science fiction – Page 222

Review of The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon

The Speed of Dark
By Elizabeth Moon, Read by Grover Gardner
9 cassettes – 13 hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Books on Tape, Inc.
Published: 2003
Themes: / Science fiction / Gene Therapy / Autism /

In the near future, disease will be a condition of the past, cured genetically at birth or soon afterward. But for the generation born before this development, it is too late, and they must get along as best they can. Lou Arrendale is in this lost generation. He is a high-functioning autistic with a job, friends and a love of fencing. But now, an experimental treatment will cure his autism. The question is, will he be the same person after he receives the treatment?

This is the first time I’ve been really happy that a book was on tape as opposed to CD. Normally I like not having to change cassettes or flip them over, but The Speed of Dark hooked me so deeply that I took it everywhere with me. I dragged my little portable tape player around the house and then would pop the tape out and put it in the car stereo while I was running errands. I couldn’t stop listening.

Most of the novel is told from Lou Arrendale’s first person point of view and Grover Gardner gave a pitch-perfect performance. His clipped and precise delivery captured the precision with which Lou dealt with the world. Coupled with Ms. Moon’s evocative language, the story unfolded with the inevitable beauty of a Bach cantata–events surprised me, but there was no other way for the story to unfold.

One of the most fascinating things was how Ms. Moon dealt with Lou’s perceptions of normal people. He had been taught that it was rude to interrupt other people, but normal people could interrupt and it was not rude. He is fascinated by how normal people can pick up on subtle social cues so that they seem to read each others minds. His wonder at the complex pattern of group conversation is so palpable that I felt it too, and found myself watching a conversation of my friends with some of the same awe. How do we know when it’s time to stop talking and let someone else, or when it is okay to interrupt and when it is not?

Other sections of the book are briefly told from the point of view of other characters, but Ms. Moon stays with third person for them. The writing is as clear, but I never connected with the other characters and sometimes found myself shifting in my seat, anxious to get back to Lou. These sections provide necessary plot information, and are also a fine way to view Lou from the outside. I suspect that in written format, my impatience would be less pronounced, but since Lou’s sections are in first person I came to associate Mr. Gardner’s voice with Lou. When he was reading other characters it seemed like a mask. A good mask, but I wanted Lou back.

And that is the crux of the novel. Ms. Moon made me care about Lou by showing me the inside of his thoughts. I could not fathom how he could possibly be the same person if he were not autistic. The dilemma is fascinating.

I won’t tell you what decision Lou makes in the end. Why? The gift-giving season is upon us; rather than recommending this as an item for your gift-giving list, you should have a copy of The Speed of Dark for yourself.

Posted by Mary Robinette Kowal

Review of Nightmares on Congress Street, Part 5

SFFaudio Review

Nightmares on Congress Street – Part 5
By Rocky Coast Radio Theatre; Performed by a Full Cast
2 CD’s – 2 hours [AUDIO DRAMA]
Publisher: Rocky Coast Radio Theatre
Published: 2005
Themes: / Horror / Science Fiction / Murder / Government / Spirits /

Here’s another top-notch title from Rocky Coast Radio Theatre out of Maine. It contains seven dramatized horror tales:

The Demon of the Gibbet by Fitz-James O’Brien
A horror poem, very nicely rendered.

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe, adapted by Patrick Bradley
A modern adaptation of Poe’s classic story. Nightmares on Congress Street, Part IV contained Poe’s “A Cask of Amontillado” presented traditionally – this one is also excellent, but the script updates the story to a modern setting.

Retroactive Anti-Terror by Alex Irvine, adapted by William Dufris
This science fiction story portrays a different type of horror – a future where people are prosecuted for what they might do. Alex Irvine’s original story appeared in Salon.com in 2004. The story makes a clear political statement which people from all viewpoints would benefit from hearing.

Much A-Zoo About Nothing written and performed by Michael Duffy
A humorous song in which a guy goes to a zoo and encounters “ten green men with super suits on”.

The Wind by Ray Bradbury, adapted by William Dufris
It starts when Alan calls Herb on the phone obviously very nervous. After a little prodding by Herb, Alan reveals that it’s the wind he’s so worried about, and the tense story takes off from there. Bradbury probably has more stories available as audio drama than any other author, and this wonderful adaptation has me hunting for more.

The Door Below by Hugh B. Cave, adapted by William Dufris
Another good horror story that takes place mostly in a lighthouse… ghosts, anyone?

The Statement of Randolph Carter by H.P. Lovecraft, adapted by William Dufris
This is my favorite of the collection. Dufris and crew perfectly capture the creepy horror of Lovecraft’s original story.

Nightmares on Congress Street V is the second title I’ve heard from Rocky Coast, and I’m convinced that they are one of the top current producers of audio drama. With first-rate acting, the careful placing of sound effects, very good music, and fantastic scripts, these stories capture and hold tight. I can’t recommend this title highly enough for fans of audio drama and horror.

You can get this title from Paperback Digital, Tantor Media, Amazon, and Audible.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

Review of Snow Bank by Jeffrey Adams

Snow Bank
By Jeffrey Adams, performed by Icebox Radio Theater
2 CDs – 115 minutes [UNABRIDGED 4 part serial]
Publisher: Icebox Radio Theater
Published: 2004
Themes: / Science Fiction / Alien / Mystery / Teen Drama

A body in a snowbank…
A town under siege
A family that must solve the mystery, or be torn apart!

If you had to do a high-concept pitch for Snow Bank you’d probably wind up saying “X-files meets the Bobbsey Twins.” Sean (Brock Krahnke) and his twin sister Bobbie (Anna Remus) discover a body under a snowbank next to their school. Despite warnings from their father, the local D.A., the twins set out to investigate the murder themselves. What follows dips into UFOs, alien scientists and twin psychic connections. They even manage to pull off a car chase in radio. That’s pretty impressive.

The story is all over than map and unfortunately wraps up in the final episode with a long expository scene which, maddeningly, says that the car chase was a hallucination–which both twins shared. There are logical inconsistencies in the story and unresolved questions which left me very frustrated. For instance, I can’t give you a spoiler on how the dead body got in the snow bank because they never explain it.

The acting in this is very strong with only one or two exceptions. What is most impressive about the production is that it was originally broadcast live. When I listened to the first episode I was troubled by some over-modulation on the microphones, but when I listened to the outro and realized that I had just heard a live performance, I was stunned. The performances are tight and the Foley is beautifully handled to create an aural picture of what is happening. Both Krahnke and Remus turn in really compelling performances. In particular, when Remus’s character, Bobbie, is sent to a juvenile detention center you can hear her character change posture from a cocky teenage girl, to an insecure and frightened one.

So, although the story almost felt like they were making it up as they went, the execution makes Snow Bank worth listening to.

Posted by Mary Robinette Kowal

Review of House of Bones by Robert Silverberg

House Of Bones
By Robert Silverberg; Read by Jared Doreck
1 CD – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Infinivox
Published: 2005
ISBN: 1884612431
Themes: / Science Fiction / Time Travel / Prehistory /

Another stunning audio achievement from Infinivox! House Of Bones is a unique time-travel story that imbues a deep sense of satisfaction on nearly every level. A top shelf reading by a dynamic reader, a dynamite story and an elegant production combine to make pure aural delight! House Of Bones is a modest tale, recounting the unfortunate fate of the world’s first and perhaps last time traveler. After a misguided test run he’s become trapped 20,000 years in our past, unequipped for survival his future is uncertain. What’s worse he’s surrounded by people so primitive they don’t even have a written language. So primitive they take in his unworthy and skilless self and accept him into their society. This glimpse of what life might have been like for Cro-Magnon man in the late Pleistocene epoch shows us precisely why we can’t judge a society by it’s lack of tool based technology. Silverberg skillfully extrapolates a fascinating working culture out of what little modern archaeologists and paleoanthropolgists know of these people, our ancestors and creates in the process something to think about when using words like “primitive”. House Of Bones is kind of a mirror image of Isaac Asimov’s The Ugly Little Boy. And like that tale this one is a keeper.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of The Pocket and the Pendant by Mark Jeffrey

The Pocket And The Pendant
By Mark Jeffrey; Read by Mark Jeffrey
13 MP3 Files – 10 Hours 25 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: markjeffrey.typepad.com / Podiobooks.com
Published: 2005
Themes: / Science Fiction / Young Adult / Physcics / Immortality / Time Travel / Aliens / Time / Ancient Astronauts /

“On April 8th at exactly 3:38 in the afternoon the world STOPPED.”

It is one of the fundamental constants of the universe – every second thrift store one enters will contain a lonely shelf somewhere in the back with a battered paperback copy of Chariots Of The Gods? by Eric von Däniken on it. That is a terrible, terrible book. I encourage you – only partially in jest – to burn down any store that has one. Chariots Of The Gods is a massive failure in every way but one, it’ll help me tell you about a certain 1970s pop culture concept – the “ancient astronauts” theory. This is a speculative/delusional hypothesis that posits that extraterrestrial aliens are responsible for the ancient civilizations of Earth. Basically it argues that ancient people with their distinctive lack of heavy diesel powered machinery, could not possibly have constructed things like the Pyramid of The Sun at Teotihuacán and so the relics of archeological wonders throughout the world must have been constructed by aliens with a ‘higher’ technology. It is of course a ridiculous notion, wholly unsubstantiated by any evidence that wasn’t manufactured by fraudsters. That said, it can occasionally makes for a cool basis for fiction.

