March 2010 – Page 4

Recent Arrivals: David Wellington

SFFaudio Recent Arrivals

13 Bullets: A Vampire Tale
By David Wellington; Read by Bernadette Dunne
10.5 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2010

Arkeley nailed the last vampire, in a fight that nearly killed him. But the evidence proves otherwise.

When a state trooper named Laura Caxton calls the FBI looking for help in the middle of the night, it is Arkeley who gets the assignment. Who else? He’s been expecting such a call to come eventually. Sure, it has been years since any signs of an attack, but Arkeley knows what most people don’t: that there is one left. In an abandoned asylum, she is rotting, plotting, and biding her time in a way that only the undead can.

Caxton is out of her league on this case and more than a little afraid, but the Fed has made it plain that there is only one way out. The worst thing, though, is the feeling that the vampires want more than just her blood. They want her for a reason, one she can’t guess…a reason her sphinxlike partner knows but won’t say…a reason she has to find out—or die trying.

Now there are only thirteen bullets between Caxton and Arkeley and the vampires. There are only thirteen bullets between us, the living, and them, the damned.

Frostbite: A Werewolf Tale
By David Wellington; Read by Tai Simmons
8 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2010

There’s one sound a woman doesn’t want to hear when she’s lost and alone in the Arctic wilderness: a howl. When a strange wolf’s teeth slash Cheyenne’s ankle to the bone, her old life ends, and she becomes the very monster that has haunted her nightmares for years. Worse, the only one who can understand what Chey has become is the man—or wolf—who’s doomed her to this fate. He also wants to chop her head off with an axe. Yet as the line between human and beast blurs, so too does the distinction between hunter and hunted, for Chey is more than just the victim she appears to be. But once she’s within killing range, she may find that—even for a werewolf—it’s not always easy to go for the jugular.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

NPR: Blade Runner – Dreams of Electric Sheep

SFFaudio Online Audio

There’s an old NPR/WNYC piece on Blade Runner that casts the fear of Nexus 6 androids on Earth as a kind of allegory for racism and slavery. Perhaps we could coin a term for this. How about, “The Plastic Peril”? Although that sounds a bit too much like a reference to Autons.

Dreams Of Electric Sheep
By Phillip Martin
June 29, 2007
25 years ago this week, Blade Runner debuted in American theaters. It was set in a Los Angeles of the future, but its portrayals of race and racism had plenty of resonance in 1982. Reporterlooks back on a classic of cyborgian social criticism.

|MP3|

[via HuffDuffer and Adactio]

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Identity Theft by Robert J. Sawyer

SFFaudio Review

Beginning the fourth week of this SFFaudio 7th Anniversary Story-a-Day Celebration! Be careful out there…

Identity Theft
By Robert J. Sawyer; Read by Anthony Heald
2 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2010
ISBN: 9781441716729
Themes: / Science Fiction / Robots / Consciousness / Mystery / Detectives /

This is a great story. It originally appeared in Down These Dark Spaceways, and anthology edited by Mike Resnick and published by the Science Fiction Book Club. This version is read by Anthony Heald, a terrific narrator who was once the voice of choice for the Star Wars universe. He reads with energy and verve, great characterization and accents as needed.

Sawyer has said before that he feels that science fiction has more in common with the mystery genre than it does the fantasy genre, and this isn’t the first time he’s written an effective science fiction mystery. In the future Mars he presents, people can trade their bodies in for artificial ones, providing long life and more reliable body parts. The process requires making a copy of a person’s conscious mind, and imprinting that copy into the brain of the new body.

Like in many Sawyer stories, many of the implications of such a world are explored. What happens to the originals? What about unauthorized copies? In addition, there is a very interesting human settlement on Mars, and some fossil finding there. “Identity Theft” is a very entertaining novella, very well presented.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

Entilted Opinions: The Disenchantment and Re-Echantment Of The World

SFFaudio Online Audio

Entitled Opinions is a radio program (and podcast) from Stanford university’s radio station KZSU. In discussion from a program in May 2009 are the editors of
The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age: Joshua Landy (a professor of French at Stanford) and Michael Saler (professor of history at the UC Davis). Together they are responding to Max Weber’s famous statement:

“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ —Max Weber

This concept, disenchantment (entzauberung), was introduced by Weber to describe the character of his modernized, and increasingly secularized society, where scientific understanding had become more highly valued than religious belief. In their discussion Saler and Landy ask questions like:

‘Do all philosophical inquiries begin in wonder?’

