Received: Nine titles from Blackstone Audio

Posted on 2012-10-18 at 14:58 by Sam

First, though chronologically last, the physical mp3-cd shipment, which includes Crossing Overby Anna Kendall (2010, The Soulvine Moor Chronicles, Book One), The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe (read by Stefan Rudnicki, 2009, The Eddie LaCrosse Mysteries, Book 1), None So Blind by Joe Haldeman, Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce (read by John Lee), and The Fullness of Time by Kate Wilhelm:

Second, though chronologically first, four digital review copies:

• V Wars Edited by Jonathan Maberry, Read by various readers (already listened, review soon)
• Between Two Fires By Christopher Buehlman Read by Steve West (already listened, review soon)
• Building Harlequin’s Moon By Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper Read by Tom Weiner
• Jepp, Who Defied the Stars By Katherine Marsh Read by Paul Michael Garcia

Posted in received

Release Week: The Twelve, Bowl of Heaven, Roadside Picnic, and George R.R. Martin

Posted on 2012-10-17 at 20:05 by Sam

Vampires and aliens are featured in two new highly-anticipated books in this mid-October release week, and aliens and vampires are also featured in new audiobooks of highly-regarded books published in past years.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin, read by Scott Brick for Random House Audio continues the story from Cronin's post-apocalyptic vampire novel The Passage which introduced a set of death row inmates used as experimental subjects for a virus discovered by an unfortunate South American expedition and the devastation and post-apocalyptic world which followed -- as well as the story of a group of humans fighting the vampires a hundred years in the future. In The Twelve we again get both "present day" storylines as well as the continuing story of Amy and other survivors fighting to save humanity. The Guilded Earlobe loved the audiobook and I'm hoping to yet find time for it later this year, helped by the fact that The Twelve is about ten and a half hours shorter -- though at 26.5 hours it's still a lengthy listen.

The alien artifact this release week is Bowl of Heaven By Larry Niven and Gregory Benford, Narrated by Zach Villa for Audible Frontiers -- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins -- "In this first collaboration by science fiction masters Larry Niven (Ringworld) and Gregory Benford (Timescape), the limits of wonder are redrawn once again as a human expedition to another star system is jeopardized by an encounter with an astonishingly immense artifact in interstellar space: a bowl-shaped structure half-englobing a star, with a habitable area equivalent to many millions of Earths...and it’s on a direct path heading for the same system as the human ship."

Speaking of alien artifacts and human curiosity: Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, read by Robert Forster for Random House Audio -- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins -- A 1977 Soviet sf classic re-released earlier this year in a new US edition by Chicago Review Press, with a new translation by Orlena Bormashenko, a foreward by Ursula K. Le Guin, and an afterword by Boris Strugatsky: "Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems."

Meanwhile, Harper Audio has produced George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, and Tuesday brought three of the author's backlist to audio, led for me by Fevre Dream, read by Ron Donachie, Martin’s 1982 vampire novel set on the Mississippi River in 1857. Also coming to audio are Windhaven (read by Harriet Walter) and Dying of the Light (read by Iain Glen).

ALSO OUT TUESDAY:

Posted in regular, Release Week | Tagged bowl of heaven, george rr martin, gregory benford, justin cronin, larry niven, mike mignola, release week, roadside picnic, scott brick, the twelve

Received: 3 titles from Harper Audio

Posted on 2012-10-15 at 17:49 by Sam

Received: More review copies from our fall requests are coming in, this batch includes three titles from Harper Audio:

• The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
• Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson
• Dodger by Terry Pratchett

Posted in received, regular | Tagged dodger, harper-audio, neal stephenson, received, some remarks, terry pratchett, the long earth

What's in a name? Welcome to The AudioBookaneers!

Posted on 2012-10-14 at 00:56 by Sam

When I started The Audible SF/F Blog in June 2011, I was hoping that the double meaning of “audible”, that is both the well-known audiobook company and the state of being, er, audible, which is so very characteristic of audiobooks, wouldn’t create TOO much confusion. While the first words of the site description were “completely unaffiliated”, when people looked only at the short name, whether on Twitter @AudibleSFF or Facebook, or wherever, it’s pretty obvious that it wasn’t a good idea.

So: a new name! I’d been toying around with a few possibilities for the better part of a year, but it’s been actually fairly hard to find something that is available on both Facebook and Twitter, and also isn’t someone’s well-established pseudonym out there. And which both I and Dave (Thompson) both like.

But late last week, Dave sent me: “The AudioBookaneers”. Yes. That’s it. That’s the name we’ve been waiting on: Dave and I are now The AudioBookaneers, sailing the seven seas of audiobooks in search of treasure and monsters.

