Penguin Audio – Page 15

Review of Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher

SFFaudio Review

Proven Guilty by Jim Butcher Proven Guilty
By Jim Butcher; Read by James Marsters
Audible Download – approx. 16 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2009
Themes: / Fantasy / Urban Fantasy / Magic / Chicago / Wizard / Faeries / Vampires / Black Magic

By the time most fantasy series reach their eighth novel, they’re usually showing their age. For proof, one need look no further than Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, in which the eighth book, Path of Daggers, is seen as the beginning of the cycle’s decline, although some would place this event significantly earlier. In any case, Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series certainly doesn’t follow this trend. In fact, Proven Guilty suggests that the series just keeps getting better.

The novel initially follows the series formula: Chicago wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden faces a series of seemingly-disconnected incidents which, as the plot progresses, reveal themselves to be connected in a sinister way. The White Council is on the lookout for black magic; monsters from the big screen are wreaking havoc at a horror fan convention; and Molly Carpenter, daughter of Harry’s good friend Michael, is in some kind of mysterious trouble. Harry must juggle all these fly balls and, as usual, keep himself from getting killed. He’s aided by the usual cast of supporting characters like officer Karin Murphy and the elemental Bob the Skull., and White Court vampire Thomas.

Harry soon discovers that the faerie courts of Summer and Winter have taken an interest in recent events. Perhaps this is why I enjoyed Proven Guilty so much, since it evoked themes from the other faerie-centric novel in the series so far, Summer Knight, which is also one of my favorites. Butcher writes about the fae as if they are both inscrutably beautiful and incalculably terrifying. In general, the Summer Court tends to side with the “powers of good”, while the Winter Court allies itself with “evil”, but faerie politics aren’t quite that simple. Summer can be incredibly crafty and deceptive, while denizens of Winter are prone to occasional acts of kindness and sacrifice.

This moral ambiguity cuts to the heart of the success of Proven Guilty. Themes of morality, self-control, parenthood, and responsibility abound. Butcher’s early novels felt like little more than exciting detective thrillers with a supernatural twist–entertaining, witty, humorous, but lacking any real depth. In later Dresden Files novels, Butcher has cultivated a heightened emotional sensitivity. in Proven Guilty, this manifests most prominently in Harry’s complex relationship with the Carpenter family. Without giving too much away, suffice to say that the execution of a young boy at the hands of the White Council for misuse of magic holds more than a hint of foreshadowing.

James Marsters, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, narrates the novel flawlessly. His hard-boiled narrative style perfectly fits the book’s genre as a detective story, and his dust-dry rendition of Harry Dresden’s dialogue captures the wizard’s lonely character perfectly. Marsters also handles the female characters deftly, avoiding the pitfall of overacting that some other male vice actors fall prey to.

Readers might get away with reading Proven Guilty as a stand-alone novel, since it does a passable job of weaving backstory into the plot in an unobtrusive manner, but it’s worth reading the Dresden Files series from the beginning. Unfortunately, books six and seven (Blood Rites and Dead Beat) haven’t yet received the audio treatment, though they’re schedules for release sometime in the coming months. It’s well worth plodding through those two volumes in print.

Also take a look at SFFaudio’s favorable review of Small Favor, book ten in the series, which I’m immensely looking forward to once I’ve read the intervening White Night.

Posted by Seth Wilson

Review of Daemon by Daniel Suarez

SFFaudio Review

Daemon by Daniel Suarez Daemon
By Daniel Suarez; Read by Jeff Gurner
Audible Download – approx. 16 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audiobooks
Published: 2009
Themes: / Science Fiction / Cyberpunk / Techno-Thriller / Virtual Reality / Online Gaming / Politics /

Daemon‘s success as a self-published novel that crossed over to attain mainstream success is a testament to its cultural relevance, especially among the technorati. Suarez, who moonlights (sunlights?) as a systems analyst, promoted the novel to the movers and shakers in the technology community, Its positive reception even among this tech-savvy elite suggests that Daemon has its finger on the pulse of technological developments and their implications for politics and culture.

Daemon opens with the death of game developer Matthew Sobol, acclaimed developer of multiplayer games such as first-person shooter Over the Rhine and RPG The Gate, which bears a strong resemblance to World Of Warcraft. Some successful entrepreneurs leave money to their kids when they die, others give it all away to charity. Not Sobol. His legacy is the book’s eponymous daemon, a background process which through distributed computing has spread itself across the net and continues to carry out the developer’s will through a series of intricate commands. The capabilities of this daemon, and Sobol’s talent as a developer of artificial intelligence, become apparent when the police raid Sobol’s mansion in Thousand Oaks, California, and find themselves outclassed by a network of elaborate automated booby-traps, including an almost-sentient Humvee.