‘Why does Science Fiction take off as a genre?’

‘Can we replace God and the Devil with Sherlock Holmes’ rationality and Moriarty’s criminality?’

‘Is the hierarchy of Middle Earth something we’d like to see in our world?’

It’s a fascinating discussion! |MP3|

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox.org: Around The World In Eighty Days by Jules Verne

SFFaudio Online Audio

LibriVox I like it when SFFaudio gets cited on Wikipedia. One of the citations there is a point I made about The Green Odyssey |READ OUR REVIEW| and the Dungeons & Dragons module Dragonlance: DL6 Dragons of Ice. I compared The Green Odyssey‘s roller-ships (a kind of wind powered land ship) with the iceboats of Dragons Of Ice And it was just yesterday I came across another similar variant on the sail-powered-terrestrial-ship:

“Mr. Fogg examined a curious vehicle, a kind of frame on two long beams, a little raised in front like the runners of a sledge, and upon which there was room for five or six persons. A high mast was fixed on the frame, held firmly by metallic lashings, to which was attached a large brigantine sail. This mast held an iron stay upon which to hoist a jib-sail. Behind, a sort of rudder served to guide the vehicle. It was, in short, a sledge rigged like a sloop. During the winter, when the trains are blocked up by the snow, these sledges make extremely rapid journeys across the frozen plains from one station to another. Provided with more sails than a cutter, and with the wind behind them, they slip over the surface of the prairies with a speed equal if not superior to that of the express trains.”

-From Around The World In Eighty Days (chapter XXXI) by Jules Verne

Here’s an image of it from a Golden Picture Classic edition of Around The World In Eighty Days:

An iceboat from Around The World In Eighty Days by Jules Verne

Around The World in Eighty Days
By Jules Verne; Read by Mark F. Smith
37 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 6 Hours 33 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: April 16, 2008
Mysterious Phileas Fogg is a cool customer. A man of the most repetitious and punctual habit – with no apparent sense of adventure whatsoever – he gambles his considerable fortune that he can complete a journey around the world in just 80 days… immediately after a newspaper calculates the feat as just barely possible. With his excitable French manservant in tow, Fogg undertakes the exercise immediately, with no preparations, trusting that his traveling funds will make up for delays along the way. But unbeknownst to him, British police are desperately seeking to arrest him for the theft of a huge sum by someone who resembles him, and they will track him around the world, if necessary, to apprehend him. This is an adventure novel of the first water, with wholly unexpected perils, hair-breadth escapes, brilliant solutions to insoluble problems, and even a love story. And can this be? – That he returns to London just five minutes too late to win his wager and retain his fortune?

Podcast feed:

http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/around-the-world-in-80-days-by-jules-verne-2.xml

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

Posted by Jesse Willis

ABC Radio National: The Philosopher’s Zone – conciousness, sensation and BLINDSIGHT

SFFaudio Online Audio

Peter Watts‘ novel Blindsight (the audiobook for which is available from Recorded Books) takes its title from a phenomenon, of the same name, first observed by philosopher and psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. Humphrey is the guest on an episode of my favourite Australian podcast The Philosopher’s Zone. Here’s the description:

You are in a darkened lecture hall looking at a patch of red projected onto a screen in front of you. What’s involved in “seeing red”? This week, we meet the philosopher and psychologist Nicholas Humphrey who uses the phenomenon of seeing red as way into the mystery of consciousness.

If you think the phenomena of consciousness is interesting and wonder whether dogs think about themselves then have a listen |MP3|

Podcast feed:

http://abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/pze.xml

Posted by Jesse Willis