Review: The King's Blood

Posted on 2013-05-14 at 19:46 by Dave Thompson

The King’s Blood, Book 2 in The Dagger and the Coin by Daniel Abraham, Narrated by Pete Bradbury Length 15 hours, 42 minutes

The priests have spiders in their blood.

They worship a goddess that has spend centuries in hiding, “a spider” who blesses them with the power to divine whether or not someone is lying, as well as the ability to speak truth. When you hear them, you believe - despite the circumstances, or whether you have evidence to the contrary, you believe. And so what the priests say comes to pass. They are prophets, and they’re creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Probably.

”Probably” is what’s important. Because what the priests are speaking isn’t actually the truth. It’s a belief made of sincerity, certainty, and absolute conviction. Even if it’s wrong.

If you haven’t checked out Daniel Abraham’s The Dagger and the Coin series, you need to do that ASAP, starting with The Dragon’s Path. It’s epic fantasy, and it does what it says on the tin - it’s full of all the stuff we love about epic fantasy - an incredible cast of characters, magic (albeit a very subtle magic), fantastical creatures, adventure, romance, and most surprisingly - banking. And yet, it grapples with big ideas like forced belief and fundamentalism.

If you’re looking for B&B (Battles & Badasses), there’s some of that but the books are generally more subtle, and instead focus on what’s really special about this series: the characters. Whether it’s ex-soldiers Marcus and Yardem waxing philosophical and theological while collecting a debt (like shades of Jules and Vincent from Pulp Fiction) or banking ingenue Cithrin meeting up with her old friends from an acting troupe, the characters feel like friends you haven’t seen in years, but when you reunite with them, it’s like no times gone by.

Not all of them are heroic - some are monstrous, whether in actions or philosophy, but Abraham doesn’t let us forget they’re humans too, and gets us to empathize with them far easier than we should. Dawson Kalliam’s class-warfare attitudes are despicable, yet the genuine affection he showers on his wife and children is endearing. Geder Palliako was bullied before his unpredictable rise to power, and so when he uses his newly gained positions to keep people from lying ot his face and taking advantage of him, we understand, despite his awful and barbaric actions.

The Dagger and the Coin is one of the best kept secrets in epic fantasy. Unfortunately, the audiobooks aren’t released until about 9 months or so after the print and eBooks come out (which seems to happen as often as not for Recorded Books)…or maybe that’s a good thing? Like The Dragon’s Path, I ended up reading this book, and then listening to it once the audio came out, right in time for The Tyrant’s Law (3 of this 5 book series). There are two reasons for this: 1) Daniel Abraham’s series is just that good (I expect to revisit these books and characters many, many more times, and 2) Pete Bradbury’s narration gives an added gravity to the story that’s phenomenal. Daniel Abraham was born to write SF/F, and Pete Bradbury was born to narrate it.

Let the countdown to The Tyrant’s Law audiobook commence!

Posted in reviews

Featured author and narrator: Mary Robinette Kowal

Posted on 2013-05-14 at 17:36 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

AudioBookaneers Features Presents: Mary Robinette Kowal, author, narrator, and puppeteer

By Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

Hugo Award winning author Mary Robinette Kowal visited Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books on Friday, on her book tour for Without a Summer, the third book in her The Glamourist Histories series which began with 2010’s Shades of Milk and Honey. Billed as, more or less, “the fantasy novel which Jane Austen might have written” the series is a Regency period historical fiction with plenty of manners, costume changes, polite conversations, sisters competing for the affections of suitors, and — this is also fantasy, after all — the “womanly art” of Glamour, which in its high society form is a sort of drawing room magic of delightful illusions and fancy.

All three novels in the series are also narrated by Kowal, an experienced voice actor with credits on Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series and Sherryl Woods’ Sweet Magolia series prior to voicing her own novels. Since, she has also narrated Rosa Montero’s Tears in Rain, Neve Maslakovic’s The Far Time Incident, and Oksana Zabuzhko’s The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, among other projects.

Shades of Milk and Honey was produced by Macmillan Audio, and both book 2, 2012’s Glamour in Glass, and the new book are out from Audible Frontiers. All three are in hardcover, paperback, and ebook from Tor Books.

Kowal began the program with a short presentation of an historical shadow puppet play, 1784’s “The Broken Bridge”. A trained puppeteer with work on the children’s TV series LazyTown as well as many stage play productions and performances, Kowal’s delightful shadow puppet antics and “Tra-la-la”s brought plenty of smiles; more followed as Kowal explained the construction of her curtain and puppets, out of white shower curtain and Trader Joe’s boxes, respectively.

Attendees were treated to a reading that was wonderful in at least two respects. The first being that after polling the audience for their wishes, she read from the first chapter of the forthcoming 4th book in the series, 2014’s Valor and Vanity, which takes place after Napoleon’s defeat to Duke Wellington, and is set near Venice as Jane and Vincent sail for Murano and a meeting with Lord Byron. The second is that, as both an experienced voice actor and narrator and of course as the narrator of her own books, is that it was pretty much a “live audiobook” experience, complete with a wide range of familiar character voices both gruff and matronly which, again, brought plenty of smiles and a few laughs as well.

Jane and Vincent only begin to experiment a bit with creating magical folds at sea — creating and maintaining folds in the ether even while walking is an enormous undertaking — before… well, there has to be some benefit for actually attending the reading, so I’ll leave it at that. Kowal concluded the reading with some additional details about Lord Byron — who has some time which is “unaccounted” for in the historical record — and another historical figure, Doctor John William Polidori, a friend of Byron’s and the author of The Vampyre, a “progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction” (Wikipedia). And one last thing — Doctor Polidori is “a” Doctor, and, apparently known to most of the people in the room and many of my friends who have read Kowal’s books who were not in the room, Kowal has inserted a Doctor Who reference into each of the novels so far. Kowal read one more short excerpt from further into the novel, featuring a character wearing a fez. Which, apparently, was a Doctor Who reference, though as someone who doesn’t watch the show, fairly well lost on me.

In the Q&A session after the reading, I asked Kowal about The Transfigured Lady, a novel she posted chapter by chapter in draft form on a password-protected blog, in order to get reader feedback from the very beginning. Now that novel is Passing Fair, set in early 20th century Nashville, Tennessee, and while it does not (yet!) have a publisher, it’s still very much a live project, complete with 99 pins of research on Pinterest.

Another question from the audience concerned the Science of Glamour, which Kowal explained as “manipulation of waveforms”. In the deep past of her world, humans and fae did not go apart but rather interbred, and so everyone can do magic, some to lesser or greater extents. Further, the farther outside the visible spectrum the harder it is, the more energy is required, the harder the toll on the glamourist. This was expanded upon in an answer to a later question, about analogues between the historical Luddite uprising and the Coldmongers of Kowal’s new novel, Without a Summer. Kowal explained that coldmongery — the transfer of heat energy — was among the most physically demanding, debilitating, and dangerous.

Another question led to some details on two of Kowal’s methods for preventing anachronisms in word and language use. The first is by using a special thesaurus which lists synonyms in order of their year of appearance in English. The second is by using a “Jane Austen Spellcheck Dictionary” which includes the text of all of Austen’s works. But! Even this is not quite enough, because some words, though both in historic use and even in use by Austen, such as “electric” would “feel” too much like anachronisms to be used. And just the words are not enough, either, as Kowal illustrated with the idiom “to have a measured reaction”. This, she explained, was not the way these words were used, due to a different relationship between language and “self” in this time period, requiring the author to “unpack” the meaning into other phrasing.

After the reading, and a costume change of her own out of her Regency dress and a drive over to the recently-opened Raleigh Brewing Company, I got to talk to Kowal about her other recent work. This led me to find out that somehow I’d been living under a rock, because as much as I’d enjoyed METAtropolis and METAtropolis: Cascadia I somehow did not know that a third, again audiobook-first all-original novella anthology was coming, edited by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes, and including stories from (among others) Kowal, Karl Schroeder, and Elizabeth Bear. Kowal said that her story is in a new storyline, not a follow-on to “Water to Wine”, and, after correcting my faulty memory as to which TV cast narrated which previous anthology (Battlestar Galactica narrated METAtropolis and Star Trek: The Next Generation narrated METAtropolis: Cascadia, for the record) named Firefly as perhaps a dream cast to narrate the new anthology, METAtropolis: Green Space.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged mary robinette kowal

Review: Double Feature

Posted on 2013-05-13 at 19:50 by Dave Thompson

Double Feature by Owen King, read by Holter Graham Length: 16 hours, 11 minutes

Review by Dave Thompson:

When I was in college, I made a student film. I went to a Christian university, and so I decided to write and direct a movie about vampires. This was just as Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show came out, before it became "a thing." So, I spent a semester of my life and education attempting to make a horror movie - one that to this day has never actually been edited together and completed. One of the tapes was lost (probably the one with some of the best footage on it - where we tromped through a sewer). And while that does completely suck (ha!) most of the time I'm generally okay with that, because I think it probably would not have turned out to be a very good movie for a number of reasons. Most of the time. I was trying to make a movie that I really didn't have the right budget for, and I'm sure any multiverse version of me would be a decent cinematic director. (I will say  - I think we put together a pretty kickass preview, though!) Also, I made some choices back then that I regret. But what if - what if I'm wrong? And the movie was bad, but so bad it was awesome? And still haunted me?

Owen King's Double Feature is a modern-day coming of age story - one win which the characters only figure out how to redeem the errors of their youth as adults. It's the funniest thing I've listened to in a long time, and while it might attempt answering some of life's harder questions a little too pat at times, I still found it genuinely moving.

Posted in reviews, Uncategorized | Tagged double feature, holter graham, owen king

The Shambling Guide to New York City Listen-a-Long: Chapter 1

Posted on 2013-05-09 at 19:04 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

Welcome to the first installment of The Shambling Guide to New York City Listen-a-Long, covering Chapter 1 of Mur Lafferty’s The Shambling Guide to New York City. There’s a bit more to this installment than will be usual, as we get to also talk about Lafferty’s introduction to the podcast, and, well, a bit about my listening history where it comes to her other podcasts. First a warning, that I’ll repeat each episode, that the discussion here is oh-so-spoilerific, so if that’s a concern, pop over and take the 15 minutes to listen to the podcast episode first. On to…

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“200”] Cover art by Jamie McKelvie[/caption]

The Shambling Guide to New York City: Chapter One by Mur Lafferty Runtime: 15 minutes

I find it hard to count how many hours of Mur Lafferty’s voice I’ve heard over the past few years now. I met Mur in late 2009, and soon after started checking out her I Should Be Writing podcast (where I learned that “It’s OK to suck” — a better mantra for me probably doesn’t exist) and then her Afterlife series, starting with Heaven, then (and still) available as a free Podiobook. I’ve listened to her host dozens and dozens of Escape Pod episodes, and narrate quite a long list as well. (Inlcuding “You’re Almost Here” by Melinda Thielbar, in which Mur drops the F-bomb with some verve and panache; for several mostly selfish reasons one of my favorite episodes.)

Still, even after all those episodes, all those intros and outtros and narrations, there’s still something very exciting that happens between my ears when I press “play” on Chapter One of Mur’s latest podcast, for her forthcoming novel The Shambling Guide to New York City. While the other projects were well-ongoing before I knew what a podcast even was, for this one, I’d get to be listening along right from the first episodes.

The intro here for episode one is pretty short, though we find out that the idea for this book has been rolling around since 2005. We hear just a bit about selling the book to Orbit (and somehow selling Hachette Audio on the idea of the free podcast as well) and get the plans for the podcast: one chapter a week, for free, for 29 weeks, then remaining up for one month afterwards. Of course, the novel and full audiobook will go on sale on May 28, so those of us who can’t wait to find out what happens next in any given week will have a pretty easy time of scratching that particular itch.

Then it’s right into the “real” audiobook, complete with “Hachette Audio presents…” and intro music. Having gotten to sit in on one studio session, to hear the care and attention to detail from Mur’s editor and recording engineer, I knew I was in for a high-quality recording, and, no surprise, here we are. “Chapter One.”