The novel pans cinematically between several characters who, in one way or another, become embroiled in the daemon’s plot, which ultimately proves to be global in scale. Dramatis personae include police detectives, government agents, a gamer, a laid-off fashion reporter, a white-hat hacker, ad a convict. It’s not clear from the outset whether these characters will become heroes or villains as the story progresses, and even when battle lines are more firmly drawn most of them still defy simple caricature, exhibiting complex motives and emotions.

The real show-stopper, of course, is the daemon itself, who possesses a high degree of intelligence and resourcefulness despite residing in lines of code. The novel’s conceit still demands the willing suspension of disbelief, but the concept and the technical specifics are so finely conceived and executed that the reader is left with a small but nagging suspicion that somewhere, sometime in a future that may be all too near, Daemon could become a reality. Suarez achieves this feat by investigating the wider political, economic, and social implications of a self-aware autonomous computer system.

The living Matthew Sobol embedded many elements of his daemon into his multiplayer games, and several characters venture into these online worlds in search of clues. These scenes are among the strongest in the book, and they carry favorable resonances with both the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and the simulator in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Like the virtual reality elements in these novels, the online gaming sequences in Daemon succeed because they maintain a strong causal relationship to events in the “real” world.

The action battle sequences in Daemon are high-octane, and like all good action sequences they manage to incorporate the book’s themes rather than standing as mere set pieces. For the most part, the protagonists are fighting against computer-controlled contraptions. Nevertheless, I felt that these ultimately visceral and superficial scenes occupy too much space in the novel, and detract from the book’s otherwise deep and intellectually stimulating themes. Paramount Pictures has optioned the movie rights for Daemon, and I shudder to think that the cultural significance of this novel may be boiled away, leaving only two hours of car chases.

The pacing of Daemon also leaves something to be desired. Suarez has revealed that a sequel is in the works, and the book’s cliffhanger ending promises an exciting continuation to the story. Lots of loose ends also remain dangling free, mostly in the arc of character development. The novel’s ending was certainly climactic, but it somehow failed to provide satisfactory closure. As I’ve said in other reviews, even books in a multi-volume series need to retain a high level of internal cohesion.

Jef Gurner’s narration for Daemon is spot-on. His performance is varied enough that each character’s unique identity extends into the aural sphere. Through some tricks of distortion, Penguin Audio has turned the dialogue of the daemon itself into a performance worthy of classic cinematic computerized villains.

Fans of cyberpunk in particular should consider Daemon essential reading, but any science fiction fan looking for an intriguing and visionary techno-thriller should add this audiobook to their summer reading list. The novel’s fascinating themes make it worth slogging through some scenes of gratuitous violence and tugging in vein on a few loose plot threads. Daemon is an impressive debut novel by Daniel Suarez, hopefully presaging an illustrious writing career.

Posted by Seth Wilson

Review of Thinner by Stephen King

SFFaudio Review

Thinner
By Stephen King; Read by Joe Mantegna
9 CDs – 10 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2009 (reissue from 1984)
ISBN: 9780143143901
Themes: / Fantasy / Horror / Gypsies / Curses / Magic /

I put off reading Stephen King’s Thinner for the better part of two decades. The dust jacket description—lawyer runs down gypsy and is cursed to become, well, thinner—seemed like a decent short story stretched out into a novel. The premise just didn’t grab me.

As it turns out, my fears proved ill-founded. Thinner is an entertaining little novel that is, at its heart, about big concepts, including guilt, the dangers of not accepting responsibility for one’s actions, and the ruinous, generation-spanning cycle of destruction wrought by revenge. Thinner is positively short by King standards (about 300 pages), moves quickly, and contains a couple nasty little shocks that keep you on your toes and leave you feeling unsettled.

I’ve stated before that Stephen King was, in his early career, batting very nearly 1.000 as a writer. If you take a look at his work from 1973’s Carrie through 1987’s Misery and The Eyes of the Dragon, King was consistently great. I submit that The Tommyknockers (1988), written at the height of his drug and alcohol problems, was the first true misstep in King’s career. Now that I’ve finally read Thinner (released in 1984), I find that my rule holds true. It’s a fine book from King’s classic period.

