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.
AudioComics has launched its debut line of Full Cast Audio Movies, inspired by stories from comics, graphic novels, and genre fiction!
Titanium Rain: A near-future, sci-fi epic. Civil war in China spirals into global conflict. Nations are destroyed, millions killed. For Air Force pilot Alec Killian, survival will mean shedding some of his humanity in exchange for biotech and machine.
Honey West: Murder on Mars: Hollywood’s sexiest detective goes undercover on the set of a low-budget sci-fi film. Who killed the movie’s starlet – the sweet Ingénue, the aging teen idol, the agent boyfriend, or the killer robot?
The Domino Lady: All’s Fair in War: Thrill to the exploits of the Domino Lady and her alter ego, Ellen Patrick, in the Raymond Chandleresque Southern California of 1935. First in a series of Domino Lady releases.
The Batsons: Do you think your family’s strange? Meet The Batsons, a spooky-kooky family of misfit monsters who reside in Flemme Falls, where “awful is lawful and everyone’s mean.” First two episodes: The Trouble with Fang and Carmilla’s Crush.
The first time I read Philip K. Dick’s The Skull, it took me a couple of attempts to really get into it. But with PKD you out to give it a couple of good attempts. So I kept trying. Reading along with the text helped, and after about 150 words or so I could manage the story without the extra textual assistance. I guess this is one of those stories that doesn’t translate to audio that well. That said, once I did get into it it I did find it worthwhile. The Skull is a time travel story that makes a nice companion piece to Michael Moorcock’s Behold The Man. It’s about a future criminal who goes on a mission to kill a religious revolutionary from the 1960s.
The Skull
By Philip K. Dick; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 50 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: November 01, 2009 Conger agreed to kill a stranger he had never seen. But he would make no mistakes because he had the stranger’s skull under his arm. From If Worlds of Science Fiction, September 1952.
|ETEXT| Wikisource
|ETEXT| Gutenberg
|PDF| Made from the publication in IF.
Recently a friend pointed out a 1962 French short film, done in photomontage style, called La Jetée. It’s nicely comparable and totally French:
One of the earliest detectives in history, or at least the history of literature, is Zadig. Zadig is the main character of Voltaire’s philosophical novel Zadig; Or The Book Of Fate – An Oriental History. I stumbled across it’s existence while reading an old issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in which one chapter was featured under the title The Dog And The Horse. The brief editorial introduction, and some further researches on my own, assert that Zadig in this chapter may have been the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s C. August Dupin!
I can sort of see it too, for The Dog And The Horse shows a kind of giant first step in an evolutionary process of the detective – seeing his marriage turn sour Zadig turns to the study of nature for his joy. A kind of passionate interest in the world is necessary for both the scientific detective and the more Sherlockian sort of detective.
The story is damn funny too.
The Dog And The Horse
By Voltaire; Read by Lucy Burgoyne
1 |MP3| – Approx. 13 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: January 31, 2008
First published in 1747.
Here’s a spooky tale that’s set, in part, in an art museum. It’s read by our old friend Gregg Margarite.
The Golgotha Dancers
By Manly Wade Wellman; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 24 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: August 8, 2010 A curious and terrifying story about an artist who sold his soul that he might paint a living picture. First published in Weird Tales, October 1937.
|ETEXT|
Here’s a |PDF| made from the publication in Weird Tales.
Here is the description of Arnold Böcklin’s The Isle Of The Dead, the painting conspicuous for its absence in the story:
“I started down, relishing in advance the impression Böcklin’s picture would make with its high brown rocks and black poplars, its midnight sky and gloomy film of sea, its single white figure erect in the bow of the beach-nosing skiff.”
The Dog And The Horse