Mark Jeffrey’s The Pocket And The Pendant uses the concept of ancient astronauts to very good effect. This is the story of Max Quick a very odd little boy and his companions, other children who’ve found themselves trapped living in a frozen instant of time. Has this time “pocket” has been caused by the strange aircraft in the skies above the USA? What about the almost magical books that everyone who isn’t frozen seem to be after? Only the aptly named “Mr. E.” knows the answer. Weaving together a carefully researched history with an intriguing and well executed scenario Mark Jeffrey has put together an engaging and satisfying adventure that while aimed at a younger audience never talks down to it. Basically Jeffrey does for science fiction what Harry Potter does for fantasy – I’d say he does it better by layering in facts and mythology from many sources. He takes the whacked out theories of Zecharia Sitchin and asks “what if they were true?”, mixes it up with action like The Matrix, the premise of the Doctor Who “Key To Time” arc and with a couple dutiful nod to the 1959 and 1985 The Twilight Zones.

Jeffrey is very inventive with solving the problems he’s created. But there was one thing that bothered me about the story, if Max and his companions are trapped in time how can they see? Let me explain, this is basically the same nitpick I had with H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, without light hitting a retina you can’t see. If time is stopped then the light has stopped (in The Invisible Man the title character’s retinas are transparent!). I’m nitpicky.

Jeffrey reads the novel himself, doing accents, adults children boys girls and aliens. The sound quality is very good and well leveled, but there is one caveat, a constant musical score underlies the reading (almost always keyed to characters and events in the tale). In this case it is fairly benign, and certainly allows an atmosphere of emotion to build in the story – but not having heard the tale without music I’m not sure if it wouldn’t have been better just as a clean reading.

SFFaudio COMMENT: This is the second “Podiobook” we’ve reviewed on SFFaudio, and the quality is WAY, WAY UP THERE, not just in terms of podcast novels, but in terms of novels on audio. Combine this fact with the price, which is just a request for a donation if you enjoyed the experience, and you’re literally crazy by not listening to them. The worst that can happen is you listen, enjoy the heck out of it and then feel guilty for a few years because you were to cheap to throw a few $$$ towards the producers. Go ahead now, give yourself a gift, subscribe to Morevi: The Chronicles Of Rafe And Askana and The Pocket And the Pendant you’ll marvel at your own generosity.

Posted by Jesse Willis

Review of The Quantum Rose by Catherine Asaro

The Quantum Rose
By Catherine Asaro, read by Anna Fields
1 CD (MP3) – 13 ½ hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks
Published: 2004
ISBN: 0786186232
Themes: / Science fiction / Fantasy / Romance / Space opera / Telepathy /

I’ve always been a big fan of math. I like the chumminess of commuting, associating, and distributing; the edginess of integrating by parts; and the sharp antiseptic sting of differentiating exponentials. In The Quantum Rose, Catherine Asaro brings the robust methodology of a table of cosines to romantic space opera. Like a seasoned mathematics professor, she begins by defining the variables: A fantastically beautiful heroine; her strong, handsome but brutish betrothed; and a mysterious stranger who takes a sudden interest in the heroine. She then lays out the equations for us: fear, mutual need, and strange loyalty between her and the betrothed; fear, mistrust, sexual attraction, and a hidden wound that must be healed between her and the stranger. From there, she manipulates the terms using standard algebraic operations such as nudity, well-meaning ignorance, revenge, treachery, self-sacrifice for the greater good, declarations of undying love, and first time sex so amazing it humbles those of us with decades of experience.

Asaro’s story-solving skills are honed to such an atom-splitting edge that only halfway through the book, she derives the main quantity of interest: True love. Not satisfied with so straightforward a proof, however, she dashes diligently on to lead us through a desperate, if leisurely (and admirably bloodless), rescue of an exiled royal family halfway across the galaxy. It’s all quite rigorous.

Never does Asaro skip a step. In fact, for the elucidation of the reader, she will often review a step several times to ensure we’ve understood each point before moving on to the next. She also provides enlightening chapter headings, which contain both a plain English title and a subtitle composed from quasi-quantum mechanical terms (for those hopelessly muddled by such clever cryptology, I’ll provide a clue: Substitute the word “person” for “particle” in these subtitles, and you’ll crack the code for over half of them). Thus, we are duly apprised of all developments well before they occur in the text. As a final touch, Asaro has defined most of the significant variables to be empaths or telepaths, which means we are never in doubt of what anyone in the story is thinking or feeling unless some misunderstanding is required by the plot.

Anna Fields adds to the proceedings by reading the text out loud for us. As an intriguing counterpoint to Asaro’s linear clarity, Fields adds a note of mystery by using female character voices that are quite similar to one another and by occasionally using the voice of one lead male to deliver the dialog spoken by another. The drunken mutter she maintains for the most prominent male throughout the entire length of the book also tends to soften the hard edges of understanding that sometimes seem too prominent for comfort.

The most exciting aspect of this audio book, however, is the medium it is recorded on. That MP3 technology allows nearly 14 hours of spoken text to be recorded on a single, handy CD is like a divine response to listeners’ prayers. There is only one nicely packaged jewel box to open–no snarling tapes nor floppy CD sleeves that produce obligingly but accept only grudgingly, the sound quality is excellent, and the production is clean. Maybe someday I will have the opportunity to actually enjoy an audio book in this format.

Posted by Kurt Dietz