Thinner tells the story of Billy Halleck, an overweight lawyer who gets distracted while driving home (his wife is giving him a handjob) and accidentally runs down an old gypsy woman crossing the street. Halleck avoids what should have a manslaughter conviction because the judge is an old golfing buddy and lets him off the hook. But Halleck can’t escape the scales of justice. The ancient father of Halleck’s victim curses Halleck by laying a scaly finger upon him and uttering the single word, “thinner.”

In the coming weeks, Halleck’s weight begins to drop alarmingly. When the doctors rule out cancer, Halleck realizes that the gypsy’s curse has taken root. The rest of the novel features Halleck chasing down the gypsies to get the curse lifted as his weight plunges from a high of 252 pounds to half that.

King has the problem of trying to convince the reader that a steadily weakening lawyer from a wealthy Connecticut suburb is capable of exerting enough pressure on a stubborn gypsy clan to lift the curse. He neatly sidesteps this problem by introducing the character of Richie “The Hammer” Ginelli, a minor mafia boss and a former client of Halleck’s. Ginelli assists Halleck by lending his unique and persuasive “services” learned in the hard-knock school of organized crime.

There’s a lot to recommend in Thinner. Taduz Lemke, the old gypsy with the power to curse, is a wonderful character, an ancient soul (over 100 years old) from the old world, the last of the Magyar chiefs. Although he’s initially unlikeable, King renders Lemke and the rest of his gypsy clan sympathetic. Though they are dirty and uneducated, and routinely skirt (and cross) the boundaries of the law, the gypsies are treated with open hostility from the hypocritical communities that they visit. Men like Halleck view the gypsies as an unwelcome disease in their safe and pure suburban communities, which are actually corrupt at the core with their unequal systems of justice, “old boy” networks, and inherent prejudices. When Halleck claims that Lemke’s daughter is equally at fault for the accident, since she didn’t look before crossing the street, he shows his unwillingness to accept responsibility for his own actions. Worse, Halleck took advantage of an unfair system of justice and never had to pay for his (and his wife’s) carelessness. Lemke’s curse is a painful lesson in admitting one’s guilt: “There is no push, white man from town,” Lemke says, again and again throughout the story. “No push.”

If you’re a Generation X-er you’ll appreciate the 1980’s time machine that is Thinner. In it you’ll find references to Apples and TRS-80s, Thunderbirds and Novas. Halleck’s family physician casually blows cocaine during a checkup and it doesn’t seem out of place here, given the period. Halleck’s daughter is mentioned as playing a year long game of Dungeons and Dragons.

Thinner contains very little horror until the end and is more accurately classified as a thriller, which may be why King adopted his (unsuccessful) pseudonym Richard Bachman during the book’s initial release. In Thinner, King was attempting something a bit outside his reputation as a horror author.

Veteran actor Joe Mantegna provides the narration for Thinner and he is magnificent, particularly in his portrayal of Ginelli (no surprise here, given that Mantegna has appeared in various gangster films). I’ve previously railed against the inclusion of music in audio books, but this version by Penguin makes excellent use of it, in particular its use of a chilling, off-putting theme whenever the gypsies—or Halleck’s alarmingly plunging weight—are mentioned.

Posted by Brian Murphy

Recent Arrivals from Penguin Audio

SFFaudio Recent Arrivals

Four Stephen King audio re-issues!

Desperation
By Stephen King; Read by Kathy Bates
8 CDs – 9 hours – [ABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2009 (reissue from 1996)
ISBN: 9780143143895

One of King’s best novels!

There’s a place along Interstate 50 that some call the loneliest place on Earth. It’s known as Desperation, Nevada. It’s not a very nice place to live. It’s an even worse place to die. Let the battle against evil begin.

The Regulators
By Stephen King; Read by Kate Nelligan
8 CDs – 9 hours – [ABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2009 (reissue from 1996)
ISBN: 9780143143918

This was released at the same time as Desperation, has the same cast as that novel, and appeared as written by Richard Bachman.

There’s a place in Wentworth, Ohio, where summer is in full swing. It’s called Poplar Street. Up until now it’s been a nice place to live. The idling red van around the corner is about to change all that. Let the battle against evil begin.

Thinner
By Stephen King; Read by Joe Mantegna
9 CDs – 10 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2009 (reissue from 1984)
ISBN: 9780143143901

The last Bachman book – after this novel was published, it was revealed that Bachman was Stephen King.

When an old Gypsy man curses Billy Halleck for sideswiping his daughter, six weeks later he’s 93 pounds lighter. Now Billy is terrified. And desperate enough for one last gamble…that will lead him to a nightmare showdown with the forces of evil melting his flesh away.

