News, Reviews, and Commentary on all forms of science fiction, fantasy, and horror audio. Audiobooks, audio drama, podcasts; we discuss all of it here. Mystery, crime, and noir audio are also fair game.
Heather Ordover has a great new book at the center of of her splendid CraftLit podcast.
It’s Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift!
You can read the shownotes HERE.
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Podcast feed: http://craftlit.libsyn.com/rss
And, if you’re not into crafts, as much as books, check out the Just The Books podcast (which is the CraftLit podcast minus the crafting) – pretty crafty title eh?
I expect Gulliver’s Travels to enter the Just The Books feed soon.
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Podcast feed: http://jtb.libsyn.com/rss
Here’s an interesting story by the always pioneering H.G. Wells – it’s Horror of sorts – or as close as the master of SF can come to it – it features an out of body experience, a near death experience, and astral projection!
Under The Knife (aka Slip Under the Knife)
By H.G. Wells; Read by William Coon
1 |MP3| – Approx. 35 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: January 07, 2007
A patient, under surgery, relates his sense experiences as careens around the physical universe in a celestial journey. First published in The New Review, January 1896.
Here’s a |PDF| made from the March 1927 issue of Amazing Stories.
Posted by Jesse Willis
William Rosen’s appearance on The Daily Show with John Stewart, a couple of years ago, prompted me to pick up his audiobook The Most Powerful Idea In The World. It’s a terrific book, and a very solid audiobook (with Michael Prichard narrating). It delivered a concise, impressively researched and argued, history of the industrial revolution’s engine and it’s causes. I highly recommend that book (also available from Tantor). But what I hadn’t realized was that Rosen had already penned a book on another fascinating historical period.
Sample |MP3|
Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, And The Birth Of Europe
By William Rosen; Read by Barrett Whitener
MP3 Download – Approx. 11 Hours 51 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Media
Published: May 22, 2007
The Emperor Justinian reunified Rome’s fractured empire by defeating the Goths and Vandals who had separated Italy, Spain, and North Africa from imperial rule. At his capital in Constantinople, he built the world’s most beautiful building, married its most powerful empress, and wrote its most enduring legal code, seemingly restoring Rome’s fortunes for the next 500 years. Then, in the summer of 542, he encountered a flea. The ensuing outbreak of bubonic plague killed 5,000 people a day in Constantinople and nearly killed Justinian himself.Weaving together evolutionary microbiology, economics, military strategy, ecology, and ancient and modern medicine, William Rosen offers a sweeping narrative of one of the great hinge moments in history, one that will appeal to readers of John Kelly’s The Great Mortality, John Barry’s The Great Influenza, and Jared Diamond’s Collapse.
Posted by Jesse Willis
There are few authors worthy of re-writing Edgar Allan Poe – few would dare – and of those few fewer still would succeed in the attempt. Jack London is one such and his short story, Moon Face, is one such success. Sometimes subtitled “A Story Of Mortal Antipathy” this story runs nearly the same length as the Poe story that I think inspired it. I’ve read one essay that argues it was inspired by The Tell Tale Heart, but I think it is another. Sure, the unnamed protagonist may be insane, but I think there’s still something to his lunacy – we can go for decades without encountering our own personal Claverhouse – then one day he will appear – and his mere presence is enough to set one’s teeth on edge.
Moon-Face
By Jack London; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 13 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: October 01, 2009
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First published in The Argonaut, July 21, 1902.
Posted by Jesse Willis
Carl Hiaasen talks about John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. Hiaasen suggests that a sense of place was central to the series.
Posted by Jesse Willis
We’re going to be recording a discussion for the SFFaudio Podcast this weekend. It’ll be centered around a wonderful, horrible, 19th century short story by Lucy Clifford. It’s called The New Mother.
Our narrator, Heather Ordover from the wonderful Craftlit podcast, has just sent me the file!
Happily it will be included in the podcast, along with our discussion of it, but I thought it might be interesting to share the audiobook with everyone early.
If you do download the audiobook |MP3| (which I’ll keep in my DropBox folder for the next week or so) and have a comment about the story, post it below. If it’s interesting we may refer to it in our discussion. And, for extra credit, we participants are planning on talking about The New Mother‘s relationship to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Philip K. Dick’s The Father Thing.
I’ve also put together a |PDF| from the original scans of The Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise (1882) over on Archive.org.
Posted by Jesse Willis