TWIT’s Security Now podcast science fiction episode

SFFaudio Online Audio

Usually the Security Now podcast covers the latest stress-inducing security holes in Windows, Flash, Acrobat, and Java.  But at the end of last December in episode 333 Steve Gibson devoted an episode to his favorite science fiction.  He started with some movies:  This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet, and The Day The Earth Stood Still.  But most of the episode covered books, and Steve has good taste and likes Hard SF.  He started with Asimov’s Robot mystery novels, beginning with The Caves Of Steel.  His favorite Larry Niven is Protector, but The Mote In God’s Eye was ok too.  He also enjoyed Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series.

And I actually learned about Peter F. Hamilton from him: the Mandel Series, the Night’s Dawn series (huge), Fallen Dragon (standalone novel), and the Pandora’s Star/Judas Unchained duology.

Next came an independent author who sells from his own site, Michael McCollum at scifi-az.com.  Michael has the Antares series and the Gibralter series.  Someone told me to check out his 1st 2 books from the 80’s.  There’s also The Sails Of Tau Ceti.  Some free short stories are available.  There’s no audiobooks unfortunately (an opportunity for someone?), unless you count some computer generated audio files.

Steve also mentioned Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series, Graham Sharp Paul’s Helfort’s War series, David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, Greg Bear’s Eon, and Gregory Benford’s Galactic Center saga.

Feed:  http://leo.am/podcasts/sn

MP3: http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/aolradio.podcast.aol.com/sn/sn0333.mp3

Posted by Tamahome

LibriVox: Empire by Clifford D. Simak

SFFaudio Online Audio

Described as: “A Powerful Novel of Intrigue and Action in the Not-So-Distant Future”

Empire by Clifford D. SimakEmpire
By Clifford D. Simak; Read by Kevin Green
21 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 4 Hours 57 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: January 27, 2012
|ETEXT|
In a future time, the solar system is powered by one energy source, controlled by one huge organization, which has plans to use this control to dominate the planets. Unknown to them, a couple of maverick scientists accidentally develop a completely new form of energy supply and threaten the corporation’s monopoly. Naturally, the corporation can’t allow this to happen… A stunning story about the manipulation of pure energy, climaxing in interstellar conflict. First published in 1951 as Galaxy Science Fiction Novel 7.

Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/rss/6165

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

[Thanks also to midgecoates and Guero]

Posted by Jesse Willis

Recent Arrivals: Blackstone Audio, Brilliance Audio, Macmilian Audio

SFFaudio Recent Arrivals

Check out this freshly scanned batch of audiobooks from Blackstone Audio, Brilliance Audio, and Macmilian Audio. Personally I’m most excited about the two Dick titles (despite the terrible covers) and The Lost World in part because how great the cover is! I can highly recommend Immortality, Inc as we talked about it on SFFaudio Podcast #144 – sadly its boring cover belies the exiting contents and the terrific narration that lies beneath it.

Blackstone Audio - Berserker Prime by Fred Saberhagen

Blackstone Audio - Destiny's Road by Larry Niven

Blackstone Audio - The Engines Of God by Jack McDevitt

Blackstone Audio - Farseed by Pamela Sargent

Blackstone Audio - Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley

Blackstone Audio - The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Blackstone Audio - Mermaid by Carolyn Turgeon

Blackstone Audio - Power Play by Ben Bova

Brilliance Audio - Against The Light by Dave Duncan

Brilliance Audio - The Crack In Space by Philip K. Dick

Brilliance Audio - Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick

Brilliance Audio - Resurrection by Arwen Elys Dayton

Brilliance Audio - Wild Cards 1 edited by George R.R. Martin

Macmilian Audio - Shadows In Flight by Orson Scott Card

Posted by Jesse Willis

The SFFaudio Podcast #146 – AUDIOBOOK/READALONG – Eight O’Clock In The Morning by Ray Nelson

Podcast

The SFFaudio PodcastThe SFFaudio Podcast #146 – Eight O’Clock In The Morning by Ray Nelson, read by Gregg Margarite. This is a complete and unabridged reading of the short story (16 Minutes) followed by a discussion of it with Jesse, Gregg Margarite and Ray Nelson himself!

