audiobook – Page 159

LibriVox: Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Monday, August 18, 2008Thursday, July 12, 2012 Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

The Quasar Dragon blogmeister Wolfkahn is excited about the newest SF novel to be catalgoued at LibriVox:

“Yes!!! LibriVox has just finished a free audiobook version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ adventure masterpiece Pellucidar, the first sequel to At the Earth’s Core.”

Meanwhile, that preceding novel in the series (At The Earth’s Core) is still listed as“in progress” and is set to be a multi-voiced production as opposed to this single narratored one. Check it out…

Pellucidar
By Edgar Rice Burroughs; Read by Ralph Snelson
16 Zipped MP3s or Podcast – Approx. 6 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: August 2008
Pellucidar is a fictional “Hollow Earth” milieu invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs for a series of action adventure stories. The stories initially involve the adventures of mining heir David Innes and his inventor friend Abner Perry after they use an “iron mole” to burrow 500 miles into the earth’s crust. This is the second book in the series.

Podcast feed:

http://librivox.org/bookfeeds/pellucidar-by-edgar-rice-burroughs.xml

[via Quasar Dragon]

Posted by Jesse Willis

Aural Noir Review of Grifter’s Game by Lawrence Block

Sunday, August 17, 2008Friday, January 29, 2010 Jesse Willis

Aural Noir: Review

Grifter’s Game is book number 001 in the Hard Case Crime library.

SFFaudio Essential Hard Case Crime Grifter’s Game
By Lawrence Block; Read by Alan Sklar
5 CDs – 5 Hours 17 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: BBC Audiobooks America
Published: 2006
ISBN: 9781602834538
Themes: / Crime / Noir / Femme Fatale / Drugs / Murder / Atlantic City /

Con man Joe Marlin was used to scoring easy cash off of gullible women. But that was before he met Mona Brassard — and found himself holding a stolen stash of raw heroin. Now that Joe has fallen hard for Mona, he’s got to pull off the most dangerous con of his career: one that will leave him either a killer — or a corpse.

Before he settled into the comfortable (and profitable) serial novels, starring the characters you love to love, Lawrence Block was writing crime novels. With every turn of the page, you could almost hear the peeling the wallpaper off of even the swankiest of hotel room walls. These are the gritty, acidic, abrasive early novels of Lawrence Block. The characters in these fifty-thousand worders were hardened criminals. Unrepentant, unlovable, more disposable, but ultimately just as magnetic as those who would come later. Block’s first novel (under his own name) featured just one such criminal. Joe Marlin is smooth and hungry. He’s no ageless, cuddly Bernie Rhodenbarr, solving murders between burglaries. He can’t relate the moral greyness that comes from too many years as a cop, like Matt Scudder. And he doesn’t contemplate the American lifestyle whilst planning murder for hire, like Keller. He’s just one low-down and dirty sonofabitch, telling as compelling a crime tale as you’ll ever likely to hear. Marlin’s story was first published by Gold Medal in 1961 under the title Mona. In 1986, it was released as Sweet Slow Death. And most recently it was republished with a third title: Grifter’s Game, this time by Hard Case Crime. Block himself fancied The Girl on the Beach, as the novel’s title. But no matter what name the novel goes by, it’s a fast and dirty, and shoots a strong enough curve to throw even the most hardened of modern readers off their game. At 47 years old it’s still one of Block’s strongest novels.

Reader Alan Sklar grows into the voice of the narrator as Marlin’s plans turn darker. We like his Joe Marlin, he’s clever and slick, he lingers on the details and teases us. The only thing is that Sklar sees it all coming – he knows, he tells us he knows, but doesn’t telegraph, and so, when the killing blow ultimately comes, it doesn’t hit us until we’re too close, until we can really feel it, until we own it. Until we live it.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser come to Audible.com

Thursday, August 14, 2008Saturday, July 16, 2011 Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

Audible Frontiers Steve Feldberg, director of content for Audible.com sez:

Man, am I pumped! And fans of Fritz Leiber’s classic Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser stories should be jazzed, too, because Audible has just brought all seven books of this all-time great series into audio for the first time! And even better, each title comes with an exclusive introduction by none other than Neil Gaiman. I especially like his lengthy, thoughtful introduction to THE SWORDS OF LANKHMAR. But, frankly, it’s all great. Especially since narrator Jonathan Davis has done such an outstanding job of bringing the Lankhmar series to life. Jonathan is perhaps best known for his great work on numerous Star Wars audiobooks, but I think he’s outdone himself this time.

In his email, Feldberg also included an exclusive Neil Gaiman intro to Leiber, and we’ve got it for you right here |MP3|! Check out the entire Lankhmar series HERE.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton

Saturday, August 9, 2008Saturday, August 9, 2008 Dave

SFFaudio Review

The Dreaming Void
By Peter F. Hamilton; Read by Toby Longworth
20 CDs – 23 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Audio UK
Published: February 2008
ISBN: 9780230709829
Themes: / Science Fiction / Aliens / Artifact / Nanotechnology / Politics / Singularity / Space Travel /
AD 3580. The Intersolar Commonwealth has spread through the galaxy to over a thousand star systems. It is a culture of rich diversity with a place for everyone. Even death itself has been overcome. But at the centre of the Commonwealth is a massive black hole. This Void is not a natural artefact. Inside there is a strange universe where the laws of physics are very different to those we know. It is slowly consuming the other stars of the galactic core – one day it will devour the entire galaxy. Inigo, a human, has started to dream of a wonderful existence in the Void. He has a following of millions of believers and they now clamour to make a pilgrimage into the Void to live the life they have been shown. Other starfaring species fear their migration will cause the Void to expand again. They are prepared to stop them no matter what the cost. And so the pilgrimage begins…

The Dreaming Void is a very big book and it’s an even bigger audiobook. Peter F. Hamilton’s story is one of the better recent SF stories that I’ve experienced in any form, full of fascinating settings, situations, and ideas. It has many fully realized subplots and varied characters, too many. What could have been at least two brilliant stories, one of the commonwealth dealing with the potentially disastrous consequences of an attempted pilgrimage into the Void, and one of the much more low-key story of Inigo’s dreams, is instead merely a long opening to a longer trilogy.

The main plot(s) of the story are wonderful. It is science fiction as it should be. It takes the imagination to new vistas, mixing newer ideas (the Void, gaiafield, etc) with core traditions of SF (space travel, aliens, etc). Indeed, the basic story is nearly perfect but with all the stretching, it greatly overstays its welcome. Somewhere around the twelve hour mark, listening to The Dreaming Void became a chore. If I had not already committed so much time to the story, I would have quit then.

Final analysis: The Dreaming Void is just too big a novel, filled with many unnecessary subplots and distractions. It is far too easy loose track of the multitude of characters inhabiting this enormous beginning to the “Void Trilogy.” Yet, it is far from a hopeless audiobook. Throughout the epic story, the skill of both author and the reader are quite apparent and each part of the story is interesting. I am still of very mixed opinions about the story. I will look for more stories written by Peter F. Hamilton and more read by Toby Longworth, but only if they are about half this length or shorter. However, the audiobook might well be worth the effort for someone who has a lot of free time and is willing to take notes.

Posted by David Tackett

Aural Noir Review of Fever by Sean Rowe

Friday, August 8, 2008 Jesse Willis

Aural Noir: Review

As part of our revival of the Aural Noir label, we’ll be re-running some of our classic (offline) Aural Noir posts, including this “vintage” audiobook review which was first posted in December 2005…

Fever
By Sean Rowe; Read by William Dufris
5 CDs – Approx 6 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Tantor Media
Published: 2005
ISBN: 1400101778
Sample: |MP3|
Themes: / Crime / Heist / Noir / Thriller / Terrorism / Florida / Cuba / Nautical / Family /

Raw, is probably the best one-word sum up of Sean Rowe’s first novel Fever. Rowe’s prose lacks the polish found in novelists like Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake and Elmore Leonard, but he doesn’t lack what it takes to eventually become worthy of hanging out with these masters, especially if he keeps writing like this!

Fever follows a tight knit group of fuck-ups through their attempt to rob thirty million dollars of stashed drug money from an aging cruise ship plying the waters between Miami and Cuba. The crew, on paper at least, looks like it should be able to handle anything. It consists of an ex-FBI agent Matt Shannon, his step brother (an ex-DEA agent named Jack Fontana), an emergency room nurse named Julia, a former Black Panther, and a South American soldier of fortune. Despite their collective skill set these are all losers in almost every way. Shannon’s past is slowly revealed, working backwards we know that he’s an in-debt alcoholic, with a dead wife, missing an index finger and has a step-brother who is a recently paroled felon. When the step-brother frames Shannon in the sinking of a freighter Matt is half-blackmailed into going along, with a vague desire to somehow help his brother. The rest of the crew are nearly as sad, Julia was an orphan who was sexually abused from a young age. And Jack Fontana is dying after serving his sentence. Even the minor characters have their share of problems…. one passage detailing the last job the mercenary took killing Indians in the jungles of South America is brutal, funny and illustrative of just how unlikely this string will be of pulling off this or any job. The malformed love triangle between Shannon, his brother, and Julia pays off in a tasty neo-noir style. In fact love, brotherly and the other kind is probably at the heart of this story. Fever is extremely enjoyable, the dialogue is crisp and fun, the scenes are imaginative and original. A constant surprise awaits in every chapter. None of it goes exactly according to plan and that makes it all the better to follow. The novel’s few problems seem mostly structural, scene transitions aren’t handled as well as I’d like and despite it being a first person perspective we never really get an idea of what’s going on inside the narrator’s head. This could be a deliberate style on the part of Rowe, as both flaws could be thought to pay off in certain ways later in on the book, but I’m thinking a more seasoned novelist might have been better able to give us everything. I eagerly look forward to reading the next Sean Rowe novel!

Read by the always reliable William Dufris, the first person perspective plays into such classics as Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Dufris’ natural timbre doesn’t exactly embody the gravelly voiced loser we imagine as the narrator but his voicing of the rest of the crew is spot on. Men, women, a Colombian drug lord, the string and even minor characters like an aging boxer all sound just like you’d want them to. Tantor Media, an exciting new player in unabridged audiobooks has packaged Fever in a clamshell CD case with leaved pages. The cover is the same as the Little Brown & Co. original and the sound quality is phenomenal. The pricing is extremely reasonable too. I think Tantor is probably the most exciting new big little publisher of the decade!

Posted by Jesse Willis

New Releases – Allen M. Steele, James Patterson, Star Wars

Thursday, August 7, 2008Thursday, August 7, 2008 Jesse Willis

This story was nominated for a Hugo award and is part of the author’s popular “Coyote Trilogy”…

The Days Between
By Allen M. Steele; Read by Tom Dheere
1 CD – 72 minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Infinivox
Published: July 2008
ISBN: 9781884612817
Three months after leaving Earth, the URSS Alabama had just achieved cruise velocity when the accident occurred: Leslie Gillis woke up. His first lucid thought was: Thank God, I made it. His next thought was: Something’s wrong. Everyone was still asleep. Everyone except himself. This story was nominated for a Hugo award and is part of the author’s popular Coyote Trilogy.
*The first 20 orders will receive a signed copy!

And, since when is James Patterson a YA novelist? Well, in audio, since now! He’s got three titles out…

The Dangerous Days Of Daniel X
By James Patterson; Read by Milo Ventimiglia
4 CDs – [ABRIDGED?]
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Published: July 2008
ISBN: 9781600242007
The greatest superpower of all isn’t to be part spider, part man, or to cast magic spells — the greatest power is the power to create. Daniel has that power. Daniel’s secret abilities — like being able to manipulate objects and animals with his mind or to recreate himself in any shape he chooses — have helped him survive. But Daniel doesn’t have a normal life. He is the protector of the earth, the Alien Hunter, with a mission beyond what anyone could imagine.

Maximum Ride – (Book 1) The Angel Experiment
By James Patterson; Read by Evan Rachel Wood
4 CDs – [ABRIDGED]
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Published: July 2008
ISBN: 9781600242267
Fourteen-year-old Maximum Ride, better known as Max, knows what it’s like to soar above the world. She and all the members of the “Flock”–Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gasman and Angel–are just like ordinary kids–only they have wings and can fly.

Maximum Ride – (Book 2) School’s Out – Forever
By James Patterson; Read by Valentina de Angelis
4 CDs – [ABRIDGED]
Publisher: Hachette Audio
Published: July 2008
ISBN: 9781600242625
The Flock members are taken under the wing of an FBI agent and try to live “normal” lives by going to school, making friends–and continuing their relentless search for their parents.

Released in anticipation of the new Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series and the new SW game….

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
By Sean Williams (based on a story by Haden
Blackman); Read by Jonathan Davis
5 CDs – 6 Hours [ABRIDGED]
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: August 19th 2008
ISBN: 978073935808-5
The overthrow of the Republic is complete. The Separatist forces have been smashed, the Jedi Council nearly decimated, and the rest of the Order all but destroyed. Now absolute power rests in the iron fist of Darth Sidious–the cunning Sith lord better known as the former Senator, now Emperor, Palpatine. But more remains to be done. Pockets of resistance in the galaxy must still be defeated and missing Jedi accounted for . . . and dealt with. These crucial tasks fall to the Emperor’s ruthless enforcer, Darth Vader. In turn, the Dark Lord has groomed a lethal apprentice entrusted with a top-secret mission: to comb the galaxy and dispatch the last of his masters’ enemies, thereby punctuating the dark side’s victory with the Jedi’s doom.

Posted by Jesse Willis