Revisiting the regional digital divide, again

Posted on 2013/05/22 by

It’s been a year since I last turned too much attention to the regional digital divide, and it’s high time to give the bee’s nest another poke.

There’s still! no sign of a US release for China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun, The Scar, or Iron Council, and… well, on and on. We did get, from Tantor Audio, Ben Aaronovitch’s Peter Grant series, narrated wonderfully by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as in the UK edition.

Iron Council: New Crobuzon, Book 3 | [China Mieville] Midnight Riot: Peter Grant, Book 1 | [Ben Aaronovitch]

But there’s more titles coming out in audio “across the pond” that the US isn’t getting, at least not yet. In late April: The City by Stella Gemmell, narrated by Simon Shepherd for Random House Audio, and to Songs of the Earth by Elspeth Cooper, still not out in audio in the US, I can also add 2012′s Trinity Rising, both out from Orion.

The City - Volume 1 | [Stella Gemmell] Trinity Rising | [Elspeth Cooper]

I was set to add Hugh Howey’s recently-UK-released Shift: Wool Trilogy, Book 2, narrated by Peter Brooke to this list, but it is set for a US release next week as Shift Omnibus Edition: Shift 1-3, Silo Saga, read by Tim Gerard Reynolds.

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Release Week: Will Self’s Umbrella, Mark T. Barnes’ The Garden of Stones, Dan Krokos’ The Planet Thieves, and a free Neil Gaiman short

Posted on 2013/05/22 by

A bit of a lull after last week’s haul, but certainly none the lesser in top-level impact as a long, long hoped-for literary fiction title is here this week in the form of Will Self’s Booker-shortlisted Umbrella. But don’t worry, sf/f fans, whether “sf” or “f” strikes your fancy there are a few audiobooks to check out this week as well, of course. There’s also a particularly strong crop of “indie” releases (see a selection of those in the “also out this week” listings) as well as a few more “mainstream” fiction titles that may pique.

PICKS OF THE WEEK:

Umbrella: A Novel by Will Self, narrated by John Lee for Audible Inc. by arrangement with Grove/Atlantic. Published in the UK last year and shortlisted for the Booker, the latest novel from Self was published in the US in January and finally comes to audio. “Moving between Edwardian London and a suburban mental hospital in 1971, Umbrella exposes the 20th century’s technological searchlight as refracted through the dark glass of a long-term mental institution. While making his first tours of the hospital at which he has just begun working, maverick psychiatrist Zachary Busner notices that many of the patients exhibit a strange physical tic: rapid, precise movements that they repeat over and over. One of these patients is Audrey Dearth, an elderly woman born in the slums of West London in 1890. Audrey’s memories of a bygone Edwardian London, her lovers, involvement with early feminist and socialist movements, and, in particular, her time working in an umbrella shop, alternate with Busner’s attempts to treat her condition and bring light to her clouded world. Busner’s investigations into Audrey’s illness lead to discoveries about her family that are shocking and tragic.”

Umbrella: A Novel | [Will Self] The Garden of Stones: Echoes of the Empire, Book 1 | [Mark T. Barnes]

The Garden of Stones: Echoes of the Empire, Book 1 by Mark T. Barnes, narrated by Nick Podehl for Brilliance Audio, concurrent with the print/ebook release from Amazon’s 47North, tops my interest meter this week in terms of fantasy and science fiction, not the least reason being that it is narrated by Podehl, the voice of the US editions of Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles. Australian writer and Clarion South alumnus Barnes sold the first three books to Amazon last July, and Tor.com has an excerpt. Here’s the pitch: “Fueled by visions promising him prolonged life and political power, the dying Corajidin, leader of a millennia-old dynasty, has brought the nation of Shrian to civil war. But is his bright destiny assured, or do the events unfolding around him promise a more ignoble, and finite, future? Indris, warrior-mage of the Seq Scholars and scion of a rival Great House, is caught in the upheaval. Driven by loyalty and conscience to return to a city that haunts his past, Indris reluctantly accepts the task of finding a missing man, the only one able to steer the teetering nation toward peace.The celebrated warrior-poet, Mari, touches both men’s lives: one as daughter, one as lover. As her world unravels around her, can she be true to both her duty to blood, and her own desires for freedom and happiness?”

While I still retain most of my decade-long allergy to most YA-oriented fiction, closer to middle grade books can still be a welcome listen. In that category this week: The Planet Thieves By Dan Krokos, narrated By Kirby Heyborne for Blackstone Audio, concurrent with its print/ebook release from Starscape (Tor). “13-year-old Mason Stark and 17 fellow cadets from the Academy for Earth Space Command (ESC) boarded the SS Egypt for a routine voyage to log their required space hours when they are attacked by the Tremist, an alien race at war with humanity. With the captain and crew dead, injured, or taken prisoner, Mason and the cadets are all that’s left to warn the ESC. Soon they find out the reason the Tremist chose to attack: the Egypt is carrying a weapon that could change the war forever. Mason will have to lead the cadets in a daring assault to take back the ship, rescue the survivors, and recover the weapon – before there isn’t a war left to fight.”

