Watch Jenny unbox the steampunkiest audiobook ever:
Posted by Jenny Colvin
Month: February 2013
Mark Time and Ogle Award deadline approaching!
The deadline for the 16th Annual Mark Time Awards for Science Fiction Audio theater, and the Ogle Awards for Fantasy & Horror Audio Theater is coming right up!
It’s March 1, 2013.
Producers who created a new SF or Fantasy audio story in 2012 are encouraged to enter. They can find such information HERE.
Awards will be presented at Convergence, in Minneapolis, MN, on July 4, 2013.
Last year many of the winners were able to attend the ceremony, some from as far away as London and South Africa. Creators of the awards – Jerry Stearns, David Ossman, and Richard Fish were all in attendance, as well as four of the five judges.
At that same convention, Convergence, there’s something else special for audio dramatists too: The War of the Worlds 75th Anniversary Audio Contest. Sponsored by the Convergence, Aural Stage Productions and Final Rune Productions, with actual prizes in the form of high-tech audio software from iZotope.
Posted by Jesse Willis
Review of Father Gaetano’s Puppet Catechism
Father Gaetano’s Puppet Catechism
By Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden; Read by Nick Podehl
4 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: 2012
Themes: / Horror / Puppets / Possession /
When this audio novella came in for review, it took a few days to make the connection: Mike Mignola is the creator of Hellboy! I’m a fan of the Hellboy movies (directed by Guillermo del Toro), but haven’t picked up any of the comics. If anyone has a recommendation for a particular volume I’d like to give it a go.
Mignola and Christopher Golden, the writing team that produced some Hellboy novels, wrote this. The Amazon description calls it “an illustrated novella”. I haven’t spotted a copy of this at a bookstore, but I’d like to so I can see the art. Mignola, in an interview with Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy gives Christopher Golden full credit for the writing, so I suspect that this audiobook contains little of Mignola’s input.
The story did have a Hellboy (or even a Pan’s Labyrinth) feel to it. Dark, a bit sad, with something spiritually sinister about. It’s about an Italian orphanage in World War II, shortly after the Allies’ victory. Father Gaetano, recently assigned there, and a group of nuns struggle to connect with the grieving children. One of the kids finds puppets and a puppet stage in the basement, and Fr. Gaetano decides to put it to use. The kids become more interested as he, with their help, paints the puppets as Old Testament characters, then performs stories with them.
And then, the problem – the puppets come to life at night, and they take on the persona of the Bible characters they have been decorated to portray. Not knowing this, Father Gaetano plods along with his plans, and he wants to tell the story of Lucifer’s fall.
This wasn’t a bad novella, but it wasn’t stellar either. An interesting idea, and there are some great scenes, but even at novella length it feels a bit padded out. Still, it’s worth a listen, in my opinion. Or a look if you can find the hardcopy. Nick Podehl is a terrific narrator.
Posted by Scott D. Danielson
Five Free Favourites #17: SFFaudio’s Socialist Leanings
This post, over on The Weekly Ansible, is, apparently, China Miéville’s list of 50 SFF “Works Every Socialist Should Read.”*
We’ve talked about four of the books and short stories on the list and done five shows on them.
I think each of them is pretty terrific, so I’ve added links to where you can download them:
#1 – The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
SFFaudio Podcast #178 (AUDIOBOOK/READALONG) – |MP3|
“Towering work by this radical thinker. Terrifying short story showing how savage gender oppression can inhere in “caring” relationships just as easily as in more obviously abusive ones.”
#2 – Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
SFFaudio Podcast #094 (READALONG) – |MP3|
“Savage attack on hypocrisy and cant that never dilutes its fantasy with its satire: the two elements feed off each other perfectly.”
#3 – The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells (1896)
SFFaudio Podcast #140 (AUDIOBOOK) |MP3|
“Like a lot of Wells’s work, this is an uneasy mixture of progressive and reactionary notions. It makes for one of the great horror stories of all time.”
#4 – The Island of Dr Moreau by H.G. Wells (1896)
SFFaudio Podcast #140 (READALONG) – |MP3|
“Like a lot of Wells’s work, this is an uneasy mixture of progressive and reactionary notions. It makes for one of the great horror stories of all time.”
#5 – We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924)
SFFaudio Podcast #192 (READALONG) – |MP3|
“A Bolshevik, who earned semi-official unease in the USSR even in the early 1920s, with this unsettling dystopian view of absolute totalitarianism. These days often retrospectively, ahistorically, and misleadingly judged to be a critique of Stalinism.”
*the original article from Fantastic Metropolis is “temporarily available.”
Posted by Jesse Willis
R(oom) by Holt McCarley
We talk so much about spoken-word audio at SFF Audio that I thought I’d take a second to feature a musical work inspired by two works of fiction, one literary and one zombie.
From the composer’s post:
Two summers ago, before my sophomore year, I read two novels: one featuring a protagonist named “R,” the other entitled “Room.” R is a grown man trapped in apocalyptic America who can’t even remember his whole name. His outlook on the world crumbling around him is deeply profound, but almost from the perspective of an innocent child.
In the novel “Room,” John is a 5 year-old boy born and raised in a small garden shed, unable to leave, but ignorant of any other world apart from the one that has been created for him. When he escapes, he is suddenly surrounded by the world – and he doesn’t know what to think of it. My piece R(oom) is a compilation of these two conflicting ideas: a man who sees the world through the eyes of a child, and a child who sees the world of man for the first time.
Inspired by Room (by Emma Donaghue) and Warm Bodies (by Isaac Marion), composer Holt McCarley wrote R(oom). You can listen to it and some of his other works by going to his SoundCloud account. I saw it performed live last fall at Furman University, where the composer is a undergraduate student. It has been on my mind lately since the film version of Warm Bodies recently released in theaters.
Posted by Jenny Colvin