Release Week: Railsea by China Mieville; Osama by Lavie Tidhar; CS Friedman's Magister and Coldfire trilogies; and more

Posted on 2012-05-16 at 14:03 by Sam

For the third week in a row there are multiple major releases in the YA SF & F section, led by Railsea, a foray into a younger age category by the always brilliant China Mieville (Perdido Street Station, Embassytown, etc.). Narrated by Jonathan Cowley for Random House Audio, the audiobook comes in at just under 10 hours, and it also comes with heaps of praise for its ability to both engage younger audiences at a narrative level, with a world of trains and giant mole hunts, as well as offer a deeper reading with its references to Moby Dick and Mievillian critiques of power. It’s already bought, so it’s likely up next for me:

In adult sf/f and released Monday was another long-anticipated audiobook, Osama (2011) By Lavie Tidhar, which is narrated by Jeff Harding for Audible Ltd [Audible UK link here]:

“In a world without global terrorism Joe, a private detective, is hired by a mysterious woman to find a man: the obscure author of pulp fiction novels featuring one Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante…Joe’s quest to find the man takes him across the world, from the backwaters of Asia to the European Capitals of Paris and London, and as the mystery deepens around him there is one question he is trying hard not to ask: who is he, really, and how much of the books is fiction? Chased by unknown assailants, Joe’s identity slowly fragments as he discovers the shadowy world of the refugees, ghostly entities haunting the world in which he lives. Where do they come from? And what do they want? Joe knows how the story should end, but even he is not ready for the truths he’ll find in New York and, finally, on top a quiet hill above Kabul—nor for the choice he will at last have to make….”

Who likes this novel? Jeff VanderMeer, Christopher Priest, Paul Kincaid, theBSFA, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award jury, … I was very excited when Tidhar announced a multi-book audio rights deal with Audible, and Osama is here much, much sooner than I expected. Delightfully so! I am nearing the halfway point and am starting to put together my thoughts so far.

More! Thus far in 2012, Audible Frontiers has nearly every week produced a major author’s backlog in audio, and this week is another huge haul of audiobooks centered around a single author’s backlog as C. S. Friedman’s Magister Trilogy and Coldfire trilogy are both now out in audio, along with several standalone novels. (To toot my Bull Spec horn a bit here, I carry a review of Friedman’s Magister Trilogy along with an interview of the author by Dan Campbell in the current issue.) The Magister Trilogy is narrated by Elisabeth Rodgers, and comprises Feast of Souls: Magister Trilogy, Book 1 (2007), Wings of Wrath: Magister Trilogy, Book 2 (2009), and Legacy of Kings: Magister Trilogy, Book 3 (2011):

Meanwhile, the Coldfire Trilogy is read by R. C. Bray, and comprises Black Sun Rising: Coldfire Trilogy, Book 1 (1991), When True Night Falls: Coldfire Trilogy, Book 2 (1993), and Crown of Shadows: Coldfire Trilogy, Book 3 (1995), along with last week’s release of Dominion: A Coldfire Novella. Also new in audio are: The Madness Season (1990, Narrated by Jonathan Davis), This Alien Shore (1998, Narrated by Kathleen McInerney), and the Azean Empire novels In Conquest Born (1987, Narrated by Joe Barrett) and The Wilding (2004, Narrated by Marc Vietor).

ALSO NEW TUESDAY:

Posted in regular, Release Week | Tagged china mieville, cs friedman, lavie tidhar, osama, railsea, release week

Audible.com "3 books for 2 credits" sale ends tonight at midnight

Posted on 2012-05-15 at 14:09 by Sam

Using a special mini-cart, and if you happen to have piles of credits lying around you can “3 for 2” more than once, Audible.com has been running a 3 books for 2 credits sale for the past week which ends tonight at midnight Eastern Time (US). In the sale are books by David Anthony Durham (books 2 and 3 of Acacia), Robert J. Sawyer (WWW: Watch and Wonder), R. A. Salvatore (Forgotten Realms: Transitions), Jo Walton (Small Change trilogy), Margaret Weis (Dragonvarld trilogy), Scott Westerfield (Behemoth and Goliath in his Leviathan trilogy), Peter F. Hamilton, Mark Hodder (Burton & Swinburne series), and more. It’s organized by author last name across 5 partitions, so… happy hunting.

