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.
Both David and Wayne have taken public domain novels and made them into wondrous unabridged audiobooks. Both narrators are consummate professionals, as well as being two really cool dudes who love the stuff they’re recording.
Both have also made their audiobooks available for FREE (Stifel podcasts his audiobooks and June streams them).
I’ve heard both novels, and I can heartily recommend them to you. In fact, both The House On The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson and At The Earth’s Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs are the subject of individual upcoming readalongs for The SFFaudio Podcast!
Click on through – and if you can afford it, please consider buying their audiobooks. These guys are truly awesome, I consider their audiobooks the definite editions, and their work is absolutely worth supporting.
I’ve been looking for an audio copy of this wonderful 5,000 word essay, and I’ve just found it. In this 27 minute long reading of The Philosophy Of Composition Edgar Allan Poe explains the creation of The Raven – showing the necessity of all of the components of the poem – and in the process, explaining what’s wrong with most fiction – Poe argues that most composition (poetry and prose) is typically aiming at the sufficient and not the necessary.
This movie got me thinking. Is it the only biopic of an Science Fiction author?
So I looked around and found a list of biographical films on Wikipedia. And while I had remembered there had been movies featuring Mary Shelley, like Gothic – that isn’t a biopics per se.
Based on the Wikipedia list, it appears that Edgar Allan Poe has been a character in some quasi-biographical films, notably the recent John Cusak movie, The Raven (which has its roots in earlier dramatized biographical snippets like The Raven (1915)). The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944) is a true biographical film, but it’d be hard to argue that twain wrote Science Fiction (though the case for Fantasy is pretty easy). Robert E. Howard got a biopic, in a solid little movie called The Whole Wide World (1996) but it’s just a snippet of Howard’s life.
I don’t think there have been any other Science Fiction writers who’ve had an actual biographical film made about him or her. Maybe writer’s lives are too sedentary for good drama?
Jim Warren’s cover illustration for Tor Double #26 excites me:
The original illustrations, by Virgil Finlay, from the publication in Galaxy excite me:
And this episode of Escape Pod, a novella by Robert Silverberg (!) REALLY, REALLY excites me!
Escape Pod #346: Hawksbill Station
By Robert Silverberg; Read by Paul Tevis
1 |MP3| – Approx. 1 Hour 46 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Escape Pod
Podcast: May 24, 2012
First published in Galaxy, August 1967.
Just crossed the border, literally (it came in the back of a Subaru), here’s a Brilliance Audio audiobook collection that does almost everything right! First, check out the awesome cover art for Welcome To Bordertown:
Next, note the detailed track listings on the back:
So that’s a look at the outside, inside the discs themselves don’t detail their contents, which is bad, but not fatal (considering you’ve got the back of the audiobook to go by). As to the audio content itself, well I’m looking forward to picking up stories here and there as I research the authors more – that’s usually how I listen to collections these days.
This is the official description:
Bordertown: a city on the Border between the human world and the elfin realm. A place where neither magic nor technology can be counted on, where elf and human kids run away to find themselves. The Way from our world to the Border has been blocked for thirteen long years. . . . Now the Way is open once again — and Bordertown welcomes a new set of seekers and dreamers, misfits and makers, to taste life on the Border.
Here are thirteen interconnected stories, one graphic story, and eight poems — all new work by some of today’s best urban fantasy, fantasy, and slipstream writers
Now I’ve already checked out Neil Gaiman’s entry, which is a poem entitled The Song Of The Song. And I listened to Holly Black reading her own introductory essay. In it she credits the original Bordertown books as ‘creating the urban fantasy subgenre’. Ellen Kushner, Black’s co-editor, reads Terri Windling’s introductory essay, which details the background for the Bordertown series itself. It’s is described as a “Thieves’ World for teens.” Windling also talks about the phenomenon of shared worlds. Also, and this is pretty cool, there’s an additional editorial introduction written, and read, by Ellen Kushner (one that’s not found in the paperbook edition at all).
The only thing missing from this great audiobook edition is the story named Fair Trade by Sara Ryan and Dylan Meconis. But that’s probably because it’s actually a comic and so it would have been very hard to translate into audio (there are two panels of it HERE). And finally, here’s a promo video for the book:
Brilliance Audio sent us this audiobook: Warriors 2 (aka Warriors Volume 2) edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois – 9 CDs, 10 Hours 45 Minutes, UNABRIDGED.
This audiobook is titled Warriors 2 on the box, and titled Warriors: Volume 2 in the narration. Either way it’s a collection of seven novelettes, novellas and short stories. The readers are Patrick Lawlor and Christina Traister.
It’d be hard to tell which stories are included in the collection from a quick look at the packaging, but they are there, buried in the miniature copyright text at the bottom left of the back:
And, as is all too typical with audiobook releases of collections, once yopu’ve opened it up the discs themselves don’t help either – none of them say anything about which story can be found on which disc. Which is where your friendly neighbourhood SFFaudio comes in…
Disc 1:
Track 2: Introduction: Stories From The Spinner Rack by George R.R. Martin – Read by Patrick Lawlor
Track 4: Seven Years From Home by Naomi Novik – Read by Christina Traister
Disc 2:
Track 7: Dirae by Peter S. Beagle – Read by Christina Traister
Disc 3:
Track 5: Ancient Ways by S.M. Stirling – Read by Patrick Lawlor
Disc 4:
Track 7: The Scroll by David Ball – Read by Patrick Lawlor
Disc 5:
Track 8: Recidivist by Gardner Dozois – Read by Patrick Lawlor
Disc 6:
Track 3: Ninieslando by Howard Waldrop – Read by Patrick Lawlor
Track 12: Out Of The Dark by David Weber – Read by Patrick Lawlor
