The SFFaudio Podcast #163 – NEW RELEASES/RECENT ARRIVALS

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #163 – Jesse, Tamahome, and Jenny (from Reading Envy) talk about newly released and recently arrived audiobooks.

Talked about on today’s show:
please send Jenny audiobooks for review, a lack of a listing of the short stories on audiobooks, kudos to Welcome To Bordertown, George R.R. Martin’s Warriors II and Down These Strange Streets (urban fantasy), Jenny is reading around the world in 52 books, Tigana is sort of Italian, future releases, Happy Audiobook Month, audiobook sale at Tantor, Nick wants Redshirts by John Scalzi, coming soon on Audible, Audible Modern Vanguard, Colin Firth narrated the Graham Greene novel The End Of The Affair, Redshirts has three codas (short stories), Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter’s The Long Earth, Flood, Discworld has giant turtles, Good Omens is great in audio, Stephen Baxter is doing a Doctor Who (The Wheel Of Ice), Gregory Benford’s free audio novelette The Hunger For The Infinite is part of the Galactic Center series, sort of like I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, sheer amount of David Brin audiobooks, Jenny might read Kiln People, how do Scott and Jesse truly feel about David Brin? (Jesse’s review of Startide Rising), the value of awards, The Greatest Science Fiction Stories Of The 20th Century has a good Brin and others, (Ben Bova was in the news not David Brin), The Postman book and movie, “if you build it they will come”, Heinlein’s Glory Road narrated by Pinchot, it’s one of Jo Walton’s least favorites, How To Build An Android also narrated by Pinchot, Alastair Reynolds’s Blue Remembered Earth, reviewed by Luke, Heinlein’s The Number Of The Beast (666?), Moonwar by Ben Bova, 21st Century Dead (zombies), Jenny’s collecting subgenres, Daniel Wilson’s Amped (1st three chapters on io9), someone stole that title, Energized by Edward M. Lerner sounds like Paolo Bacigalupi, Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, separate chapters like the Nova tv show, Red Mars, super science!, Jonathan Maberry, Robert Bloch’s Psycho series, “did he escape?”, H.G. Wells stuff added, Etsy 101: Sell Your Crafts On Etsy, Jenny wants N.K. Jemisin’s The Killing Moon in audio, Liz Williams’s Worldsoul has librarian heroes, “X-men meets The Breakfast Club”, Sfsignal’s book cover gallery for June, is body horror the same as splatterpunk?, Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination looks like a Jenny book, The Islanders by Christopher Priest (author of The Prestige), waiting for international books, Paul McCauley’s In The Mouth Of The Whale is not in America, “I would buy the ebook”, small fonts, William Gibson is only in mass market paperback, many Philip K. Dick novels with plain covers, the value of book covers, “it’s like a good looking person”, “that screams I am a literary miracle”, Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, get the annotated one, Die, Snow White! Die, Damn You! A Very Grimm Tale by Yuri Rasovsky (audiodrama), so many fairy tales, a superficial interest in Further: Beyond The Threshold by Chris Roberson, a law that a bookcover should be honest, “that’s enough on that”, C.S. Friedman?, Adam-Troy Castro is not always super creepy, Paul Krugman’s End This Depression!, he was just on Geek’s Guide, “oh that kind of depression”, Justinian’s Flea, The Most Powerful Idea In The World, The Swerve: How The World Became Modern, author on The Bookworm podcast, Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds, “I’m sensing a pattern with your reading, Tam”, Delany interview, Delany’s Nova, Tigana is the Sword and Laser pick for June

cover for Chris Roberson's Further: Beyond The Threshhold

Posted by Tamahome

Featured Promotion: At The Earth’s Core and The House On The Borderland

Jesse Willis

Featured Promotion

I’ve put up a couple of new ads on the top right of the website. They’re for the latest projects by two excellent audiobook narrators:

The House On The Borderland by William Hope Hodgson – READ BY WAYNE JUNE

and

At The Earth’s Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs – READ BY DAVID STIFEL

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.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Lit2Go: The Philosophy Of Composition by Edgar Allan Poe

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Lit2GoI’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.

|MP3|

The full text is also HERE.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Jack London (1943) – a biographical feature film about Jack London

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

Jack London is a 1943 biographical feature film about Jack London!

It’s also available for download via Archive.org: |AVI|MP4|OGV|

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?

Posted by Jesse Willis

Escape Pod: Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Am I excited?

You bet.

Jim Warren’s cover illustration for Tor Double #26 excites me:

TOR Double #26 - Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg

The original illustrations, by Virgil Finlay, from the publication in Galaxy excite me:

Galaxy August 1967 page 8 (Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg)

Galaxy August 1967 page 11 - illustration by Virgil Finlay

Galaxy August 1967 page 31 - illustration by Virgil Finlay

Galaxy August 1967 page 41 - illustration by Virgil Finlay

Galaxy August 1967 page 51 - illustration by Virgil Finlay

And this episode of Escape Pod, a novella by Robert Silverberg (!) REALLY, REALLY excites me!

Escape PodEscape 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.

[via SFSignal]

Posted by Jesse Willis

Recent Arrivals: Welcome To Bordertown edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Recent Arrivals

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:


BRILLIANCE AUDIO - Welcome To Bordertown edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner

Next, note the detailed track listings on the back:

BRILLIANCE AUDIO - Welcome To Bordertown edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner

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:

Posted by Jesse Willis