Posted in regular | Tagged sales

Audiobook release day: Osama by Lavie Tidhar

Posted on 2012-05-14 at 23:35 by Sam

Link: Audiobook release day: Osama by Lavie Tidhar

I don’t always do a release day post these days, usually saving things up for one week-in-recap. But sometimes an audiobook comes along off-Tuesday that I’m really excited about, and today has one such audiobook. Coming in at about 8.5 hours, Osama By Lavie Tidhar is Narrated by Jeff Harding for Audible Ltd [Audible UK link here]:

“In a world without global terrorism Joe, a private detective, is hired by a mysterious woman to find a man: the obscure author of pulp fiction novels featuring one Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante…Joe’s quest to find the man takes him across the world, from the backwaters of Asia to the European Capitals of Paris and London, and as the mystery deepens around him there is one question he is trying hard not to ask: who is he, really, and how much of the books is fiction? Chased by unknown assailants, Joe’s identity slowly fragments as he discovers the shadowy world of the refugees, ghostly entities haunting the world in which he lives. Where do they come from? And what do they want? Joe knows how the story should end, but even he is not ready for the truths he’ll find in New York and, finally, on top a quiet hill above Kabul—nor for the choice he will at last have to make….”

Who likes this novel? Jeff VanderMeer, Christopher Priest, Paul Kincaid, the BSFA, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award jury, … I was very excited when Tidhar announced a multi-book audio rights deal with Audible, and Osama is here much, much sooner than I expected. Delightfully so! I expect to start listening tonight, pushing my planned next listen of China Mieville’s Railsea (due out tomorrow) off a day or two.

ALSO OUT TODAY: Lightspeed Year One: From the Hugo Award Nominated Magazine which is a (slightly incomplete in audio) anthology from the excellent online/e-zine Lightspeed, edited by John Joseph Adams. The Skyboat Audio production collects the high-production value podcast of the first year of the magazine, including stories by Orson Scott Card, Joe Haldeman, Nancy Kress, Ursula Le Guin, Jack McDevitt, Robert Reed, Catherynne Valente, and Carrie Vaughn (among others, such as Eric Gregory, …) and is narrated by Paul Boehmer, Emily Card, Gabrielle De Cuir, Rosalyn Landor, Stefan Rudnicki, Robin Sachs, and more; and it comes in at a bit over 13 hours.

Posted in link | Tagged lavie tidhar, osama

Twenty-first stop on the DWJ blog tour -- The Functional Nerds!

Posted on 2012-05-10 at 20:11 by Sam

Link: Twenty-first stop on the DWJ blog tour — The Functional Nerds!

dwj2012:

Samuel Montgomery-Blinn (who is also behind the very terrific Bull Spec) provides a comprehensive overview of DWJ audiobooks. You’d be surprised by some of the narrators!

“[Howl’s Moving Castle] is done so well, so earnestly, and so authentically that those with an ear for dialects might begin to wonder why Howl speaks with a ‘tapped r’ long before we find out what’s sewn across one of his shirts.”

Thanks for letting me play along! (And for the Bull Spec comment, too.)

Posted in link

Untitled

Posted on 2012-05-10 at 20:01 by Sam

Received: from Blackstone Audio, two MP3-CD audiobooks: HAMLET’S FATHER by Orson Scott Card, read by Stefan Rudnicki (published May 1); and A SHORT, SHARP SHOCK by Kim Stanley Robinson, read by Paul Michael Garcia (published April 1).

