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.
Nathaniel Tapley, of the In The Gloaming podcast, subtitled “Creepy Tales of Now” sez:
We’ve just started making a new monthly horror-comedy podcast that might be of interest to you and your readers. Called In The Gloaming it features some of Britain’s most exciting young comics in creepy tales of now…
The first episode, Dead Skinny, is out now. Have a listen |MP3| or get it via the podcast feed:
So I listened to the first episode, it features some very silly (but very funny) jokes in the intro and lots of laugh-out-loud ridiculousness in the story proper. It’s very dark humour, dark and very funny. It’s actually quite creepy how much laughing I did. Body dysmorphic disorder probably shouldn’t be this funny. I’m going to subscribe.
Our friend Mister Ron (of the Mister Ron’s Basement podcast) was recently written about for a 700 word newspaper article in The Washington Post!
The story, by columnist John Kelly, is titled A new voice for the humorists buried deep in the newspaper bin. In it we get a real picture of what Mister Ron is doing with his long running podcast (he’s podcast a stunning 1,500 episodes so far), a real sense of the connectedness modern newspaper journalists feel for their centenary predecessors, and what Mr. Ron’s basement actually looks like (it’s full of books, comics and newspapers).
Here’s the start:
“In the basement of his Woodbridge home — surrounded by comic books and paperbacks, crumbling hardbacks and yellowing newspapers — Ron Evry is conjuring up a vanished world.
It’s a world of patent medicine-hustling mountebanks and pushy insurance salesmen, of clueless wives and blustering bosses, of penny farthing bicycles and steam trains and celluloid collars and mistaken identities and close scrapes and comically ill-planned get-rich-quick schemes.
It’s a world that you would have recognized instantly if you had been reading a newspaper a century or more ago.
Back then, just about every U.S. newspaper published short, humorous stories, brief bits of fiction set amongst the shipping news and the ads for liver pills. Mark Twain and O Henry did that sort of thing better than anybody, but plenty of other writers did it, too: Stanley Huntley, Fanny Fern, Ellis Parker Butler, Stephen Leacock…”
To read the rest of the article go |HERE|, to hear what happened when Mister Ron’s visited our podcast, check out The SFFaudio Podcast #013 |MP3|.
“Since July I’ve been plumbing the depths of Pseudopod’s backlog and now I’m sad to say I’ve listened to everything they’ve offered to date. Now I only get one new Pseudopod a week like the rest of the world (released every Friday). But now that I’ve listened to all of Pseudopod’s offerings, I feel qualified to make a list of the Best of Pseudopod, my top ten favorite stories that have been posted to the site (and a few that ALMOST made the list).”
And here are the top 10 picks:
1. Deep Red
By Floris M. Kleijne; Read by Ben Phillips
1 |MP3| – Approx. 20 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Pseudopod
Podcast: November 21st, 2008
2. Suicide Notes By An Alien Mind
By Ferrett Steinmetz; Read by Phil Rossi
1 |MP3| – Approx. 34 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Pseudopod
Podcast: October 2nd, 2009
4. Come To My Arms, My Beamish Boy
By Douglas F. Warrick; Read by Phil Rossi
1 |MP3| – Approx. 32 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Pseudopod
Podcast: April 17th, 2009
5. The Button Bin
By Mike Allen; Read by Wilson Fowlie
1 |MP3| – Approx. 42 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Pseudopod
Podcast: June 12th, 2009
The August 20th 2009 episode of Hi-Sci-Fi (a podcast radio show out of CJSF 90.1FM in Burnaby, British Columbia) features a very interesting interview with the author of The Unselfish Gene Sez host Irma Arkus:
“This week we have one of my new favorite authors, Robert Burns, who not only has the touch for the undead, but writes most beautiful adventure sci-fi pulp I’ve read in a long, long time. And together with Burns, we bring you his new novel, The Unselfish Gene.
The premise of the novel is genuinely un-boring: colonists on moon are the last of humans as we know it, because the rest of the Earth’s populous has been affected by a Zombie virus.
But that is only where the fun starts, as moon colonists seem to suffer from endless complications and health issues of their own: they are not the best choice for human propagation due to long-term radiation exposure, and mental illnesses, including clinical depression, are quite common.
Worst of all, they are the only and best candidates for survival of humanity, because they have the runaway vehicle: Anita, an Orion-like ship, propelled by nuclear-bombs, is a way out, as Earth also faces a run-in with a comet.
The premise of the novel simply spells disaster, which is AWESOME.”
In the interview Irma gushes over the cool illustrations.
The interview proper starts at about 22 minutes in |MP3|.
The SFFaudio Podcast #041 – Jesse and Scott are joined by SF author Robert J. Sawyer to talk about his audiobooks, writing Science Fiction novels, and the TV show based on his novel FlashForward.
Robyn Lass, the editor of GeekBlips.com asked me to contribute to a “blogger opinion” article, kind of a mind meld like post (of the kind SFSignal.com regularly does). Here’s the question she asked:
“If you could have the ability/gadgetry of your favorite science fiction TV or Movie character and join them – in their world – on one of their adventures, who would it be and why?”
Yeah. So, I wasn’t sure I could answer the question. Join their adventures? That’s not me exactly. But, there was something there. I thought about it for a few hours. Then, I finally wrote this:
A few years ago there was a pirate broadcast called Prisoners Of Gravity that would regularly interrupt a lame TV Ontario nature show called Second Nature. Lasting just under a half hour, it was hosted by a crazy Canadian who had strapped a rocket to the roof of his Camaro, launched himself into space and then crashed into an orbiting satellite. From there, in his high castle, Commander Rick (aka Rick Green) lived, surrounded by the things he’d brought with him: computers, comics and lots of paperback books.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, a shadowy crew of SF fans would rove the bookstores and Science Fiction conventions recording interviews with the creators of SF and Fantasy. They’d take the interviews with writers like Robert J. Sawyer, Alan Moore, Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman and Garth Ennis, and upload them all to Commander Rick in the satellite. From there Rick would record these interviews onto audio cassettes and keep them for use in his live broadcasts. He would also make use of the telephone and satellite video feeds that he had access to in order to record live interviews with his guests during the show. The programs were compiled and broadcast with the help of a mute, but highly intelligent, computer named NanCy. Topics discussed were different every episode,with individual shows on censorship, superheroes, humor, religion, fairy tales, Mars, cyberpunk, war, overpopulation, sex and much, much more.
The series aired 139 episodes over a five years mission – it is rumored that Commander Rick died (having perhaps run out of food) – but it is also rumored that he returned to earth – since then NanCY has managed just a very few transmissions in the form of reruns. There was no better news magazine program that explored SF, Fantasy, Horror and comics and their various themes and ideas.
I’ve been thinking it would be really great to strap a few solid rocket boosters to the roof of my own car and do my own show. In the meantime I’ve been bidding on ebay for used spacesuits. One day I may win one.
You can see the original article |HERE|. You’ll find a few other peoples’ answers too.
Nathaniel Tapley, of the In The Gloaming podcast, subtitled “Creepy Tales of Now” sez: 