We meet former travel guide writer Zoë Norris, browsing through a strange New York City bookstore that isn’t in the guidebook. Well, Zoë’s guidebook at least. After passing by a few even stranger titles, such as “How to Make Love, Marry, Devour, and Inherit in Eight Weeks”, Zoë picks up a book on hounds from hell from the Pets section. With a sticky leather binding. That makes its way onto Zoë’s sweater. Of course.

Upon trying to actually buy the strange book in this strange bookstore, though, Zoë runs into some difficulties, as the clerk responds to Zoë’s inquiry about the book’s price with an unsmiling: “We cater to a specific clientele.” As a man who was posting a flyer turns to regard the rising confrontation, we get a peek into Zoë’s paranoid inner voice as she struggles to remind herself that: Not everyone is out to get you.

The man begins to diffuse the situation, but Zoë’s interest in the book is thrown by the wayside when bigger quarry is spotted. The man had just posted a flyer for a travel guide writing job on the bulletin board, and, as we find out immediately, “She needed a job.”

Of course, she gets the job, the book ends, everyone’s happy.

No, of course not. Instead, she gets pretty much the same treatment from the man about the job posting as the clerk was giving her about the hound book. Through the resulting exchange, we find out a bit of Zoë’s backstory: a former head researcher and writer for Misconceptions Publishing (“the second biggest travel book publisher in the USA”) laid off after finding herself as the “other woman” to her boss, Godfrey’s, wife.

Still, Zoë presses on. Who is this pudgy guy in a T-shirt and jeans to tell her that she wasn’t “what they’re looking for”? Just Phillip Rand, the owner, president, and CEO of the company, Underground Publishing, of course.

And yet, still, Zoë pushes on, listing her qualifications, lining up her qualifications and experience as the perfect fit. Shot down yet again, she asks, “Isn’t this illegal?” Though Rand assures her that she’s not being discriminated against based on gender or race — though going by the clues given by the cover art and chapter so far, we might suspect the “human” race, mightn’t we? — and that, as they say, is that.

Finding no help in the self-help section (“Get the Salary You Deserve! Negotiating Hell Notes in a Time of Economic Downturn”) she heads for a long bath, via a “tall caloric caffeine bomb” stop on the way. Finally, chapter one closes with an “Excerpt from The Shambling Guide to New York City”, in which we find out a bit more about the bookstore in which this has all just happened.

And, the chapter finished, the podcast episode ends with a brief outtro, in which we learn about Orbit’s wallpaper images for the book, and an official necklace at Surlyramics.

Well, I’m biased, but I’m also very pleased. We’re starting to get to know Zoë — needs a job, smart, knows she’s got what it takes to write, juuuuust a bit paranoid, maybe a bit slow on the “every book in here seems non-a-joke directed towards mythical beings” uptake, but hey, it’s New York City, every subculture has its hole-in-the-wall bookstore, right?

So! Chapter Two is already up, which is a more meaty 24 minutes. See you next week! Will Zoë find her caffeine bomb? Will she end up dressed as a sandwich, or will better employment opportunities come her way? Tune in, and see you next week for the listen-a-long discussion!

Posted in The Shambling Guide to NYC Listen-a-Long

Release Week: The Kings and Queens of Roam, Odds Against Tomorrow, Tales of Majipoor, and The Crystal Shard

Posted on 2013-05-08 at 19:46 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

MAY 1-7, 2013: May is here, and the first release week brings quite a haul, so let's get right to it:

PICKS OF THE WEEK:

The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel by Daniel Wallace, read by Angela Brazil for AudioGO. Out concurrent with the print/ebook release from Touchstone, it's the first new novel since 2007 for Wallace, the author of Big Fish. Here it's a story blending tall tales, folklore, and magical realism in, well, "Wallace"-ian fashion; is the magic "real"? Does it matter if it is? "Helen and Rachel McCallister, who live in a town called Roam, are as different as sisters can be: Helen older, bitter, and conniving; Rachel beautiful, naïve - and blind. When their parents die an untimely death, Rachel has to rely on Helen for everything, but Helen embraces her role in all the wrong ways, convincing Rachel that the world is a dark and dangerous place she couldn’t possibly survive on her own... or so Helen believes, until Rachel makes a surprising choice that turns both their worlds upside down. In this new novel, Southern literary master Daniel Wallace returns to the tradition of tall tales and folklore made memorable in his bestselling Big Fish. The Kings and Queens of Roam is a wildly inventive, beautifully written, and big-hearted tale of family and the ties that bind."

Odds Against Tomorrow By Nathaniel Rich, Narrated By Kirby Heyborne for Tantor Audio. Released a month ago in print/ebook (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 2) to quite a bit of coverage. "New York City, the near future: Mitchell Zukor, a gifted young mathematician, is hired by a mysterious new financial consulting firm, FutureWorld. The business operates out of an empty office in the Empire State Building; Mitchell is employee number two. He is asked to calculate worst-case scenarios in the most intricate detail, and his schemes are sold to corporations to indemnify them against any future disasters. This is the cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility, and business is booming. As Mitchell immerses himself in the mathematics of catastrophe - ecological collapse, war games, natural disasters - he becomes obsessed by a culture's fears."

Tales of Majipoor by Robert Silverberg, read by Stefan Rudnicki for Blackstone Audio. "Hailed as 'one of the most fully realized worlds of modern science fiction,'(Booklist) Majipoor is a planet unlike any other, with countless untold stories. Now, available for the first time in one volume, science fiction grand master Robert Silverberg presents seven tales that chronicle thousands of years of Majipoor’s history, from the arrival of the settlers of Old Earth, to the expansion of vast cities, to the extraordinary life of Lord Valentine. Within these stories lie the secrets of Majipoor, a wondrous world of incredible imagination."

The Crystal Shard: Legend of Drizzt: Icewind Dale Trilogy, Book 1 By R. A. Salvatore, Narrated By Victor Bevine for Audible Frontiers. While several hundred other audiobooks have been added to the Audible Frontiers stash of Dungeons and Dragons titles, including plenty of others in the long-running story of dark elf Drizzt Do'Urden, this is the book which started it all. Not chronologically in terms of Drizzt's story, but this is the book that introduced Drizzt -- and much of the Forgotten Realms setting, not to mention Salvatore himself -- to the reading world. "Drizzt Do'Urden has settled in the windswept towns of Icewind Dale. There, he encounters a young barbarian named Wulfgar, captured in a raid and made the ward of a grizzled dwarf name Bruenor. With Drizzt's help, Wulfgar will grow from a feral child to a man with the heart of a dwarf, the instincts of a savage, and the soul of a hero. But it will take even more than that to defeat the demonic power of Crenshininbon, the fabled Crystal Shard." Streams of Silver and The Halfling's Gem are scheduled for two and four weeks later, respectively.

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK:

Posted in Release Week | Tagged daniel wallace, stefan rudnicki

Received: April 2013

Posted on 2013-05-03 at 19:42 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

I took it pretty easy on the review copy front in April, to the tune of three titles:

1. No Return by Zachary Jernigan, read by John FitzGibbon for Audible Frontiers.

This is one I finished listening to a couple of week ago now, so here’s a snippet of my review, A stunning and original debut fantasy: “In a crowded year of strong debut fantasy novels, “No Return” is a very strong contender. Beginning with an assured voice, a prologue of a pitiless landscape of an hallucinogenic salt lake, expanding out to a world whose currency is the powdered skin of an Elder race, populated by (among others) rival enclaves of warrior monks engaging in ritualized battles to defend and proselytize their competing faiths. There is a god with city-killing orbital kinetic ordinance at his whim; there are deeply weird and sexualized alchemistic magics; there are sentient constructs of magical metal spheres; there are dragons and ghosts.”

2. River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay, read by Simon Vance for Penguin Audio.

I haven’t gotten to this one yet, but it’s due up this weekend, where a road trip to and from DC should allow plenty of uninterrupted listening.

3. YOU by Austin Grossman, read by Will Collyer for Hachette Audio.

I did listen to and very much enjoy this one; as a “software engineer by day” who has worked for quite a long time in a big software project release environment, and as a gamer, this one really was quite fantastic. I don’t have a full review put together, but I did have a quip: “With apologies to Jonathan Coulton, this is what it feels like to write software for a living.” The Guilded Earlobe does have a full review up.

Posted in received

May is for Mur: The Shambling Guide to New York City Listen-A-Long begins tomorrow!

Posted on 2013-05-01 at 19:59 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

I hope you enjoyed Dave’s The Human Division Listen-a-Long the past couple of months, because we have another one planned for May and June, getting started tomorrow as part of a month-long feature here on The Audiobookaneers, focusing on author, podcaster, and narrator, Mur Lafferty.

Due out in print, ebook, and audiobook on May 28 from Orbit and Hachette Audio, Lafferty’s new series The Shambling Guides gets started with The Shambling Guide to New York City. Great reviews have been rolling in along with other accolades, the latest being the book’s inclusion on io9’s list of Summer Beach Reads That You Won’t Want to Miss, which provides this nifty summary: “Campbell Award-nominated writer Lafferty’s new novel is about a hapless travel writer who doesn’t realize she’s been hired by a publishing house run by monsters. Now she has to write a travel guide to New York City for the undead — and stop a collision that’s brewing between the world of humans and the world of all the other creatures who haunt the city.”

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“307”] The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty, cover illustration by Jamie McKelvie (Orbit Books, May 2013)[/caption]

Hachette Audio booked Lafferty to narrate the book, and later this month we’ll feature pictures “in studio” from one of the recording sessions, along with an interview about narrating, podcasting, writing, and I can’t quite remember what else right now. (That’s why I took notes, people!)

But first up, starting tomorrow, Lafferty will be podcasting the first chapter of the audiobook, free! So tune in, and we’ll make it a regular Monday thing to discuss, Listen-A-Long style, the chapters as they come. This time I’ll be your host, and I hope you’ll join me!

Posted in The Shambling Guide to NYC Listen-a-Long | Tagged mur lafferty, the shambling guides

Release Week: Joe Hill's NOS4A2, Wesley Chu's The Lives of Tao, Allen Steele's Apollo's Outcasts, and Ballard's The Drought

Posted on 2013-05-01 at 14:54 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

APRIL 24-30, 2013: April goes out with a howl and a bang, with more than a quartet of excellent titles, ranging from concurrent new horror and humorous sf releases, to one of last year's most "missing in audio" young adult sf titles, to one of sf's classic stories of climate change. Next week is another huge crop of high-interest titles as publishers start ramping up for summer reading and listening, so you'd better get started!

PICKS OF THE WEEK:

From the author of the novels Heart-Shaped Box and Horns and the comic book series Locke & Key comes NOS4A2: A Novel By Joe Hill, Narrated By Kate Mulgrew for Harper Audio. Narrator Mulgrew is best known as Captain Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager but also turned in a fine narration in the METAtropolis audio anthology series as well as a story in the Ray Bradbury tribute anthology Shadow Show but this is her first full-length solo narration. Here: "Victoria McQueen has an uncanny knack for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. When she rides her bicycle over the rickety old covered bridge in the woods near her house, she always emerges in the places she needs to be. Vic doesn't tell anyone about her unusual ability, because she knows no one will believe her. She has trouble understanding it herself. Charles Talent Manx has a gift of his own. He likes to take children for rides in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the vanity plate NOS4A2. In the Wraith, he and his innocent guests can slip out of the everyday world and onto hidden roads that lead to an astonishing playground of amusements he calls Christmasland. Mile by mile, the journey across the highway of Charlie's twisted imagination transforms his precious passengers, leaving them as terrifying and unstoppable as their benefactor. And then comes the day when Vic goes looking for trouble...and finds her way, inevitably, to Charlie. That was a lifetime ago. Now, the only kid ever to escape Charlie's unmitigated evil is all grown up and desperate to forget. But Charlie Manx hasn't stopped thinking about the exceptional Victoria McQueen. On the road again, he won't slow down until he's taken his revenge. He's after something very special - something Vic can never replace. As a life-and-death battle of wills builds her magic pitted against his - Vic McQueen prepares to destroy Charlie once and for all... or die trying...."

The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu, narrated By Mikael Naramore for Angry Robot on Brilliance Audio, out concurrent with the print and ebook edition from Angry Robot. "When out-of-shape IT technician Roen wakes up and starts hearing voices in his head, he naturally assumes he’s losing it. He isn’t. As of last night, he has a passenger in his brain - an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Over the millennia his people have trained human heroes to be great leaders, to advance our species at a rate far beyond what it would have achieved on its own. Split into two opposing factions - the peace-loving, but under-represented Prophus, and the savage, powerful Genjix - the aliens have been in a state of civil war for centuries. Both sides are searching for a way off-planet… and the Genjix will sacrifice the entire human race, if that’s what it takes. So now Roen must train to be a hero worthy of his unwanted companion. Like that’s going to end up well.…" And! The book also comes with probably my favorite blurb so far this year: "Wesley Chu is my hero.… He has to be the coolest science fiction writer in the world." (Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama). And! Whew. There's more. Author Chu has an essay up on the Big Idea behind the novel.

Apollo’s Outcasts By Allen Steele, Narrated By Ramon DeOcampo for Audible Frontiers was published in print/ebook last year by Pyr Teen, a story in the vein of Heinlein’s Space Cadet, updated by Steele, the author of the Coyote series of sf novels. Here: "Jamey Barlowe has been crippled since childhood, the result of being born on the Moon. He lives his life in a wheelchair, only truly free when he is in the water. But then Jamey’s father sends him, along with five other kids, back to the Moon to escape a political coup d’etat that has occurred overnight in the United States. Moreover, one of the other five refugees is more than she appears. Their destination is the mining colony, Apollo. Jamey will have to learn a whole new way to live, one that entails walking for the first time in his life."

The Drought (1965) By J. G. Ballard, Narrated By Julian Elfer for Audible Inc. It's a shorter title at under 6 hours, and hopefully, maybe, this also means Audible is at work on audio for Ballard's The Drowned World. Here it isn't an excess of water, but rather its lack, which drives the story from one of sf's most prescient authors. "The world is threatened by dramatic climate change in this highly acclaimed and influential novel. Water. Man's most precious commodity is a luxury of the past. Radioactive waste from years of industrial dumping has caused the sea to form a protective skin strong enough to devastate the Earth it once sustained. And while the remorseless sun beats down on the dying land, civilisation itself begins to crack. Violence erupts and insanity reigns as the remnants of mankind struggle for survival in a worldwide desert of despair."

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK:

Posted in Release Week | Tagged allen steele, joe hill, wesley chu

Release Week: Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni, Neil Gaiman's The Silver Dream, Sarah Prineas' Summerkin, and David Niall Wilson's Nevermore

Posted on 2013-04-24 at 15:56 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

APRIL 17-23, 2013: Though it's not a tremendously crowded release week, there are great picks in adult, teen, and kids audiobooks, ranging from the latest in a long line of strong debut fantasy novels in 2013 (Helene Wecker's The Golem and the Jinni) to a sequel to Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves' InterWorld, and more. (In "meta coverage" notes, this week seems to belong to Harper Audio, whereas last week I noted strong weeks for Hachette Audio and Audible Frontiers.) Without further preamble:

PICKS OF THE WEEK:

The Golem and the Jinni: A Novel By Helene Wecker, Narrated By George Guidall for Harper Audio, concurrent with print/ebook release from Harper. “Harper is really getting behind this debut in the vein of The Night Circus and The Discovery of Witches. The novel combines historical fiction with a magical fable about two supernatural creatures in turn-of-the-20th-century New York City.” (via PW). Here: "Helene Wecker's dazzling debut novel tells the story of two supernatural creatures who appear mysteriously in 1899 New York. Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a strange man who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic. When her master dies at sea on the voyage from Poland, she is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York Harbor. Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire, born in the ancient Syrian Desert. Trapped in an old copper flask by a Bedouin wizard centuries ago, he is released accidentally by a tinsmith in a Lower Manhattan shop."

In the young adult category: The Silver Dream: An InterWorld Novel, Book 2 By Neil Gaiman, Michael Reaves, and Mallory Reaves, Narrated By Christopher Evan Welch for Harper Audio, concurrent with the print/ebook release from HarperTeen, with Welch returning as narrator after 2007's book 1, InterWorld. Here: "New York Times best-selling authors Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves deliver a thrilling sequel to the science fiction novel InterWorld, full of riveting interdimensional battles and alternate realities. After mastering the ability to walk between dimensions, Joey Harker and his fellow InterWorld freedom fighters are now on a mission to maintain peace between the rival powers of magic and science who seek to control all worlds. When a stranger named Acacia somehow follows Joey back to InterWorld's base, things get complicated. No one knows who she is or where she's from - or how she knows so much about InterWorld. Dangerous times lie ahead for Joey and the mission. There's a traitor hidden among them, and if Joey has any hope of saving InterWorld, the multiverse, and the mission, he's going to have to rely on his wits - and, just possibly, on the mysterious Acacia Jones. With a story conceived by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves and written by Michael and Mallory Reaves, this mind-bending follow-up to the exciting science fiction novel InterWorld is a compelling fantasy adventure through time and space, in which the future depends on a young man who is more powerful than he realizes."

In the young reader category: Summerkin: Winterling, Book 2 By Sarah Prineas, Narrated By Erin Moon for Harper Audio, continuing Prineas' Winterling series after last year's Winterling. Here: "In the Summerlands, time moves slowly, roots grow deeply, and change is not welcomed. But change is needed. After defeating the wicked Mor and freeing her kin from deadly oaths made to this false ruler, Fer is now the rightful Lady of the land. Yet her people don't know what to make of their new Lady's strange ways, and neither do the High Ones, the rulers of the magical realm, for Fer is an outsider - half human. To prove herself worthy of the Summerlands crown, Fer is summoned to compete in an epic contest where her strengths and skills will be tested and her loyalties challenged. Can she trust Rook, the puck she calls friend? Can she trust herself? If Fer fails, she will lose her land and the Way will be closed to her forever."

Lastly, a book published a bit earlier this year but one I've been looking forward to in audio: Nevermore: A Novel of Love, Loss, & Edgar Allan Poe By David Niall Wilson, Narrated By Gigi Shane for Crossroad Press. On the shorter end (a bit over 6 hours) it's also a change of pace from my usual more sf/fantasy picks, with Wilson an award-winning horror author. "On the banks of Lake Drummond, on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, there is a tree in the shape of a woman.One dark, moonlit night, two artists met at the Lake Drummond Hotel, built directly on the borderline of North Carolina and Virginia. One was a young woman with the ability to see spirits trapped in trees and stone, anchored to the earth beyond their years. Her gift was to draw them, and then to set them free. The other was a dark man, haunted by dreams and visions that brought him stories of sadness and pain, trapped in a life between the powers he sensed all around him and a mundane existence attended by failure. They were Eleanore MacReady, Lenore, to her friends, and a young poet named Edgar Allan Poe, who traveled with a crow that was his secret, and almost constant companion, a bird named Grimm for the talented brothers of fairy-tale fame.Their meeting drew them together in vision, and legend, and pitted their strange powers and quick minds against the depths of the Dismal Swamp itself, ancient legends, and time. Once, upon a shoreline dreary, there was a tree. This is her story."

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK:

Posted in Release Week

The Guilded Earlobe reviews Bitterwood by James Maxey, read by Dave Thompson

Posted on 2013-04-23 at 13:19 by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

Go check it out! “Quick Thoughts: Maxey’s tale of revenge and Dragons set in a unique Post Apocalyptic world is finally now available in Audio. Fans of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, and David Gemmell’s Jerusalem man series should cheer this offering by James Maxey. It blends multiple genres creating a fascinating tableau that vaults this classic story from the mundane into something special.”

Posted in Uncategorized