Posted in photo | Tagged blackstone audio, kim stanley robinson, orson scott card, received

Over on The Functional Nerds blog, I invite you to Rediscover (or discover for the first time) the works of Diana Wynne Jones in audio

Posted on 2012-05-10 at 14:29 by Sam

Link: Over on The Functional Nerds blog, I invite you to Rediscover (or discover for the first time) the works of Diana Wynne Jones in audio

A big thanks both to Sharyn November’s Diana Wynn Jones 2012 Tumblr and to The Functional Nerds (whom I joined for a podcast on audiobooks late last year) giving me space to play along.

So: Go read the article!

Posted in link | Tagged diana wynne jones, functional nerds

Release Week: Last Dragon by J.M. McDermott, Enchanted by Alethea Kontis, and more

Posted on 2012-05-09 at 14:51 by Sam

Release week for Tuesday, May 8, 2012: My top pick this “week” is Last Dragon by J.M. McDermott, read by Cori Samuel for Iambik Audiobooks. This is a bit of a cheat job, as the audiobook was actually released in audio in late April, but I missed its arrival then so I will trumpet it loud and clear now: this is the next book I’m listening to. (See that “currently listening to” sidebar? Yeah, that.) Originally published as the first novel in Wizards of the Coast’s Discoveries series in 2008, and re-issued in paperback and e-book by Apex Book Company in early 2011, the book placed 8th in the 2009 Locus Poll for First Novel and was shortlisted for an IAFA William Crawford Award and included on Amazon.com’s Top 10 Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2008. I’ve read some great reviews (by Kaolin Fire and John H. Stevens in particular), enjoyed meeting JM and hearing him read from his short fiction, and am looking forward to diving into this mosaic story of Zhan’s quest for vengeance in a world of bison-riders, shamans, heretic paladins, and betrayals. Choice review quote: “This fantasy adventure belongs in libraries where literary fantasy in the tradition of Gene Wolf, A.A. Attanasio, and Gabriel García Márquez is popular.” –Library Journal.

Though it’s fairly quiet week for new adult titles, it’s another week of strong YA releases to start the merry month of May, this time led by Alethea Kontis’s debut novel Enchanted, Narrated by Katherine Kellgren for Brilliance Audio, the Big Idea behind which she explains over on Scalzi’s Whatever blog as starting with fairy tales like the frog prince and then: “I took all those tales and rhymes you know and love (and some you’ve never heard of) at their word, and I rehydrated them. I filled in some blanks, came to some logical conclusions, and fit them together like John Nash puzzle pieces.”

The Gift of Fire & On the Head of a Pin: Two Short Novels from Crosstown to Oblivion By Walter Mosley, Narrated by Dominic Hoffman and Beresford Bennett for Random House Audio. At 6 hrs and 29 mins in total, each novel is indeed a short one. There’s always been something about the old Ace doubles that never quite leaves the memory, and recent months have seen a few of these “two short novels” packaged in print in just that old way, where instead of reading from front to back and encountering book number two about halfway through, you read from front to middle, and then turn the book over and read from “front” to middle again. Here’s the print book “covers” instead of the audiobook cover:

These “doubles”, whether multiple authors (The New People/Elegant Threat) or, as in Mosley’s case, single-author doubles (The Thorn and the Blossom: A Two-Sided Love Story by Theodora Goss) have always intrigued me, and in the age of e-books and audiobooks they ask the question of how the reader experience changes, if at all. For other books that could have been doubles, such as Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias S. Buckell’s excellent The Alchemist and the Executioness, the shared world in audio is hard to experience in other ways than the order presented. For these “upside down” bound print books, the reader has a choice, and the choice seems so easily able to inform the reading, particularly in the case of Goss’s book, as each of the short novels share a world and overall story (and additionally for book-binding wonks uses the “accordion” style and comes with a box case), whereas here Mosley’s tales are each standalone. These kinds of double stories exist n the e-book world as well, for example Minister Faust’s The Alchemist of Kush, the author explicitly invites reading the storylines in a variety of orders — first one, then the other, or vice versa, or (for those very, very handy with e-bookmarks) in alternating chapters. But where am I going with this? I’m rambling. I’ll close by linking to Mosley’s recent essay, “The Case for Genre”.

