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.
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.
The SFFaudio Podcast #201 – The Inn (aka Ulrich The Guide) by Guy de Maupassant, read by Mirko Stauch. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the short story (34 minutes) followed by a discussion of it. Participants in the discussion include Jesse and Mirko.
Talked about on today’s show:
Where and why, more and more Maupassant, is there a definitive list of Guy de Maupassant SFF stories?, German translations, the BBC audio drama adaptation of The Inn, RadioArchive.cc, a ghost story, the twist in the end or the twist middle, great writing, an ambiguous ghost story, a psychological happening, the dog’s reaction, revenant, “it becomes the monster”, Louise Hauser, is Ulrich dead?, Gaspard, The Others, Maupassant tricks us, “they bury themselves”, Ulrich is punished for no reason, the voice, white noise, Ulrich’s religious beliefs, Cologne on a cold night, the ravens!, the audio drama improves on the short story!, a filling metaphor, “the immense ocean of pale mountain summits”, mainstream, the vertical issue, Wolfgang von Goethe, “only a very stable character”, a proto-cosmic horror, The Festival by H.P. Lovecraft, a Christmas story, describing nature, the second meaning, “arose from the snow itself”, “he’s alone on the Moon”, being alone, cabin fever, we are alone in the cosmos, community allows us to hide from the harsh truth, gambling, “I would have brought a bunch of books”, “illiterate mountain peasants”, a lonely island, did Gaspard fall into a crevasse?, nature is the monster, the unknown is more terrifying, the terror of the soul, undeserved guilt, “eighteen degrees of frost”, “he was of a sleepy nature”, 1886, Guy de Maupassant visited the Alps, riddled with disease, the Inn at Schwarenbach, The Shining by Stephen King, an internal flaw, “he could speak no human words”, Nightflyers by George R.R. Martin, Perry Rhodan, Silent Running, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, the dog as a symbol, the dog as a companion, the importance of routine for the lonely, the demon of loneliness, “all is busy work before the grave”, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Castaway, The Piece Of String (aka The Piece Of Yarn), “eating a sandwich that you find on the sidewalk”, he dies alone and unloved, “two feets”, every Norman is trapped in disbelief, it could have happened to us!, his hair turned white, Supernatural Horror In Literature by H.P. Lovecraft, “the unseen”, “the outer blackness”, able to appreciate the immensity of reality, Honey Boo Boo, The Horla by Guy de Maupassant, The Call Of Cthulhu, “when I think of H.P. Lovecraft I don’t think of immense tentacles.”
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.
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 SFFaudio Podcast #200 – Jesse, Mirko, and Gary Lovisi discuss the Science Fiction novel Mars Needs Books! by Gary Lovisi.
Talked about on today’s show:
the great description, Audible.com, it’s a prison novel, it’s a dystopian science fiction novel, it’s a book collector’s novel, Philip K. Dick, a reality dysfunction, The Man In The High Castle, 1984 by George Orwell, “retconning“, Stalin, airbrushing history, a new Science Fiction idea!, Amazon’s Kindle, Mark Twain, “The Department Of Control”, J. Edgar Hoover, Simon is the most evil character ever, oddball individualists, a straw man gulag, one way of keeping the population in control is to send troublemakers away, another is to give them someone to hate, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein, the Attica Prison riot (1971), Arabella Rashid, entertainment media, when you can’t tell what the truth is anymore it’s very easy to control people, maybe it’s an allegory for our times, Paperback Parade, SF writers were wrong about what our times are like, Mars, crime novels, Science Fiction as a metaphor, people are scared of reading, “I like good writing”, Richard Stark’s Parker novels, getting the word out about Mars Needs Books!, Gargoyle Nights, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, horror, fantasy, nice and short, short books pack a punch (and don’t waste your time), Stephen King, Patrick O’Brian, ideas, paperback novels from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, customers want thick books, Winter In Maine by Gerard Donovan, were looking at a different readership today, James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, there’s nothing that doesn’t add to the story, “Lawrence Block is scary good”, Donald E. Westlake, Robert Bloch, Eight Million Ways To Die, A Pair Of Recycled Jeans by Lawrence Block, Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), Charles Ardai (was on SFFaudio Podcast #090), book-collectors, Murder Of A Bookman by Gary Lovisi (is also on Audible.com), collectable glassware, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, cool dialogue, Driving Hell’s Highway by Gary Lovisi (also on Audible.com), That Hell-bound Train by Robert Bloch, noir, Violence Is The Only Solution by Gary Lovisi (paperback), hard-boiled, revenge, betrayal, personality disorder, Sherlock Holmes, westerns, “if there’s one truth in the universe that I know it’s that Germans love westerns”, which frontier are you talking about?, The Wild Bunch, a western with tommyguns, Akira Kurosawa, Outland (is High Noon in space), Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, hard-boiled, violence, the Martian national anthem, Prometheus Award, libertarian motifs, world-building, GryphonBooks.com, Hurricane Sandy, Wildside Press, POD Books, eBooks, fire and water, that paperback is still in readable condition in 150 years?, fanzines, Jack Vance, The Dying Earth, Robert Silverberg, Dell Mapbacks, paperbacks were disposable, used bookstores, sex books.
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.
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!
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.