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.
The SFFaudio Podcast #115 – Scott and Jesse talk to Anne Frid de Vries of the Anne Is A Man blog for a talk about podcasts and podcasting.
Talked about on today’s show:
Anne rhymes with manna, SFFaudio Podcast #053, finding time to review podcasts, listening ideas, recruiting blog readers to be blog contributors, working with WordPress, this Anne needs 3G, university courses, iTunes U, Yale, Joanne B. Freeman, subscribe to iTunes U programmes as podcast, University of California, Berkeley, Anne does the detective work for his readers, BBC World Service: Witness, Fermat’s Last Theorem, Luke Burrage, The Tobolowsky Files, Groundhog Day, HuffDuffer, use your DropBox public folder to HuffDuff your audio files, this doesn’t fit the Wikipedia definition of podcast, podcasts are not radio, retweeting and re-retweeting, using Google Reader as a podcatcher, Dutch Treat (a podcast about the audiobooks of Elmore Leonard), sooo nichey, radio is about scarcity, paper publishing and ebooks, there’s a need for a new podcasting snipper software, drag and drop and trim and label and tag online, we need an audio search engine, speech to text, YouTube’s transcribe beta feature, MIT, speech recognition, podscope.com, trend in podcasting (blogs adding podcasts), iO9.com, Rivets And Trees, are podcasts just portable blogs?, podcasts about podcasts are the best podcasts, what makes a podcast good?, BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg, On Being (aka Speaking Of Faith), CBC Radio One, Spark, Spark Plus, Eric S. Rabkin, Robert J. Sawyer, using podcast medium to enhance radio shows, Rachel Remen, prep and post production, live podcasts vs. scripted podcasts, “Interesting Stuff About History” pisses Anne off, Europe From Its Origins, A Good Story Is Hard To Find, Julie Davis’ Forgotten Classics, Genesis, what do you do with footnotes?, CBC Ideas, 104 Pall Mall (the Reform Club), Phileas Fogg, Around The World In Eighty Days, Ideas is too pretentious, Entitled Opinions, a very insightful slice into English history, putting in a bad episode in a podcast feed can hurt your podcast (or ours), LibriVox, Mystery at Geneva: An Improbable Tale Of Singular Happenings by Dame Rose Macaulay, The League Of Nations, The United Nations, iTunes is not where you find podcasts anymore?, HBO’s Realtime with Bill Maher podcast, CBS’ 60 Minutes podcast, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, can podcasting do for TV what it did for radio?, NBC’s Meet the Press, MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, The Ricky Gervais Show, how do you listen to podcasts? TWiT, how many podcasts exist?, can you hurt students by recording their classes? – consensus no, smartpens (like the Livescribe) should be hacked to podcast, podcast editing app, people get really hung up on video, Fr. Roderick‘s Catholic Insider podcast, the intimacy of audio podcasts, sound seeing tours, ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone, Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Brief History Of Mathematics, CBC Radio One’s Tapestry, thank you to all the Australian taxpayers, why is philosophy so prevalent in podcasting, A Partially Examined Life, Philosophy Bites, The History Of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, CJSW’s Today In Canadian History, Bob Packett’s History According To Bob‘s endless Civil War series, Viking armor, The Conquest Of Mexico, Matt’s Today In History, The Tunguska Event, Medieval Commune, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, Death Throes Of The Republic VI, The Ghosts Of The Ostfront, Dan Carlin has perfected the art of the monologue, Common Sense with Dan Carlin, Hardcore History, blitz shows, James Burke, Gwynne Dyer, New Books In History podcast, the New Books Network, New Books In Public Policy, iTunes fail, I like podcasts about books, Marshall Poe interview with Christopher Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania From The Roman Empire To The Third Reich, The Origins Of Political Order, BIG HISTORY, Anne needs funding, The Do It Yourself Scholar, podcast directories are dead (Podcast Pickle), The Podcast Place, soccer, Tour de France, big media is dropping podcasts in favour of iPod and Android apps, Lance Armstrong, Queen Elizabeth II, “there’s something to be said for a constitutional monarchy in which the monarchy doesn’t live in the country.”