Talked about on today’s show:
This story was suggested by a listener [thanks], Eight O’Clock In The Morning, a terse procedural aspect of the text, Ray is a fan of bare bones writing, alien forks and knives, inspired by flies, a new adaptation of Eight O’Clock In The Morning (on IMDB), John Carpenter’s They Live, occupy wall street, the 1% aren’t just mean, one of the best short story adaptations, Nada = nothing, a traitless character, a modern fable, The Twilight Zone, sowing a distrust of television, “Work Eight Hours, Play Eight Hours, Sleep Eight Hours”, Ray co-wrote The Ganymede Takeover with Philip K. Dick, Gregg likes it, The Ganymede Takeover has been translated 15 times, Ray and Phil are a hit in France, Edgar Allan Poe owes his classical status to Baudelaire, the short story form itself, Again, Dangerous Visions, Hillside School in Berkley, CA, Ray went to school with Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin, France, 1950s, Harlan Ellison, Jean Paul Sarte, book smuggling, Henry Miller, Ray gave Phil acid twice, Philip K. Dick’s acid trips (and flashbacks), answers vs. questions, public and private realities, Ray loves radio theatre, the new audio drama, Tim Heffernan, The Drama Pod, The Cosmic Circle on KPFA, live broadcast, live TV, Saturday Night Live, Your Show Of Shows, Mel Brooks, Woody Allan, Larry Gelbart, the last unsafe TV show was Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, anthology series, The Twilight Zone, Black Mirror, Carleton E. Morris, radio drama in Canada, Carleton E. Morris, Prairie Home Companion, appointment radio, X Minus One, Dimension X, Escape, Suspense, I Love A Mystery, BrokenSea’s OTR Swag Cast, The Temple Of The Vampires, Bill Hollweg, The Quantum Door, Gregg gets to be Rod Serling, Jake Sampson: Monster Hunter, Egypt, Texas, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, paperbook publishing is tough, we want ebook and audiobook editions of , iambik.com, $0.30, William Blake, Laser Books, pseudonyms, RayNelson.com, cartoonism, American Window Cleaner Magazine, “Inflate my girl James … the Viagra is kicking in.”, the propeller beanie, Flying Down To Rio, the 1939 Worlds Fair, The World Of Tomorrow, Elektro the smoking robot, Treasure Island, Hitler’s swastika farm at the world’s fair, The Old Beatnik, Herb Caen, how the beatniks got their name, Jack Kerouac, a synchronistic view of the universe, theology, the University Of Chicago, my Edgar Allan Poe drawing, why don’t people draw more often?, every little kid knows how to draw, essay writing, the death of newspapers, the smell of a used bookstore, How To Fuck Like The Stars aka How To Do It, drawing, writing and smuggling pornography, the Wikipedia entry on Ray Nelson, “Push where it gives”, singing black spirituals in a cowboy suit in Paris, Ray “Tex” Nelson aka Tex The Singing Cowboy, Jeffrey Lord’s Richard Blade, Harlequin Books, Slave Of Sarma by Jeffrey Lord (read by Lloyd James), California Ray, Allen Ginsberg, “I wrote verse. I wrote verse and verse as I went along.”, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Howl, the San Fransisco Renaissance, Sex Happy Hippie, Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Marion Zimmer Bradley, I, Lesbian by Lee Chapman (aka Ray Nelson and Marion Zimmer Bradley), copyright, fanzines, the smell of a mimeograph machine, Ray Bradbury, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Weird Tales, H.P. Lovecraft is more like a blogger than a 1950s writer, Farnsworth Wright, Astounding Stories, Pickman’s Model by H.P. Lovecraft, extraterrestrial monsters, cosmic horror, L. Sprague de Camp, H.P. Lovecraft in a dress, flipped his lid, the Fascinators are fascinating, the adaptation of They Live, Frank Armitage, scripting They Live, the sunglasses, the venetian blind glasses, Blade Runner, Total Recall, John Carpenter’s The Thing, The Thing From Another Planet, John W. Campbell, John Carpenter’s music, Roddy Piper doesn’t look like an everyman, the five minute fight scene works great!, Keith David, Seeing Ear Theatre, Tales From The Crypt |READ OUR REVIEW|, Eight O’Clock In The Morning is a kind of Lovecraftian tale, The Lurking Fear, “anything includes everything.”

Eight O'Clock In The Morning by Ray Nelson

They Live - based upon The Story Eight O'Clock In The Morning by Ray Nelson

Got A Light Buddy?
The Children

They Live - Indian poster art

They Live - illustration by Jeremy Wheeler

THEY LIVE poster from Printed In Blood

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Influence of RADIO DRAMA on comics and vice versa

SFFaudio News

EC ComicsThere’s a fascinating article by Kurt Kuersteiner HERE titled “OTR: The Evil Influence Behind EC.” In it Kuersteiner maps some of the many stories swiped from radio drama series and turned into EC Comics.

It came to me at the perfect time too. I’ve just been getting into EC comics over the last few months. Having grown up under the censorship of the Comics Code Authority I didn’t really know what I was missing. Now though, reading these pre-code comics, I can now see that my intellectual growth had been greatly stunted.

I’d have been a far smarter person if I’d been able to buy and read comics like these as a kid.

My favourite such tale so far was published in the July/August 1953 issue of Weird Fantasy (issue number 20). It’s called The Automaton. At first it seemed to me like a mashup of a Philip K. Dick’s The Electric Ant, Alfred Bester’s Fondly Fahrenheit and George Orwell’s 1984. But looking at the chronology that can’t be what it is. First off Philip K. Dick was just getting started around then. And while he was a comics reader The Electric Ant wasn’t published until 1969.

And while by 1953 Bester had already been working in comics – he hadn’t yet written Fondly Fahrenheit. So the story is definitely Orwellian and very cool, and certainly like a couple of Dick and Bester tales that were yet to be written. But then again, maybe it was inspired by a radio drama that I’ve not heard yet. Anybody know of one like this?

As it stands The Automaton is set in the futuristic dystopian world of Los Angeles in 2009. Our protagonist is XT-751, a man recounting his story of being sent to a northern labour camp after a suicide attempt. Suicide is illegal in this world because the state owns every person from the cradle to the grave.

I actually have been thinking about The Automaton for months now. And after reading Kuersteiner’s article it somehow gelled into a post. It’s just been something I could’t quite shake. The story is not only extremely thought provoking, and still timely, but also extremely frightening. And maybe a lot of the rest of it is that it is about as far away from superhero comics as you can possibly get. Best of all it’s told in just seven pages – that’s a highly distilled story.

The only credit for The Automaton is for the artist, Joe Orlando, but maybe he wrote it too?

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 1

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 2

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 3

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 4

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 5

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 6

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 7

Posted by Jesse Willis