The Planet Thieves | [Dan Krokos] Shoggoth's Old Peculiar: A Free Short Story by Neil Gaiman, Plus a Preview of The Ocean at the End of the Lane | [Neil Gaiman]

And… apparently I missed this last week? How? Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar: A Free Short Story by Neil Gaiman, Plus a Preview of The Ocean at the End of the Lane written and read by Neil Gaiman for Harper Audio. It runs nearly an hour, all told: “‘Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar’, a short story from Neil Gaiman’s collection Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions, follows an American student’s walking tour of the British coastline, which takes an odd turn when he comes to the town of Innsmouth. This free short story also includes a preview of The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel, the author’s next full-length novel, available now for pre-order and due out on June 18.” (This had been the short story “Cold Colors” when I bought it, but it morphed into “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar” by the time I downloaded it.)

ALSO OUT: Continue reading →

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The Shambling Guide to New York City Listen-a-Long: Chapter 2

Posted on 2013/05/16 by

Welcome to the second installment of The Shambling Guide to New York City Listen-a-Long, covering Chapter 2 of Mur Lafferty’s The Shambling Guide to New York City. First, there’s now a book trailer up, she’ll be appearing on a live chat event via Shindig.com next week, and great reviews keep popping up all over the place — like this starred review from Booklist. Before I get into the write-up: a warning, that I’ll repeat each episode, that the discussion here is oh-so-spoilerific, so if that’s a concern, pop over and take the less-than-half-an-hour to listen to the podcast episode first. On to…

Cover art by Jamie McKelvie

Cover art by Jamie McKelvie

The Shambling Guide to New York City: Chapter Two
by Mur Lafferty
Runtime: 24 minutes

The intro here is super brief, listing a couple of things listeners can do to show their support, such as pre-ordering the book of course, subscribing to the podcast, and counting down the three (and counting, it’s already less than two weeks as of this post) weeks until the full book and audiobook release, and detailing two launch parties, one at BaltiCon on Memorial Day weekend and the other a local event at Chapel Hill Comics, which I’ll be covering with a special post in this series. On to the chapter!

When last we left off in Chapter One, Zoë was in search of “tall caloric caffeine bomb” and fresh off being rejected not only as a buyer of strange books on keeping hellhounds, but as even being a job applicant for a job which looked pretty much perfect for her, with new travel guide publisher Underground Publishing.

We take a moment to get a little more backstory on Zoë’s path back “home” to New York City as she makes her way through said city, though she doesn’t have to go far to find “Bakery Under Starlight”, a little café only a few doors down from Mannegishi’s Tricks, the bookstore where the book opens. Things are clearly still a bit strange (in how many coffee shops will you hear “Latte for the son of a demon and a whore!” as orders are ready?) and when Zoë grabs a job posting flyer for Underground Publishing from the café’s corkboard, things get a bit stranger as a man stares at her and, echoing company CEO Phillip Rand from chapter one with “I’m not sure if that’s a good idea for you to pursue.”

It turns out that John Dickens, described as a fat man with sallow skin and limp brown hair, works for Rand in public relations at Underground. After a brief exchange, he encourages Zoë to go ahead and apply and see what happens, which she does, right there, from her BlackBerry.

Things go from strange to interesting, perhaps a bit in the ancient Chinese curse definition of the word, as “Granny Good Mae” comes into the café, an elderly woman who, it appears, the patrons and staff are nearly completely terrified of. Zoë helps her get a cup of tea, and escorts her out of the store, only to find that Granny Good Mae claims to have come to the café explicitly to see how Zoë has “grown up”, implying a previous relationship which is a complete mystery to Zoë.

Returning to her table, Zoë discovers that she’s already received a reply and an offer of an interview from Rand — in less than an hour. John offers to escort her to the company headquarters, which are just around the corner from the café in a refurbished off-Broadway theater. Which, upon examination, looks pretty much exactly like an abandoned, condemned off-Broadway theater, complete with boarded-up doors. After dialing 9-1 and holding her finger over the last 1, she follows John into a “dark hallway” and… that’s the end of Chapter Two, other than the end-of-chapter “Excerpt from The Shambling Guide to New York City”, this one on the nightlife of the Theater District.

And, a brief outtro.

—-

Well, I’m still biased, but I’m also still very pleased. I’ve only read to the end of Chapter Two, and so starting with the end-of-chapter excerpt I’m into new territory in the novel. We’re left with some definite mysteries — exactly how weird is John, and do we need to keep worrying about some of his remarks about now wanting to work with Zoë, and more importantly who and maybe what is Granny Good Mae? — and pretty much exactly a cliffhanger, except the cliff is a boarded-up door, leading into the darkness of a condemned-looking building. So a cliffhanger without the cliff.

But! Chapter Three is already up, so there’s no need to endure the pain of not knowning for long. See you next week!

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Release Week: Brandon Sanderson’s The Rithmatist; Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer; Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors; World War Z; The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl; Fiction River; and John Scalzi’s The Human Division

Posted on 2013/05/15 by

It’s a very, very crowded middle release week in May, with a long list of new audiobooks including new books in translation, a new YA novel from Brandon Sanderson, Neil Gaiman voicing one of his earlier collections, and finally an “unabridged” (scare quotes explained later…) US recording for World War Z. And more. How long is the list? Very long. I grudgingly winnowed things down to six seven picks, but others (a non-fiction Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction By Annalee Newitz, and Tor-published fiction with “fantastical elements” Mending the Moon By Susan Palwick, in particular) are certainly worth checking out as well, along with a pair of “Book 3″ in a series, Raymond Feist’s Magician’s End: Book Three of the Chaoswar Saga and Jenna Black’s Rogue Descendant: Nikki Glass, Book 3.

PICKS OF THE WEEK:

The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson, narrated By Michael Kramer for Macmillan Audio, out concurrent with the hardcover/ebook release from Tor Teen. While Sanderson is a multiple-times bestselling adult author (Mistborn, The Way of Kings, and the concluding volumes of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time), and with his “Alcatraz” series he has written several books for young readers, this is his “debut novel for the young adult audience.” Early reviews have described an interesting magical fighting system in which writing and drawing with chalk is indeed mightier than the sword. Here’s the setup: “More than anything, Joel wants to be a Rithmatist. Chosen by the Master in a mysterious inception ceremony, Rithmatists have the power to infuse life into two-dimensional figures known as Chalklings. Rithmatists are humanity’s only defense against the Wild Chalklings – merciless creatures that leave mangled corpses in their wake. Having nearly overrun the territory of Nebrask, the Wild Chalklings now threaten all of the American Isles.” First of a new series.

The Rithmatist | [Brandon Sanderson] The Healer | [Antti Tuomainen, Lola Rogers (translator)]

The Healer By Antti Tuomainen, translated by Lola Rogers, and narrated By Simon Shepherd for Random House Audio, out concurrent with Henry Holt’s US release of the English translation of this 2010 novel from Finnish author Tuomainen, winner of the Scandinavian Glass Key crime-fiction prize and the Clue Award for Best Finnish Crime Novel. It’s on the shorter side for an adult fiction at under 6 hours, and a physical CD release is set for early June from AudioGO. Here, in his third novel, Tuomainen sets his sights on a post-climate-catastrophe Helsinki: “It’s two days before Christmas, and Helsinki is battling ruthless climate catastrophe: subway tunnels are flooded and abandoned vehicles are burning in the streets. People are fleeing to the far north where conditions are still tolerable. Social order is crumbling and private security firms have undermined the police force. Tapani Lehtinen, a struggling poet, is among the few still willing to live in the city. When Tapani’s wife, Johanna, a journalist, goes missing, he embarks on a frantic hunt for her.”

Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions by Neil Gaiman, read by Gaiman for Harper Audio, brings one of Gaiman’s earlier collections (1998) to audio. While Gaiman’s 2006 collection Fragile Things contains a long list of awarded and nominated stories (“A Study in Emerald”, “How to Talk to Girls at Parties”), Smoke and Mirrors collects Gaiman’s major short fiction and poetry up to that point in his career, and was itself nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. The publication of American Gods was still two years away, though Gaiman was already well-known for Sandman, Neverwhere, and Good Omens. It’s a picture-window look into Gaiman’s fiction where: “In the deft hands of Neil Gaiman, magic is no mere illusion… and anything is possible. In Smoke and Mirrors, Gaiman’s imagination and supreme artistry transform a mundane world into a place of terrible wonders.”

Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions | [Neil Gaiman] World War Z: The Complete Edition (Movie Tie-in Edition): An Oral History of the Zombie War | [Max Brooks]

And now it’s time to explain the “scare quotes” about getting an “unabridged” World War Z, as the already Guilded Earlobe A+ reviewed World War Z: The Complete Edition (Movie Tie-in Edition): An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks is finally here, narrated by the author along with an all-star cast including Alan Alda, John Turturro, Rob Reiner, Mark Hamill, Alfred Molina, Simon Pegg, Henry Rollins, and Martin Scorsese, and still more including Nathan Fillion, Nicki Clynes, and Kal Penn, for Random House Audio. Another title, World War Z: The Lost Files: A Companion to the Abridged Edition is also out, intended to supplement the previously released abridged edition from 2006, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. So, what gives with the scare quotes? Well, this is an unabridged recording — of the “Movie Tie-in Edition”. Which itself first cuts some text from the original 2006 edition. So while we don’t yet in the US have an “unabridged original edition”, this one’s so very, very close.

