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.
While Victoria Day is one damn fine holiday in May it has never given me one FREE COMIC in all the years I’ve dutifully observed it. That’s why I’m thinking that the best day in May is the first Saturday in May. The first Saturday in May is, of course, FREE COMIC BOOK DAY!
That’s this Saturday! I’ll be making a special trip to my comic book store, Hourglass Comics (in Port Moody, B.C.).
Which comic store do you go to?
Posted by Jesse Willis
Bob Neufeld’s reading of the Phaedo, Plato’s account of the final day of Socrates (in 399 BC), is of professional audiobook quality. There’s no way I could overstate how impressed I am with this audiobook. Neufeld’s pronunciation and character discrimination are spot-on and the sound quality of the recording is absolutely stellar. If you haven’t read any Plato I think you’ll be amazed at how clear and compelling the dialogue is. Its an accessible introduction to the thought of Socrates (and Plato) in that it discusses a very down to earth subject: death.
Phaedo
By Plato; Translated by Benjamin Jowett; Read by Bob Neufeld
8 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 3 Hours 4 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: May 2, 2011
Socrates has been imprisoned and sentenced to death by an Athenian jury for not believing in the gods of the state and for corrupting the youth of the city. The dialogue is told from the perspective of one of Socrates’ students, Phaedo of Elis. Having been present at Socrates’ death bed, Phaedo relates the dialogue from that day to Echecrates, a fellow philosopher. By engaging in dialectic with a group of Socrates’ friends, including the Thebans Cebes and Simmias, Socrates explores various arguments for the soul’s immortality in order to show that there is an afterlife in which the soul will dwell following death. Phaedo tells the story that following the discussion, he and the others were there to witness the death of Socrates.
Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/rss/4421
iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|
[Thanks also to Barry Eads]
Posted by Jesse Willis
Bill Mills, of REB AudioBooks, sent me a link to an interesting video that he put together. Writes Mills:
I have been involved in helping The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) bring this worthy new video webcast series to fruition and I had hoped that you might be willing to mention it on the site. Of course, LASFS is a non-profit organization and my efforts, as well as all those connected with the production donated free of charge to the club. We all are essentially engaging in FANAC (Fan Activity), in support of this venerable institution deservedly known as “This World’s Oldest Science Fiction Club”!
The video is basically a short history of the club and a tour their wonderful facilities and offerings. While the video’s volume is okay there is a hideous hiss in the audio, but if you can get past it I think you’ll agree that the completely crazy people at LASFS are utterly awesome. They’ve got a sweet looking library too (though I didn’t see any audiobooks on the shelves). Check it out:
Posted by Jesse Willis
Second Variety And Other Stories
By Philip K. Dick; Read by William Coon
WMA, MP3 or Audible Download – Approx. 6 Hours 20 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Eloquent Voice
Published: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 9780983089834
Available through: OverDrive, NetLibrary, Audible, CD Baby
This collection of five stories from early in his career casts a spotlight on Dick’s incredible imagination. In Second Variety robot warriors appear to have given one side the advantage in a devastating war. But a small band of soldiers begins to question just what the robots’ endgame truly is. In Beyond Lies The Wub a member of a spaceship’s crew buys a Wub (‘a huge dirty pig!’) for fifty cents, thinking it might be a good source of meat for the long journey home. Then the Wub speaks. In The Eyes Have It a man’s imagination gets the best of him, as he takes the words in a paperback novel a bit too literally. In Piper In The Woods a doctor attempts to unravel the mystery of why workers on an asteroid base begin to behave as if they have become plants. In The Variable Man giant computers indicate earth will likely win an interstellar war that will free it from the limits imposed by an aging Centauran empire. Plans are disrupted, however, when a man from the past arrives and throws off all calculations.
Posted by Jesse Willis
DVDcommentaries.co.uk is one of those specialized podcasts that I too rarely talk about. It’s a podcast that provides an alternative audio commentary track that you can run while watching a film, or just listen to while you’re on the go. Unlike many of the official DVD commentaries, that are too often about all the technical junk that nobody except aspiring directors could ever care about, fan commentaries can be extremely compelling listening. A great example of that is this one, from Jan 2010: Curits, Dave, Stu and Tom, a knowledgable set of fans who genuinely love movies, priovide the commentary of Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World. It’s well worth listening to if you’re a fan of the film.
The movie is, of course, based on the novella Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell. Have a listen |MP3|.
Here’s the trailer:
I’ve participated in a similar podcast myself, Hey Want To Watch A Movie?, in which a few folks watch John Carpenter’s The Thing (a remake/re-adaptation of the same story). Check it out HERE.
Posted by Jesse Willis
Confessor
By Terry Goodkind; Read by Sam Tsoutsouvas
20 CDs – 24 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: 2007
ISBN: 9781423316589
Themes: / Fantasy / Series / Magic / War
The final novel in Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series begins in near-hopeless darkness. The hero of the series, Richard Rahl is not only a slave to the black hole of evil known as the Emperor Jagang, but he’s also been stripped of his magical powers, forced to play a murderous game rigged against him, and wakes to find an unhealthily devoted fan of another team trying to stab him to death. How can he possibly get free, save his wife, his friends, and his kingdom from millions of life-hating fanatics of the Imperial Order come to burn his followers from the earth?
The answer takes some doing to get to. Between you and the final resolution lie some brilliant set pieces; epic sequences of pulse-pounding battle action (and sports action in a game best described as naked football to the death with rocks); and some of the most glaciated, pace-killing, engine-gumming dialogue ever laid out on the slab of an otherwise well-paced story. Some of the characters are interesting and likable, but lord, don’t get them talking! They blather on about the principles of a well-lived life, the course of prophesy, and the evils of mindless devotion to religion so long, you wish you could conjure a little Wizard’s Fire to shorten the book.
Completing the tale also takes a healthy dose of credulity to accept a non-magical mensch getting up after two nights without sleep to play a brutal blood-sport for hours on end and then slice his way through a million-man army before hiking to the top of a mountain to fight his way through a packed room of elite warriors. But even more so, it takes a strong stomach for clinically detailed, lavishly prolonged violence against women. Apparently, it isn’t sufficient for Jagang to be bad; he has to be over-the-top, heinously Dark-Lord evil. What should be a quick, stark characterization draws on so long, it begins to feel like a creepy fetish.
This is the only novel of the entire series I have read, and I’m certainly glad of it. It was entertaining, overall, but I can’t imagine wading through ten-thousand pages of Goodkind’s uneven prose only to get to the slightly anticlimactic climax that Confessor brings. In sum, it wasn’t bad, but it isn’t good enough to be great, and certainly not good enough to cap a dozen books in a way I would have found satisfying.
Posted by Kurt Dietz