Review of Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

Jenny

SFFaudio Review

Image of Moxyland audiobook Moxyland
By Lauren Beukes; Read by Nico Evers-Swindell
8 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Angry Robot via Brilliance Audio
Published: 2011

Themes: dystopia / commericalism / police states / apartheid / art / AIDS / cell phones

Publisher summary:

You think you know what’s going on?
You think you know who’s really in power?
You have No. Fucking. Idea.

Moxyland is an ultra-smart thriller about technological progress, and the freedoms it removes. In the near future, four hip young things live in a world where your online identity is at least as important as your physical one. Getting disconnected is a punishment worse than imprisonment, but someone’s got to stand up to government inc., whatever the cost.

This might be one instance where an audiobook has the potential to lead a reader (listener) into confusion more than reading the print might do. Moxyland is read by Nico Evers-Swindell, best known for his portrayal of Prince William in the made-for-tv movie William & Kate.  While he does a good job with the voices and South African accents, the intertwining stories are hard to keep up with, particularly with the way the reader is dumped right into the center of everything already going on.

That’s how living in a totalitarian, nearly-post-Apartheid South Africa can be sometimes. The four main characters in Moxyland don’t seem to have a grasp of the big picture either, and can hardly keep up with navigating the landscape where your cellphone can punish you, viruses can be used as crowd control, and your body can be turned into an irrevocable product advertisement.

This has tastes of William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, and the realism is helped by the ten years Beukes spent as a journalist, where she started thinking “What would happen if…?” The world she has created is scary, but not difficult to imagine.  After all, some of us are already living it.

Posted by Jenny Colvin

Dan Carlin’s Common Sense #217 – The Big Ketchup Show

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Common Sense with Dan CarlinThe latest Dan Carlin’s Common Sense episode, #217 – The Big Ketchup Show, has Carlin asking tough questions and proffering incredibly reasonable answers. |MP3|

Podcast feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/dancarlin/commonsense?format=xml

Carlin’s take on SOPA is both surprising and insightful. He also talks about the latest U.S. presidential jockeying and a number of other recent items in the news. But the most enduring takeaway, at least for me, was his argument with regard to the “mistreatment of enemy dead by U.S. soldiers” – As Carlin points out the reasons for the controversy and compares it to the Collateral Murder video promulgated by Wikileaks and then wonders if:

‘First person shooters offered the chance to piss on a virtual enemy’s corpse?’

Now I love a good FPS myself. I’ve played quite a few of them. Many deliberately offer controversial sequences. Modern Warfare 2, for instance, has one sequence in which you can act as a terrorist, shooting innocents in a Russian airport. And while the body count is incredibly high in these games, I’ve virtually killed more than 51,000 times in Battlefield 2 alone, most game companies actively discourage swearing, racism, and such from their servers. I haven’t yet seen one yet that officially offered desecrating an enemy corpse as an option.

But where there is humanity there something just as human, and similarly disrespectful: I refer of course to the rampant teabagging of enemy corpses!

The Wikipedia entry on the subject describes the virtual act as “done to humorously imply domination or humiliation.” And The Giant Bomb website has this to say:

“Tea-bagging is primarily used to make one’s death a more humiliating experience and provoking the other player. This action is most commonly performed in video games found within the first-person shooter genre; however, every game that has a crouch button and dead bodies is susceptible to this phenomenon.”

The difference is, the worst of human behavior in computer games is all virtual, and generally not mean-spirited. Going to war should be a big fucking deal. And to make that clear we’d do better to show the reality of it, and to do it in high definition.

Posted by Jesse Willis

CBC: Nazi Eyes On Canada

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

Relic RadioThere’s one segment of Nazi Eyes On Canada, episode 5 “Alameda” (Saskatchewan), available via Relic Radio’s Orson Welles: On The Air podcast.

|MP3|

This is one of the strangest and oldest alternate history radio programs I’ve ever heard |READ OUR REVIEW|.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Shepherd by Fredrick Forsyth; Read by Alan Maitland

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

If you were to take a stab at guessing the favourite audiobook of Canadians you’d be well to guess a Christmas story that includes a vampire, a ghost, and a mosquito.

