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 latest episode of The Signal podcast contains an interview with Andrew Dorfman and Jack Ward from Firefly: Old Wounds. Hosts Les and Kari talked to Andrew and Jack about the creation of the audio drama for nearly 90 minutes! You can download the episode HERE. Or to subscribe to The Signal Podcast plug this feed into your podcatcher:
http://signal.serenityfirefly.com/podcast.xml
The story this week over on Escape Pod, the preeminent podcast SF magazine, is Barnaby In Exile by Mike Resnick. Bring a hanky to this one. The story is reminiscent, and from my POV clearly in dialogue with, Pat Murphy‘s classic Rachel In Love. Both are powerful anthropomorphic visions of apes in tough emotional spots. If you like Barnaby In Exile Robert J. Saywer reccommends also reading Robert Silverberg‘s Pope Of The Chimps.
EP073: Barnaby in Exile
By Mike Resnick; Read by Paul Fischer
1 MP3 File – [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Escape Pod
Podcast: September 28th 2006
BBC7’s the 7th Dimension will be re-airing a truly AWESOME unabridged reading of Ted Chiang‘s novelette Understand.
This story has been broadcast on BBC Radio 7 previously and it blew my mind when I first heard it! This sort of unabridged reading is what makes me so attuned to what The 7th Dimension is up to. If you listen to no other BBC Radio production this year listen to this one!
Here’s a teaser: Leon is a former coma victim, who has gone experimental medical treatment to repair the massive trauma his brain recieved after he was trapped under ice for more than an hour. He’s regained consciousness, found he has all of his faculties back and a whole lot more. In the tradition of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers For Algernon. It was originally published in “Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine” in 1991.
Understand
By Ted Chiang; Read by Rashan Stone
4 half-hour segments – Approx. 2 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
BROADCASTER: BBC Radio 7
AIRING: Saturdays for four weeks @ 6pm (repeats 12am) UK Time
This will be available via the Listen Again service shortly after it airs.
Joe Mahoney, CBC Radio Producer, Science Fiction writer and blogger appears as a character in Robert J. Sawyer‘s latest novel, Rollback which is being serialized in Analog Science Fiction Magazine. Joe writes:
“Rob mentions my name on pg 107 as the sound engineer in charge of Sounds Like Canada… Don Halifax stands behind me at the controls as his wife is being interviewed. Now that’s really cool. I should point out that the current, real life engineer of Sounds Like Canada is Natasha Aziz. But the interview in Rob’s novel takes place in 2009, so it’s not completely inconceivable that I could engineer the show sometime in 2009. (I used to engineer Sounds Like Canada’s predecessor Morningside from time to time.) Rob also mentions the show Faster Than Light that we attempted to develop a while back for CBC Radio.”
Cool!
Parable of the Sower
By Octavia E. Butler; Read by Lynne Thigpen
10 CDs – 12 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Recorded Books
Published: 2000
ISBN: 0788747606
Themes: / Science Fiction / Dystopia / Survival / Religion /
Occasionally in science fiction there comes a novel that should be considered important not only inside the genre, but in all of literature. Like 1984 by George Orwell. Or Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Or like nearly everything Octavia Butler ever wrote, including this novel.
Parable of the Sower is a novel consisting of the diary entries of the main character, a teen named Lauren. She lives and writes in 2020’s United States of America, in the Los Angeles area. Butler imagines a lawless future America where everyone is on their own. Lauren lives in a cul-de-sac with a wall around it – her family and several others haved pooled together. Murders are commonplace, as is theft, and people struggle to survive while the world moves on. Lauren comments on the death of an astronaut on Mars, the election of a new president, as well as her ever-changing day-to-day life.
Complicating things is the fact that Lauren is a hyper-empath. If she sees someone get hurt, she feels that pain as if it was happening to her. An extremely uncomfortable thing to be, when pain exists all around her.
Out of all of this, she creates a new religion, called Earthseed, which springs forth from the beliefs formed by her life’s circumstances. She isn’t inventing it, as she says more than once – no, she’s discovering it. In a world in which the only surety is change, she discovers God. And God, she figures, is change itself.
Lynne Thigpen is flawless in her narration of this book. She did a wonderful job speaking as if the world in which Lauren moved was normal. Her emphasis and emotion perfectly fit the character. The result was an audiobook that I’m better off for having heard.
Posted by Scott D. Danielson
Our UK correspondent codenamed “Roy” writes:
“Just spotted an item in the latest Radio Times that might be of interest to at least a section of the SFFAudio audience…….
Star Trek At 40 – Where No-One Has Gone Before
Broadcaster: BBC Radio 2
Broadcast: Tuesday October 3rd – 20:30-21:30
Roy sez: “I don’t suppose this will be the only Star Trek anniversary documentary and it remains to be seen if this will have any unique insights, but I for one will be tuned in. It will likely be available via ‘listen again‘ for a week or so, but archiving of R2 is not perhaps as comprehensive as other BBC stations.”
And over on Radio 4:
Tomorrow, Today!
Broadcaster: BBC Radio 4
Broadcast: Friday October 6th – 11:30-12:00
A new four part comedy series, a spoof on life in the BBC’s Light Entertainment Unit: A BBC Producer in 1961 struggles to make a radio soap set in the unimaginably futuristic world of 2006.
Roy sez: “Much of the BBC’s radio comedy output has been poorly received by both critics & listeners over the last few years so I wouldn’t hold my breath for anything on the scale of Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, but the cast looks pretty high-powered (Peter Bowles, Cheryl Campbell and John Fortune amongst other British stalwarts) so I live in hope.”
We do to. Thanks Roy!