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.
First published in the June 12, 1920 issue of Argosy, The Mad Planet was eventually to become one third of Murray Leinster’s fix-up novel The Forgotten Planet. But there were plenty of standalone republications too. It was, for instance, in the November 1926 issue of Amazing Stories – where it was published with this introduction by Hugo Gernsback:
It ran with this art (by Frank R. Paul):
Super Science and Fantastic Stories, December 1944:
Fantastic Novels Magazine, November 1948:
And now available as a LibriVox audiobook:
The Mad Planet
By Murray Leinster; Read by Roger Melin 4 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 2 Hours 46 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: April 6, 2011
|ETEXT| It is 30,000 years following dramatically changed climate conditions on earth which had let massive amounts of carbon dioxide belch from the interior of the planet into the atmosphere. Over the millenia this would have quite devastating effects on life as it had once been known. Much of the human and animal population would not survive the climate change, and indeed those few humans who did survive knew nothing of all which their predecessors had learned and built. Indeed, they knew not even of their existence. On the other hand insects and fungi would flourish over time. And so those few remaining humans were unknowingly at the very beginning of the building of a tribal society, which at the time of the story of Burl simply meant food and survival. And so it was Burl who chose to travel beyond his small tribal community in an effort to hunt for something new and different to hopefully impress Saya, the young female of his tribe to whom he felt a peculiar attraction. The Mad Planet is Burl’s adventure.
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“Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.”
I love the fedora!
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Read by Kristin Luoma
1 |MP3| – Approx. 31 Minutes [POETRY]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: 2006 For killing an albatross, the mariner and his crew are punished with drought and death. Amidst a series of supernatural events, the mariner’s life alone is spared and he repents, but he must wander the earth and tell his tale with the lesson that “all things great and small” are important.
The Fredosphere, author and performer of the fantastic song They’re Made Out of Meat, has another for us!
It’s call “Earth Girl” and you can get it from Amazon, iTunes, and a number of other outlets. It’s an a cappella pop song about a space alien who falls in love with a vacuum cleaner. Fred sang all the vocal parts.
Death Cloud
By Andrew Lane; Read by Dan Weyman
6 CDs – Approx. 7 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Published: February 2011
ISBN: 9781427211224
Themes: / Mystery / Sherlock Holmes / Bees / Evil Mastermind / YA /
It is the summer of 1868, and Sherlock Holmes is fourteen. On break from boarding school, he is staying with eccentric strangers—his uncle and aunt—in their vast house in Hampshire. When two local people die from symptoms that resemble the plague, Holmes begins to investigate what really killed them, helped by his new tutor, an American named Amyus Crowe. So begins Sherlock’s true education in detection, as he discovers the dastardly crimes of a brilliantly sinister villain of exquisitely malign intent.
I realize that I’m not the target audience for this book, but I went into it with hopes for some Sherlock Holmes-like detecting. What I found was a fairly typical YA story with lots of chases, a little bit of teenage romantic awkwardness, and the promise of a sequel.
The Sherlock Holmes-ness in the book can be found mainly in discussions between 14 year-old Sherlock and his tutor from America, Amyus Crowe. He tells Sherlock to remember even unimportant things, and to prize logic. Other allusions to his later life come near the end, when he reflects on how his life will never be the same now that he’s brushed with things he needs to put right. He thinks about Laudanum (he was knocked out with the drug earlier in the story). He’d heard of people getting hooked on the stuff, and he “had no desire to go down that route – none at all”. Also, bees play a very important role in the story, as they will late in Sherlock’s fictional life.
I’m no Sherlock Holmes expert. I haven’t read any significant Arthur Conan Doyle for probably 30 years. But this book just doesn’t feel like any Sherlock Holmes story I remember. It would be perfectly at home as a story of James Bond as a teen. Young James could encounter his first evil (and ridiculous) villain with a big evil (but ultimately ridiculous) plan and a long monologue meant to reveal the plan just before failing to kill the hero. I am pleased that some kids will pick this up and go on to pick up some of the famous Holmes stories, but I dunno. This isn’t an introduction to Sherlock Holmes.
Enough with reviewing the book I wanted. The book it is is an entertaining, light listen with some eye-rolling moments. Dan Weyman does a fantastic job with the narration. There are plenty of characters to perform, but standouts are Amyus Crowe and the evil villain, Baron Maupertuis, who is performed with enthusiasm.
The SFFaudio Podcast #102 – Scott, Jesse and Tamahome talk about new audiobook, book, and comic book releases.
Talked about on today’s show: The Infinite Worlds Of H.G. Wells, Sherlock Holmes, Memory by Donald E. Westlake, Hard Case Crime, A Good Story Is Hard To Find, nihilism, SFSignal’s 122 books that bring Scott to tears, All The Lives He Led by Frederik Pohl (a semi-nihilistic novel), Yellowstone, “half minus negative zero”, A Matter Of Time by Glen Cook, The Black Company, Abel One by Ben Bova, blood and flesh and shirtless, Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente, BoingBoing, Russian Ark, Enigmatic Plot vs. Enigmatic Pilot, Enclave (aka Razorland) by Ann Aguirre, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, The Scorch Trials, The Hunger Games, Hunt The Space Witch and Other Stories by Robert Silverberg, WWW: Wonder by Robert J. Sawyer, Starstruck, Blair Butler, “Geoff Boucher’s Los Angeles Times Hero Complex ‘Get Your Cape On’ pick of the week”, The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi, Macmillan Audio, Audible.com, Brilliance Audio, Warriors edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, Forever Bound by Joe Haldeman, Lawrence Block, O. Henry-ish, “I see no reason to buy through iTunes” (vs. Audible.com), Limitless (aka The Dark Fields) by Alan Glynn, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flowers For Algernon, Understand by Ted Chiang, acquiring a whole bag of pills, “smart people are neat”, Tantor Media, History Is Wrong by Erich von Däniken, Jesse becomes momentarily depressed, The Guns Of August by Barbara W. Tuchman, John Lee, the John Cleaver series, have world events have sped because of modern technology?, Libya, Tripoli, “The Graveyard Of Empires”, “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores Tripoli”, NPR, A History Of The World In Six Glasses by Tom Standage, beer, wine, spirits, tea, coffee, cola, the Today In Canadian History podcast, the Canadian Navy, I Don’t Want To Kill You by Dan Wells, I Am Not A Serial Killer, “normally I don’t do this”, Dexter, the Writing Excuses podcast, Homeward Bound by Harry Turtledove, alternate history, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Grover Gardner, Eric S. Rabkin, George Orwell’s 1984, Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, William Dufris, binary fission, Tantor Media is very innovative in including ebooks with their audiobooks, we need a new demarcation to desperate urban fantasy romance from SF, “conspiracy and ignorance based books”, The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds, Tales From A Thousand Nights And The Night (aka 1,001 Nights!) translated by Richard Burton, The Thousand Nights And A Night is the first fix-up novel, Nostromo by Joseph Conrad, South America, Three Men In A Boat (To Say Nothing Of The Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome, To Say Nothing Of The Dog by Connie Willis, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein, Atlantis And Other Places by Harry Turtledove, Slave To Sensation shouldn’t be a science fiction novel, Orson Scott’s Card Intergalactic Medicine Show, Rejiggering The Thingamajig by Eric James Stone on Escape Pod #277, body-swapping, I Will Fear No Evil by Robert A. Heinlein, gender-swapping, For Us The Living: A Comedy Of Customs by Robert A. Heinlein, Heinlein’s old theme: “naked people talking to each other”, Heinlein likes to examine social preconceptions and social prejudices, “not a Heinlein classic but still classic Heinlein”, Eifelheim, Luke Burrage, Idiot America by Charles P. Pierce, George Washington riding a dinosaur, The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson, contemporary with Tolkien (rather than derivative of Tolkien), Michael Moorcock, Eric Birghteyes by H. Rider Haggard, Bronson Pinchot, The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams, anthropomorphic fiction, quasi-Science Fiction, quasi-Fantasy, Coyotes In The House by Elmore Leonard |READ OUR REVIEW|, The Call Of The Wild by Jack London, We Three by Grant Morrison, Transmetropolitain, Warren Ellis, Tama’s pet peeve in comics is silent panels, Audible Frontiers, The Death Of Grass by John Christopher, The Tripods, The Sam Gunn Omnibus, The Steel Remains, Cliffs Notes are now available as audiobooks, Brave New World, The Spiral Path by Lisa Paitz Spindler, Eat Prey Love by Kerrelyn Sparks, William Coon’s Eloquent Voice titles, Andre Norton’s The Time Traders, Gilgamesh The King by Robert Silverberg |READ OUR REVIEW|, Philip K. Dick, Henry James, Anton Chekov, Paul of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth.comThe Whisperer In Wax, wax cylinder tech, Embedded by Dan Abnett, SFSignal.com.
The Mad Planet