Nearly lastly, two “indie” picks, starting with The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl By Tim Pratt, narrated By Marguerite E. Croft. Pratt is no stranger to indie releases, having funded multiple books through Kickstarter and previously publishing the Dave Thompson-narrated Briarpatch via ACX. Here, “Rangergirl” is his 2005 debut novel, now available in audio: “Acclaimed short-story author Tim Pratt delivers an exciting heroine with a hidden talent – and a secret duty. Witty and suspenseful, here is a contemporary love song to the West that was won and the myths that shape us. As night manager of Santa Cruz’s quirkiest coffeehouse, Marzi McCarty makes a mean espresso, but her first love is making comics. Her claim to fame: The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, a cowpunk neo-western yarn. Striding through an urban frontier peopled by Marzi’s wild imagination, Rangergirl doles out her own brand of justice. But lately Marzi’s imagination seems to be altering her reality. She’s seeing the world through Rangergirl’s eyes – literally – complete with her deadly nemesis, the Outlaw.”

The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl | [Tim Pratt]  Unnatural Worlds: Fiction River: An Original Anthology Magazine, Volume 1 | [Richard Bowes, Leah Cutter, David Farland, Esther M. Friesner, Kellen Knolan, Devon Monk, Irette Y. Patterson, Annie Reed, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith]

Speaking of Kickstarter and experienced indie publishers, Unnatural Worlds: Fiction River: An Original Anthology Magazine, Volume 1 includes stories by Richard Bowes, Leah Cutter, David Farland, Esther M. Friesner, Kellen Knolan, Devon Monk, Irette Y. Patterson, Annie Reed, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Dean Wesley Smith, and is narrated By Matthew Buchman, Jerimy Colbert, Jane Kennedy, Irette Y. Patterson, Kristine Katherine Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, Stephanie Writt. I’m not completely sold on the narration of each story, but this is quite an ambitious indie release and one of note. The new original anthology series edited by Rusch and Smith was funded by a Kickstarter project, and plans a new volume every other month, though I’m not sure yet whether future volumes will be produced in audiobook format as well. Here, it’s the first volume: “From a funeral procession in Asia, to an ancestral estate deep in the heart of a vaguely Victorian forest, to a carriage accident in the vast universe of The Runelords, Unnatural Worlds takes listeners on a journey to the far side of the imagination. Funny, heartbreaking, frightening, but most importantly, memorable, the original stories in this anthology go places few writers dare reach. Unnatural Worlds marks the perfect start to the brand-new Fiction River anthology series.”

Lastly, it’s almost hard to wrap my head around it really being the “release week” for The Human Division by John Scalzi, since we hosted the Listen-a-Long for the serialized releases of the weekly back-to-back-to-back-to…back bestselling episodes.

The Human Division | [John Scalzi] The B-Team: The Human Division, Episode 1 | [John Scalzi]

But! Here it is, all in one volume, narrated of course by William Dufris for Audible Frontiers — and there’s also a physical CD audiobook from fellow Amazon.com imprint Brilliance Audio — collecting all the episdoes from The B-Team: The Human Division, Episode 1 to Earth Below, Sky Above: The Human Division, Episode 13. I’m not yet 100% sure whether or not the full audiobook includes, as does the also-now-just-released Tor hardcover/ebook, the short story “After the Coup” (first published and still available at Tor.com) and a new short story “Hafte Sorvalh Eats a Churro and Speaks to the Youth of Today”, which (per the author) will be available standalone at some later point, and is a character piece not necessary to the plot in any case.

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK: Continue reading →

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Review: The King’s Blood

Posted on 2013/05/14 by

The King's Blood

The King’s Blood, Book 2 in The Dagger and the Coinby Daniel Abraham, Narrated by Pete Bradbury
Length 15 hours, 42 minutes

The priests have spiders in their blood.

They worship a goddess that has spend centuries in hiding, “a spider” who blesses them with the power to divine whether or not someone is lying, as well as the ability to speak truth. When you hear them, you believe – despite the circumstances, or whether you have evidence to the contrary, you believe. And so what the priests say comes to pass. They are prophets, and they’re creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Probably.

“Probably” is what’s important. Because what the priests are speaking isn’t actually the truth. It’s a belief made of sincerity, certainty, and absolute conviction. Even if it’s wrong.

If you haven’t checked out Daniel Abraham’s The Dagger and the Coin series, you need to do that ASAP, starting with The Dragon’s Path. It’s epic fantasy, and it does what it says on the tin – it’s full of all the stuff we love about epic fantasy – an incredible cast of characters, magic (albeit a very subtle magic), fantastical creatures, adventure, romance, and most surprisingly – banking. And yet, it grapples with big ideas like forced belief and fundamentalism.

If you’re looking for B&B (Battles & Badasses), there’s some of that but the books are generally more subtle, and instead focus on what’s really special about this series: the characters. Whether it’s ex-soldiers Marcus and Yardem waxing philosophical and theological while collecting a debt (like shades of Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction) or banking ingenue Cithrin meeting up with her old friends from an acting troupe, the characters feel like friends you haven’t seen in years, but when you reunite with them, it’s like no times gone by.

Not all of them are heroic – some are monstrous, whether in actions or philosophy, but Abraham doesn’t let us forget they’re humans too, and gets us to empathize with them far easier than we should. Dawson Kalliam’s class-warfare attitudes are despicable, yet the genuine affection he showers on his wife and children is endearing. Geder Palliako was bullied before his unpredictable rise to power, and so when he uses his newly gained positions to keep people from lying ot his face and taking advantage of him, we understand, despite his awful and barbaric actions.

The Dagger and the Coin is one of the best kept secrets in epic fantasy. Unfortunately, the audiobooks aren’t released until about 9 months or so after the print and eBooks come out (which seems to happen as often as not for Recorded Books)…or maybe that’s a good thing? Like The Dragon’s Path, I ended up reading this book, and then listening to it once the audio came out, right in time for The Tyrant’s Law (3 of this 5 book series). There are two reasons for this: 1) Daniel Abraham’s series is just that good (I expect to revisit these books and characters many, many more times, and 2) Pete Bradbury’s narration gives an added gravity to the story that’s phenomenal. Daniel Abraham was born to write SF/F, and Pete Bradbury was born to narrate it.

Let the countdown to The Tyrant’s Law audiobook commence!

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Featured author and narrator: Mary Robinette Kowal

Posted on 2013/05/14 by

AudioBookaneers Features Presents: Mary Robinette Kowal, author, narrator, and puppeteer

kowal-shadow-puppets

By Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

Hugo Award winning author Mary Robinette Kowal visited Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books on Friday, on her book tour for Without a Summer, the third book in her The Glamourist Histories series which began with 2010′s Shades of Milk and Honey. Billed as, more or less, “the fantasy novel which Jane Austen might have written” the series is a Regency period historical fiction with plenty of manners, costume changes, polite conversations, sisters competing for the affections of suitors, and — this is also fantasy, after all — the “womanly art” of Glamour, which in its high society form is a sort of drawing room magic of delightful illusions and fancy.

All three novels in the series are also narrated by Kowal, an experienced voice actor with credits on Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series and Sherryl Woods’ Sweet Magolia series prior to voicing her own novels. Since, she has also narrated Rosa Montero’s Tears in Rain, Neve Maslakovic’s The Far Time Incident, and Oksana Zabuzhko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, among other projects.

Shades of Milk and Honey was produced by Macmillan Audio, and both book 2, 2012′s Glamour in Glass, and the new book are out from Audible Frontiers. All three are in hardcover, paperback, and ebook from Tor Books.

—-

Kowal began the program with a short presentation of an historical shadow puppet play, 1784′s “The Broken Bridge”. A trained puppeteer with work on the children’s TV series LazyTown as well as many stage play productions and performances, Kowal’s delightful shadow puppet antics and “Tra-la-la”s brought plenty of smiles; more followed as Kowal explained the construction of her curtain and puppets, out of white shower curtain and Trader Joe’s boxes, respectively.

Attendees were treated to a reading that was wonderful in at least two respects. The first being that after polling the audience for their wishes, she read from the first chapter of the forthcoming 4th book in the series, 2014′s Valor and Vanity, which takes place after Napoleon’s defeat to Duke Wellington, and is set near Venice as Jane and Vincent sail for Murano and a meeting with Lord Byron. The second is that, as both an experienced voice actor and narrator and of course as the narrator of her own books, is that it was pretty much a “live audiobook” experience, complete with a wide range of familiar character voices both gruff and matronly which, again, brought plenty of smiles and a few laughs as well.

Jane and Vincent only begin to experiment a bit with creating magical folds at sea — creating and maintaining folds in the ether even while walking is an enormous undertaking — before… well, there has to be some benefit for actually attending the reading, so I’ll leave it at that. Kowal concluded the reading with some additional details about Lord Byron — who has some time which is “unaccounted” for in the historical record — and another historical figure, Doctor John William Polidori, a friend of Byron’s and the author of The Vampyre, a “progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction” (Wikipedia). And one last thing — Doctor Polidori is “a” Doctor, and, apparently known to most of the people in the room and many of my friends who have read Kowal’s books who were not in the room, Kowal has inserted a Doctor Who reference into each of the novels so far. Kowal read one more short excerpt from further into the novel, featuring a character wearing a fez. Which, apparently, was a Doctor Who reference, though as someone who doesn’t watch the show, fairly well lost on me.

In the Q&A session after the reading, I asked Kowal about The Transfigured Lady, a novel she posted chapter by chapter in draft form on a password-protected blog, in order to get reader feedback from the very beginning. Now that novel is Passing Fair, set in early 20th century Nashville, Tennessee, and while it does not (yet!) have a publisher, it’s still very much a live project, complete with 99 pins of research on Pinterest.

Another question from the audience concerned the Science of Glamour, which Kowal explained as “manipulation of waveforms”. In the deep past of her world, humans and fae did not go apart but rather interbred, and so everyone can do magic, some to lesser or greater extents. Further, the farther outside the visible spectrum the harder it is, the more energy is required, the harder the toll on the glamourist. This was expanded upon in an answer to a later question, about analogues between the historical Luddite uprising and the Coldmongers of Kowal’s new novel, Without a Summer. Kowal explained that coldmongery — the transfer of heat energy — was among the most physically demanding, debilitating, and dangerous.

Another question led to some details on two of Kowal’s methods for preventing anachronisms in word and language use. The first is by using a special thesaurus which lists synonyms in order of their year of appearance in English. The second is by using a “Jane Austen Spellcheck Dictionary” which includes the text of all of Austen’s works. But! Even this is not quite enough, because some words, though both in historic use and even in use by Austen, such as “electric” would “feel” too much like anachronisms to be used. And just the words are not enough, either, as Kowal illustrated with the idiom “to have a measured reaction”. This, she explained, was not the way these words were used, due to a different relationship between language and “self” in this time period, requiring the author to “unpack” the meaning into other phrasing.

—-

After the reading, and a costume change of her own out of her Regency dress and a drive over to the recently-opened Raleigh Brewing Company, I got to talk to Kowal about her other recent work. This led me to find out that somehow I’d been living under a rock, because as much as I’d enjoyed METAtropolis and METAtropolis: Cascadia I somehow did not know that a third, again audiobook-first all-original novella anthology was coming, edited by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes, and including stories from (among others) Kowal, Karl Schroeder, and Elizabeth Bear. Kowal said that her story is in a new storyline, not a follow-on to “Water to Wine”, and, after correcting my faulty memory as to which TV cast narrated which previous anthology (Battlestar Galactica narrated METAtropolis and Star Trek: The Next Generation narrated METAtropolis: Cascadia, for the record) named Firefly as perhaps a dream cast to narrate the new anthology, METAtropolis: Green Space.

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Review: Double Feature

Posted on 2013/05/13 by


Double Feature
by Owen King, read by Holter Graham
Length: 16 hours, 11 minutes

Review by Dave Thompson:

When I was in college, I made a student film. I went to a Christian university, and so I decided to write and direct a movie about vampires. This was just as Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show came out, before it became “a thing.” So, I spent a semester of my life and education attempting to make a horror movie – one that to this day has never actually been edited together and completed. One of the tapes was lost (probably the one with some of the best footage on it – where we tromped through a sewer). And while that does completely suck (ha!) most of the time I’m generally okay with that, because I think it probably would not have turned out to be a very good movie for a number of reasons. Most of the time. I was trying to make a movie that I really didn’t have the right budget for, and I’m sure any multiverse version of me would be a decent cinematic director. (I will say  – I think we put together a pretty kickass preview, though!) Also, I made some choices back then that I regret. But what if – what if I’m wrong? And the movie was bad, but so bad it was awesome? And still haunted me?

Owen King’s Double Feature is a modern-day coming of age story – one win which the characters only figure out how to redeem the errors of their youth as adults. It’s the funniest thing I’ve listened to in a long time, and while it might attempt answering some of life’s harder questions a little too pat at times, I still found it genuinely moving.

Continue reading →

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The Shambling Guide to New York City Listen-a-Long: Chapter 1

Posted on 2013/05/09 by

Welcome to the first installment of The Shambling Guide to New York City Listen-a-Long, covering Chapter 1 of Mur Lafferty’s The Shambling Guide to New York City. There’s a bit more to this installment than will be usual, as we get to also talk about Lafferty’s introduction to the podcast, and, well, a bit about my listening history where it comes to her other podcasts. First a warning, that I’ll repeat each episode, that the discussion here is oh-so-spoilerific, so if that’s a concern, pop over and take the 15 minutes to listen to the podcast episode first. On to…

Cover art by Jamie McKelvie

Cover art by Jamie McKelvie

The Shambling Guide to New York City: Chapter One
by Mur Lafferty
Runtime: 15 minutes

I find it hard to count how many hours of Mur Lafferty‘s voice I’ve heard over the past few years now. I met Mur in late 2009, and soon after started checking out her I Should Be Writing podcast (where I learned that “It’s OK to suck” — a better mantra for me probably doesn’t exist) and then her Afterlife series, starting with Heaven, then (and still) available as a free Podiobook. I’ve listened to her host dozens and dozens of Escape Pod episodes, and narrate quite a long list as well. (Inlcuding “You’re Almost Here” by Melinda Thielbar, in which Mur drops the F-bomb with some verve and panache; for several mostly selfish reasons one of my favorite episodes.)