The Red Panda Adventures – Season 6
By Gregg Taylor; Performed by a full cast
12 MP3 Files via podcast – Approx. 6 Hours [AUDIO DRAMA]
Podcaster: Decoder Ring Theatre
Podcast: August 2010 – May 2011
Themes: / Fantasy / Superheroes / Mystery / Crime / Nazis / WWII / Adventure / Toronto / Vancouver / Amnesia / Telepathy / Airships / Time Travel / Magic / Aliens /
“Let the festival of unsolicited advice begin” -Kit Baxter (All The King’s Men)
Season six of The Red Panda Adventures begins with World War II fully underway. The first six episodes are set prior to December 7th, 1941 and the twelfth episode ends in the high summer of 1942. There’s not a bad episode in the bunch. In fact, this season features some of the finest episodes of the entire series. My personal favourites are: the buoyant adventure of “Girls’ Night Out“, the standalone goodness of “The Wild West“, and the deeply disturbing arc episode “There Will Be Rain Tonight.” September and season seven can’t come soon enough!
Episode 1 – “The Nose For News”
A new adversary appears, a shadowy leader of a fifth column inside of Canada! He’s sowing the seeds of discontent and planning acts of sabotage. Can anyone stop Archangel?
Episode 2 – “The Home Team”
Having joined the army, Lt. August Fenwick (aka The Red Panda) receives a visit from his new boss Colonel Archibald Fitzroy. But can a superhero really do more good following orders and digging trenches than by defending a city from supervillians?
Episode 3 – “The King Of Crime”
There’s a new ruler of the underworld, a royal sort, who demands absolute fealty from his criminally inclined vassals. But is this supercrook merely what he appears to be?
Episode 4 – “Rocket Science”
A runaway train packed with high explosive is hurtling toward Montreal, this sounds like a job for the Red Panda. Unfortunately he’s all tied up and Doc Rocket isn’t helping.
Episode 5 – “Girls’ Night Out”
Kit Baxter, aka The Flying Squirrel, on a field trip to Vancouver runs afoul of a ring of Japanese spies (who aren’t). But Vancouver’s got its own vigilante superhero, The Grey Fox, who is already on the case. And she’s no fan of aerially inclined rodents meddling on her turf.
Episode 6 – “Barbarian At The Gates”
There’s a creature coming and it can’t be stopped. It’s steamrolling its way across the forests of Northern Ontario and heading straight for Toronto! No weapon can stop it, no force can slow it. This sounds like a job for … oh, just guess.
Episode 7 – “Sword Of The Sun King”
A 3,000 year old khopesh is the target of an occult Nazi snatch team. But what makes a magic sword a useful tool in this era of Stukas and Panzers?
Episode 8 – “Small Wonders”
Molecule Max, a variably sized superhero, joins the Red Panda and the Flying Squirrel in an adventure that may cost them all more than they’ll want to give.
Episode 9 – “Stop The Presses”
It’s the story of a lifetime for any reporter, “The Death Of The Red Panda” and Kit is being forced to write it! An army of Nazi thugs have seized her newspaper, taken its staff hostage, and only an old adversary a sinister simian can help!
Episode 10 – “The Wild West”
Somebody has been messing with history, and its up to the Red Panda and the Flying Squirrel to clean up. They’ll need to saddle up, partner up, and load their six-shooters up (in case they need to throw down).
Episode 11 – “All The King’s Men”
With the Red Panda’s network of agents away in the army it’s up to young Harry Kelly to infiltrate Archangel’s conspiracy. Meanwhile, Kit’s got secret and the only person she’s more afraid to tell than her husband is her mother!
Episode 12 – “There Will Be Rain Tonight”
A second front in Europe is still years away but there are those who think a sinister network of black towers is key to Hitler’s defense of the French coast. Red Panda and Doc Rocket are on a secret mission to take them out. Back in Canada the Flying Squirrel is in full retreat as the Nazis have assassinated every Home Team agent in Canada!
I’m not a fan of series, normally, but I’m utterly enthralled by this one. More than fifty years in the writing The Stainless Steel Rat series is completely available, for the first time, as series of audiobooks from Brilliance Audio.
James Bolivar diGriz (aka Slippery Jim diGriz) is the protagonist of the series and the titular Stainless Steel Rat of the title. He’s an anti-hero you’ll be wholly in favour of. He’s slick and quick and fast with a quip as he tells his own tale, in first person (past tense), like an adventurer out of some long forgotten future age.
