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.
In an upcoming SFFaudio Podcast you’ll hear of my discovery source for these three SECRET (poorly publicized) HARD CASE CRIME audiobooks. I’m very excited about these books coming to audio.
Nominated for the Edgar and Shamus awards (in the BEST FIRST NOVEL category)…
HCC-004:
Little Girl Lost: A John Blake Mystery
By Richard Aleas (aka Charles Ardai); Read by L.J. Ganser Audible Download – Approx. 6 Hours 36 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible, Inc.
Published: April 13, 2010 John Blake and Miranda Sugarman dated in high school, but after graduation they went their separate ways: he stayed in New York City and became a private investigator, while she moved to the midwest and settled down to a safe, respectable life as an eye doctor. Or so he thought – until the day, 10 years later, when he opened the Daily News and saw Miranda’s photo staring out at him under the headline “STRIPPER MURDERED.” John wants to find out how Miranda ended up stripping for a living. What happened to Miranda’s college roommate, Jocelyn, who also dropped out when Miranda did? And just how was Miranda involved with small-time drug dealer Murco Khachadurian? The closer John gets to the answers, the more dangerous and violent the case becomes, until a bloody assault on someone close to him leads John to a shocking discovery and a shattering face-off with the person responsible.
Winner of the SHAMUS AWARD (for BEST PAPERBACK NOVEL of 2007)…
HCC-033:
Songs of Innocence: A John Blake Mystery
By Richard Aleas (aka Charles Ardai); Read by L.J. Ganser Audible Download – Approx. 7 Hours 34 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible, Inc.
Published: April 13, 2010 While investigating the apparent suicide of a beautiful college student with a double life, detective John Blake finds his own life in danger when he makes a startling discovery that could blow the lid off New York City’s sex trade.
Nominated for the EDGAR ALLAN POE award (in the category BEST PAPERBACK NOVEL OF THE YEAR)…
HCC-040:
Money Shot
By Christa Faust; Read by Susie Bright Audible Download – Approx. 6 Hours 47 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Ltd
Published: August 7, 2010 They thought she’d be easy. They thought wrong. It all began with the phone call asking former porn star Angel Dare to do one more movie. Before she knew it, she’d been shot and left for dead in the trunk of a car. But Angel is a survivor. And that means she’ll get to the bottom of what’s been done to her, even if she has to leave a trail of bodies along the way….
The story: In the far future when Thousandth Night is set in, humankind has advanced to the point where almost anything is possible: living for hundreds of thousands of years, travelling across the galaxy, and transforming the structure of the human body to almost any form. One thing that is not possible is breaking the laws of physics by travelling or communicating faster than the speed of light.
One group of humans, the Gentian line, meets every few thousand years. For 999 days each member shares his or her experiences from travelling through the galaxy. Then on the thousandth night, they elect the member with the most entertaining presentation to prepare the next reunion.
Reynolds introduces together a number of space opera technologies on the framework of a mystery during one Gentian reunion. He later reused these technologies in the setting for another novel, House of Suns. Although the big science fiction ideas are the star, Reynolds never loses sight of the effects of science on humans. In fact, one of the major themes of the novella is our efforts change the physical world around us and the long-term consequences, good and bad, of those actions.
Note: This story contains sexual situations and may not be suitable for younger listeners.
Rating: 8 / 10
The reader: Mowry has a wonderfully smooth voice with a richness like a less gravelly Charlton Heston. His reading is clear and his pacing is rhythmic. He doesn’t try to charge the reading with emotion that isn’t there, but instead remains restrained. The only complaint I have is that his fairly straight reading sometimes makes it difficult to know what is narration and what is dialog. After a bit, I got into the story and had no trouble with knowing when characters were speaking and enjoyed his reading tremendously.
Here’s a wonderful batch of audiobooks that didn’t show up under an SFFaudio Xmas tree. Stupid Santa!
Winner of an AudioFile magazine “Earphones Award”, narrated by a “2010 AudioFile Best Voice winner” –
The Wycherly Woman: A Lew Archer Novel
By Ross Macdonald; Read by Grover Gardner
7 CDs or 1 MP3-CD – Approx. 8 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: January 2010
ISBN: 9781433278594 (cd), 9781433278624 (mp3-cd) Phoebe Wycherly was missing two months before her wealthy father hired Lew Archer to find her. That was plenty of time for a young girl who wanted to disappear to do so thoroughly—or for someone to make her disappear. And before he could locate the Wycherly girl, Archer had to reckon with the Wycherly woman, Phoebe’s mother, an eerily unmaternal blonde who kept too many residences, had too many secrets, and left too many corpses in her wake.
