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.
The Pirates Own Book is a new LibriVox audiobook (originally published in 1837) that I’m not hesitant to recommend despite it being read by multiple narrators. It’s a non-fiction collection of short biographies of REAL LIFE pirates! I haven’t heard all of the different sections yet, but I do recommend you try it out.
Incidentally, one LibriVox narrator who I’m growing fond of is Barry Eads. Eads has a clean mic setup and he enunciates very well. Here is his section (#2) on the subject of “The Danish and Norman Pirates” |MP3|. And here’s the rest…
The Pirates Own Book
By Charles Ellms; Read by various 30 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 13 Hours 21 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: October 22, 2009 Authentic Narratives of the Most Celebrated Sea Robbers.
I first experienced Alessandro Cima’s narrative abilities back in 2005. Back then podcasting was barely a toddler – still wobbly legged, with novel length podcasts being few an far between. Cima was reading his own young adult Pirate Jack.Here’s the “Pirate Jack” pitch:
Young Jack Spencer sees his father’s boat-building business destroyed by a powerful land developer. Then Jack unearths three ancient scrolls that propel him on a dangerous adventure through time in search of a pirate treasure. When Jack finds himself aboard the pirate ship Revenge he enters a life or death world of ship battles, jungle islands, prison escapes, gold, and treachery.
It was and is a compelling pirate adventure story (with some fantastic elements). If you’ haven’t heard it you can check it out through the same podcast feed as his latest project. He’s about a third of the way through this novel…
A Princess Of Mars
By Edgar Rice Burroughs; Read by Alessandro Cima
Podcast – [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Candlelight Stories
Podcast: 2009 This is the first John Carter of Mars novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of the Tarzan books. It was his first novel, published in 1917 and it’s a work of rip-roaring science fiction that has inspired many of the great writers in the genre. The story concerns soldier John Carter who is mysteriously transported to the red planet where he fights to protect his princess against impossible odds and many peculiar creatures. The book is very much a product of its time, with outdated ideas about the red planet and outdated social ideas. But if you can just go along for the adventurous ride, you are in for a sci-fi space opera swashbuckling treat.
The Adventures of Sexton Blake
Based on the character created by Harry Blyth; Performed by a full cast
2 CDs or MP3 Download – Approx. 2 Hours [RADIO DRAMA]
Publisher: BBC Audiobooks / Perfectly Normal Productions
Published: September 2009
ISBN: 1408410540
Themes: / Mystery / Adventure / Crime / Steampunk / Airships / London / Exmouth / Willesden /
Britain’s iconic and most prolifically chronicled sleuth explodes back into action in a brand new series of thrilling Adventures packed with incident and hilarity!
Back in 2006 we had a story about the new co-venture between Perfectly Normal productions and BBC Audiobooks. Audio drama legend Dirk Maggs was set to revive several “cult British comic characters.” This is the first of these. I hope there will be MANY MORE!
Sexton Blake, a renowned Baker Street detective, and his youthful assistant Tinker regularly face peril with deceptive disguises and flying fists. In between investigations they return to their Baker Street rooming house for endless lashings of tea and heaping plates of kippers. Their landlady, Mrs. Bardell, makes the food, debriefs the great detective, and commiserates with her neighbor, Mrs. H. (she’s also a landlady to another famous Baker street detective). The story begins aboard a runaway locomotive at the tail end of a kind of locked room mystery – after a few shootings by the various suspicious characters and a brief detour into the dining car’s wine cellar, the villain is revealed -only to escape by auto-gyro. When Blake returns to his Baker street residence he’s soon embroiled in a new investigation brought on by the arrival of a beautiful American actress. The investigation is both serpentine and ingenious, and it leads directly into the next – one in which an incredibly capable and amnesic woman saves Blake and Tinker from a false charge of burglary. Their investigation into her curious abilities and former profession lead Blake and Tinker into a house of deathtraps (or is that a deathtrap house). The action finally culminates in a thrilling saber duel atop a Zeppelin! At the beginning of each new episode there’s a mini-scene from an unrelated Sexton Blake adventure – each depicting Blake defeating either a rapscallious villain or a villainous rapscallion.
