Audiobook Fix: Audio Stross

Over the past several years, Allen Kaster and his crew at Infinivox have selected and produced consistently excellent short fiction in their Great Science Fiction series of audiobooks. Amongst their recent releases are three stories by Charles Stross: “Antibodies,” “Lobsters,” and “A Colder War.”

Charles Stross’s work is dense with tech information and atypical syntax, and I admit that I was surprised at how well the stories translated to audio. Some of his words are clearer to me in print, but I didn’t lose my way in any of these stories. They did require my absolute and complete attention, though. You don’t want to miss a word of Stross, because he’s got something important going on in each and every sentence.

In the opening paragraph of “Antibodies,” Stross writes:

“You can kill a politician, but their ideas usually live on. They have a life of their own. How much more dangerous then, the ideas of mathematicians?”

And from there, he launches into a tech-rich story that posits the existence of runaway, self-replicating Artificial Intelligence that will eventually take over meatspace (i.e., you and I). But that’s not all. In this short space, Stross also fits in multiple universes, conspiracies, and the solution to the traveling salesman problem, which triggers the whole tale.

Shondra Marie and Jared Doreck read the story, and do so well. Doreck is called upon to do some accents, and I found them believable and effective, but I was caught by surprise when the first-person narrator spoke some dialogue to another character in a accent not used until then; shouldn’t the entire story have been read in that character’s accent? A minor quibble. Overall, I enjoyed their reading very much—Shondra Marie was particularly excellent.

Publisher: Infinivox (2005)
Price: $10.99
Audio CD: 80 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
ISBN: 1884612474

The pair also performs “Lobsters,” which is another techy, mind-bender of a story. The main character is Manfred Macx, who spends his time coming up with ideas and giving them away for free, since he’s not a fan of capitalism. Instead of payment, he takes gifts. Clothing, food, bandwidth, and everything he needs is provided for him by other people. He’s the idea man. And then he gets a phone call from an AI in Russia asking him for assistance. This story, like “Antibodies,” explores the effect of the Internet on future society, both in day-to-day terms, like the constant mobile news feeds that Manfred Macx reads, and in the extrapolative look at software that would have no problem with Turing’s test. The high rate of change (The Singularity) is a large part of both stories.

Publisher: Infinivox (2005)
Price: $10.99
Audio CD: approx. 70 Minutes
ISBN: 1884612466

“A Colder War” is not like the previous two stories I’ve talked about here. This one, read by Pat Bottino, is about the aftermath of an expedition that followed fifty years after the events in H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. It’s at once humorous and horrifying to imagine something like The Old Ones used as weapons during the Cold War arms race; the thought is humorous at first, but then sobering to think that unleashing destructive power worse than any weapon imaginable would be something that folks would really consider using, as long as it had the illusion of controllability. The story is serious good fun, even if you’re not a fan of H.P. Lovecraft.

Publisher: Infinivox (2005)
Price: $10.99
Audio CD: 80 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
ISBN: 1884612482