Audible SF/F

Listening report: June 2012

After six audiobooks in May (though KSR’s 2312 went on well into the first week of June) I listened to eight in June, with Tim Powers’s On Stranger Tides and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay being the outstanding audiobooks, with plenty to recommend Mark L. Van Name’s No Going Back, John Scalzi’s Redshirts, and Jon Sprunk’s Shadow’s Son.

REVIEWS: (Note: as I’m terribly terribly behind in these reviews, these are short (or long in the cases where I did not have time to make them shorter) and mostly off the cuff.)

The release week for Tuesday July 17 sports a pair of anticipated sf audiobooks, along with a “genre in the mainstream” title and all-star cast zombie anthology.

The first of the sf titles is a the first in a planned prequel series to Ender’s Game, telling the story of first contact and the First Formic War, introducing (but only just) a young Mazer Rackham, and exploring both the powerful reach of interstellar corporations and the tightly-knit lives of independent mining families. The book is Earth Unaware by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston, and is narrated for Macmillan Audio by a full cast including Stefan Rudnicki, Stephen Hoye, Arthur Morey, Vikas Adam, Emily Janice Card, Gabrielle de Cuir, and Roxanne Hernandez. “The mining ship El Cavador is far out from Earth, in the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Pluto. Other mining ships, and the families that live on them, are few and far between this far out. So when El Cavador’s telescopes pick up a fast-moving object coming in-system, it’s hard to know what to make of it. It’s massive and moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light. El Cavador has other problems. Their systems are old and failing. The family is getting too big for the ship. There are claim-jumping corporate ships bringing Asteroid Belt tactics to the Kuiper Belt. Worrying about a distant object that might or might not be an alien ship seems…not important. They’re wrong. It’s the most important thing that has happened to the human race in a million years. The first Formic War is about to begin.”

The second sf title is Energized by Edward M. Lerner, narrated by Grover Gardner for Blackstone Audio. “No one expected the oil to last forever. How right they were…. A geopolitical miscalculation tainted the world’s major oil fields with radioactivity and plunged the Middle East into chaos. Any oil that remains usable is more prized than ever. No one can build solar farms, wind farms, and electric cars quickly enough to cope. The few countries still able to export petroleum and natural gas - Russia chief among them - have a stranglehold on the world economy. Then, from the darkness of space, came Phoebe. Rather than deflect the onrushing asteroid, America coaxed it into Earth’s orbit. Solar power satellites - cheaply mass-produced in orbit with resources mined from the new moon to beam vast amounts of power to the ground - offer America its last, best hope of avoiding servitude and economic ruin.”

The “genre in the mainstream” title is Shine Shine Shine by Lydia Netzer, narrated by Joshilyn Jackson for Macmillan Audio concurrent with the print and e-book release from St. Martin’s Press. “When Maxon met Sunny, he was seven years, four months, and 18 days old. Or, he was 2693 rotations of the Earth old. Maxon was different. Sunny was different. They were different together. Now, 20 years later, they are married, and Sunny wants, more than anything, to be “normal”. She’s got the housewife thing down perfectly, but Maxon, a genius engineer, is on a NASA mission to the moon, programming robots for a new colony. Once they were two outcasts who found unlikely love in each other: a wondrous, strange relationship formed from urgent desire for connection. But now they’re parents to an autistic son. And Sunny is pregnant again. And her mother is dying in the hospital. Their marriage is on the brink of imploding, and they’re at each other’s throats with blame and fear. What exactly has gone wrong?”

And the zombie anthology is 21st Century Dead: A Zombie Anthology by Christopher Golden (editor), Amber Benson, S. G. Browne, Chelsea Cain, Orson Scott Card, Dan Chaon, Simon R. Greene, Brian Keene, Caitlin Kittredge, and Jonathan Maberry, narrated by Scott Brick, Cassandra Campbell, Bernadette Dunne, Paul Michael Garcia, Kirby Heyborne, Malcolm Hillgartner, Chris Patton, John Pruden, Renée Raudman, and Stefan Rudnicki. “The Stoker Award-winning editor of the acclaimed, eclectic anthology The New Dead returns with 21st Century Dead and an all-new lineup of authors from every corner of the fiction world, shining a dark light on our fascination with tales of death and resurrection—and with zombies!”

ALSO OUT TUESDAY:

While the first release week in July isn’t headlined with new star-powered releases — those might be found in the “seen but not heard” section, including a new Charles Stross “Laundry Files” novel — there are a few intriguing new titles along with another round of new Audible Frontiers productions of previously well-received novels.

The title that most intrigues me this week is shelved in the Mysteries/Thrillers section, but with both some near future cyberthriller elements, and supernatural fantasy elements as well: Alif the Unseen By the award-winning graphic novelist G. Willow Wilson, Narrated By Sanjiv Jhaveri for Brilliance Audio:

“In an unnamed Middle Eastern security state, a young Arab-Indian hacker shields his clients — dissidents, outlaws, Islamists, and other watched groups — from surveillance and tries to stay out of trouble. He goes by Alif — the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, and a convenient handle to hide behind. The aristocratic woman Alif loves has jilted him for a prince chosen by her parents, and his computer has just been breached by the state’s electronic security force, putting his clients and his own neck on the line. Then it turns out his lover’s new fiancé is the “Hand of God”, as they call the head of state security, and his henchmen come after Alif, driving him underground. When Alif discovers The Thousand and One Days, the secret book of the jinn, which both he and the Hand suspect may unleash a new level of information technology, the stakes are raised and Alif must struggle for life or death, aided by forces seen and unseen.”

ALSO OUT TUESDAY:

Well, the release week for Tuesday, April 24, 2012 is not messing around. There are two dozen+ new audiobooks, including a pretty big list of big titles.

The Mongoliad: The Foreworld Saga, Book 1 By Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, Mark Teppo, E. D. deBirmingham, Erik Bear, Joseph Brassey, and Cooper Moo, Narrated by Luke Daniels for Brilliance Audio — concurrent with its print and e-book publication from Amazon’s 47North, this is the first novel to come out of the serial novel project “The Mongoliad”, of which I’ve been a subscriber but which I haven’t followed terrifically closely since about chapter 5 or 6. I’m about 3/4 of the way through the audiobook at this point thanks to receiving a review copy, and Daniels (with whom I am familiar after his world on the Wild Cards anthologies and Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles) employs a wide variety of voices to bring the motley cast of Christendom’s champions to audio; from Hungarians to Italians and Irishmen, to Germans and onwards east to their opponents in Mongolia. The much-awaited “sword porn” — meticulously researched and choreographed martial combat — appeared in the form of an impressive gladiatorial contest about halfway through. I’ll have more thoughts on this fairly short (13 hrs and 17 mins) novel soon:

Tricked: The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book 4 By Kevin Hearne, Narrated by Luke Daniels for Random House Audio — speaking of Daniels’s work on Hearne’s series, here’s the 4th installment of the Arizona-dwelling Druid Atticus O’Sullivan, concurrent with its print and e-book release from Del Rey. Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins.

The Wind Through the Keyhole: The Dark Tower By Stephen King, Narrated by the author for Simon & Schuster Audio — billed as “Book 4.5” of King’s The Dark Tower series, it’s another shorter audiobook at 10 hrs and 29 mins, and one which has already been reviewed quite positively over at The Guilded Earlobe. Here’s the publisher’s pitch: “King has returned to the rich landscape of Mid-World. This story within a story within a story finds Roland Deschain, Mid-World’s last gunslinger, in his early days during the guilt-ridden year following his mother’s death. Sent by his father to investigate evidence of a murderous shape-shifter, a “skin-man”, Roland takes charge of Bill Streeter, a brave but terrified boy who is the sole surviving witness to the beast’s most recent slaughter.”

Blackbirds By Chuck Wendig, Narrated by Emily Beresford for Angry Robot on Brilliance Audio — 8 hrs and 7 mins — yet another non-doorstop-length novel, also already reviewed, and also quite positively, by The Guilded Earlobe. (Bob, do you ever sleep?!) Publisher’s pitch: “Miriam Black knows when you will die. Still in her early twenties, she’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, suicides, and slow deaths by cancer. But when Miriam hitches a ride with truck driver Louis Darling and shakes his hand, she sees that in thirty days he will be gruesomely murdered while he calls her name.Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. No matter what she does, she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.” Wendig is quite worth following on Twitter, by the way; his piece on Lady Gaga should be required reading for the new millennium. Update: Wendig wrote up his “Big Idea” (hint: “Everybody poops. Everybody dies.”) for Scalzi’s Whatever blog.

Lastly (well, above the fold at least) is the release of seven (seven!) audiobooks from Robert Silverberg, all out from Audible Frontiers, split between two narrators. First, the new audiobooks read by Stefan Rudnicki: Tower of Glass (8 hrs and 2 mins), The Stochastic Man (7 hrs and 13 mins), The Book of Skulls (8 hrs and 14 mins), and Dying Inside (7 hrs and 31 mins).