Tag: dystopia

LibriVox: The Man In Asbestos: An Allegory Of The Future by Stephen Leacock

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Online Audio

LibriVoxThere’s a new great narrator working over on LibriVox and his name is Phil Chenevert.

Now when I say new I mean new-to-me, Chenevert has, apparently, been active on LibriVox since 2010. Since then he’s recorded an impressive number of audiobooks. I only discovered that after hearing his newly released, pitch perfect, reading of The Man In Asbestos: An Allegory Of The Future by Stephen Leacock (which is just one section of THIS audiobook).

You can check out all of his narrations HERE – based on what he’s recorded so far Chenevert seems to have a fondness towards children’s literature with several whole single narration audiobooks of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and the Br’er Rabbit stories (which are awesomely accented) as well as a schooling manual (Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook by Dr. Maria Montessori). But there are a few SF titles in his catalogue too.

LIBRIVOX - The Man In Asbestos by Stephen LeacockThe Man In Asbestos: An Allegory Of The Future
By Stephen Leacock; Read by Phil Chenevert
1 |MP3| – Approx. 27 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: April 16, 2012
A 20th century man travels to the distant future by typical means (eating donuts and reading comics) only to find himself in a museum of the 20th century. The museum’s curator isn’t exacty sure if it’s the year 3000 or not, but he is sure that life is better now that nobody dies, eats, or has a telephone. First published in 1911 as a part of Nonsense Novels.

[Thanks also to April Gonzales!]

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley on YouTube

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

One of the finest Science Fiction audiobooks on LibriVox, the novel that was the subject of SFFaudio Podcast #056, here it is …. The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley on YouTube.

A man awakes with amnesia. He is aboard a spaceship. He is a prisoner. He is gnorant of his crime and his name. His destination is the planet Omega. It is a prison planet from which there is no escape.

If you give it a five minutes, it’ll take you into the full five hours and you’ll know the truth of The Status Civilization!

The regular audiobook is available HERE.

Posted by Jesse Willis

The Influence of RADIO DRAMA on comics and vice versa

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

EC ComicsThere’s a fascinating article by Kurt Kuersteiner HERE titled “OTR: The Evil Influence Behind EC.” In it Kuersteiner maps some of the many stories swiped from radio drama series and turned into EC Comics.

It came to me at the perfect time too. I’ve just been getting into EC comics over the last few months. Having grown up under the censorship of the Comics Code Authority I didn’t really know what I was missing. Now though, reading these pre-code comics, I can now see that my intellectual growth had been greatly stunted.

I’d have been a far smarter person if I’d been able to buy and read comics like these as a kid.

My favourite such tale so far was published in the July/August 1953 issue of Weird Fantasy (issue number 20). It’s called The Automaton. At first it seemed to me like a mashup of a Philip K. Dick’s The Electric Ant, Alfred Bester’s Fondly Fahrenheit and George Orwell’s 1984. But looking at the chronology that can’t be what it is. First off Philip K. Dick was just getting started around then. And while he was a comics reader The Electric Ant wasn’t published until 1969.

And while by 1953 Bester had already been working in comics – he hadn’t yet written Fondly Fahrenheit. So the story is definitely Orwellian and very cool, and certainly like a couple of Dick and Bester tales that were yet to be written. But then again, maybe it was inspired by a radio drama that I’ve not heard yet. Anybody know of one like this?

As it stands The Automaton is set in the futuristic dystopian world of Los Angeles in 2009. Our protagonist is XT-751, a man recounting his story of being sent to a northern labour camp after a suicide attempt. Suicide is illegal in this world because the state owns every person from the cradle to the grave.

I actually have been thinking about The Automaton for months now. And after reading Kuersteiner’s article it somehow gelled into a post. It’s just been something I could’t quite shake. The story is not only extremely thought provoking, and still timely, but also extremely frightening. And maybe a lot of the rest of it is that it is about as far away from superhero comics as you can possibly get. Best of all it’s told in just seven pages – that’s a highly distilled story.

The only credit for The Automaton is for the artist, Joe Orlando, but maybe he wrote it too?

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 1

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 2

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 3

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 4

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 5

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 6

From EC Comics - Weird Fantasy #020 - The Automaton Page 7

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

Jenny

SFFaudio Review

Image of Moxyland audiobook Moxyland
By Lauren Beukes; Read by Nico Evers-Swindell
8 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Angry Robot via Brilliance Audio
Published: 2011

Themes: dystopia / commericalism / police states / apartheid / art / AIDS / cell phones

Publisher summary:

You think you know what’s going on?
You think you know who’s really in power?
You have No. Fucking. Idea.

Moxyland is an ultra-smart thriller about technological progress, and the freedoms it removes. In the near future, four hip young things live in a world where your online identity is at least as important as your physical one. Getting disconnected is a punishment worse than imprisonment, but someone’s got to stand up to government inc., whatever the cost.