Another title beloved of Audiofile magazine: Starring Stacy Keach as Mike Hammer!
The New Adventures Of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Vol. 2: The Little Death
By Max Allan Collins; From a story by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins; Performed by a full supporting cast
2 CDs or 1 MP3-CD – Approx. 1.9 Hours [AUDIO DRAMA]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: December 2009
ISBN: 9781441712585 (cd), 9781441712592 (mp3-cd) Private eye Mike Hammer is no stranger to murder, but this time he has two to untangle: the killing of the Captain, a legless, homeless panhandler, dismissed by the police as “minor,” and the slaying of gambling kingpin Marty Wellman. Marty’s lady friend, Helen Venn, turns to the P.I. for help when the Mob fingers her for the next kill. Seems the new kingpin, Carmen Rich — with whom Hammer has a violent history — thinks Helen made off with ten mil in skim money courtesy of her late lover. But Mike Hammer knows a damsel in distress when he sees one and takes up Helen’s cause, igniting a series of hit attempts on his life by a small army of out-of-town shooters. Such minor distractions can’t prevent the toughest detective of them all from solving two murders and avenging a “little death” in a big way.
I liked the movie. Has anyone read the book?
Somewhere In Time
By Richard Matheson; Read by Scott Brick
9 CDs or 1 MP3-CD – Approx. 10.5 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: December 1, 2010
ISBN: 9781441722201 (cd), 9781441722218 (mp3-cd) Written by one of the grand masters of modern fantasy, Somewhere In Time is the moving, romantic story of a modern man whose powerful love for a woman he has never met allows him to literally transcend time. A dying young playwright staying in a turn-of-the-century hotel becomes captivated by a painting of a beautiful stage actress from the previous century. Obsessed, he begins to study everything he can about the woman and her time and becomes convinced he belongs with her. Through self-hypnosis, he transports himself to 1896, where he finds the soul mate he was fated to meet. But will he be able to stay? Somewhere In Time won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and was the basis for the 1980 cult classic movie starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour.
Is this an audiobook about playing poker with the devil? Nice!
Last Call
By Tim Powers; Read by Bronson Pinchot
16 CDs or 2 MP3CDs – Approx. 19.1 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: December 1, 2010
ISBN: 9781441757364 (cd), 9781441757371 (mp3-cd) Scott Crane abandoned his career as a professional poker player twenty years ago and hasn’t returned to Las Vegas, or held a hand of cards, in ten years. But troubling nightmares about a strange poker game he once attended on a houseboat on Lake Mead are drawing him back to the magical city. For the mythic game he believed he won did not end that night in 1969—and the price of his winnings was his soul. Now, a pot far more strange and perilous than he ever could imagine depends on the turning of a card. Enchantingly dark and compellingly real, this World Fantasy Award–winning novel is a masterpiece of magic realism set in the gritty, dazzling underworld known as Las Vegas.
Translated from the German…
Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures (A Novel in Two Books)
By Walter Moers; Translated by John Brownjohn; Read by Bronson Pinchot
19 CDs or 2 MP3-CDs – Approx. 22.8 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: December 1, 2010
ISBN: 9781441757982 (cd), 9781441758019 (mp3-cd) Set in the land of Zamonia, this exuberant, highly original fantasy from Walter Moers features an unlikely hero. Rumo is a little Wolperting—a domesticated creature somewhere between a deer and a dog—who will one day become the greatest hero in the history of Zamonia. Armed with Dandelion, his talking sword, he fights his way through the Overworld and the Netherworld. He meets Rala, a beautiful Wolperting female; Urs of the Snows, who thinks more of cooking than of fighting; Gornab the Ninety-Ninth, the demented king of Netherworld; Professor Ostafan Kolibri, who goes in search of the Non-Existent Teenies; Professor Abdullah Nightingale, inventor of the chest-of-drawers oracle; and, worst luck, the deadly Metal Maiden. Astonishingly inventive, amusing, and engrossing, Rumo is a captivating story from the unique imagination of Walter Moers. Filled with humor, this novel puts a new spin on the usual epic fantasy. The comparisons are many—Douglas Adams, Lewis Carrol, J. K. Rowling, Dr. Seuss, and R. Crumb—but Moers is clearly an original. Long live Zamonia!
One of the Heinlein juvies that I read while in the UK. It, along with Starman’s Quest (by Robert Silverberg) have got to be directly inspired by the famous twin paradox thought experiment!