ALSO OUT TUESDAY:

Posted in regular, Release Week | Tagged alethea kontis, enchanted, jm mcdermott, last dragon, release week, ta pratt, watler mosley

Listening Report: April 2012

Posted on 2012-05-03 at 19:52 by Sam

Last month it was 6 audiobooks, heavily slanted in favor of sf over fantasy. This month it’s back up to 9 audiobooks, with a pretty even split between genres, and some non-speculative (or at least not heavily speculative) stuff in the mix as well.

REVIEWS:

Posted in regular, Sam's Monthly Listening Report | Tagged monthly listening report

The Guilded Earlobe interviews Mainak Dhar about "Zombiestan"

Posted on 2012-05-02 at 18:22 by Sam

Link: The Guilded Earlobe interviews Mainak Dhar about “Zombiestan”

Posted in link | Tagged guilded earlobe

Release Week: The Drowned Cities, The Killing Moon, Empire State, Giant Thief, and Range of Ghosts

Posted on 2012-05-02 at 14:06 by Sam

It’s quite a release week in the Teen SF/F category, led by my overall pick for the week, The Drowned Cities By Paolo Bacigalupi, Narrated by Joshua Swanson. It’s the second in Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker series, a post-oil-crash world, out concurrently with the print/e-book edition from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. Along with all of my picks for this week, it’s in the 10-12 hour range, a length I am becoming more and more happy with.

Outside of YA, and also out concurrently with its print/e-book release (Orbit in this case) is The Killing Moon: Dreamblood, Book 1 By N. K. Jemisin, Narrated by Sarah Zimmerman for Hachette Audio; it begins a new duology for Jemisin after her well-regarded Inheritance Trilogy (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, and The Kingdom of the Gods). No worries about a long wait for the sequel to The Killing Moon, as The Shadowed Sun (Dreamblood, #2)  is due in just a month.

It’s also a good release week for Angry Robot on Brilliance Audio, bringing several books published earlier in the year to audio. (With samples for all of them handily available here.) The first of the two which most grab my eye this week is Empire State: A Novel By Adam Christopher, Narrated by Phil Gigante. “It’s a parallel-universe, Prohibition-era world of mooks and shamuses that is the twisted magic mirror to our bustling Big Apple. It’s a city where sinister characters lurk around every corner while the great superheroes who once kept the streets safe have fallen into deadly rivalries and feuds. Not that its colourful residents know anything about the real New York…until detective Rad Bradley makes a discovery that will change the lives of all its inhabitants.” [Big Idea link.]

The second such title I want to mention is Giant Thief: Tales of Easie Damasco, Book 1 By David Tallerman, Narrated by James Langton. “Meet Easie Damasco: rogue, thieving swine, and total charmer.Even the wicked can’t rest when a vicious warlord and the force of enslaved giants he commands invade their homeland. Damasco might get away in one piece, but he’s going to need help. Big time.” Adrian Tchaikovsky calls it “A fast-paced, witty and original fantasy, reminiscent of Scott Lynch and Fritz Leiber.” Having read both Lynch and Leiber, I’m looking forward to finally reading Tallerman’s debut novel, after having read several (and even published one!) of his short stories.

Also newly out in audio this week is Range of Ghosts: The Eternal Sky, Book 1 By Elizabeth Bear, Narrated by Celeste Ciulla for Recorded Books. Out in late March in print and e-book (Tor), it is pitched as: “In a world where wizards are unable to procreate, Temur, heir to his empire’s throne, flees to avoid assassination. Once-Princess Samarkar, formerly heir to her own empire’s throne, gives up everything to seek the wizards’ magical power. Drawn together by fate, Temur and the Once-Princess must stand against a cult inciting strife and civil war in all the empires.” Over on Scalzi’s Whatever blog, Bear explains a bit more of the Big Idea behind the novel.

ALSO OUT TUESDAY:

Posted in regular, Release Week | Tagged adam christopher, david tallerman, elizabeth bear, empire state, giant thief, n k jemisin, paolo bacigalupi, range of ghosts, release week, the drowned cities, the killing moon