Still, even after all those episodes, all those intros and outtros and narrations, there’s still something very exciting that happens between my ears when I press “play” on Chapter One of Mur’s latest podcast, for her forthcoming novel The Shambling Guide to New York City. While the other projects were well-ongoing before I knew what a podcast even was, for this one, I’d get to be listening along right from the first episodes.

The intro here for episode one is pretty short, though we find out that the idea for this book has been rolling around since 2005. We hear just a bit about selling the book to Orbit (and somehow selling Hachette Audio on the idea of the free podcast as well) and get the plans for the podcast: one chapter a week, for free, for 29 weeks, then remaining up for one month afterwards. Of course, the novel and full audiobook will go on sale on May 28, so those of us who can’t wait to find out what happens next in any given week will have a pretty easy time of scratching that particular itch.

Then it’s right into the “real” audiobook, complete with “Hachette Audio presents…” and intro music. Having gotten to sit in on one studio session, to hear the care and attention to detail from Mur’s editor and recording engineer, I knew I was in for a high-quality recording, and, no surprise, here we are. “Chapter One.”

We meet former travel guide writer Zoë Norris, browsing through a strange New York City bookstore that isn’t in the guidebook. Well, Zoë’s guidebook at least. After passing by a few even stranger titles, such as “How to Make Love, Marry, Devour, and Inherit in Eight Weeks”, Zoë picks up a book on hounds from hell from the Pets section. With a sticky leather binding. That makes its way onto Zoë’s sweater. Of course.

Upon trying to actually buy the strange book in this strange bookstore, though, Zoë runs into some difficulties, as the clerk responds to Zoë’s inquiry about the book’s price with an unsmiling: “We cater to a specific clientele.” As a man who was posting a flyer turns to regard the rising confrontation, we get a peek into Zoë’s paranoid inner voice as she struggles to remind herself that: Not everyone is out to get you.

The man begins to diffuse the situation, but Zoë’s interest in the book is thrown by the wayside when bigger quarry is spotted. The man had just posted a flyer for a travel guide writing job on the bulletin board, and, as we find out immediately, “She needed a job.”

Of course, she gets the job, the book ends, everyone’s happy.

No, of course not. Instead, she gets pretty much the same treatment from the man about the job posting as the clerk was giving her about the hound book. Through the resulting exchange, we find out a bit of Zoë’s backstory: a former head researcher and writer for Misconceptions Publishing (“the second biggest travel book publisher in the USA”) laid off after finding herself as the “other woman” to her boss, Godfrey’s, wife.

Still, Zoë presses on. Who is this pudgy guy in a T-shirt and jeans to tell her that she wasn’t “what they’re looking for”? Just Phillip Rand, the owner, president, and CEO of the company, Underground Publishing, of course.

And yet, still, Zoë pushes on, listing her qualifications, lining up her qualifications and experience as the perfect fit. Shot down yet again, she asks, “Isn’t this illegal?” Though Rand assures her that she’s not being discriminated against based on gender or race — though going by the clues given by the cover art and chapter so far, we might suspect the “human” race, mightn’t we? — and that, as they say, is that.

Finding no help in the self-help section (“Get the Salary You Deserve! Negotiating Hell Notes in a Time of Economic Downturn”) she heads for a long bath, via a “tall caloric caffeine bomb” stop on the way. Finally, chapter one closes with an “Excerpt from The Shambling Guide to New York City”, in which we find out a bit more about the bookstore in which this has all just happened.

And, the chapter finished, the podcast episode ends with a brief outtro, in which we learn about Orbit’s wallpaper images for the book, and an official necklace at Surlyramics.

—-

Well, I’m biased, but I’m also very pleased. We’re starting to get to know Zoë — needs a job, smart, knows she’s got what it takes to write, juuuuust a bit paranoid, maybe a bit slow on the “every book in here seems non-a-joke directed towards mythical beings” uptake, but hey, it’s New York City, every subculture has its hole-in-the-wall bookstore, right?

So! Chapter Two is already up, which is a more meaty 24 minutes. See you next week! Will Zoë find her caffeine bomb? Will she end up dressed as a sandwich, or will better employment opportunities come her way? Tune in, and see you next week for the listen-a-long discussion!