The Adventures Of Sexton Blake is jam packed with as much rib-tickling raillery as The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. The script is unbelievably clever and funny. It features a kind of endless stream-of-consciousness wordplay that clearly follows in the tradition of Douglas Adams, Monty Python, and The Goon Show. What sets it apart from it’s forebearers is a strict adherence to the medium. The only possible way to tell this tale is as an audio drama. Perhaps the most amazing aspect is vaguely amazing feeling I got while listening to it. There’s this kind of general consensus by all the characters to LARP their way through the adventure. No one character has the final word on anything, and every character in the scene is constantly throwing new nuance on the mental pictures being created in the listener. It’s not so much a mystery you can solve by following the clues, it’s more of an adventure you can ride with a flashing smirk.
These adventures are brilliantly envisioned by a terrific combination of skilled comedic acting, an engaging theme song and thousands of layered sound effects. I’m betting the script was at least twice as thick, per minute, as a typical (or ordinary, or normal) one. The outstanding cast and crew has made The Adventures Of Sexton Blake a play that can stand shoulder to shoulder, chin to chin, and eye to eye, with the finest audio dramatizations ever produced – and not feel even the slightest weak in the knees. This is very highly recommended listening!
Crew:
Written by Mil Millington and Jonathan Nash; Directed by Dirk Maggs
Sound Design and Music by Paul Weir
Produced by David Morley
Cast:
Simon Jones ….. Sexton Blake, Adventuring Detective
Wayne Forester …. Tinker, his Plucky Assistant
June Whitfield …. Mrs Bardell, their Doughty Housekeeper
Graham Hoadly …. Professor Kew, a Spindly Cackler
Lorelei King …. Miss Elizabeth Mary-Louise Tarabelle Beauchamp
Simon Treves …. Inspector Coutts Of Scotland Yard
Felicity Duncan …. Miss Terry, Window-Leaping Adventuress
Susan Sheridan …. Mrs Hudson, Housekeeper To A Neighbouring Detective
Malcolm Brown …. Count Ivor Carlac, a Villainous Juggernaut
Philip Glassborow …. Cyril, A Grim Assassin
Oscar Sharp …. The Frantic Caller
William Franklyn …. The Mysterious Waiter
Available over on RadioArchive.cc is an audiobook that my friend Bill Hollweg recommends. Sez Bill:
“Ghost Galaxies [is] one of my fave short tales. A fantastic short story [that] I have in an Asimov magazine or one of those digests I got from the library and have loved it since I read it a few months back – just found the audio and thought I would share.”
Thanks Bill! I’m torrenting it now. It looks like a winner!
The Ghost Galaxies
By Piers Anthony; Read by Stephen Hogan
2 Broadcasts – Approx. 1 Hour [UNABRIDGED?]
Broadcaster: BBC Radio 7
Broadcast: 2007, 2008, 2009 What happens to a galaxy when it dies? A spaceship faces an unknown future, hurtling towards the rim of the universe. First published in Worlds Of IF September 1966. This novelette was later expanded into the novel Ghosts.
Were you intrigued by my Howard Pyle post from the other day but still not quite ready to commit to nearly 7 hours of listening? If the answer was yes then why not try this…
Otto Of The Silver Hand by Howard Pyle, an 1888 novellette published three years prior to Men Of Iron. Unlike the latter this story is set in Germany, sometime in the late Dark Ages, and features a far more villainous father figure. There’s also a different focus, namely the apparent disparity between the cruelty of the era vs. the rise of chivalry. This makes a nice contrast: Just think, the sedate manors of the modern landed gentry are merely the millennial old skeletons of their ancestors, the wicked robber barons and their deadly feuds. Christianity and gentlemanlyness is all well and good, but dark times call for dark manners eh?
Here’s a quick plot hook: Our hero, Otto, after being born is quickly shuffled off to monastery for some early childhood education. When Otto reaches eleven years of age his father returns to claim him from the monastery and take him back to live in their ancestral castle “Drachenhausen” (which my one semester of German tells me literally means “Dragon House”). It is then that Otto learns of his father’s life as a thief and robber and particularly how his father killed a defenseless enemy. Needless to say the sin of the father comes back to hurt poor young Otto. The trauma is great, but survivable – and that alone is a very neat message. There’s also the requisite romance so this short audiobook has something for everybody.
Otto Of The Silver Hand
By Howard Pyle; Read by various 15 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 3 Hours 3 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: March 30, 2007 The story of little Otto, a gentle, peace-loving child born into the heart of turmoil and strife in the castle of a feuding robber baron in medieval Germany.
Men of Iron is an 1891 book by the American author Ernie Howard Pyle. It is juvenile novel in which the author has the reader experience the medieval entry into knighthood through the eyes of a young squire, Myles Falworth. It was adapted into a film in 1954 using the title The Black Shield Of Falworth. The film featured the then real life married team of a very buxom Janet Leigh and a young beducktailed Tony Curtis (doing a fine Errol Flynn impression). The film also has some terrific fight scenes including maybe the best axe vs. shield brawling ever put on film. This LibriVox version of the novel, despite being a multi-narrator volume, is still highly listenable.
One curiosity though is how the language seems particularly homo-erotic. Take these passages from Chapter 5:
From this overlordship of the bachelors there had gradually risen a system of fagging, such as is or was practised in the great English public schools—enforced services exacted from the younger lads—which at the time Myles came to Devlen had, in the five or six years it had been in practice, grown to be an absolute though unwritten law of the body—a law supported by all the prestige of long-continued usage. At that time the bachelors numbered but thirteen, yet they exercised over the rest of the sixty-four squires and pages a rule of iron, and were taskmasters, hard, exacting, and oftentimes cruel.
and
Then a sudden thought came to Myles, and as it came his cheeks glowed as hot as fire “Master Gascoyne,” said he, with gruff awkwardness, “thou hast been a very good, true friend to me since I have come to this place, and hast befriended me in all ways thou mightest do, and I, as well I know, but a poor rustic clod. Now I have forty shillings by me which I may spend as I list, and so I do beseech thee that thou wilt take yon dagger of me as a love-gift, and have and hold it for thy very own.”
Gascoyne stared open-mouthed at Myles. “Dost mean it?” said he, at last.
“Aye,” said Myles, “I do mean it. Master Smith, give him the blade.”
At first the smith grinned, thinking it all a jest; but he soon saw that Myles was serious enough, and when the seventeen shillings were produced and counted down upon the anvil, he took off his cap and made Myles a low bow as he swept them into his pouch. “Now, by my faith and troth,” quoth he, “that I do call a true lordly gift. Is it not so, Master Gascoyne?”
“Aye,” said Gascoyne, with a gulp, “it is, in soothly earnest.” And thereupon, to Myles’s great wonderment, he suddenly flung his arms about his neck, and, giving him a great hug, kissed him upon the cheek. “Dear Myles,” said he, “I tell thee truly and of a verity I did feel warm towards thee from the very first time I saw thee sitting like a poor oaf upon the bench up yonder in the anteroom, and now of a sooth I give thee assurance that I do love thee as my own brother. Yea, I will take the dagger, and will stand by thee as a true friend from this time forth. Mayhap thou mayst need a true friend in this place ere thou livest long with us, for some of us esquires be soothly rough, and knocks are more plenty here than broad pennies, so that one new come is like to have a hard time gaining a footing.”
“I thank thee,” said Myles, “for thy offer of love and friendship, and do tell thee, upon my part, that I also of all the world would like best to have thee for my friend.”
Such was the manner In which Myles formed the first great friendship of his life, a friendship that was destined to last him through many years to come. As the two walked back across the great quadrangle, upon which fronted the main buildings of the castle, their arms were wound across one another’s shoulders, after the manner, as a certain great writer says, of boys and lovers.
The problem with assuming there is some homo-erotic subtext, seems to me a problem of false positives. They’re easy to spot, and once spotted harder to shake than a case of the yawns. A nudge is as good as a wink to a blind bat. Not that this book is in any way boring, it’s actually quite rollicking and definitely worth checking out!
Men Of Iron
By Howard Pyle; Read by various 35 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 6 Hours 55 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibiVox.org
Published: March 14, 2008 Men of Iron by Howard Pyle is historical fiction that transports us back to the 1400’s, a time of knighthood and chivalry. Myles Falworth is eight years old when news comes they must flee their home. His blind father is accused of treason. We see Myles grow up, train as a knight, and with perseverance, clear his father of any wrong-doing and restore their family name.
The Pirates Own Book is a new LibriVox audiobook (originally published in 1837) that I’m not hesitant to recommend despite it being read by multiple narrators. It’s a non-fiction collection of short biographies of REAL LIFE pirates! I haven’t heard all of the different sections yet, but I do recommend you try it out.
The Pirates Own Book
The Adventures of Sexton Blake
