Does Brandon Sanderson have superpowers or is he just chained to his laptop? James reviews Calamity (The Reckoners, Book 3)

Posted on 2016-03-14 at 18:09 by Sam

Calamity: The Reckoners, Book 3 By Brandon Sanderson Narrated by MacLeod Andrews for Audible

-- Review by James Alexander --

Does Brandon Sanderson have superpowers or is he just chained to his laptop? It feels like the Reckoners trilogy has only just begun and the conclusion is already here. And it isn’t the only thing he’s been doing right now.

Posted in reviews | Tagged brandon sanderson, james alexander, macleod andrews, the reckoners

For Those of Us Who Have Spent Way Too Much Time at IKEA! Dave Reviews Horrorstör

Posted on 2016-03-07 at 04:59 by Dave

Horrorstör By Grady Hendrix, narrated Tai Sammons and Bronson Pinchot Length: 6 hours, 16 minutes

Does anyone else out there have an aversion to IKEA? Like, someone suggests we pop over there real quick, maybe bribes you with coffee and cinnamon rolls, and then BAM. The whole Saturday has mysteriously disappeared? Wait, what just happened to me this past weekend?

Horrorstör is one part Office Space, and one part haunted house story. Thankfully, the haunted house in Horrorstör is essentially an IKEA.

I'm thoroughly enjoying Grady Hendrix's Great Stephen King reread over at Tor.com (please note the presence tense, and my faith it'll one day continue), and thought his White Street Society short stories exquisite dark humor, so when I heard he had a novel set in a Haunted IKEA (or, more accurately: ORSK, an IKEA competitor), I knew I had to check it out.

Posted in reviews | Tagged bronson pinchot, grady hendrix, horror, humor, tai sammons

Audible's $5.95 members-only sale: The Fifth Season, H is for Hawk, Aurora, The Grace of Kings, A Wizard of Earthsea, A God in Ruins, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and much more

Posted on 2016-03-04 at 22:10 by Sam

Audible is having a big $5.95 members-only sale with over 200 titles, across science fiction and fantasy, non-fiction, YA, classics, and more:

And 200+ titles are a lot to page through. Here's what I most recommend from the sale, but hurry! The sale ends March 6, 2016 at 11:59 PM PT (US).

The Fifth Season: The Broken Earth, Book 1 by N.K. Jemisin, read by Robin Miles, and Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, read by Ali Ahn, both for Hachette Audio -- Wait, WHAT? These are the two best fantasy and science fiction audiobooks (and books) from 2015. The Fifth Season begins new fantasy trilogy by Hugo, Nebula & World Fantasy Award-nominated author N. K. Jemisin, starting with a powerful magician literally ripping a volcanic rift across a continent and continuing into a moving story of a mother seeking both vengeance for her murdered sun and for signs of her missing daughter in the aftermath, and Aurora is absolutely amazing from both a generation ship and artificial intelligence perspective, along with being one of the most subtly and terrifically produced audiobooks I have ever had the pleasure of listening to. If you don't know where to start with this sale, start here.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged audible

Whispersync deal roundup for Thursday, March 3: Joe R. Lansdale, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Ferret Steinmetz, Annie Bellet, Charles E. Gannon, and more

Posted on 2016-03-03 at 17:11 by Sam

Another day where there's just too many deals to share them piecemeal, one Tweet at a time. Starting with the best deals from among the 10 Whispersync for Voice enabled titles from today's Kindle Daily Deals and picking up a few other titles, here we go:

Savage Season: A Hap and Leonard Novel (1) (Hap and Leonard Series) by Joe R. Lansdale for $1.99+$3.99 -- The first of Lansdale's "Hap and Leonard" series, "A rip-roaring, high-octane, Texas-sized thriller, featuring two friends, one vixen, a crew of washed-up radicals, loads of money, and bloody mayhem. Hap Collins and Leonard Pine are best friends, yet they couldn't be more different. Hap is an east Texas white boy with a weakness for Texas women. Leonard is a black, gay Vietnam vet. Together, they stir up more commotion than a fire storm. But that's just the way they like it. So when as ex-flame of Hap's returns promising a huge score, Hap lets Leonard in on the scam, and that's when things get interesting. Chock full of action and laughs, Savage Season is the masterpiece of dark suspense that introduced Hap and Leonard to the thriller scene. It hasn't been the same since." (And you know it's gotta be good if this science fiction and fantasy heavy blog leads with a crime thriller, right? Right.)

First Activation (The Activation Series Book 1) and Second Activation (The Activation Series Book 2) by Darren and Marcus Weymouth, read by James Langton for $1.99+$1.99 each -- "Brothers Harry and Jack leave Manchester for New York City for their annual weekend getaway. But upon arrival, they find a silent, deserted JFK, where the few ground crew they can spot have all been slaughtered. Harry and Jack are military veterans, but they've never encountered anything like this. As they witness the carnage and stumble across murderous madmen in a postapocalyptic New York City, it becomes clear that escape is the only option--that is if there is anywhere sane to which to escape...."

