If you go to any of the major legal online sources for audiobooks such as iTunes, you’ll find very little to be head for this author. Oh you’ll find The Chronicles of Amber novels, all ten of them which is certainly a good thing but the only other work by him is This Immortal. Why this is so is a great puzzler as there was a great deal of material that got produced as audiobooks including Donnerjack, he Dream Master , Eye of Cat , and Doorways in the Sand .
Some audioworks oddly are in print but are not available through the major sources such as A Night in the Lonesome October which is read by the author and is a really wonderful listening experience.
I’ve reviewed sle of Dead previously but I’ll repeat what I said there as it holds true here as well. Our MP3 Archives, the Infinite Jukebox, holds music, video and, of course, audiobooks. Where both of these audiobooks came from is something best that gone into, but suffice it to say that you can find them on the net if you search sites where the concept of copyright is something that never gets paid attention to.
This audio book, like Isle of Dead , was only released on cassettes which means whatever digital copy you find might have hisses and oops depending on what the tapes were like that were converted. Or not as it’s possible that all of the copies on the net are from the source. I should stress that cassette tapes as a recording medium were a major steep backwards from the previous medium of long playing acetate which Cadmeon and other spoken word (as it was called) companies used for decades.
My Name is Legion is three novellas about a nameless freelance trouble fixer who decides when all paper records are digitised and entered into a global database to opt out by making no trace of him is entered into it. He earns very good money by handling problems that the set unity firm he ‘consults’ with cannot handle.
The first of is ‘The Eve of RUMOKO’ in which our nameless agent is called in to find and stop saboteurs who are trying to stop the creation of a new island archipelago being formed by inducing the formation of volcanic eruptions in the North Atlantic sea. This being the era when everything atomic was a Good Thing for most sf writers, the method to doing this was setting off atomic bombs. Our agent of course discovers who’s doing and more importantly why. And we discover some interesting as regards the beliefs of this nameless individual.
Next us is ‘Kjwall’kje’k’koothai’lll’kjek’. At a research station in the Bahamas, a diver working there was died apparently murdered by a dolphin. Our agent is called in by the Institute for Dolphinological Studies to clear Kjwall’kje’k’koothai’lll’kjek of murder charges but once all is not as it seems. This is a stronger story all around than the first one and shows Zelazny at his best.
Finally we have ‘Home is a the Hangman’ in which the story echoes the replicants found in the Bladerunner in that a intelligent android has returned home from exploring the far reaches of the solar system and appears to be murdering the team that created it. Once again not only it seems to be. All is resolved if somewhat messily.
The narration’s typical of the era before the companies decided that giving each individual a unique voice was a Great Idea, so it’s a straight reading. The unknown narrator does manage to pronounce the tongue twisting Kjwall’kje’k’koothai’lll’kjek so that it actually makes sense.
All in all its a tasty serving of Zelazny at his (more or less) best. I’m still hoping that someday some company like Audible will see fit to produce the complete audioworks of this author. If they do, I very much look forward to listening to them!
(Blind and Dyslexic, 1976)
