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.
In his latest Science Fiction Book Review Podcast, #173, Luke Burrage reviews the new audiobook of The Simulacra, one of the many previously unrecorded PKD novels from Brilliance Audio.
It’s a comedic and relevant SF novel. The plot makes very little sense, but the themes and ideas are terrific. It skewers and examines various forms of crazy – from the American political system (and a kind of proto Occupy movement), to a rampant pharmacological industry, to the perils of psychotherapy. Add in musical contest TV shows, artificial people, and the planet Mars and you get a kind of crazy nuts book that only Dick can pull off.
And Luke, in turn, must abandon his usual format to try to make sense of the thing.
The podcast is here |MP3| and you can subscribe to Luke’s podcast via this feed:
I’m not sure exactly how I came across this broadcast recording. But I’m very glad I did. It’s as part of a collection called The Golden Apples Of The Sun – a five part half hour of radio drama series adapting Ray Bradbury stories. This episode, episode 2, includes a pair of stories.
The first, The Flying Machine, is a short “fantasy” set in a mythical China. The story was familiar somehow so I looked it up and realized it was in an issue of Playboy that I have. I have appended the beautiful accompanying illustration (by Franz Altschuler).
In the same broadcast was an iconic tale of an obsessive compulsive murderer. Called, The Fruit At The Bottom Of The Bowl, it was first published as Touch And Go! in a mag called Detective Book (November 1948). Unfortunately, I don’t have a beautiful scan of the first publication of that. Instead, I have a terrible scan (see below).
But, my new friend John Feaster, who I found through LibriVox, mentioned an adaptation of it in the EC Comics comic called Crime SuspenStories (#17). And that I do have a nice picture of.
The Golden Apples Of The Sun – The Flying Machine
Adapted from the story by Ray Bradbury; Adapted by Lawrence Gilbert; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 30 Minutes [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: BBC Radio 5
Broadcast: January 30, 1991
Source: Archive.org
Producer Peter Hutchings.
Cast:
Paul Maxwell
Don Fellows
Ed Bishop
Paul Downing
And The Fruit At The Bottom Of The Bowl was adapted to TV for The Ray Bradbury Theater. And it stars Michael Ironside and Robert Vaughn!
The SFFaudio Podcast #189 – Jesse, Tamahome, Jenny, and Tim Prasil talk about the six episode anthology series Marvellous Boxes, recorded and podcast by Decoder Ring Theatre. But first we play an episode, Facing Cydonia.
Talked about on today’s show: The Magic Of The Movies, The Crasher, horror, stage play (post Meridian Radio Players), Thinking In Trinary, Decoder Ring Theatre, Gregg Taylor, the Cobol Club, OTR, radio commercials, flash fiction, CBC, The Age Of Persuasion, “Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!”, Plotting For Perfection (the short story), stage play, the Vera Van Slyke stories, occult detectives, Fitz-James O’Brien, audio dramatizations of the Vera Van Slyke stories, Black Jack Justice, The Red Panda Adventures, why be locked into the 1/2 hour audio drama format?, A Demon Once Removed, a one set one act play, Nicole (the peripheral character with a personality), Chekhov’s Gun, an alternate history, “Gregg Taylor need not be played by Gregg Taylor”, Orson Welles, history, Frozen Words Thawed, Remembering The Martians, an all black cast of MacBeth, The War Of The Worlds, H.G. Wells, The Tempest (as an alien contact story), William Shakespeare, a controversy over the character names in Facing Cydonia, Jenny will sing us a song, the boxes, “are there more boxes in you?”, ghosts, the button, the wax cylinder recorder, the Piltdown Man hoax, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an authentic hoax, Conan Doyle is the most gullible, the Cottingley Fairies, FairyTale: A True Story, Harry Houdini, Terry Jones, Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book, the EULA on wax cylinders, Thomas Edison, the most science-fictiony story, Plotting For Perfection, a femme fatale story without the femme fatale, “talk about your retro-causality”, “a box with a hole in it”, Andrea Lyons?, Scene Of The Crime, Remembering The Martians, racism, difference, tolerance, Doctor Who – The Power Of Three, fish people, are the Martians really dead?, binary fission, fruitful names, Jacob, Jason, Easter eggs, Finbar, The Silver Tongued Devil, The Sonic Society, Roger Gregg, it’s a pseudo-documentary, a joke/haiku, “conclusions should be drawn with a pencil not a pen”, Aliens Are Like Mirages, “it’s an indictment I’m just not sure what it’s an indictment of”, “if we had this power would we use it?”, the curiousness of the chaplaincy, prequels are for readers not writers, the miracle, the yup, human history in a nutshell, To Serve Man, narrative structure, why is X-Minus One a good name?, Marvellous Boxes as a name doesn’t have a super-punch, steampunky, “steamy contraptions”, Murdoch Mysteries (CBC TV), “a little less steam and a little more electricity”, Netflix in Canada sucks, Weeds, Walk Off The Earth.
Our preview copy of The Scarifyers: The Thirteen Hallows has just arrived. This is the eighth Scarifyers adventure. The first was released in 2006. I’ve caught previous releases on BBC Radio – and found it to be smirkingly good stuff – a period ghost hunter send up, full of jokes, and top shelf performers.
Indeed, The Scarifyers is rather like a sweet marmalade that you really don’t mind if it gets in your mustache as you’ll be able to enjoy it all day long.
It’ll be available for purchase on December 3, 2012 HERE.
Here’s the official description:
When a haunted chess set causes consternation at the British Chess Championships, and a horse magically materialises in Kettering Agricultural Museum, MI:13 are called to investigate.
Harry Crow (David Warner) and Professor Dunning (Terry Molloy) follow the trail of inexplicable happenings to an unremarkable terraced house in South Wales, home to the mysterious Mr Merriman (David Benson). He’s very old, and very mad; but is there more to Merriman than first appears?
Meanwhile, in the South West of England, famed archaeologist Ralegh Radford (Ewan Bailey) is on the verge of the greatest discovery of the age. Britain’s Tutankhamen, the press are calling it. But what he certainly isn’t expecting to unearth is boisterous 1400-year-old knight Glewlwyd Gafaelfawr (Gareth David-Lloyd).
As Crow and Dunning unravel an unlikely plot to resurrect Britain’s greatest-ever hero, the race is on to stop sinister forces at home and abroad from finding… THE THIRTEEN HALLOWS.
A new five part abridged reading, with added sound effects, of the first part of A Canticle For Leibowitz, “Fiat Homo”, begins here:
A Canticle For Leibowitz
By Walter M. Miller, Jr.; Read by Nigel Lindsay STREAMING AUDIO – [ABRIDGED]
Broadcaster: BBC Radio 4 Extra
Broadcast: November 26, 2012 Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the story spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the fictional Albertian Order of Leibowitz take up the mission of preserving the surviving remnants of man’s scientific knowledge until the day the outside world is again ready for it.
First published in 1959.
And here is John Feaster’s reading of the poem: |MP3|
R.E.H.
Died June 11, 1936
By R.H.BARLOW
Conan, the warrior king, lies stricken dead
Beneath a sky of cryptic stars; the lute
That was his laughter stilled, and sadly mute
Upon the chilling earth his youthful head.
There sounds for him no more the clamorous fray.
But dirges now, where once the trumpet loud:
About him press old memories for shroud,
And ended is the conflict of the day.
Death spilled the blood of him who loved the fight
As men love mistresses, and fought it well—
His fair young flesh is marble where he fell
With broken sword that vanquished all but Night;
And as of mythic kings our words must speak
Of Conan now, who roves where dreamers seek.
In his latest Science Fiction Book Review Podcast, #173, Luke Burrage reviews the new audiobook of The Simulacra, one of the many previously unrecorded PKD novels from Brilliance Audio. 
The SFFaudio Podcast #189 – Jesse, Tamahome, Jenny, and 