This might be one instance where an audiobook has the potential to lead a reader (listener) into confusion more than reading the print might do. Moxyland is read by Nico Evers-Swindell, best known for his portrayal of Prince William in the made-for-tv movie William & Kate.  While he does a good job with the voices and South African accents, the intertwining stories are hard to keep up with, particularly with the way the reader is dumped right into the center of everything already going on.

That’s how living in a totalitarian, nearly-post-Apartheid South Africa can be sometimes. The four main characters in Moxyland don’t seem to have a grasp of the big picture either, and can hardly keep up with navigating the landscape where your cellphone can punish you, viruses can be used as crowd control, and your body can be turned into an irrevocable product advertisement.

This has tastes of William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, and the realism is helped by the ten years Beukes spent as a journalist, where she started thinking “What would happen if…?” The world she has created is scary, but not difficult to imagine.  After all, some of us are already living it.

Posted by Jenny Colvin

Stage play of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother in San Francisco

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio News

Little Brother stage play photo by Jay Yamada

An upcoming episode of The SFFaudio Podcast will be a discussion of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow |READ OUR REVIEW|. The audiobook is available from Random House Audio (not through audible).

I reviewed it back in 2008 but in listening to it again it seems even more relevant today than it was then.

And while we’re on the subject this stage play adaptation, it opened last week in San Fransisco, looks really terrific!

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of Blake’s 7 The Early Years – Jenna: The Trial / The Dust Run (Vol. 1.5)

Jesse Willis

SFFaudio Review

Blake's 7 The Early Years - Jenna: The Trial / The Dust Run (Vol. 1.5)SFFaudio EssentialBlake’s 7 The Early Years – Jenna: The Trial / The Dust Run (Vol. 1.5)
By Simon Guerrier; Performed by a full cast
1 CD – Approx. 70 Minutes [AUDIO DRAMA]
Publisher: B7 Productions
Published: November 30, 2009
ISBN: 9781906577087
Themes: / Science Fiction / Galactic Empire / Dystopia /

The Dust Run – Jenna Stannis has grown up as a spacer, where the normal rules don’t apply. No school, no police, no public imperatives – that’s still all to come. But the situation on Earth is changing and the effects are slowly being felt throughout the Vega system. It’s going to mean trouble for a brash boy called Townsend – who Jenna doesn’t fancy at all. Soon Jenna and Townsend are competing in the Dust Run – racing shuttles through an asteroid field without using computers, making the complex calculations in their heads. It’s dangerous, fool-hardy and really good fun. But they’re playing for the highest of stakes…

The Trial – The election is going to change everything. A man called Roj Blake promises the voters new hope, an end to years of corruption. There are those who can’t let him be heard. But Jenna Stannis is determined to get his message out to the colonies. It’s been years since the Dust Run, and Jenna’s a changed woman. She’s left the Vega system far behind, using her exceptional piloting skills to carve out a life as a smuggler. Blake’s message could earn her a fortune – or cost her, her life.

This is the final two stories in the first Blake’s 7 The Early Years series. First up is The Dust Run. It starts with a framing story in which we see the cruelty of the Earth Federation up close. Under torture Jenna, a young woman, reveals everything about her truant past. Then, in the story proper, we meet her as a charming teen. She comes from an underemployed spacer family, has just a few friends but none of them are particularly trustworthy. For fun Jenna likes piloting shuttles at high speed through a region of space filled with a heavy concentration of particulates. It’s precisely her lightheartedness that sets Jenna up for a fall.

The Trial also uses the framing device but skips ahead in time to the events which lead to Jenna’s incarceration. The problem is that her interrogator also claims to be acting as her advocate! If Jenna is to have any chance of avoiding imprisonment on Cygnus Alpha she’ll have to shade the truth. This episode reminded me of the other great Orwellian episodes of serial SF (like Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Chain of Command” – in which Picard is tortured and Babylon 5‘s “Intersections In Real Time” – in which Sheridan is tortured). The darkness of Jenna Stannis’ Federation universe is equally Orwellian, but, as I’ve mentioned in other reviews of this series it has more than a touch of Brave New World in it too. This new Blake’s 7 series, like it’s TV predecessor, is an intelligent Science Fiction series that masquerades as consumable pop-culture “sci-fi”.

Carrie Dobro, who played a charismatic alien thief in the Babylon 5: A Call To Arms TV-movie and on the prematurely canceled Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade, stars as Jenna Stannis. Dobro has a star-level magnetism in both these productions. She’s sure of herself, a devious and clever power seeker, never fully in control, always seeking it, but at heart a sympathetic survivor. Simon Guerrier and Carrie Dobro have created a worthy back-story for Jenna Stannis. Highly recommended!

Posted by Jesse Willis