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Release Week: The Kings and Queens of Roam, Odds Against Tomorrow, Tales of Majipoor, and The Crystal Shard

Posted on 2013/05/08 by

May is here, and the first release week brings quite a haul, so let’s get right to it:

PICKS OF THE WEEK:

The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel by Daniel Wallace, read by Angela Brazil for AudioGO. Out concurrent with the print/ebook release from Touchstone, it’s the first new novel since 2007 for Wallace, the author of Big Fish. Here it’s a story blending tall tales, folklore, and magical realism in, well, “Wallace”-ian fashion; is the magic “real”? Does it matter if it is? “Helen and Rachel McCallister, who live in a town called Roam, are as different as sisters can be: Helen older, bitter, and conniving; Rachel beautiful, naïve – and blind. When their parents die an untimely death, Rachel has to rely on Helen for everything, but Helen embraces her role in all the wrong ways, convincing Rachel that the world is a dark and dangerous place she couldn’t possibly survive on her own… or so Helen believes, until Rachel makes a surprising choice that turns both their worlds upside down. In this new novel, Southern literary master Daniel Wallace returns to the tradition of tall tales and folklore made memorable in his bestselling Big Fish. The Kings and Queens of Roam is a wildly inventive, beautifully written, and big-hearted tale of family and the ties that bind.”

The Kings and Queens of Roam | [Daniel Wallace] Odds Against Tomorrow | [Nathaniel Rich]

Odds Against Tomorrow By Nathaniel Rich, Narrated By Kirby Heyborne for Tantor Audio. Released a month ago in print/ebook (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 2) to quite a bit of coverage. “New York City, the near future: Mitchell Zukor, a gifted young mathematician, is hired by a mysterious new financial consulting firm, FutureWorld. The business operates out of an empty office in the Empire State Building; Mitchell is employee number two. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters. This is the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business is booming. As Mitchell immerses himself in the mathematics of catastrophe – ecological collapse, war games, natural disasters – he becomes obsessed by a culture’s fears.”

Tales of Majipoor by Robert Silverberg, read by Stefan Rudnicki for Blackstone Audio. “Hailed as ‘one of the most fully realized worlds of modern science fiction,’(Booklist) Majipoor is a planet unlike any other, with countless untold stories. Now, available for the first time in one volume, science fiction grand master Robert Silverberg presents seven tales that chronicle thousands of years of Majipoor’s history, from the arrival of the settlers of Old Earth, to the expansion of vast cities, to the extraordinary life of Lord Valentine. Within these stories lie the secrets of Majipoor, a wondrous world of incredible imagination.”

Tales of Majipoor | [Robert Silverberg] The Crystal Shard: Legend of Drizzt: Icewind Dale Trilogy, Book 1 | [R. A. Salvatore]

The Crystal Shard: Legend of Drizzt: Icewind Dale Trilogy, Book 1 By R. A. Salvatore, Narrated By Victor Bevine for Audible Frontiers. While several hundred other audiobooks have been added to the Audible Frontiers stash of Dungeons and Dragons titles, including plenty of others in the long-running story of dark elf Drizzt Do’Urden, this is the book which started it all. Not chronologically in terms of Drizzt’s story, but this is the book that introduced Drizzt — and much of the Forgotten Realms setting, not to mention Salvatore himself — to the reading world. “Drizzt Do’Urden has settled in the windswept towns of Icewind Dale. There, he encounters a young barbarian named Wulfgar, captured in a raid and made the ward of a grizzled dwarf name Bruenor. With Drizzt’s help, Wulfgar will grow from a feral child to a man with the heart of a dwarf, the instincts of a savage, and the soul of a hero. But it will take even more than that to defeat the demonic power of Crenshininbon, the fabled Crystal Shard.” Streams of Silver and The Halfling’s Gem are scheduled for two and four weeks later, respectively.

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK: Continue reading →

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Received: April 2013

Posted on 2013/05/03 by

I took it pretty easy on the review copy front in April, to the tune of three titles:

1. No Return by Zachary Jernigan, read by John FitzGibbon for Audible Frontiers.

No Return | [Zachary Jernigan]

This is one I finished listening to a couple of week ago now, so here’s a snippet of my review, A stunning and original debut fantasy: “In a crowded year of strong debut fantasy novels, “No Return” is a very strong contender. Beginning with an assured voice, a prologue of a pitiless landscape of an hallucinogenic salt lake, expanding out to a world whose currency is the powdered skin of an Elder race, populated by (among others) rival enclaves of warrior monks engaging in ritualized battles to defend and proselytize their competing faiths. There is a god with city-killing orbital kinetic ordinance at his whim; there are deeply weird and sexualized alchemistic magics; there are sentient constructs of magical metal spheres; there are dragons and ghosts.”

2. River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay, read by Simon Vance for Penguin Audio.

River of Stars | [Guy Gavriel Kay]

I haven’t gotten to this one yet, but it’s due up this weekend, where a road trip to and from DC should allow plenty of uninterrupted listening.

3. YOU by Austin Grossman, read by Will Collyer for Hachette Audio.

You | [Austin Grossman]

I did listen to and very much enjoy this one; as a “software engineer by day” who has worked for quite a long time in a big software project release environment, and as a gamer, this one really was quite fantastic. I don’t have a full review put together, but I did have a quip: “With apologies to Jonathan Coulton, this is what it feels like to write software for a living.” The Guilded Earlobe does have a full review up.

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