Time For The Stars
By Robert A. Heinlein; Read by Barrett Whitener
6 CDs or 1 MP3-CD – 6.8 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: December 10, 2010
ISBN: 9781433230462 (cd), 9781433230493 (mp3-cd) Travel to other planets is now a reality, and with overpopulation stretching the resources of Earth, the necessity of finding habitable worlds is growing ever more urgent. There’s a problem though—because the spaceships are slower than light, any communication between the exploring ships and Earth would take years. Tom and Pat are identical twin teenagers. As twins they’ve always been close, so close that it seemed like they could read each other’s minds. When they are recruited by the Long Range Foundation, the twins find out that they can, indeed, peer into each other’s thoughts. Along with other telepathic duos, they are enlisted to be the human transmitters and receivers that will keep the ships in contact with Earth. But there’s a catch: one of the twins has to stay behind—and that one will grow old—while the other explores the depths of space and returns as a young man still.
Hasn’t this been done like four or five times before? Or maybe I just dream’t that?
Dust And Shadow (An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson)
By Lyndsay Faye; Read by Simon Vance
8 CDs or 1 MP3-CD – Approx. 9.3 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: December 10, 2010
ISBN: 9781441768117 (cd), 9781441768131 (mp3-cd) Breathless and painstakingly researched, this is a stunning debut mystery in which Sherlock Holmes unmasks Jack the Ripper. Lyndsay Faye perfectly captures all the color and syntax of Conan Doyle’s distinctive nineteenth-century London. In Dust and Shadow, Sherlock Holmes hunts down Jack the Ripper—the world’s first serial killer—with impeccably accurate historical detail and without the advantage of modern forensics or profiling. Sherlock’s desire to stop the killer who is terrifying the East End of London is unwavering from the start, and in an effort to do so he hires an “unfortunate” known as Mary Ann Monk, the friend of a fellow streetwalker who was one of the Ripper’s earliest victims. However, when Holmes himself is wounded in Whitechapel attempting to catch the villain, and a series of articles in the popular press question his role in the crimes, he must use all his resources in a desperate race to find the man known as “The Knife” before it is too late. Penned as a pastiche by the loyal and courageous Dr. Watson, this debut signals the arrival of a tremendous talent in the mystery and historical fiction genres.
The moral horror of colonialism as performed by Kenneth Branagh? Sign me up!
Heart Of Darkness
By Joseph Conrad; Read by Kenneth Branagh Audible Download – Approx. 3 Hours 51 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Signature Classics
Published: November 23, 2010 Prose that demands to be read aloud requires a special kind of narrator. For the Audible Signature Classics edition of Joseph Conrad’s atmospheric masterpiece, Heart of Darkness, we called upon four-time Academy Award nominee Kenneth Branagh. Branagh’s performance is riveting because he reads as though he’s telling a ghost story by a campfire, capturing the story’s sense of claustrophobia, while hinting at the storyteller Marlow’s own creeping madness. Heart of Darkness follows Captain Marlow into the colonial Congo where he searches for a mysterious ivory trader, Kurtz, and discovers an evil that will haunt him forever. With this landmark work, Conrad is credited with bringing the novel into the twentieth century; we think Branagh brings it into the twenty-first. Stay tuned for more one-of-a-kind performances from actors David Hyde Pierce, Leelee Sobieski, Tim Curry, and more, only from Audible Signature Classics.
This 1959 novel’s title is derived from a few lines in the Book of Revelation…
Alas, Babylon
By Pat Frank; Read by Will Patton Audible Download – Approx. 11 Hours 14 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible.com
Published: December 21, 2010 This true modern masterpiece is built around the two fateful words that make up the title and herald the end – “Alas, Babylon.” When a nuclear holocaust ravages the United States, a thousand years of civilization are stripped away overnight, and tens of millions of people are killed instantly. But for one small town in Florida, miraculously spared, the struggle is just beginning, as men and women of all backgrounds join together to confront the darkness. Will Patton’s narration paints this classic tale as an ominous picture of the terrible possibilities of the nuclear age.
This audiobook is the subject of an upcoming SFFaudio Readalong…
Gulliver’s Travels
By Jonathan Swift; Read by David Hyde Pierce Audible Download – Approx. 9 Hours 52 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Signature Classics
Published: December 14, 2010 Four-time Emmy Award winner David Hyde Pierce is famous for playing the lovably self-important Dr. Niles Crane in the hit TV series Frasier. Now, he brings the same wit and charming arrogance to his Signature Classics performance of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. More than just a mock travel book and fabulous adventure, Gulliver’s Travels is a character study and social satire that skewers politics, science, religion, philosophy, and pretentiousness with a bite and resonance that remains as fresh today as the day it was published. Maybe that’s why it hasn’t been out of print in nearly 300 years. Set sail with David Hyde Pierce for a smart, fun, new Gulliver’s Travels experience that’s unlike any other. And stay tuned for more one-of-a-kind performances from actors Leelee Sobiesky, Casey Affleck, Tim Curry, and more, only from Audible Signature Classics.
