Gregg Margarite recorded only one poem for LibriVox.org. I find it highly appropriate. It’s by one of his favourite authors, Jonathan Swift.
Here’s Gregg’s reading of The Logicians Refuted |MP3|.
Posted by Jesse Willis
Tag: LibriVox
Gregg Margarite of LibriVox, Iambik Audio, The Drama Pod, and SFFaudio has died
I’ve just heard that Gregg Margarite, my good friend, and a friend to humanity, has died.
Here are the facts as I’ve been told them.
Gregg died of a sudden heart attack on Friday morning (March 23, 2012).
__
I’ve never used an emoticon in a post on SFFaudio. Emoticons, I thought, were for when words couldn’t be easily employed. And I figured that was never.
I was wrong.
If there ever was a day for a frowny face that day is this day.
:(
I became a friend of Gregg’s after listening to his recordings on LibriVox. I said to him that I wanted to be his friend because he was narrating so many of the audiobooks that I wanted to listen to. I told him that meant we had to be friends. And he believed me. And so we were.
We did several podcasts with Gregg. All of them were really fun. And, we were planning more. My last communication with him was about Philip K. Dick’s The Short Happy Life Of The Brown Oxford – which he wanted to narrate. Gregg wrote:
“I have 3 holy grails when it comes to PKD short stories, Brown Oxford, Electric Ant (not gonna happen in my lifetime) and Not By Its Cover.”
I was also waiting to hear his thoughts on the first episode of Black Mirror. I know he got it, but I don’t know if he saw it. I guess I’ll never know.
I told Gregg I had started listening to his narration of the novel Couch by Benjamin Parzybok. He asked that I tell him about it after listening. I won’t get that chance now.
Gregg was also planning on narrating The Ganymede Takeover, a novel by Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson. I don’t think he’d actually started it yet though as I hadn’t yet sent him my copy.
The last update on Gregg’s site says that he’d recorded 205 hours, 58 minutes, and 30 seconds of audiobooks. Most of that was for LibriVox. I figure that’s one hell of a legacy.
In the many times we spoke I learned many surprising things about Gregg. He said he used to build “surrogate penises for Ronald Regan”, he was a musician, he was an artist and he was a fiction writer too (but under pseudonyms). I never learned his pseudonyms.
Gregg’s website, Acoustic Pulp, offers no comments section. So I invite anybody wishing to communicate any kind thoughts with Janine, Gregg’s wife, to comment below.
Update:
Mark Nelson has started a LibriVox forum thread.
Posted by Jesse Willis
LibriVox: The City At World’s End by Edmond Hamilton
Produced for SFFaudio Challenge #6, The City At World’s End is terrific audiobook. Part of that’s because Mark Nelson’s narration is super-listenable and the other part is because the novel itself is very keen Science Fiction.
If you’re a Superman fan the plot may remind you of a particular issue of Action Comics (#300) – that’s the one in which Superman travels to the distant future of Earth only discover it emptied of life and with a giant red Sun in its sky. Indeed, the similarities between the two tales would be very eerie were it not for the fact that both were written by Edmond Hamilton!
I’m halfway through The City At World’s End and am really enjoying it. The prejudices, assumptions, and attitudes of the townsfolk are all vintage 1950, but the idea quotient is very high. Hamilton has thought through a lot of the problems he makes his characters face. If you’re familiar with Robert A. Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold, in which a family is transported into Earth’s future, you’ll find The City At World’s End to be a kind of macroscopic version of that – and both novels start with a really big, and highly unnatural, bang.
Or, if you’re looking more contemporaneously, you could think of The City At World’s End as a kind of highly inverse version of Terra Nova (because they go forward in time not back, and what was bad on TV is actually good in the audiobook). I highly recommend you give The City At World’s End a listen!
The City At World’s End
By Edmond Hamilton; Read by Mark Nelson
21 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 7 Hours 6 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: March 20, 2012
The pleasant little American city of Middletown is the first target in an atomic war – but instead of blowing Middletown to smithereens, the super-hydrogen bomb blows it right off the map – to somewhere else! First there is the new thin coldness of the air, the blazing corona and dullness of the sun, the visibility of the stars in high daylight. Then comes the inhabitant’s terrifying discovery that Middletown is a twentieth-century oasis of paved streets and houses in a desolate brown world without trees, without water, apparently without life, in the unimaginably far-distant future.
Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/rss/6121
iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|
Here’s the |PDF|.
And for people like me I’ve also made a single giant 7 hour |MP3| version – which you can download from our server. It’ll be especially useful for iPod users as it has art, is tagged “Audiobook”, and is also checked with “remember playback position.” Even better it has been volume adjusted. Let me know if you like it!
Cover and illustrations from the appearance of The City At World’s End in Startling Stories, July 1950:
More covers:
And one more image, from the cover of Urania:
[Thanks also to DaveC, Barry Eads, and Gerard Arthus]
Posted by Jesse Willis
The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley on YouTube
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
Red Nails by Robert E. Howard – an UNABRIDGED audiobook as a YouTube video
Disappointed with the latest Conan movie? Yeah me too.
Here’s my response.
I’ve combined Gregg Margarite‘s narration of Robert E. Howard’s Red Nails with the original illustrations from its serialization in Weird Tales. It’s CONAN, it’s awesome storytelling, and it’s available in HD!
Posted by Jesse Willis
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (audiobook on YouTube)
Mark Nelson’s unabridged narration of A Princess Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs is available as a set of three YouTube videos:
The uploader, CC Prose, has done something interesting here by combining LibriVox audiobooks with the printed text. I like it!
Posted by Jesse Willis