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.
This Noir Masters series book is a “pseudo classic” was first published in 1941. It was later reprinted as a Penguin paperback and also as a Dell Mapback. The modern ebook edition comes courtesy of the Wonder Publishing (which has a great new Wonder Ebooks site). Here are the |PDF| and the |EPUB| editions.
See You At The Morgue
By Lawrence G. Blochman; Read by Mark Douglas Nelson
14 MP3 Files (Podcast) – Approx. 6 Hours 57 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Podiobooks.com
Published: August 15th, 2011 When a gigolo is shot to death in the bedroom of a beautiful girl, it raises some perplexing problems for Detective Kenny Kilkenny. Why, for example, would a man steal the license plates off his own car? Why should an innocent young professor come to the murder room … and then conceal a key to the crime? Why was a ‘phantom secretary’ hiding in the closet near the murdered man? Was there really money to be made selling glass eyes for stuffed ducks? Why would a beautiful girl ask her lover to kill her?
Buffalito Destiny
By Lawrence Schoen; Read by William Coon
12 Hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Eloquent Voice
Published: 2011
Themes: / Science fiction / Aliens / Eco-terrorism /
We meet The Amazing Conroy at the beginning of his career as a stage hypnotist. He’s been stranded on an alien planet after making a delivery as a courier. This situation in and of itself begins to let the reader know about author Lawrence M. Schoen’s talent in combining the mundane with the unexpected. Certainly, I’d never have imagined earning my way around the universe as a stage hypnotist.
The book proper is set in Conroy’s present where he has smuggled an alien life form to Earth. Rarely has an alien been more adorable than the Buffalito Dog, Reggie. He is Conroy’s personal pet and the leader of the rest of the Buffalito pack which forms the foundation of Conroy’s corporation. Conroy has become incredibly wealthy by renting the services of his Buffalitos which literally eat anything and fart oxygen.
At the time we join the story, the Mexican president wants a demonstration of Conroy’s services to convince his government to clean up toxic waste sites. However, this plan is put in jeopardy by an anti-alien, eco-terrorist group with no qualms about using extreme force to achieve their goal of banning aliens and their technology from the earth. To make matters worse, Conroy has been having mysterious dreams which he must decipher in order to fulfill his destiny of keeping the Earth from being destroyed.
These are only a few of the features of this entertaining novel which include the joys of Mexican sandwiches, a huge region of temporal instability in Texas, and a bus tour of Mayan ruins that includes one of the most creative alien races I’ve ever read about.
There is a zany charm about this novel which makes any threats seem less serious, although I was extremely curious about how Conroy was going to fulfill his destiny. The oddest but imaginative elements come together in the most ordinary of ways and somehow all hang together pretty well to form a story that kept me interested.
It helps that I simply love William Coon’s narration although he does occasionally struggle with an accent (the Texan drawl was bravely attempted but not quite right). However, that is the only one that didn’t ring quite true for me. His reading is half the charm of Conroy’s character. This is the first time I’ve heard him use different voices for different characters and I feel sure that I wouldn’t be able to read the actual book without hearing Coon’s narration reading along in my mind’s ear.
The story is not always imaginatively plotted, perhaps because so much else was going on that the author could only juggle so many balls in the air. I was able to peg the main eco-terrorist quite early in the story and hoped against hope (as it turns out) that the author would be able to sacrifice a character necessary to the story’s integrity. However, there were other surprises that I didn’t expect so it isn’t as if the entire plot was obvious.
Buffalito Destiny is a great deal of fun even with a few plot glitches. And I’m ok with that.
The good folks at Tantor Media are offering a new limited-time FREE MP3 download of Hard Times by Charles Dickens!
As usual you will need to have an account, and to login. Start by clicking HERE. Accounts are free and do not require a credit card. After logging in you will be redirected back to the Hard Times page, and there you will be able to find the download link. Hard Times should be available for FREE through August 31, 2011. Unlike previous FREE releases from Tantor this audiobook comes with a PDF of the entire text as well.