As the first novel, The Stainless Steel Rat |READ OUR REVIEW|, begins diGriz is a low down and completely immaculate criminal, an uncatchable super-thief and con-man who has earned his name for never being caught. But before too long he’s soon baited, corralled, and ensnared by an insidious interstellar agency that’s been tracking the resourceful rodent and means to draft him!
By the end of the first story-arc the reluctant recruit has settled down (and married) the psychopathic arch-criminal that he’d been chasing after. Then, moonlighting on his extended honeymoon (the next couple books), he proceeds to traipse across both time and space as an interstellar (and inter-epoch) troubleshooter.
You’d think it’d be hard for diGriz to play good guy, but this galahad in grey steel still has his fun. In fact, he funds all of his galactic gallivanting by good old fashioned bank robbery! And when not actually in the act of larceny he never fails to luxuriate in the finest of hotels (or the finest cave of his own construction). Soon he’s snuffing out a intragalactic coup-d’etat, getting grief from his honey and back to stealing all of his boss’s finest cigars right before existence ends. Then it is all: ‘Quick give me a copy of your mind, and yours too, and all those weapons there and this equipment there! I’ve got to travel back in time to a planet called “Dirt” to prevent all this nothing from happening.’
Amazingly, the stories just work. The universe which Harry Harrison has created is one in which anything that can be imagined exists. There’s mind wiping, personality reconstruction, sleep gas grenades, mind and memory transfer, immortality, gravity belts, atomic compressor tools, faster than light travel and robots robots robots everywhere! Harrision invents the tech for the Rat to play with but never fully describes it. And so it never seems old-fashioned, becomes all the more plausible and you can just go with the action. The characters are fresh and perky with personality. The plots, which are grandiose but never very central to the immediate action, serve to provide scene after scene of hilarious problem and ingenious solution for the wily Stainless Steel rodent to navigate. The novels aren’t long, and make for great fun between heavier books by the likes of H.G. Wells and Joe Haldeman.
To me, narrator Phil Gigante has become Slippery Jim diGriz. He’s playful, full of accents for all the colourful characters and he pitches every scene just how it should be – fun, funny and fast.
If you’re looking for a series that won’t let you down, you’ve got to try this one. I’m absolutely loving it!
The Philosopher’s Zone is the long running podcast, and radio show, from Radio National, Australia’s public broadcaster. I’d argue that the programme consistently rivals the best shows on both CBC Radio and BBC Radio!
The latest to grab me was a fascinating exploration of the embodiment of evil. Guest Robin Bunce relates, to host Alan Saunders, his theories on the exact nature of evil the Daleks embody. Daleks, it seems, didn’t start out as mere extraterrestrial Nazis – despite what their creator, Terry Nation, seemed to indicate. Instead, Bunce says that the Daleks took inspiration from the cold war, fears of nuclear annihilation (by neutron bomb), religious fundamentalism and particularly the Science Fiction of H.G. Wells. Sure, their are some episodes that make the Daleks like Nazis (and Davros like Hitler), but the story is more complex. Here’s the description:
They are among the most loved, or most feared, villains in science fiction. But what is it that makes Daleks such great baddies? What constitutes evil and why do the Daleks represent a very specific idea about rationality and morality? This week, we talk to a philosopher about what the Daleks have to tell us – in their mechanical, screechy voices – about who we are.
Macbeth: A Novel
By A.J. Hartley and David Hewson (adapted from the play by William Shakespeare); Read by Alan Cumming Audible Download – Approx. 9 Hours 45 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible.com
Published: June 2011 Writing directly for audio, co-authors David Hewson and Andrew Hartley have taken Shakespeare’s Macbeth and fleshed it out into a full-blown work of historical fiction. It’s an original, gritty take on one of literature’s greatest stories. The authors add inventive details and key scenes that for centuries have played out offstage, delivering new insights into the motivations and actions of almost every character. Emmy Award nominee, Audie Award winner, and experienced Shakespeare performer Alan Cumming (TV’s The Good Wife) plays it all to the hilt, complete with engrossing (and authentic) Scottish accent. This is Shakespeare as you’ve never heard it. Includes a introduction by David Hewson and an afterword by A.J. Hartley.
