Weird” (the latter is a fate from which no man escapes), which lend The Broken Sword a hard northern ethos to match its flavor. In this pagan hierarchy the Norns are higher than the towering Jotuns or even the Aesir. Even the gods will die in the fires of Ragnarok at their appointed time. That grimness bleeds through into The Broken Sword as its protagonists are slowly crushed beneath the merciless wheel of fate.

“Throw not your life away for a lost love,” pleaded Mananaan. “You are young yet.”

“All men are born fey,” said Skafloc, and there the matter stood.

This is hard stuff and an unforgiving outlook on life, though not incompatible with that other somewhat famous work that debuted in 1954—Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring. No matter what Moorcock—he of the tin ear when it comes to Tolkien analysis—may tell you.

The writing in The Broken Sword is top-notch, really and truly great stuff. A small sample of dialogue uttered by the troll-woman Gora:

“The world is flesh dissolving off a dead skull,” mumbled the troll-woman. She clanked her chain and lay back, shuddering. “Birth is but the breeding of maggots in the crumbling flesh. Already the skull’s teeth leer forth and black crows have left its eye sockets empty. Soon a barren window will blow through its bare white bones.”

One final, important note about the Blackstone recording: The text is Anderson’s original from the 1954 version of the book, which Anderson updated in 1971 for republication in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line. This is not immediately apparent from the description on the Blackstone website. I’ve only read the 1971 version, so for those who haven’t had the chance to experience The Broken Sword in its earliest and rawest incarnation you now have another chance.

Posted by Brian Murphy

Geekscape: interview with Simon Pegg

SFFaudio Online Audio

GeekscapeSimon Pegg is the latest guest on the Geekscape podcast (#215). Pegg talks about his memoir Nerd Do Well as well as Green Lantern, Star Trek, Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Paul, Super 8, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Star Trek 2, The World’s End, Community and Spaced.

|MP3| (video available too |M4V|)

Podcast feed: http://pod.geekscape.tv/Geekscape-Audio.xml

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

Posted by Jesse Willis