Hard Times
By Charles Dickens; Read by Simon Prebble 37 Zipped MP3 Files and PDF Ebook – Approx. 12 Hours 30 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Media
Published: January 12, 2009 Full of suspense, humor, and tenderness, Hard Times is a brilliant defense of art in an age of mechanism and a blistering portrait of Victorian England as it struggles with the massive economic turmoil brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Red brick, machinery, and smoke-darkened chimneys. Reason, facts, and statistics. This is the world of Coketown, the depressed mill town that is the setting for one of Charles Dickens’s most powerful and unforgettable novels. The highest priority for Thomas Gradgrind, head of the Gradgrind model day school, is his version of education—feeding the mind while starving the soul and spirit. Inflexible and unyielding, he places conformity above curiosity and sense over sentiment…only to find himself betrayed by the very standards that govern his own unhappy life. Hard Times is Dickens’s scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society and its misapplied utilitarian philosophy. And Thomas Gradgrind is one of his most richly dimensional, memorable characters. Filled with the details and wonders of small-town life, Hard Times is also a daring novel of ideas—and ultimately a celebration of love, hope, and the limitless possibilities of the imagination.
Finally, Tantor is offering a special promotional code that may be of interest. To get $80 worth of audiobooks, when you spend $40, (until 8/31/11) use the promo code “Aug11” (without the quotation marks) upon checkout.
The SFFaudio Podcast #121 – Scott, Jesse, Tamahome and Gregg Margarite talk about Joe Haldeman’s novel Forever Peace.
Talked about on today’s show: The Forever War, Forever Peace, Forever Free, Haldeman’s experiences in South-East Asia (during the Vietnam War), William Mandella, Mandala, Julian Class, Philip Klass (William Tenn), racism, remotely controlled soldier robots, jacks, empathy, sharing menstruation, baldness as a fashion, the nanoforge (a molecular nanotechnology), caper, Stranger In A Stranger Land, heist, “two novellas smushed together”, John W. Campbell, Ben Bova, self help groups, one conceit that remains unexamined, magic machine (aka a sub-atomic replicator), Mack Reynolds, telepathy, asymmetric warfare, prescience, Libya, Pakistan, the two peaces of Forever Peace, what of the aftermath?, applying Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics to people, Gregg is a creature capable of killing, not everyone wants to be the black sheep, is 98% of humanity humanizable?, the earth where everyone is gay, the earth where everyone is a clone, “a giant of SF”, The Memory Of Earth by Orson Scott Card, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, do you grok the group?, “The Hammer of God”, Jonestown, David Koresh, a religion that requires you believe in evolution, punctuated equilibrium, treating the bible like a science book (is problematic), we’re gonna drill into you brain and then you won’t have those feelings anymore, a utopian dystopia, Malthusian theory, the singularity, A Clockwork Orange, moral conviction vs. physical restriction, Gregg needs his murderer (and we do too), Starship Troopers, false consciousness, Women’s Studies, The Tea Party,
“False consciousness is the Marxist thesis that material and institutional processes in capitalist society are misleading to the proletariat, and to other classes. These processes betray the true relations of forces between those classes, and the real state of affairs regarding the development of pre-socialist society”,
following orders (as false consciousness), Stockholm syndrome, identifying with your oppressor, why do people do things that are against their own interests?, Costa Rica, withholding technology vs. holding resources hostage, Plato’s cave, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, is Jesse making an argument for absolute truth?, what is truth?, “one person’s murder is another person’s dinner”, “God exists or he doesn’t exist”, “assuming we agree on the definition of God”, “we have a bedrock of truth”, Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction, “we’re here and we’re invading your software”, our perception of reality changes, “how can it not always be this way?”, “it’s The Matrix“, Gregg can find reasonable doubt in his own existence, Cogito Ergo Sum (I think therefore I am), René Descartes, “I doubt therefore I am”, Tama has no take, good and bad vs. right and wrong, a mass of conflicting impulses (ambivalence), Heinlein’s militaristic thinking vs. Haldeman’s militaristic thinking, Heinlein’s Future History series, religious conversion, telepathy vs. total immersion, Jonathan Swift, “you can’t reasons someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into”, there are two tenets in Greggism, what you believe doesn’t has to be true, Alan Moore’s personal made-up religion, Scott isn’t a Catholic because of feeling alone, Joseph Campbell “everything is true”, “he