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.
Two nice pieces of news from The Teaching Company, which publishes excellent college courses on audio and video.
First, their title Science Fiction: The Literature of the Technological Imagination can be purchased on cassette for only $15.95. Our earlier SFFaudio review of that course can be found here, and the direct link to purchase it is here.
Second, many of their courses are now available as MP3 download. Sweet!
This just in – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Tertiary Phase was named the Audiobook of the Year by the Audio Publisher’s Association at this weekend’s Audie Awards! Congratulations to adapter/director Dirk Maggs and everyone involved with it. It’s fantastic to see a science fiction audio drama win this award. See the SFFaudio review of this title here.
In a tough Science Fiction category, the winner was Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan. Find the SFFaudio review here.
Genre winners in other categories:
Classic
Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne, read by Jim Dale, Listening Library
Children’s Titles for Ages 8+
The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson, read by Patricia Conolly, Recorded Books
Solo Narration – Female
Davina Porter for A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon
Audio Drama
The Sherlock Holmes Theatre by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, performed by a cast, produced by Yuri Rasovsky, Blackstone Audio
ed – OK, this may not technically be a genre title, but most SF fans like Holmes, and Yuri Rasovsky has genre ties, including the excellent 2000X series.
Achievement in Production
At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald, performed by a cast, Focus on the Family
Not a bad genre showing! Find the complete list of winners and nominees at www.theaudies.com. Unfortunately, the website is a little cryptic as of this writing – to see the winners and nominees, you’ve got to download a 6Mb PDF file that is titled “The Audies Sampler”. If I can find a clean HTML list, I’ll let you know.
The RSS-only readers of SFFaudio might not be aware that we are more than just a daily news and reviews source. So for your edu-musement we present…
The Top 5 Things SFFaudio’s RSS-only Subscribers Miss:
1. Review Archives – We archive reviews for all-time. Just because it didn’t come out last week doesn’t mean it isn’t worth reading about today.
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4. Browse Archived News – SFFaudio has posted more than 500 entires since 2003!
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Check out the site for yourself right HERE.
The story this week over on Escape Pod, the superior podcast SF magazine, is “Tk’tk’tk'” by David D. Levine. The story is a current Hugo nominee! Escape Pod just gets better and better.
CBC Radio producer Joe Mahoney has just posted some interesting radio drama related tid-bits about two upcoming CBC Radio One series:
“Last Friday we finished whipping the J. Michael Strazcynski (JMS) piece The Adventures of Apocalypse Al into shape. Greg DeClute and I spent the entire week with JMS and Samm Barnes fine tuning the edit and the sound effects assembly. We’ll actually mix it next week some time. Apparently it will air over the summer, but I don’t know exactly when yet.”
Joe also writes about a follow up to the two successful Matt Watts’ series Steve, The First and Steve, The Second. It will be called Canadia. Cast details can be found in the same post which you can find on Joe’s blog.
Audio Renaissance‘s recently released Perfect Dark: Condition Zero may have been just the first of a new trend, the video game tie-in novel coming to audio. But it now it looks like that trend may never really materialize. See, there were plans afoot to release three audiobooks based around the incredibly popular XBox game called Halo but those plans have now been scrubbed. Apparently the rights-holder a small but feisty computer company called Microsoft, based out of Redmond, WA, has pulled the three slated audiobooks from the publication schedule! Here’s the kicker, the recordings for all three were already completed at the time of the pull! The narrator for all three was reportedly the talented Todd McLaren (who performed the first two Richard K. Morgan novels for Tantor Media). If you’re a Halo fan you’re probably bunny-hopping mad right now. To vent this frustration I suggest you either load up your fuel rod rifle or write your congressman.