Produced for CBC Radio this classic reading of Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd is superbly read by Alan Maitland (aka Frontporch Al, aka Fireside Al, aka Graveside Al).

Bonus: A CBC interview with Frederick Forsyth about the story, the interviewer is Barbara Budd!

Vampire

Mosquito

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of The Dragon Factory by Jonathan Mayberry

Julie

SFFaudio Review

Fantasy Audiobook - The Dragon Factory by Jonathan MayberryThe Dragon Factory: A Joe Ledger Novel
By Jonathan Maberry; Read by Ray Porter
16 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio via Audible.com
Published: 2011
Themes: / Science Fiction / Cloning / Genetics / Mayhem /
 
 
 
“Detective Ledger?” he said, and held out an ID case. “NSA.”

“How do you spell that?”

Joe Ledger’s back.

In Patient Zero, (SFFaudio review here) he saved the world from a zombie apocalypse and Muslim terrorists. Almost single handed.

How will he do on the island of Dr. Moreau?

In The Dragon Factory Joe is evading government agents trying to shut down the DMS, is the only man alive to have defeated genetically engineered super warriors, and is romancing his beautiful fellow agent Grace Courtland.

And that’s just in the first few chapters.

Once again, Jonathan Maberry weaves a threat we know with a threat from fiction. A mad scientist (Cyrus) is using genetic experiments to mold the world in a way that will have horrific results for the population at large. Did I mention he’s German? And enjoys cloning as a light pastime?

Meanwhile, a pair of amoral, super intelligent, albino twins are mixing and matching genetics to create creatures of myth and monsters from your worst nightmares.

Joe’s got to find and stop all of them before the “Extinction Wave” doomsday program counts down to zero and releases havoc on the world. With a little help from Top, Bunny, Grace, and the enigmatic Mr. Church, of course.

I enjoy the way that Maberry mashes up several genres, with tongue in cheek, and produces a pulp fiction style, action-packed roller coaster ride that keeps me on the edge of my seat.

This book tells a good portion of the story from the crazed villains’ point of view, to good effect. I really love the dysfunctional family of super-villains where the children have disappointed the father by not having enough “vision” and the kids have giant “daddy” issues.

Maberry also dug just a bit deeper than I expected by contrasting the villainous family with Eighty-Two the clone who Cyrus loves most but who fails every psych test in being “acceptable” (as his henchman, Otto, puts it). I didn’t stop to think about what that meant when filtered through the horrific mindsets that Otto and Cyrus have, but the result was an interesting surprise that led to some interesting musing about free will versus evil and nature versus nurture. It isn’t that deep but I still found its inclusion refreshing in a book of this sort.

As in Patient Zero, Ray Porter’s narration was spot on, voicing Joe Ledger as if he were the man himself, with slight variations applied to other characters to make them come alive equally well. I’d rather hear these books narrated than read them myself just for the sheer enjoyment of Porter’s style and emphasis.

Make no mistake, The Dragon Factory is a straight-up thriller without a lot of twists and turns in plot. You read it for the hunt, for the action, for the adventure. You also read it for the twists of humor, the pulp fiction style, and the monsters. Especially for the monsters.

It’s a good time at high speed. What more can you ask?

Posted by Julie D.

Commentary: MP3-CD Audiobooks (old and new)

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Commentary

The video below is a quick exploration of the MP3-CD audiobook format. It’s my favourite format for physical audiobooks. The packaging is small, the files are ready to be used, and they are cheaper audiobooks than their regular CD equivalent. The only disadvantage to the MP3-CD format is they don’t play on all CD players, and the ones they do play on may limit the volume output.

Posted by Jesse Willis