was born with a plowshare”, magical thinking, “that’s true for you and that’s fine”, a religious wacko who wants to end the world seems like a tired villain, Source Code, Moon is fantastic (but Source Code is not), the Norwegian whack job, can’t we find another kind of religion, Carl von Clausewitz, The Operative from Serenity (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), effective villains, Robert E. Lee, Adolph Hitler vs. Joseph Stalin vs. Mao Zedong, the Tehran Conference, “Uncle Joe”, Stalin’s ending was noir, Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton has a great (and dirty) villain, Orson Scott Card’s Buggers, Speaker For The Dead, Ender’s Game, zombies are like a force of nature, Heinleinian villains are not diabolical, the ultimate orbital platform, the English Empire, “besides we’re better than you”, why do English actors always play villains? American accents = movie stars, Vancouver is a science fiction ghetto, iambk audio, the proper pronunciation of “about” in Canada, shock vs. shark, accents are lazy ways of speaking, George Wilson (the narrator of Forever Peace), P.G. Wodehouse, Bertie and Jeeves, the secret language of (drunken) Cockneys, no stupid voices please (in audiobooks), if you hire Nicholson for you movie your movie is a Jack Nicholson movie, Gregg’s signature voice may lose him work, why does the narrative switch between first and third person throughout Forever Peace, Yes, Minister, Goodreads.com, senior civil servant (3rd person) vs. elected official (1st person), The Long Habit Of Living by Joe Haldeman, The Forever War is told in first person (right?)
“There Are Things I Want You to Know” about Stieg Larsson and Me
By Eva Gabrielsson and Marie-Françoise Colombani; Read by Cassandra Campbell
5 CDs – Approx. 5 Hours 30 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Media
Published: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 9781452652344
Themes: / Biography / Sweden / Family /
Sample |MP3|
There is only one person who can tell Stieg Larsson’s story better than he can, and that is his lifelong companion, Eva Gabrielsson. This is her book.
There is no doubt that writing this book was a blend of catharsis and revenge for Stieg Larsson’s life partner. For the listener it provides deep insights into the man, his habits and his motivations for writing his books. All that annoying coffee drinking in the books actually IS a reflection of Stieg’s own life habits and I now forgive him for the every detailed sip in the books.
I am also left wanting to read the other perspectives on Stieg’s life, in case Eva’s is not objective in her views. It “feels” as though she is truly telling the story of a man who truly brought his fight for justice and morality from his life to his fiction. (There are other biographies out there.) He blended facts and fiction – and for those of us listening from North America – provided a view of political troubles in our idealized Sweden. Eva adds another layer of Swedish conservatism with her difficulties as Stieg’s lifelong partner, having no children, her union went unrecognized by the state and Stieg’s assets were claimed by his almost estranged father and brother.
Of note to you, dear readers, is the fact that both Stieg and Eva were huge Science Fiction fans. If you haven’t dipped into the trilogy yet, Eva’s explanation of Salander’s (the main character) cyborg-like brain in a Pippi Longstocking body with superhuman strength may whet your appetite.
It is clear as Eva’s tale unfolds that she was intimately involved in the unfolding of Stieg’s trilogy. In a way they are her stories too – the books – their children in some odd way. This story may be the story of her custody battle for the rights to finish writing (raise to adulthood) Stieg’s final book, The Vengeance Of God. From listening to her tale and her writing style, I am positive that she will have no difficulty bringing the story to completion, should she be given the opportunity.
The reader, Cassandra Campbell, has been the narrator (or one of) in a host of books I have listened to and enjoyed (especially The Help). I was surprised that she pronounced the Swedish words and places perfectly adding immensely to my enjoyment of this audiobook.
Michael Swanwick has posted a fascinating hour-long convention monologue by Murray Leinster‘s daughter, Billee Stallings. I’m betting that a lot of folks today, even Science Fiction folks, don’t know who Leinster was. I don’t see any of his books in print anymore and that’s a shame. Leinster was one of the pioneers of SF. A giant of his time, and he’s got plenty of powerful stories that still hold up today. Writes Swanwick:
“In the introduction, James Gunn notes that ‘[Leinster] originated more SF concepts than any writer since H.G. Wells.’ Think about that. More than Heinlein! More than Asimov! More than Clarke!”
The stories Billee Stallings tells in the hour are fascinating, and valuable, check it out:
The admirable Mark Douglas Nelson has completed his SFFaudio Challenge #5 project… 
See You At The Morgue
