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 SFFaudio Podcast #101 – Scott, Jesse and Tamahome talk recent arrivals
Talked about on today’s show: The Wise Man’s Fear is long, ♪ Hellhole ♪, The Road To Dune|READ OUR REVIEW|, quality of Dune series, Adjustment Bureau, Twilight Zone, A Kind Of A Stopwatch, The Stainless Steel Rat For President, The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted, Richard Matheson, Other Kingdoms, (parentheses), Richard Christian Matheson (son), I Am Legend comic, Splatterpunk, some Masters Of Horror tv episodes, James Tiptree, Jr., The Screwfly Solution, Lovecraft, Dreams In The Witchhouse, Ambrose Bierce, Damn Thing, John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns episode, incontinence, Alex Bledsoe, Dark Jenny, Sword-Edged Blonde, Blood Groove|READ OUR REVIEW|, Alex H And The Airship City, Girl Genius Online comics, Airship Fantasy, William Gibson, Count Zero, Necromancer?, Normads Of Gor, Assasins Of Gor, Warlord Of Mars, Elvin Blood, cover of Warlord Of Mars #5 comic, comics vs trade paperbacks, 3 YA titles, Sweep: Book Of Shadows, don’t worry the title isn’t Wicca, Liparulo’s Whirlwind, Guardians of Ga’Hoole Book 9: The First Collier, would owls be good pets?, Shadowfever has a soundtrack, Darkfever used to be on Podiobooks, Moning is not George R. R. Martin, Fevre Dream, The Armageddon Rag, March In Country, Lifeforce the movie, The Executioner series, E. E. Knight at Graphicaudio, “I Am Batman!”, Batman: Inferno at Graphicaudio, Kings Of The North, borderline sf, Clive Cussler, The Jungle, aural noir, Andrew Vachss, rhymes with tax, child protection, Only Child, Down Here, Hard Looks comics, Shaken, Jacq Daniels, drink names, Tequila Mockingbird, Lucky Stiff, a million honeybees, this is noir romance, Romeo And Juliet spoiler, horoscopes, David Suzuki, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Radio Drama Revival, Anita Blake #1 (Guilty Pleasures), Death Cloud (young Sherlock), Fountains Of Paradise, Fade To Blonde, Gilgamesh The King|READ OUR REVIEW|, The God Engines|READ OUR REVIEW|, fiction where “stuff happens”, Roy Dotrice world record, TheGod Engines review gender controversy
WARNING: This review is a bit of an aberration, it’s a bit more gonzo. It was written this way out of necessity and it is thus perhaps only suitable for those who… ‘heard he was dead.’
Escape From New York
Based on the screenplay by John Carpenter and Nick Castle; Adapted by Bill Hollweg; Performed by a full cast
5 MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 2 Hours 15 Minutes [AUDIO DRAMA]
Podcaster: BrokenSea Audio Productions
Podcast: April 2009 – March 2010
Themes: / Crime / Dystopia / Science Fiction / Alternate History / WWIII / Prison / Horror / New York /
Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 |MP3| Part 3 |MP3| Part 4 |MP3| Part 5 |MP3|
In the year 1988 the crime rate in the United States rises 400%. The once great city of New York becomes the one maximum security prison for the entire country. A fifty foot containment wall is erected along the New Jersey shoreline, across the Harlem river, and down along the Brooklyn shoreline. It completely surrounds Manhattan Island. All bridges and waterways are mined. The United States Police Force, like an army, is encamped around the island. The prison’s name: New York Maximum Security Penitentiary, Manhattan Island. There are no guards inside the prison, only prisoners, and the worlds they have made. The year now… 1997.
In the opening crawl (detailed above) we are given a world rife with Science Fiction glory. Escape From New York has a premise full of promise. It is a story pregnant with possibilities – nearly all of which are fulfilled. Escape From New York, my friends, is both a powerful satire of our times and a powerful cinematic experience movie. Now, thanks to the creative love and attention by fans at BrokenSea Audio Productions it is a wondrous audio drama made by fans for fans.
Now hang with me on this. I hope I don’t end up seeming like a crazed french film critic, arguing for the superiority of the second Star Wars trilogy (The Phantom Menace et. al) over the original Star Wars and Empire. Take that first statistic: “the crime rate in the United States rises 400%” – how would that be possible? It certainly wouldn’t match any conventional trend or shift in population growth. Might it then be categorized under some sort of Freakonomics-style explanation? Maybe. But, I think we could argue, quite convincingly, that the only way to increase the crime rate 400% overnight would be to make a whole lot more human behaviors crimes. Disrespecting authority, sharing files with friends, or as the trailer for Escape From L.A. puts it “No talking, no smoking, no littering, no red meat, no freedom of religion. And remember all marriages must be approved by the Department of Health.” So, the world of Escape From New York is really fun. But a world is not enough. You need a plot and a set of characters. As to the latter…
The anti-hero takes many forms but I have a special fondness for Snake Plisken. As in an IMDB grendelkhan says:
“Snake Plissken is the classic anti-hero, ala Clint Eastwood’s Man-with-no-name. Plissken is an ex-soldier turned criminal, recruited/blackmailed into rescuing a hostage president from the prison of New York City. Plissken is a walking ball of anger and a survival machine.”
Indeed, a survival machine who’s been betrayed, lied to shat on by his own government – and he’s got a cool eye-patch, a reverse tramp stamp of a cobra, and a gravelly voice. He is a great character.
