2006 starts with some fine titles: Anne Manx on A…

SFFAudio Header New Releases

2006 starts with some fine titles:

Anne Manx on Amazonia, audio drama from Radio Repertory Company of America, starring Claudia Christian, Pat Tallman, and Barbara Harris
This audio drama is excellent entertainment – a comic book for your ears!

Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries by Jeffrey A. Carver, read by Jonathan Davis, Audio Renaissance, Abridged
In the tradition of Star Trek and Star Wars audiobooks, here’s the first audiobook from the best current show on television.

The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein, read by Patrick Lawlor, Blackstone Audio, Unabridged
Click here to listen to a sample.
Another classic Heinlein novel from Blackstone Audio!

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Quandary Phase by Douglas Adams, performed by BBC Radio, Audio Partners
The penultimate Hitchhiker’s radio show.

H.P. Lovecraft Collection – Volume 3 by H.P. Lovecraft, Audio Realms
More Lovecraft from Audio Realms! This one contains “The Horror at Red Hook”, “The Statement of Randolph Carter”, “The Outsider”, and “Herbert West Reanimator”. The first Lovecraft collection from Audio Realms landed on our SFFaudio Essential List.

The Incredible Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson, read by Yuri Rasovsky, Blackstone Audio, Unabridged
Click here to listen to a sample.
A classic novel by Richard Matheson read by the mighty Yuri Rasovsky.

The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock, Audio Realms
The second of the original Elric saga from Audio Realms. If quality is half of the first one (Click here for the SFFaudio review of Elric of Melnibone) then this is a must-have.

Star Wars: The Dark Nest III: The Swarm War by Troy Denning, read by Jonathan Davis, Random House Audio, Abridged
The latest in the long-running Star Wars audio series.

Tales of Terror by Edgar Allan Poe, read by various readers, Blackstone Audio, Unabridged
Click here to listen to a sample.
Contains some of Poe’s greats – “The Tell Tale Heart”, “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, and others.

Review of A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin

Fantasy Audiobook Review

Fantasy Audiobook - A Feast for Crows by George R.R. MartinA Feast for Crows
By George R.R. Martin; Read by John Lee
26 CDs – Approx. 31 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: 2005
ISBN: 0739308742
Themes: / Fantasy / Epic Fantasy / Medieval setting / Power Struggle / Dragons /

There’s a long story behind A Feast for Crows, but I’ll make it short. George R.R. Martin, while writing the fourth installment of the superior A Song of Ice and Fire epic fantasy series, found it was getting too long. Long enough, in fact, that if he published it as-was, it would need to be broken up into two volumes. So, rather than break the book into two pieces at the middle, he split the book by character, including the complete story of select characters in one volume, leaving the rest of the characters to appear in the next volume. A Feast for Crows, then, is the fourth book, and a new fifth book (A Dance with Dragons) will be published relatively soon. This novel is a bit shorter than the previous volumes, but still clocks in at 31 hours on unabridged audio.

Roy Dotrice read the first three volumes in the series, but this time British actor John Lee narrated. I’m not sure why the change was made; the narrators were very different. While Dotrice has a rough, earthy delivery, Lee’s style is smooth and skilled. Both narrators succeed with Martin’s story, because with such a large number of characters, ranging from royalty to peasants, each found places to shine.

The myriad of characters brings me to my next point. This is the first of these large novels that I’ve heard before I read. Some listeners have complained that the novels are difficult to follow on audio because there are so many entrances, but I didn’t feel that way until now. With this novel, I found that the portions of the book that involved characters I didn’t know from previous books were indeed difficult to follow. When a character I knew arrived on the scene, I was fully engaged with the story.

There is a very simple remedy to this. There are acres of real estate on the packaging for large audiobooks. Why not include a Cast of Characters (Dramatis Personae)? Why not include the maps from the print version? Both of these items would have been welcome.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I am a huge fan of Martin’s, and especially this series. I felt that this one started a bit slowly, but ended with a bang. I reveled in being in Westeros again. Many of the characters I like were not included in this novel, which both disappointed me and heightened my anticipation for the next volume. A Feast for Crows delivers much – I was riveted to the last third of this audiobook – but I can’t help to feel that it is incomplete, because of the missing characters and because it is the middle of a long wonderful saga that I am patiently waiting to see through.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

BBC Radio 4: Documentary on Philip K. Dick

News

BBC Radio 4BBC Radio 4 will be airing a half-hour documentary on the transcendant experience near the end of Philip K. Dick‘s life. It’s called “Confessions of a Crap Artist” but the documentary’s title probably isn’t specifically about the PKD novel of the same name.

Here’s the BBC Radio 4 blurb:

“Philip K. Dick is now world famous, thanks to films like Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report. But in the last years of his life he encountered something so strange and troubling he couldn’t stop writing about it. Writer Ken Hollings asks: Was it Phil’s fault God talked to him or was it God’s?”

It airs Monday 16th January 2006 bewtween 20:30-21:00 in the UK. You can use the PublicRadioFan.com website, mentioned below, to calculate when that will be for you. Another option may be is the “Listen Again” feature on the BBC4 website.

UPDATE! …. HERE‘s a link to the listen again feature for the documentary.

posted by Jesse Willis

Though podcasting is cutting into traditional br…

Online Audio

Though podcasting is cutting into traditional broadcast radio’s audience the “tower and power” broadcasters still have a lot of great content that isn’t yet podcast. The problem is it’s not easily accessible if you are in a different time zone – in fact, unless you just happen to be listening to your chosen streaming radio station when something airs the whole prospect of figuring out when a program is going to anoyying to bother with. That said, here’s a tip, there’s an ingeniously designed website called PublicRadioFan.com which will certainly help. It features a complete database of public radio stations worldwide and it enables visitors to organize the stations’ streaming audio by program type, language, time zone and much more. This quick filtering and the ability to synchonize your time zone allows you to more easily see when a program will air on the internet stream. As an example, I can with a few clicks and filters bring up all the streams for listening to BBC7’s 7th Dimension program as it airs. I’d prefer to have the shows automatically downloaded to my iPod, but that just isn’t an option. Until it is, check out PublicRadioFan you’ll be amazed by how much content is out there streaming.

Rob Walsch the host of Podcast411, the premier p…

SFFaudio Online Audio

Rob Walsch the host of Podcast411, the premier podcast that interviews podcasters, has just interviewed Evo Terra of Podibooks.com. HERE‘s a direct link to the MP3.