Posts Tagged ‘audio’
Enjoying some Clarkesworld short fiction by Reed and Chandrasekera, Narrated by Kate Baker
Posted on: June 10, 2017
Me and audio fiction have a tenuous friendship. I tend to get distracted while listening to audio fiction, which means I have to listen to the same stories over and over and over again, almost like they are long musical pieces. Do I listen to the occasional audio book? Sure do. Are they something I seek out? Not really. But . . . long commute to work through beautiful farmland is the perfect setting for some audio short story podcasts. And Clarkesworld has the amazing Kate Baker. So there’s that.
If you’re not sure audio short stories are for you, find something narrated by Kate Baker. Her voice is warm and welcoming, drawing you in to the inflections and pauses. When I listen to her, I feel like it’s just the two of us having an intimate conversation in a dark pub where the bartender knows us and lets us hang out at that table in the back as long as we’d like. She’s not reading me a story, she is telling me a story. My brain responds to her voice the same way my brain responds to music, even though she’s not singing. All that to say that Kate Baker’s voice has absolutely spoiled me.
Still, I stick with the shorter of the short stories that she narrates. Maybe the more I listen to, the more I will want to listen to and will download longer stories? Time will tell, I guess.
Last week, I listened to “Left of Bang – Preemtive Self-Actualization for Autonomous Systems” by Vajra Chandrasekera from the April issue (issue #127) of Clarkesworld, and “Two Ways of Living” by Robert Reed from the March issue (issue #126) of the same magazine. Both were narrated by Kate Baker, and by “listened to”, I mean I listened to them each at least 3 times. Only today, as I’m writing this blog post am I actually looking at the text versions on the Clarkesworld magazine website, mostly to just check the spelling of character’s names. How strange the shapes of the text seems, after having heard the stories on audio.
I did many cool things this past weekend. One of them was listening to the audio of The Incrementalists. It’s narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal and Ray Porter. I live under a rock and didn’t know who Ray Porter was. Kowal was great (and she gets to read one of my favorite scenes), but this other guy, Porter?
This blog post is not a review of the audio.
You read my review of The Incrementalists and it doesn’t seem like your thing? Fine. I won’t hold that against you. Still, get something else Ray Porter narrated. Do it because you trust me. And do it because this man’s voice does something you to. Something that words and ink and turning pages can’t do.
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You never forget your first time.
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Ray Porter’s voice moves over you like a summer storm. Unstoppable, his voice contains the roiling tension of the incoming storm front, the thunder you feel through your feet before your ears know what it is, the shadow that falls as the clouds roll in, everything to that surreal moment when your breath catches in the silence and the stillness before the storm hits. And then the skies open up, and in his voice are the rhythms of the rain, from gentle caresses to a pounding need to being in every pore of the parched ground beneath; the tympani pulse of the thunder that resonates in your chest; the rain becoming an ocean and drowning feeling like heaven.
And as his voice fades, you are left with the shattered remains of the sated clouds that slowly lie down in repose, their edges set on fire by the glorious sunset.
The storm has passed. And all you can do is reach out with your quivering, cloudy fingers and whisper “you must come back. my ground is still thirsty for you”.
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Or I suppose you could just hit play again on the file.
Stay tuned, I have more cool stuff for you tomorrow and the next day. Photos! Links! the awesomess that was ConText! book reviews! you know, more of the cool stuff and less of these weird misguided attempts at prose-y things in which I tell all the rules of writing to fuck off because I’m having a moment.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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