Dragon Page Cover To Cover staffers Joe Murphy and Summer Brooks have spun off their own podcast! The Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas Podcast specializes in discussions of classic science fiction novels. Two full shows have been released so far:
1. Hyperion by Dan Simmons – DIRECT DOWNLOAD MP3
2. Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein – DIRECT DOWNLOAD MP3
To subscribe, plug this into iTunes:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/kickassmysticninjas/
Posted by Jesse Willis
Knife of Dreams: Book Eleven of The Wheel of Time
By Robert Jordan; Narrated by Kate Reading and Michael Kramer
26 CD’s – 32 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audio Renaissance
Published: 2005
ISBN: 1593977654
Themes: / Fantasy / Epic Fantasy / Magic / Good and Evil / Demons / Dragons /
The eleventh installment in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, Knife of Dreams proves to be a fast paced and entertaining listen. This audiobook came as a welcome surprise after the last several novels in this series that tended to feel as though they were bogged down with a lot of useless detail and little action. There may be a movement forming of people supporting the cutting off of Nynaeve’s braid. Although, to be fair, she is now overly prone to “almost” yanking her plaited tresses instead of actually doing it. Other behaviors the movement may be interested in deleting from the text are the smoothing and/or arranging of skirts and shawls, sniffing, and Elaine’s new preoccupation with cursing Rand Al’Thor for her discomforts with pregnancy (after all, it takes two, right?). If these things were taken out of the text the world might be left with Wheel of Time pamphlet instead of the series.
Monotonous behaviors aside, Knife of Dreams came through in delivering resolutions to some of the subplots that have been hanging over the course of several novels. Jordan has breathed life back into his series with this book and regained the vitality of the earlier writing.
Kate Reading and Michael Kramer once again deliver fine performances reading the female and male characters respectively. This duo has narrated each book in the Wheel of Time series. The consistency in their character voices, intonations, and personality style demonstrate how well Reading and Kramer understand their characters and how familiar they are with the direction and emotional climate of the story. If you have been disillusioned with past installments of the series, give it another chance, this book is worth the time.
There’s an old fashioned radio show that may draw your interest. It currently airs on Wednesdays between 3:00pm and 5:00pm – the Philip K. Dick Show airs on KUCI 88.9FM which is the University Of California Irvine’s radio station. Host “djzj” plays music and reads from Philip K. Dick’s work. The show is available only in the streaming audio format for folks who live outside of the UC Irvine area.
“djzj” says this about the show:
“i’m a big fan of pkd and tend to string out a kind of dickian world on the show…i like to think of myself along the lines of the dj in dr. bloodmoney, a pkd book about a post apocalyptic world… i have a co-host ‘baby dragon’ who reads select passages from the pkd opus. i start and end the show with vangelis ‘blade runner’ soundtrack. one of the main things about the show is to promote local bands, socal and so-on. i also talk about things like…was jesus an android? we live in a horror movie…alien rabbits,and anything that randfomaly pops into our heads, i sometimes will air excerpts of pkd himself talking, gleaned from the pkd website…”
Sounds cool!
James Patrick Kelly, Hugo Award Winning Science Fiction author and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine columnist, has started to podcast his new novel entiled Burn!
“On a distant planet in the far future, the last remaining true humans have come together to form a Utopia based on the principles of Walden. The post-human population resists human encroachment by setting fire to their terraformed forests.”
You can download directly from the Free Reads Podcast page or subscribe FOR FREE by plugging this into iTunes:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/freereads
Way to go Jim!
Posted by Jesse Willis
I-SCI-FI, an excellent internet science fiction talk show, has recently posted two podcast interviews – one of Brian Herbert, co-author of the Dune novels, and one of Alan Lee, a conceptual designer for The Lord of the Rings films. Check it out!
Posted by Scott D. Danielson
The Dark Worlds Of H.P. Lovecraft Volume 1: The Dunwich Horror and The Call Of Cthulhu
By H.P. Lovecraft; Read by Wayne June
3 CDs – Approx 3.5 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audio Realms
Published: 2005
Themes: / Fantasy / Horror / Gods / Evil / Mathematics / Dreams /
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
When Fantasy is inspired by science it can be especially powerful. H.P. Lovecraft built his mythos using the scientific concepts of his day. There could have been sensible talk of ‘other dimensions’ before the experiments surrounding the nature of light. And much of the alienness of his creations explicitly depend on such concepts in theoretical physics as non-euclidian geometry. With these concepts being in the air Lovecraft set out to plant a seed of churning fear with his fiction – turning the many unknowns science was uncovering into unspeakable horrors that lurk within the imagination. Combine this with Lovecraft’s dense and brooding prose and you’ve got something that no modern author could get away with. No modern author could, Lovecraft does. Audio Realms is starting to release the titles that make any classic fantasy fan salivate. Here in this terrific audiobook are two tales of horror that we declare to be SFFaudio Essential:
The Dunwich Horror is the tale of a backwater New England town with a devolving populace and one particularly strange family’s chronicle. It starts with two small things. The cataloguing of some mouldering old books and a disturbing birth of a new resident. These events are the begining of a new danger for the hamlet of Dunwich and possibly the Earth entire. What’s interesting here, as with so many early horror tales, is that Lovecraft creates evil not by revealing action directly but by atmosphere and appeal to our primitive revulsion reflex. Lovecraftian evil is not something created by moral degeneracy (though he does talk of that), but rather by sheer alieness, an atmosphere of ignorance and most of all a lurking dread.
I’m not sure it would make much sense to be an apologist for the Elder Gods who’d consume us without a thought – but what exactly makes them so evil? Since everyone who finds out has their sanity blasted we’re not likely to find out very soon.
The Call Of Cthulhu is a reconstructed tale. A nephew finds in the his recently deceased uncle’s study some strange documents. A young nephew discovers in his recently deceased uncle’s study some correspondences and notes, along with a mysterious and disturbing statue. It seems that several mysteriously similar cults worship of a being, who they call Cthulhu. A sea voyage eventually yielded a brush with an unearthly force. I won’t reveal any more of the plot, but I will say this, I think Philip K. Dick may have been inspired by this story for his novel Galactic Pot Healer. This creepy tale is perhaps the definitive Lovecraftian work. They even named a great role playing game after it. One suggestion, this one is pretty scary, you may want to wear brown pants while listening.
Narrator Wayne June’s voice will give you the absolute lurking creeps. His deep raspy voice is also used to good effect for all the narration, when he is infrequently called upon to do the voices of the damned he distinguishes between them well. This is the best Lovecraft adaptation to audio I’ve heard and more frightening than hell. For full effect a listener should turn down the lights, put on a good set of headphones, sit in a lonesome room with a view of the sea and pray that Lovecraft was just making all this stuff up.
Posted by Jesse Willis