July 2008 – Page 4

Resonance FM’s: A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou

SFFaudio Online Audio

A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou is a podcast radio show (on Resonance FM 104.4 FM in London, U.K.) that you are absolutely going to love. The hosts, Elisha Sessions and Mark Sinker, along with various guests, talk about Science Fiction short stories from “SF’s Golden and Silver Ages.” Covering stories from 1927 to 1965, these are deep, articulate, and knowledgeable discussions, along with, in at least a couple of cases, complete, unabridged readings! Planet shaking stories, with intelligent commentary – I absolutely love it!

Episode 1 – Who Goes There?
By John W. Campbell; Read by Elisha Sessions
1 |MP3| – 1 Hour [READINGS OF CHAPTERS 2 & 4]
Sarah Clarke joins Mark Sinker and Elisha Sessions to discuss John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There”, a 1938 science fiction novella about ice-bound scientists confronted with an alien who can become them. Elisha reads from the book in case you haven’t. As originally broadcast on Resonance FM 104.4 FM in London on April 1, 2008.

Episode 2 – A Pail Of Air
By Fritz Leiber; Read by Elisha Sessions
1 |MP3| – 1 Hour [ABRIDGED]
Tom Ewing joins Mark Sinker and Elisha Sessions to discuss Fritz Leiber’s “A Pail of Air”, written in 1951. It’s a short story about a kid, some rugs, and an Earth so cold that helium crawls. Will it crawl onto YOU? Elisha reads from the story in case you haven’t.

Episode 3 – The Segregationist
By Isaac Asimov; Read by Elisha Sessions
1 |MP3| – 1 Hour [???]
Alan Trewartha joins Mark Sinker and Elisha Sessions to discuss “Segregationist”, one of Isaac Asimov’s famous robot stories from 1967. Elisha reads from the story in case you haven’t.

Episode 4 – Beyond the Reach of Storms
By Donald Malcolm; Read by Elisha Sessions
1 |MP3| – 1 Hour [???]
Martin Skidmore joins Mark Sinker and Elisha Sessions to discuss the first space-travel story of the series, and the first truly obscure find, “Beyond the Reach of Storms” by Donald Malcolm.

Episode 5 – The Red Brain
By Donald Wandrei; Read by Elisha Sessions
1 |MP3| – 1 Hour [UNABRIDGED?]
Dave Queen joins Mark Sinker and Elisha Sessions to talk about the outrageous 1927 short story “The Red Brain”, written by Donald Wandrei when he was supposedly 16 years old.

Episode 6 – A Sound of Thunder
By Ray Bradbury; Read by Elisha Sessions
1 |MP3| – 1 Hour [UNABRIDGED]
Al Ewing joins Mark Sinker and Elisha Sessions to talk about “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury, the famed 1952 story about a dinosaur safari gone wrong. Lots of other Bradbury and time travel tales get a look in.

Episode 7 – The Tactful Saboteur
By Frank Herbert; Read by Elisha Sessions
1 |MP3| – 1 Hour [UNABRIDGED?]
Ken Hollings joins Mark Sinker and Elisha Sessions to talk about “The Tactful Saboteur” by Frank Herbert, a tale of civil servants and their multi-phase sexual life cycles from 1964.

Episode 8 – Build Up Logically
By Howard Schoenfeld; Read by Elisha Sessions
1 |MP3| – 1 Hour [UNABRIDGED?]
Kat Stevens joins Mark Sinker and Elisha Sessions to talk about Choose Your Own Adventure books, speaking with animals, and “Build Up Logically”, an unclassifiable short story written in 1950 by Howard Schoenfeld. It’s about two men who can summon the entire universe from thin air but spend most of their time at parties.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Fleet Of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

SFFaudio Review

Fleet Of Worlds
By Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner; Read by Tom Weiner
8 CDs – Approx 9.5 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 1433229420
Themes: / Science Fiction / Hard SF / Aliens / Physics / Space Travel / Sociology /

Larry Niven teams up with fellow science-fiction writer Edward M. Lerner to take a closer look at the events leading up to Niven’s first Ringworld novel. Kirsten Quinn-Kovacs is among the best and brightest of her people. She gratefully serves the gentle race that rescued her ancestors from a dying starship and nurtures them still. But, if only the Citizens knew where Kirsten’s people came from! A chain reaction of supernovae at the galaxy’s core has unleashed a wave of lethal radiation that will sterilize the galaxy. The Citizens flee, taking with them their planets, the Fleet of Worlds. Someone must scout ahead, and Kirsten and her crew eagerly volunteer. But as they set out to explore for any possible dangers in the Fleet’s path, they uncover long-hidden truths that will shake the foundations of worlds.

Not knowing much about Edward M. Lerner or his style, it’s hard to know precisely what parts of this novel he wrote. On the whole it definitely feels like a Larry Niven book. And of course that’s a very good thing. Surprisingly nice, this “known space” novel doesn’t feel like it’s just embellishing the dark corners we’d little explored before. There is material to be mined, and mine it they do. We learn more about the General Products corporation, early Puppeteer influence on Terra, and the back story to Niven’s classic The Borderland Of Sol. The heart of the novel though is Nessus’ interaction with a crew of Humans. As well, Niven and Lerner, introduce an entirely new and compelling alien species, though we really don’t get to interact with them. Its hard to get into much more without giving out a lot of spoilers. Suffice it to say, this is a fine, though definitely lesser entry into the “known space” canon. When recommending a novel universe, I would always start with the strongest book in that universe, and expand out from there. If you haven’t read any Niven novels before this one, go listen to Protector and Ringworld first. Then, if you are as enchanted as I was with it, come back to Fleet Of Worlds for more.

Tom Weiner, who is one of Blackstone Audio’s new narrators, previously heard in A Galaxy Trilogy, brings authority to the narrative of Fleet Of Worlds. He has to work pretty hard to do both the puppeteer contralto that is supposed to sound like “Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Marilyn Monroe, and Lorelei Huntz all rolled into one.” But both it and the human females Weiner performs come off well enough – giving more of an impression of a voice change than any actual transformation.

Update: Edward M. Lerner tells me that that the follow up to Fleet Of Worlds, titled Juggler Of Worlds, is also slated for a Blackstone Audio release!

Posted by Jesse Willis

Recent Arrivals – Blackstone Audio

SFFaudio Recent Arrivals

A pentaverate from Blackstone Audio! :)

Journey to the Center of the Earth
By Jules Verne; Read by Simon Prebble
7 CDs – 7.5 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9781433243806

Geologist Otto Lidenbrock is perusing an ancient Icelandic manuscript when he discovers a mysterious encrypted note. The message reveals the account of a sixteenth-century explorer who claims to have found a passageway to the center of the earth.

In his quest to penetrate the planet’s primordial secrets, the impetuous professor, together with his quaking nephew, Axel, and their devoted guide, Hans, sets off immediately for Iceland. Descending through the belly of a volcano into the bowels of the Earth, they discover an astonishing subterranean world of prehistoric proportions.

A classic of science fiction that helped give birth to the genre, this imaginative speculation on the earth’s nature is both a rousing adventure story and an apt portrait of the psychology of the questing scientist.

Wyrms
By Orson Scott Card; Read by Emily Janice Card
9 CDs – 11.5 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9781433218542

The sphere is alien in origin but has been controlled by Man for millennia. A legend as old as the stars rules this constructed world: when the seventh seventh seventh human heptarch is crowned, he will be the Kristos and will bring either salvation or destruction.

Patience is the only daughter of the rightful heptarch, but she, like her father, serves the usurper who has destroyed her family, for she believes that duty to one’s race is more important than duty to one’s self. But the time for prudence has passed, and Patience must journey to the heart-soul of this planet to confront her own destiny and her world’s.

The Man in the High Castle
By Philip K Dick; Read by Tom Weiner
7 CDs – 8.5 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9781433214523

It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war—and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan.

This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that first established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction, breaking the barrier between genre fiction and the serious novel of ideas. Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake.

Already Dead
By Charlie Huston; Read by Scott Brick
8 CDs – 9 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9781433235795

From the Battery to the Bronx, Manhattan is crawling with Vampyres. Joe Pitt is one of them, and he’s not happy about it. Yeah, he gets to be tough as nails and hard to kill. But spending his nights trying to score a pint of blood to feed the Vyrus that’s eating at him isn’t his idea of a good time. Now some fool who got himself infected with a flesh-eating bacteria is lurching around, trying to munch on folks’ brains. Joe hates shamblers, but he’s still the one who has to deal with them. It ain’t easy going his own way, refusing to ally with the Clans that run the undead underside of Manhattan. But it’s worse once he gets mixed up with the Coalition and finds himself searching for a little rich girl who’s gone missing. Now anarchist Vampyres are pushing him around, a crazy cult is stalking him, and Joe’s got to find that girl and kill that shambler before the sun comes up.

Winterfair Gifts
By Lois McMaster Bujold; Read by Grover Gardner
2 CDs – 2.5 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9781433250170

This Hugo-nominated novella adds a delightful extra chapter to Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, describing the wedding of Miles and Ekaterin and events leading up to it.

In the festive season of Winterfair on the planet Barrayar, Lord Miles Vorkosigan is making elaborate preparations for his wedding. The long-awaited event stirs up romance and intrigue among his eccentric family and friends, particularly for bioengineered space mercenary Sergeant Taura and shy, diffident Armsman Roic. But Miles also has an enemy who is plotting to turn the romantic ceremony into a festival of death.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

StarShipSofa No. 34 Kevin J Anderson

SFFaudio Online Audio

StarShipSofa The Audio Science Fiction Magazine, has one of the top leading writers working today in the field – none other than Kevin J Anderson!

Blast Off!

Listen to the mp3 show here!

Aural Delights No 34 Kevin J Anderson

Poetry: No Ruined Luna City by Greg Beatty 02:28

Flash Fiction: The Switch by Tony C Smith 04:00

Fact: Science News Jim Campanella 17:00

Main Fiction: Newts by Kevin J Anderson 40:40

Narrators: Jim Campanella, Julie Davis, Mur Lafferty

Subscribe to the podcast via this feed:

http://www.starshipsofa.com/rss

Posted by Tony C. Smith

BBC Radio 4: The Further Adventures of the First King of Mars

SFFaudio Online Audio

Watching the trains, the skies and the Radio Times schedule in the U.K., our agent, codenamed “Roy” – has reliable intel on an important upcoming BBC Radio 4 broadcast. Peter Capaldi will be reading a Nick Walker story which is a follow up to the short story The First King Of Mars which aired during the Sputnik season in October of 2007. Here are details on the follow up…

The Further Adventures of the First King of Mars
By Nick Walker; Read by Peter Capaldi
5 Radio Broadcasts – Approx. 15 Minutes each [UNABRIDGED?]
Broadcaster: BBC Radio 4 / Afternoon Reading
Broadcast: Mon., July 28th to Fri., 1 August 1st 2008 @ 3.30-3.45pm (U.K. time)
Peter Capaldi is back as The First King Of Mars. To mark the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik in 2007, BBC Radio 4 commissioned Nick Walker to write a short story that captured the spirit of American Fifties B-movies and the pulp science fiction of magazines such as Amazing Stories. The result was The First King Of Mars. Now, in five thrilling, action-packed instalments, the story continues where it left off. Last year, Radio 4 left the brave and fearless commander employed to head up the first manned mission to Mars as he plummeted towards the planet with no luxuriously thick atmosphere to slow him down. This series discovers how he and his crew survive the impact – and whether there is indeed life on Mars.

These should be available via the Afternoon Reading “Listen Again” feature shortly after the broadcast.

Posted by Jesse Willis