Posted in Whispersync Deals | Tagged annie bellet, charles e gannon, david drake, ferrett steinmetz, joe r lansdale, morgan rice, sherrilyn kenyon

Oscar tie-in #WhispersyncDeal roundup for February 27: Life of Pi, Mary Poppins, 12 Years a Slave, and more

Posted on 2016-02-27 at 15:26 by Sam

Amazon's Gold Box Deal today is a "Read it before you see it" set of discounted books that were made into Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated films, 9 of which are Whispersync for Voice enabled. Some of these (Room, The Silence of the Lambs) still add up to over $10, but! there's plenty of deals to be had here as well:

Life of Pi by Yann Martel (Author), Jeff Woodman (Narrator) for $2.99+$3.95 -- Winner of the Man Booker Prize, Fiction, 2002: "Pi Patel has been raised in a zoo in India. When his father decides to move the family to Canada and sell the animals to American zoos, everyone boards a Japanese cargo ship. The ship sinks, and 16-year-old Pi finds himself alone on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon it's just Pi, the tiger, and the vast Pacific Ocean - for 227 days. Pi's fear, knowledge, and cunning keep him alive until they reach the coast of Mexico, where the tiger disappears into the jungle. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story, so he tells a second one - more conventional, less fantastic. But is it more true?"

Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers (Author), Sophie Thompson (Narrator) for $1.99+$3.49 -- The beloved children's classic, on this list I think because Travers is the subject of the Oscar-nominated Saving Mr. Banks. "Here is the timeless story of Mary Poppins, the world's favorite nanny, and her magical adventures with the Banks family. Mary Poppins is like no other nanny the Banks children have ever seen. It all starts when their new nanny is blown by the east wind onto the doorstep of the Banks house, carrying a parrot-headed umbrella and a magic carpetbag. She becomes a most unusual nanny to Jane, Michael, and the twins. Who else but Mary Poppins can slide up banisters, pull an entire armchair out of an empty carpetbag, and make a dose of medicine taste like delicious lime-juice cordial? A day with Mary Poppins is a day of magic and make-believe come to life!"

Posted in Whispersync Deals | Tagged bronson pinchot, grover gardner, mary poppins, matthew quick, ray porter, rs belcher, scott brick, solomon northup, upton sinclair, yann martel

Casting Call: Skyboat Media's Stefan Rudnicki and Gabrielle de Cuir on Harlan Ellison's The City on the Edge of Forever

Posted on 2016-02-26 at 17:59 by Sam

I've been a huge fan of Skyboat Media for a long time -- anybody who brings more Lewis Shiner and Manly Wade Wellman audiobooks into the world gets my support, and that's the tip of the iceberg -- and when I saw that Stefan Rudnicki and Gabrielle de Cuir were planning to produce a full cast version of Harlan Ellison's classic Star Trek teleplay "The City on the Edge of Forever" I was definitely intrigued. When I saw the behind-the-scenes sound check with Scott Brick as Spock, and Brick's studio selfie with LeVar Burton, it was starting to sink in that, wow, this is going to be something pretty special, but I didn't yet realize just how much was going into this project.

Well, Skyboat's Kickstarter campaign for A Skyboat Audiobook of Harlan Ellison's Star Trek Teleplay went live late on February 17 (or early on February 18, depending on your time zone), and it finally started to sink in just how ambitious this project is: Ellison reading his own 80-page introduction; productions of the first and second script treatments and the WGA-winning teleplay; a huge list of afterwords from some of the biggest names in Star Trek, some read by their authors; and an absolutely, absolutely all-star cast from top to bottom, main cast to bit parts.

I'm thrilled to be able to share an interview with Rudnicki and de Cuir about the project, its formulation and execution, and I couldn't resist asking about some of their other recent work and what else might be in store for 2016. Enjoy!

-- Interview by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn --

Q: You've both been involved with Kickstarters before, both with Lightspeed and Nightmare Magazine and the "XYZ destroys ABC" genre special issues, and with David Steffen's Long List Anthology, but this is (I think) Skyboat's first audiobook Kickstarter. What has your experience with those previous projects helped you learn, and how did they help you decide that crowd-funding was the way to get this Teleplay project published?

Posted in Casting Call, Interviews | Tagged gabrielle de cuir, harlan ellison, kickstarter, scott brick, skyboat media, stefan rudnicki

2016 Arrrdies, Part 1: The digital regional divide of 2015: Tad Williams, Daniel Polansky, Becky Chambers, Robert Holdstock, Sarah Pinborough, and more

Posted on 2016-02-22 at 17:08 by Sam

I had a blast putting together the most missing audiobooks of 2014, and I'm back for more. This year saw (in the US Audible science fiction and fantasy section alone) 3,606 new audiobooks, up a few hundred from last year's 3,267. And, of course, that number doesn't include GraphicAudio, independent and podiobook releases, and (most notably for my interests) the six new Cory Doctorow audiobooks at DRM-free Downpour.com.

I suppose that in fairness I should go back through the 2014 list and highlight some of the new audiobooks of 2015 that pull from books published in 2014, but I'll save that for the "Best Audiobook of a Previously Released Book" section of the forthcoming 2015-16 Arrrdies, The AudioBookaneers' annual best audiobooks roundup.

Instead, once again this year I'm going to bury the lede juuuuust a little bit further and start (as I did last year, and have done occasionally with the digital regional divide posts) with my green-eyed jealousy aimed at new audiobooks available overseas that haven't (yet, at least) come to the US as of early 2016:

As I gear up for my own re-read of Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, & Thorn series ahead of the long, long-awaited new "Osten Ard" books coming this year and next (and beyond!) I have bemoaned the lack of audiobook editions. This year, UK publisher Hodder & Stoughton produced absolutely fantastic new audiobooks of the first two books in the series, with To Green Angel Tower coming in two parts this February and May. The Dragonbone Chair and Stone of Farewell are both read by Andrew Wincott, with whom US listeners may be aware for his work on Sarah Lotz' The Three, or classics such as Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker and Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or as a voice actor for video games such as The Witcher and Memento Mori. He lends his Shakespearean-trained voice to this, the best of the huge crop of late 1970s to early 1990s epic fantasy (Feist and Eddings and Brooks and all the rest).

Posted in The Arrrdies | Tagged Andrew Wincott, Becky Chambers, Daniel Polansky, digital regional divide, robert holdstock, sarah pinborough, tad williams

February #WhispersyncDeal roundup: Octavia E. Butler, Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, Chuck Wendig, Rysa Walker, and more

Posted on 2016-02-15 at 15:55 by Sam

Another month, another #WhispersyncDeal roundup. First up, from the Monthly Deals listings, there are 161 that are Whispersync for Voice enabled. Here's what most caught my eye, a couple handfuls of science fiction and fantasy titles, one Finnish thriller, and a few YA novels:

Dawn (The Xenogenesis Trilogy Book 1) and Adulthood Rites (The Xenogenesis Trilogy Book 2) by Octavia E. Butler, read by Aldrich Barrett for $1.99+$3.49 each -- "In a world devastated by nuclear war with humanity on the edge of extinction, aliens finally make contact. They rescue those humans they can, keeping most survivors in suspended animation while the aliens begin the slow process of rehabilitating the planet. When Lilith Iyapo is "awakened", she finds that she has been chosen to revive her fellow humans in small groups by first preparing them to meet the utterly terrifying aliens, then training them to survive on the wilderness that the planet has become. But the aliens cannot help humanity without altering it forever. Bonded to the aliens in ways no human has ever known, Lilith tries to fight them even as her own species comes to fear and loathe her. A stunning story of invasion and alien contact by one of science fiction's finest writers."

Posted in Whispersync Deals | Tagged chuck wendig, kate rudd, octavia e butler, rysa walker, steve mchugh, terry pratchett

Audible's First-in-a-Series Sale, $4.95 through Monday, February 8: Ancillary Justice, Leviathan Wakes, The Lies of Locke Lamora, The Three-Body Problem, and more

Posted on 2016-02-08 at 20:57 by Sam

So, Audible's having another big sale, with $4.95 pricing for "first books in a series" through tonight, Monday, February 8. And there's a bunch of titles. Here's my top picks, followed by a selection of further titles that most caught my eye:

Posted in Uncategorized

January #WhispersyncDeal roundup: Kameron Hurley's Worldbreaker Saga, Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone, Catherynne M. Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, and more

Posted on 2016-01-24 at 00:06 by Sam

There are 471 Whispersync-enabled titles in this month's Kindle Monthly Deal listings, 75 of them in the Science Fiction & Fantasy section. While quite a few of these we've seen before (Amazon's 47North and Brilliance Audio pipeline) there's one right at the top that's far and away my first pick this month: Kameron Hurley's Worldbreaker Saga, read by Liza Ross:

The Mirror Empire: Worldbreaker Saga 1 for $1.99+$3.49 and Empire Ascendant: Worldbreaker Saga #2 for $1.99+$2.99 are just ridiculous prices for what you're getting here. The Mirror Empire was one of my favorites of 2014, when I called it "a giant pile of ideagasm awesomeness with sentient trees, acid magic, multiple worlds, a quasi-samurai-Jedi class, pacifists vs. huge body counts, and more to come." That "more to come" is Empire Ascendant, a cataclysmic doubling down on one of the best epic fantasies going, performed fantastically by Ross. Quoting my full review from 2014: "72-year-old actress and veteran narrator Ross lends a confident voice of wisdom to the older characters — this is no one-note cast, with children and crones and all shapes and sizes in between — while still ably capturing the frightened young girl, Lilia, in whose point of view we open the novel, raiders breaching her village’s defenses, the houses on fire. Ross’ previous fantasy experience serves her well, particularly her work in the Forgotten Realms universe — how many narrators get “chitinous” to feel right?"

Posted in Whispersync Deals | Tagged alan cumming, catherynne m valente, kameron hurley, kareem abdul-jabbar, leigh bardugo, liza ross, luke daniels, matt forbeck, scott brick