And so is this one!
Oath Of Fealty
By Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; Read by Jeremy Johnson and Suzanne Toren Audible Download – Approx. 10 Hours 15 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Frontiers
Published: June 22, 2010 In the near future, Los Angeles is an all but uninhabitable war zone, wracked by crime, violence, pollution and poverty. But above the blighted city, a Utopia has arisen: Todos Santos, a thousand-foot high single-structured city, designed to used state-of-the-art technology to create a completely human-friendly environment, offering its dwellers everything they could want in exchange for their oath of allegiance and their constant surveillance. But there are those who want to see the utopia destroyed, whose answer to tomorrow’s best and brightest hope is mindless violence. And they have just entered Todos Santos.
Uvula Audio‘s James Campanella, of Uvula Audio, has just completed an unabridged reading of the 1947 adventure/mystery/science novel The Rocket’s Shadow by John Blaine. The Rocket’s Shadow was the first in a 24 book series which used “realistic science” and, according to the Wikipedia entry, the publishers were averse to “any suggestion of the supernatural in the series.” Sez James:
“The Rocket’s Shadow follows the adventures of Rick Brant and is the first in a long juvenile pulp series that was published from the late 1940’s until the late 1980’s . Rick is young (~19 since he just finished high school in the first book), but not a kid. This first exciting book in the series introduces readers to Rick , the son of a famous scientist, Hartson Brant. As with all the Brant series, quite a bit of actual down to earth science was the basis of the books– unlike Tom Swift, for example. Hartson brant is trying to win the $2 million Stoneridge Prize for the greatest scientific accomplishment of the year. The group of scientists headed by Rick Brant’s father works desperately to complete their moon rocket experiment before the deadline of year is up. But, someone in that closely knit group is a traitor – unknown and unscrupulous – who menaces the success of the experiment at every turn.”
Sounds fun hey?
The Rocket’s Shadow
By John Blaine; Read by J.J. Campanella
7 MP3 Files – Approx. [UNABRIDGED]
Podcaster: Uvula Audio
Podcast: December 2010 Rick Brant is the son of scientist/inventor Hartson Brant and they live on an island called Spindrift. The island houses a research facility and several scientists also live there. Some of those scientists are descriptively similar to members of Doc Savage’s group. Rick has as his sidekick Scott, an ex-marine, capable of physically defending himself when necessary. This story, the first in the Rick Brant series has Rick’s father trying to build a rocket to hit the moon. A large monetary prize has been offered for the first group able to do so and the Brant group is the leading contender. However, there are other groups in the chase and one of them is a criminal group that does everything it can to sabotage the Brant effort.
Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 | MP3| Part 3 |MP3| Part 4 |MP3| Part 5 |MP3| Part 6 |MP3| Part 7 |MP3|
And, for those looking for something a bit more xmasy, look out for more files in the feed. Uvula will be presenting a Christmas special “covering L. Frank Baum’s Life”, the Adventures Of Santa Claus and Kidnapped Santa Claus!
The Skylark Of Space
By E.E. Smith; Read by Richard Kilmer 19 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 9 Hours 22 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: December 16, 2010 The novel begins with the accidental discovery, in a Government laboratory in Washington D. C., of a form of clean nuclear power. Our hero, Dr. Richard Seaton, uses this power to build first a flying belt and then an interstellar spaceship. He later discovers that the process operates by generation and manipulation of gravity fields. When his government coworkers do not believe him, Seaton acquires rights to his discovery from the government and commercializes it with the aid of his friend, millionaire inventor Martin Crane. A former colleague, Dr. Marc DuQuesne, joins with the unscrupulous World Steel Corporation to try to steal Seaton’s invention. The resulting conflict escalates, as Seaton and Duquesne develop greater and greater technical capabilities and enlist more and more powerful alien races as allies.
Little Girl Lost: A John Blake Mystery
Songs of Innocence: A John Blake Mystery
Money Shot
The Wycherly Woman: A Lew Archer Novel
The New Adventures Of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Vol. 2: The Little Death
Somewhere In Time
Last Call
Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures (A Novel in Two Books)
Time For The Stars
Dust And Shadow (An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson)
Heart Of Darkness
Alas, Babylon
Gulliver’s Travels
Oath Of Fealty