Along with the name change (Twitter and Facebook, done) it was also a good time to make one more move, to a blog set up for multiple contributors. So this new site (that you are reading, right now) is on Wordpress, which also hosts Bull Spec, and so I’ll only have to remember how to use one blogging platform, at least for a little while.

I hope you’ll keep following along on our continuing audiobook adventures, and: stay tuned pretty soon for info on something we’re calling “The Arrrrrrrrrrrdies”, our version of year-end audiobook awards for our listening year. (Some of those “rrr”s may be redacted. Or not…)

-Sam and Dave, The AudioBookaneers

PS: Obviously we still have some moving to do — and some new art in mind! So pardon the wreckage for a while.

Posted in regular | Tagged meta

Received: 5 titles from Brilliance Audio

Posted on 2012-10-14 at 00:02 by Sam

Posted in photo | Tagged brilliance-audio, received

All Hallow's Listen Part 1: Dave Thompson reviews The Halloween Tree by Rad Bradbury

Posted on 2012-10-12 at 19:55 by Sam

Posted in All Hallow's Listen, regular, reviews | Tagged all hallows listen, all hallows read, dave thompson, ray bradbury, reviews, the halloween tree

First thoughts on Downpour: DRM-free and beta-testing (updated)

Posted on 2012-10-11 at 10:32 by Sam

Downpour is a new multi-publisher DRM-free digital audiobook (and physical audiobook) website and iOS app launched by Blackstone Audio, with titles from Recorded Books, Hachette Audio, and more. The site is a bit slow at times (note: it is still in Beta) but it is certainly usable, though a link here and there is wonky (when browsing Science Fiction titles, which are by default and always by default sorted by title, try clicking to sort by release date and you’ll instead get the page for Captain’s Blood by William Shatner). Overall it is set up quite a lot like Audible.com, with a-la-carte purchases of digital downloads and monthly “credit” based plans, and the addition of physical audiobook listings.

Posted in regular | Tagged downpour, miscellaneous

Release Week: Tad Williams, Steven Erikson, Iain M. Banks, and The Lord of the Rings

Posted on 2012-10-10 at 15:07 by Sam

What the second release week in October lacks in the staggering numbers department, it makes up for with three absolutely stellar titles: urban fantasy from Tad Williams, the latest Iain M. Banks “Culture” novel, and the long-awaited first audio installment of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen epic fantasy series. And! The long-awaited digital audio release of the Rob Inglis narrations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

I’ve bemoaned the US audiobook absence of The Dirty Streets of Heaven: Bobby Dollar, Book 1 By Tad Williams for quite a few release weeks now, but this week brings a Penguin Audio production of George Newbern’s narration: “You’ve never met an angel like Bobby Dollar. … Brace yourself - the afterlife is weirder than you ever believed.”

Posted in regular, Release Week | Tagged gardens of the moon, iain m banks, j.r.r. tolkien, release week, steven erikson, tad williams, the dirty streets of heaven, the hydrogen sonata, the lord of the rings

Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema, DRM-free and direct from the author

Posted on 2012-10-08 at 17:45 by Sam

Via author Cory Doctorow’s blog, he is selling direct, EULA- and DRM-free downloads of his latest audiobook, Pirate Cinema (Listening Library, read by Bruce Mann), from his own website. It’s also available DRM-free from Simply Audiobooks, eMusic, BooksOnBoard, and Barnes & Noble (probably among others), but this is the first I can remember seeing a publisher-published audiobook being sold directly in this manner. (I have purchased some of his previous audiobooks DRM-free from some of the above stores, and anyone who follow’s Doctorow’s writings knows that being DRM-free is nothing new. But this is an interesting new development.)

Posted in regular | Tagged cory doctorow, drm, listening library, pirate cinema

Release week: Ironskin, Legion, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, This Book is Full of Spiders, Building Harlequin's Moon, and a return to Fairyland

Posted on 2012-10-03 at 13:54 by Sam

Well, I tried. I put together an interstitial release week post on Friday. Then again Monday morning. And still what’s left in this week’s haul is more than enough to keep all the listening hours in a year occupied. So, since we can’t listen to everything, here are my picks for the week. Since Monday. Luckily, several of them are short. And one of them is even free. However… there are a lot of picks. And this is mostly just from Tuesday.

I’ve been looking forward to Ironskin By Tina Connolly since late last year; it was one of my most-anticipated titles of 2012 in my “too big to be useful” preview of the year. Then I learned it was to be narrated by Roslyn Landor, whose narration of Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean is up there with my all-time favorites, and my anticipation level, if possible, went even higher. Well, now it’s here, in print and ebook from Tor and in a 9 hrs and 33 mins audiobook from Audible Frontiers: “Jane Eliot wears an iron mask. It’s the only way to contain the fey curse that scars her cheek. The Great War is five years gone, but its scattered victims remain—the ironskin. When a carefully worded listing appears for a governess to assist with a “delicate situation”—a child born during the Great War—Jane is certain the child is fey-cursed, and that she can help. Teaching the unruly Dorie to suppress her curse is hard enough; she certainly didn’t expect to fall for the girl’s father, the enigmatic artist Edward Rochart. But her blossoming crush is stifled by her scars and by his parade of women. Ugly women, who enter his closed studio…and come out as beautiful as the fey. Jane knows Rochart cannot love her, just as she knows that she must wear iron for the rest of her life. But what if neither of these things are true? Step by step Jane unlocks the secrets of a new life—and discovers just how far she will go to become whole again.”

Speaking of anticipated audiobooks, and my favorite narrators, Oliver Wyman (Finch, Gateway, Logan’s Run, on and on and on) narrates Brandon Sanderson’s novella Legion, which was published about two months ago in print from Subterranean Press and ebook by Sanderson’s own Dragonsteel Entertainment. And now here is the 2 hour Audible Frontiers audiobook which iseven  (for a limited time) free: “Brandon Sanderson is one of the most significant fantasists to enter the field in a good many years. His ambitious, multi-volume epics (Mistborn, The Stormlight Archive) and his stellar continuation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series have earned both critical acclaim and a substantial popular following. In Legion, a distinctly contemporary novella filled with suspense, humor, and an endless flow of invention, Sanderson reveals a startling new facet of his singular narrative talent. Stephen Leeds, AKA ‘Legion,’ is a man whose unique mental condition allows him to generate a multitude of personae: hallucinatory entities with a wide variety of personal characteristics and a vast array of highly specialized skills. As the story begins, Leeds and his ‘aspects’ are drawn into the search for the missing Balubal Razon, inventor of a camera whose astonishing properties could alter our understanding of human history and change the very structure of society. The action ranges from the familiar environs of America to the ancient, divided city of Jerusalem. Along the way, Sanderson touches on a formidable assortment of complex questions: the nature of time, the mysteries of the human mind, the potential uses of technology, and the volatile connection between politics and faith. Resonant, intelligent, and thoroughly absorbing, Legion is a provocative entertainment from a writer of great originality and seemingly limitless gifts.” Any audiobook which begins with Wyman saying “My name is …” is a keeper — that’s how Pohl’s Gateway begins, as does Sanderson’sLegion.

Under Mysteries/Thrillers and Fiction, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel By Robin Sloan, Narrated by Ari Fliakos for Macmillan Audio. At a bit under 8 hours: “A gleeful and exhilarating tale of global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, high-tech data visualization, young love, rollicking adventure, and the secret to eternal life - mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore.”

Under Fiction, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It By David Wong returns us to the twisted — some say cracked — mind behind John Dies in the End. Narrated by Nick Podehl for Brilliance Audio at 14 hrs and 54 mins: “Warning: You may have a huge, invisible spider living in your skull. This is not a metaphor.”

A long-awaited audiobook indeed is Building Harlequin’s Moon (2005) By Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper, one of my favorite science fiction novels of the 2000s combining Niven’s hard sf edge on terraforming and solar kites with Cooper’s human characters. Now in audio, narrated by Tom Weiner for Blackstone Audio at 15 hrs and 27 mins: “The first interstellar ship, John Glenn, fled a solar system populated by rogue AIs and machine/human hybrids, threatened by too much nanotechnology, and rife with political dangers. The John Glenn’s crew intended to terraform the nearly pristine planet Ymir in hopes of creating a utopian society that will limit intelligent technology, but by some miscalculation they have landed in the wrong system. Short on the antimatter needed to continue to Ymir, they must shape nearby planet Harlequin’s moon, Selene, into a new, temporary home and rebuild their store of antimatter through decades of terraforming.”

Lastly, young readers (and older ones) can rejoice as we get to return to the world of Catherynne M. Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making as book two, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There is out today as well. Book one was voiced by the author, here book two is read by S. J. Tucker for Brilliance Audio at 8 hrs and 18 mins: “September has longed to return to Fairyland after her first adventure there. And when she finally does, she learns that its inhabitants have been losing their shadows - and their magic - to the world of Fairyland-Below. This world has a new ruler: Halloween, the Hollow Queen, who is September’s shadow. And Halloween has no intentions of giving Fairyland’s shadows back.”

ALSO OUT TUESDAY:

Posted in regular, Release Week | Tagged brandon sanderson, brenda cooper, building harlequin's moon, catherynne m valente, david wong, ironskin, larry niven, legion, mr penumbra, oliver wyman, release week, tina connolly, walter mosely