“But what of his motivation?” You ask.
Read on…
Plisken, call him Snake, lives in a parallel universe – a USA run like a fun-house-lensed double craptoberfest of moral hypocrisy. If you’ve seen the movie Escape From New York, you’re seeing the 1980 zeitgeist of Manhattan as the epitome of ghettoic urban decay. This fear, that your neighbors are out to get you, the horror that politicians so often rely upon, works great in movies (and in the opening credits to The Equalizer). But this isn’t only a horror story. The prison genre is one of my favorites (check out Animal Factory). Like westerns, these genre stories have a certain set of conventions or constraints that make a story told within those constraints far more satisfying. But neither is Escape From New York just a prison story. For it
is also a quest story, a revenge story, an all out action adventure. There are MacGuffins galore for Plisken to chase after: First up is a world peace conference that is about to end in disaster lest a certain audio cassette is retrieved, then there’s a kidnapped President Of The United States to be rescued, and of course there’s a jet glider (don’t think too hard about that one) as their only escape, but to top it all off there’s a pair of ticking time-bombs in Snake’s body! That’s not just motivation, that’s entertainment folks!
Snake, now motivated, has enough-knock-down-drag-out adventures in the course of just less than 24 hours, so as to numb any thoughy you had about suspending any disbelief. Or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued: “[if a writer could infuse a] human interest and a semblance of truth [into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative].” If you look at it another way this is the original 24, but with a hard-assed biker veteran saving the USA instead of a Kiefer Sutherland. In the course of just over 2 hours Bill Hollweg and the folks at BSAP have created a faithful and loving tribute to one of 1981’s best movies.
Speaking of 1981, I look forward to hearing BSAP adapt Clash Of The Titans (1981), Excalibur (1981) and Body Heat (1981). They’re already working on a Mad Max II (1981)-inspired series.
Vampire$
By John Steakley; Read by Tom Weiner
10 CDs – Approx. 10 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: 2010
ISBN: 1441727213
Themes: / Horror / Vampires / Religion / Catholicism / Mercenaries /
Suppose there really were vampires. Dark, stalking, destroying. They’d have to be killed, wouldn’t they? Of course they would. But what kind of fools would try to make a living at it? In best-selling author John Steakley’s vampire classic, one tightly knit band of brothers devotes itself to hunting down the monsters that infest the modern world—for a price. An exciting blend of horror and western genres, Vampire$ is a twenty-first-century Ghostbusters with an edge.
I first found out about John Steakley when watching John Carpenter’s Vampire$. The on screen accreditation didn’t mean much then. I figured that what goodness was found in that movie came from Carpenter. And that’s largely true. Their rather different in plot, or at least in the way the plot plots out. Its clear that John Steakey’s novel served more as the inspiration than a blueprint for the movie. The novel feels much richer, much wider, and also much more personal, than Carpenter’s version.
Now, having read this audiobook after John Steakley’s other novel, Armor |READ OUR REVIEW|, I’ve come to the conclusion that Steakley has a pattern or two. First up there’s the name thing. Two names are recycled from Armor (even though they aren’t the same characters). Felix, the gunslinger (and ex-drug trafficker) has an important role in Vampire$. Jack Crow, the lead vampire hunter, is arguably the main protagonist. Armor, which is set maybe a thousand years in the future, has two characters with those exact names too, and they play similar importance in the plot. This is a novel full of twists and turns that even a fan of the movie based on the novel can be surprised by Similarwise, the emotional impact is the primacy of the novel’s power. Sure, this novel has maybe a few innovations I’ve never read before:
1. God is real AND vampires are too.
2. A team of mercenaries, with pure hearts, are taking cash for cleaning up vampire infested towns.
3. The anti-vamp mercs are in league with the Pope and the Vatican, who know and support their efforts.
Narrator Tom Weiner gets to play a fairly wide range of characters. On top of the brooding Felix and the unstoppable Jack Crow he’s got a compassionate pope, an irate Texas sheriff, and a bloodsucking vampire (or two) too.
This is a case where a good movie was based on an very good novel and a good novel got made into a great audiobook. Vampire$ is an emotionally impactive audiobook that surprises with its innovate approach to an old foe: those old evil vampires fucks that you gotta love, and Jack Crow’s gotta hate.
I just finished watching one of John Carpenter‘s earliest movies. Someone’s Watching Me! (1978) is a very obscure Carpenter movie, filmed for TV, and featuring a number of what I guess would be called prototypical Carpenter signatures. After a few minutes I started taking notes. Here are a few of my notes:
-Stars David Birney (a well respected audiobook narrator)
–Adrienne Barbeau‘s character is a lesbian (and that has nothing at all to do with the plot)
-The main character, Leigh Michaels (played by Lauren Hutton) works at a Los Angeles TV station with the call sign WJHC (J.H.C. = John Howard Carpenter)
-Leigh Michaels lives in “Arkham Towers”
This got me thinking about other John Carpenter movies I’d watched – which reminded me of a podcast I participated in a couple years ago. I did a podcast commentary on John Carpenter’s The Thing with Christiana Ellis, Mike Meitin, Adam Morey, Brandon Hill, Tee Morris, and Philippa Ballantine for the Hey Want To Watch A Movie? podcast.
The SFFaudio Podcast #101 – Scott, Jesse and Tamahome talk recent arrivals