Rose Madder
By Stephen King; Read by Blair Brown
14 CDs – 18 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2009 (reissue from 1995)
ISBN: 9780143143949

Intense novel about an abused wife.

This is the story of Rose Daniels, “the most richly portrayed female King’s ever created.”* Escape from her macabre marriage is not as easy as fleeing to a new city, picking a new name, finding a new job, and lucking out with a new man. Not with a husband like Norman…

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

The SFFaudio Podcast #025

Podcast

The SFFaudio Podcast #025 – Jesse and Scott are joined by Brian Murphy of The Silver Key and The Cimmerian blogs. We mostly talk about Fantasy, with a little war talk to make things manlier.

Talked about on today’s show:
Recent Arrivals, Penguin Audio, re-release of Stephen King audiobooks, Desperation, The Regulators, Thinner, Rose Madder, Joe Mantegna, Blair Brown, Kathy Bates, Kate Nelligan, the origins of the “Richard Bachman” pseudonym, Donald E. Westlake, Chapterhouse Dune, Frank Herbert, full cast narration, Macmillan Audio, Starship series, Mike Resnick, Jonathan Davis, Book Of The Road, dual narration, Elric Of Melbinone, Michael Moorcock, Audio Realms, The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman, the Canadian publishing industry, Raincoast Books, Od Magic, Patricia A. McKillip, Dreams Underfoot, Charles de Lint, cover art matters, Black Gate blog, Confessions Of A Speed Reading Instructor, “how long is a book ?”, Top 10 Fantasy Battles Of All Time, The Iliad, Homer, Recorded Books, George Guidall, the Robert Fitzgerald translation, reciting Homeric length epics (the documentary In Search Of The Trojan War), Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King, King Arthur (2004), Clive Owen, Excalibur (1981), Audio Renaissance (Macmillan Audio), Chivers Audio (BBC Audiobooks America), ISIS Audio, the Sharpe television series, George R.R. Martin, A Song Of Ice And Fire series.

King Arthur,

Posted by Jesse Willis

Recent Arrivals from Penguin Audio

SFFaudio Recent Arrivals

These four audiobooks by Stephen King are actually reprints, I believe for the first time on CD. All four are novellas from the 1982 collection called Different Seasons. They are excellent stories, and they are read by one of my all-time favorite narrators: the late Frank Muller.

The Shawshank Redemption
aka Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption
By Stephen King; Read by Frank Muller
4 CDs – 4 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9780143143956

A man convicted of murder lives in a prison brutally ruled by a sadistic warden and secretly run by a con who knows all the ropes and pulls all the strings. Made into a movie called The Shawshank Redemption.

The Body
By Stephen King; Read by Frank Muller
5 CDs – 6 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9780143143925

Four rambunctious young boys plunge through the façade of a small town and come face-to-face with life, death, and intimations of their own mortality. The film Stand By Me is based on this novella.

The Breathing Method
By Stephen King; Read by Frank Muller
3 CDs – 3 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9780143143932

A disgraced woman is determined to triumph over death.

Apt Pupil
By Stephen King; Read by Frank Muller
6 CDs – 7 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9780143143963

Todd Bowden is one of the top students in his high school class and a typical American sixteen-year-old–until he becomes obsessed about the dark and deadly past of an older man in town. The inspiration for the film of the same name.

A high tech thriller!
Daemon
By Daniel Suarez; Read by Jeff Gurner with Garet Scott
13 CDs – 16 hours – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 2008
ISBN: 9780143144441

Technology controls almost everything in our modern-day world, from remote entry on our cars to access to our homes, from the flight controls of our airplanes to the movements of the entire world economy. Thousands of autonomous computer programs, or daemons, make our networked world possible, running constantly in the background of our lives, trafficking e-mail, transferring money, and monitoring power grids. For the most part, daemons are benign, but the same can’t always be said for the people who design them.

Matthew Sobol was a legendary computer game designer—the architect behind half-a-dozen popular online games. His premature death depressed both gamers and his company’s stock price. But Sobol’s fans aren’t the only ones to note his passing. When his obituary is posted online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events intended to unravel the fabric of our hyper-efficient, interconnected world. With Sobol’s secrets buried along with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed at every turn, it’s up to an unlikely alliance to decipher his intricate plans and wrest the world from the grasp of a nameless, faceless enemy—or learn to live in a society in which we are no longer in control. . . .

Computer technology expert Daniel Suarez blends haunting high-tech realism with gripping suspense in an authentic, complex thriller in the tradition of Michael Crichton, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson