OCTOBER 15-21, 2014: Appalachian folk magic from the legendary Manly Wade Wellman, a full cast radioplay adaptation of an Eric Flint novella, new space sf, backlist epic fantasy from Daniel Abraham, Pynchon’s postmodern epic Gravity’s Rainbow, and Ray Bradbury’s classic dystopian tale Fahrenheit 451 under the voice of Tim Robbins headline this week’s releases which also include: Ytasha Womack’s Rayla 2212, Chuck Palahniuk’s Beautiful You, Eliza Granville’s debut novel Gretel and the Dark read by Stefan Rudnicki and Cassandra Campbell, Pierre Grimbert’s third Secret of Ji novel, David Drake’s “Reaches” series, Frank Herbert’s Destination: Void, Sean Platt’s The Beam, Tonia Brown’s Devouring Milo, and! Certainty by Victor Levine, a debut novel from a narrator very near and dear to AudioBookaneers ears. In terms of other audiobook news, I was very happy to see some pre-order listings show up for the end of October: Kameron Hurley’s The Mirror Empire and the first two books of Tad Williams’ Otherland series. Meanwhile, next week will bring highly-anticipated audiobooks including William Gibon’s The Peripheral, Patrick Rothfuss’ The Slow Regard of Silent Things, George R.R. Martin’s The World of Ice and Fire, Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, and Anne Rice’s Prince Lestat. Enjoy!

PICKS OF THE WEEK:

I was very happily surprised to see The Old Gods Waken by Manly Wade Wellman come to audio this week, even more happily to see that it is read by Stefan Rudnicki. The first of Wellman’s “Silver John” novels — though by its publication in 1979 he’d already been writing “John the Balladeer” short stories for 25 years — it has a fairly simple setup: “In the wilds of Southern Appalachia lies Wolter Mountain—a sacred place for the Indians and their predecessors. But the land atop the mountain, taken over by two Englishmen, Brummitt and Hooper Voth, is undergoing frightening changes.” The first of those changes becomes outwardly apparent when Creed Forshay heads up Wolter Mountain to find the Voths trying to fence off part of Creed’s land. An argument ensues as to the proper property line, and when Creed heads back down-mountain to fetch his son Luke, he finds (who else?) but John, silver-stringed guitar in hand. While not dumping exposition on us, there are hints of John’s previous adventures and encounters, with John narrating the book as an old-timey story-teller just might, with a few asides here and there, with a back-up, a now remember when. As John begins to investigate what exactly is going on atop Wolter Mountain, he brings in past friends to help, and sinister druidic omens collide with the remnant spirits of pre-paleolithic inhabitants of the Appalachians. It’s an novel that’s very unfortunately been long out-of-print — and never yet in ebook — and one near and dear to my heart.

In the narrator’s booth, Rudnicki performed under the direction of Claire Bloom for Skyboat Media and Blackstone Audio, and after a slight hesitation — whether Rudnicki’s or more likely mine — settles right into Wellman’s characterstic dialect for these stories. I been a-waitin’ for these books to come to audio for a right long time, air one should know. And I’m not the only one; it was Rudnicki himself who instigated this project, as he explained in an email: “I began reading Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John stories in 1965 (my Junior High Librarian had my class start a journal of everything we read, and I’ve kept it up ever since, so I know my dates), beginning with Who Fears the Devil? Short stories were my favorite reading at that time, especially SF and horror. I loved the authentic feel of Wellman’s locales and the weirdness of the magic. In time, I read everything of his I could get my hands on… Part of my purpose in Skyboat Media’s audiobook publishing venture is to bring authors and books that profoundly influenced me, and who may currently be out of print or little known, to a new audience through audio. Hence Wellman’s place among other notables like Fredric Brown, John Creasey, Robert Sheckley, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Charles Beaumont, Sarban, Robert Silverberg and Robert W. Chambers. And yes, I’d love to do more of his work going forward.”

Readers of The AudioBookaneers should know by now that I’m a big Rudnicki fan. It’s been fantastic to follow his work for a number of years now, particular of another author he’s championed along the way, Lewis Shiner. (Rudnicki, who must never sleep or if he does, somehow manages to narrate in his sleep, has another Shiner work forthcoming next week, Frontera.) A Wellman story didn’t make it into Rudnicki’s Fantastic Imaginings anthology, but looking back on those selections (Chambers, Bierce, Blackwood, Burroughs, Clark Ashton Smith) was certainly in “the neighborhood” of Wellman. One very interesting synchronicity to me is that I’ve also had the pleasure of hearing Rudnicki read Alex Bledsoe’s 2011 novel The Hum and the Shiver, another Appalachian-set story of music and Old-meets-New World mythlore, one which is (whether consciously or unconsciously) indelibly stamped by the influence of Wellman’s “John the Balladeer” tales. These are stories of which I can see and hear echoes in everything from the openly stated (David Drake’s Old Nathan) to John Hornor Jacob’s Southern Gods and on and on.

But back to Rudnicki, and his work at Skyboat in steadfastly championing authos he feels have been overlooked. He’s not nearly done, as he writes: “Another Robert W. Chambers book? You bet! From the author of The King in Yellow and The Mystery of Choice, the complete Maker of Moons. Nearly done recording. Creepy and romantic. I love it!” Speaking of The King in Yellow, through October 26, it’s $4.95 at Downpour. Maker of Moons is due out in December.

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Eric Flint’s Islands: An Audio Drama Based on the Novella by Eric Flint is a four-part, full cast audio play adaptation by Tony Daniel of “Islands,” a novella by Eric Flint set within the world of the Belisarius alternate history series created by Eric Flint and David Drake: “Epic adventure, the horrors and glory of war, and the dawning of authentic love combine in this drama based on a classic novella of the Belisarius series. 751 A.D. The being from the future known as Aide has brought technology to Byzantine Rome in an attempt to oppose another nefarious A.I. from the same future. This is a Roman Empire with the telegraph, muzzle-loading rifles, and steam-powered ships. In the midst of this transformed world: Calopodius Saronites, seventeen-years-old, and a Constantinople aristocrat who has gone to the front with General Belisarius to seek glory. And Anna Saronites, also seventeen, Calopodius’s wife by arranged marriage who seeks a life for herself outside the strictures of Constantinople society. As Anna journeys into the horror of war’s rear area hospitals and uprooted lives, she finds uses for her talents of which she never dreamed, even as her husband Calopodius remakes his life on the front after he is blinded by a terrible wound.”

I’ve talked about this in previous release week write-ups — and with the scriptwriter Tony Daniel on Carolina Book Beat — as the radioplay debuted the past four weeks on Baen’s Free Radio Hour podcast. Here, once more, with feeling: “It was a thrill and an honor to have had a small part in the production, and to be able to take in first-hand the amazing performances of cast members Tracey Coppedge, Paul Kilpatrick, Lex Wilson, Jeff Aguiar, Izzy Burger, Rika Daniel, Carter, Paris Battle, Gray Rinehart, Pj Maske, and Cokie Daniel. (Between rehearsal takes, the talent on display just ad-libbing around for fun by this group was wonderful to be around.) Both Tony Daniel and director Jerome Davis were likewise amazing to work with, and to watch work.”

Available in DRM-free MP3 and (almost unbelievably) an 800MB WAV file, the dramatization includes an original score, fantastic sound effects from cannons to footsteps to the (almost ever-present!) telegraph dah-di-dah–dit. If it weren’t for the obvious amateur-hour fellow standing in as Captain Mendander, it would be a nearly spotless production. (Disclaimer: Yeah, I played Menander.) Wilson really steals the show as both Luke, Calopodius’ aide-de-camp and sometimes narrator, and Illus, an ex-soldier turned hired soldier in Anna’s service; working on his accents for the two characters is something I had the chance to talk to him about as well. Paris Battle gets perhaps the best line, as “puckle gun” operator Stavros, but I’ll leave that for listeners to discover and decide.

The Abyss Beyond Dreams: Chronicle of the Fallers by Peter F. Hamilton (Del Rey, Oct 21) begins a new series in his Commonwealth Universe, which began with 2004’s Pandora’s Star and continued through the Void trilogy. As has the entirety of his Commonwealth series, The Abyss Beyond Dreams is narrated by the always-fantastic John Lee for Tantor. While Pandora’s Star started us in the already deep future of 2380, here: “The year is 3326. Nigel Sheldon, one of the founders of the Commonwealth, receives a visit from the Raiel – self-appointed guardians of the Void, the enigmatic construct at the core of the galaxy that threatens the existence of all that lives. The Raiel convince Nigel to participate in a desperate scheme to infiltrate the Void. Once inside, Nigel discovers that humans are not the only life-forms to have been sucked into the Void. The humans trapped there are afflicted by an alien species of biological mimics.” Paul Di Filippo reviewed this for Locus Online: “Peter Hamilton’s new novel stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the Culture books of Iain Banks and the Kefahuchi Tract saga of M. John Harrison, but rotated through the looking glass of a totally different, resolutely non-postmodern worldview, to produce a book that is paradoxically both old-school and totally au courant: the best of two worlds.”

Also out from Tantor is A Shadow in Summer: Long Price Quartet, Book 1 By Daniel Abraham, Narrated By Neil Shah (Oct 21) — before The Dagger and the Coin, before “James S.A. Corey”, Abraham’s Long Price Quartet had already established him as one of modern epic fantasy’s finest authors, and this 2006 novel gets things started: “The powerful city-state of Saraykeht is a bastion of peace and culture, a major center of commerce and trade. Its economy depends on the power of the captive spirit Seedless, an and at bound to the poet-sorcerer Heshai for life. Enter the Galts, an empire committed to laying waste to all lands with their ferocious army. Saraykeht has always been too strong for the Galts to attack, but now they see an opportunity.” Shah does not have a long speculative fiction credit list — he’s best known perhaps as the narrator for The Hundred-Foot Journey: A Novel — but he’s quite solid on this, with a good range of characterizations and confident mainline narration. Books 2, 3, and 4 will be coming out every few weeks this fall and (early) winter.

Lastly, arriving (and pre-saged by) significantly more fanfare: Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury, Narrated By Tim Robbins for Audible (Oct 21). I listened to the (somewhat dry, but competent) Christopher Hurt audiobook from Blackstone Audio, apparently no longer available at Audible.com or Blackstone’s own Downpour, and a Stephen Hoye narration for Tantor is still out there as well, but to hear Robbins say “It was a pleasure to burn” and not want to hear more is beyond this reviewer. It’s not yet perfect — I don’t know really what I would be looking for in a ‘perfect’ narration of Bradbury’s dystopian classic — but there’s more than a little something to his performance here. It’s not Andy Dufresne or Nuke LaLoosh at all here, there’s a cadence that’s more reminiscent of Kerouac, a more fervent, fever-pitched urgency that certainly brings more life than Hurt’s or Hoye’s narrations, that seems more to mesh with my memory of the vibrancy of experiencing this book on the page, of videos of the energetic Bradbury himself speaking. In any case, whether you’ve read or heard the book before, or not, if it’s been too long, this one’s worth a revisit: “Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family”. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television. When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.”

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK:









SEEN BUT NOT HEARD:

Bathing the Lion by Jonathan Carroll (St. Martin’s Press, Oct 21, 2014) — “In Jonathan Carroll’s surreal masterpiece, Bathing the Lion, five people who live in the same New England town go to sleep one night and all share the same hyper-realistic dream. Some of these people know each other; some don’t.”

Fish Tails: A Novel by Sheri S. Tepper (Harper Voyager, Oct 21, 2014) — “SF novels that brings together storylines and characters from several earlier novels, from King’s Blood Four (1983) to The Waters Rising (2010).” (description via Locus Online)

(1983) to (2010).” (description via Locus Online) Kids: Centaur Rising by Jane Yolen (Henry Holt, Oct 21, 2014) — “One night during the Perseid meteor shower, Arianne thinks she sees a shooting star land in the fields surrounding her family’s horse farm. About a year later, one of their horses gives birth to a baby centaur. The family has enough attention already as Arianne’s six-year-old brother was born with birth defects caused by an experimental drug—the last thing they need is more scrutiny. But their clients soon start growing suspicious. Just how long is it possible to keep a secret? And what will happen if the world finds out?”

COMING SOON:

NOVEMBER and DECEMBER 2014:

UNDATED or 2015: