Audiobook Review: A Thousand Sons + Prospero Burns / Publisher: The Black Library / Release Date: Out Now

The books A Thousand Sons and Prospero Burns were always intended as a duology covering the same incident; the sacking of the home planet of mystically empowered, egyptian themed space knights by a horde of nordic inspired techno barbarians. As the entire Horus Heresy series is a prequel to the well-known Warhammer 40K setting, fans will know the outcome way in advance. Luckily, these two audiobooks don’t use the backdrop of war to draw tension. Instead, both are tightly written, character focused tales that explore the reasons why such a battled happened.

The idea was that both books would be written simultaneously, Graham MacNeil writing A Thousand Sons and Dan Abnett covering Prospero Burns. Sadly, Dan took ill at the time (he has since recovered), which means the books weren’t written together; A Thousand Sons came first, and then Prospero Burns followed later. The result is not a duology, but two books that complement each other perfectly, telling different stories that just happen to share one or two scenes.

The two are a great choice for unabridged audiobooks, both are pretty dense and it’s easier to catch all the fine detail when a tale is told to you; Black Library have been getting increasingly better at producing regular audiobooks to go along with their most anticipated releases. This makes a lot of sense; their target audience is mostly people who like to sit down and paint models, and having a book read to you whilst you do so. Even better, the releases are unabridged, which means you can listen to the book whilst travelling and then dive into the actual book when it’s convenient to do so. The production values are as solid as always, and the narrators have been carefully selected to match the content; Gareth Armstrong’s strong yet excited tones are perfect for Prospero Burns and I know cannot read anything about the characters from A Thousand Sons without hearing Martin Ellis’s voice. The sound effects only appear when they enhance the text, as does the score.

McNeil’s A Thousand Sons is an epic tale of a good, loyal man who leads an army to victory, and then by caring too much, to ruin. In the post-heresy world of Warhammer 40K, the main characters are villains of the darkest kind. It’s a credit to the storytelling here that you feel sorry for these characters, and sympathetic to their plight. Fans will finish the book knowing that worse is yet to come for some of the heroes here, and will find themselves hungry for more. The pacing is a little bumpy; this is a tale of sorcerous warriors in a sci-fi setting, so there’s a lot of philosophy and pseudo-science that slows things down when you want it to speed up. However, it’s worth it for the insights into the more mystical side of the setting alone, and is a solid, yet tragic tale filled with surprises.

Prospero Burns is equally good, but set in a very different vein. We learn a lot about the other faction in this tale, the Viking like Space Wolves, and the world and culture they inhabit. This is a tightly packed sci-fi thriller, filled with strange phenomena and fortean weirdness. What it doesn’t feature much of is the planet Prospero on fire. Which is all right, as Prospero Burns is a story about the build up to that seminal event. This is a tale of epic bards, spies, lies and big burly space marines hitting things with sci-fi inspired axes. I like the central character an awful lot, and I felt that the whole book adds additional depth and colour to the ongoing Horus Heresy series.

Both McNeil and Abnett love to sneak in sly references and clever puns, however, I found two character names, Kallista Eris and Kasper Hauser, to be a little bit too knowing, though I admit that’s a very minor niggle when faced with two great tales written by authors at the top of their game.

Audio Review: Doctor Who – Energy of the Daleks / Director: Nicholas Briggs / Writer: Nicholas Briggs / Starring: Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, Mark Benton, Alex Lowe, Lydia Harding, Dan Starkey, Nicholas Briggs / Release Date: Out Now (CD and Download)

Since 1999 Big Finish Productions have been rolling out regular full-cast fully-dramatised audio productions featuring all the surviving incarnations of the Time Lord from the original Doctor Who series (including, eventually, Paul McGann reprising his portrayal from the one-off 1996 TV movie). But the  prospect of new audio adventures starring the most popular ‘original’ Doctor, Tom Baker, seemed unlikely as Baker continued to refuse approaches from Big Finish. But time mellows us all and last year Baker relented and signed on the dotted line to return to the role which made him famous (if not immortal) for a string of new adventures which began recording in April 2011. Plans to reunite the fourth Doctor with his most cherished companion, Sarah Jane Smith, were abandoned following the tragic death of actress Elisabeth Sladen but Big Finish were able to replace her with Louise Jameson, Sladen’s successor in the TV series in 1977 where she portrayed ’noble savage’ Leela for a series and a half.

Energy of the Daleks is the fourth Baker audio release from BF (although it was the first to be recorded) and offers the irresistible opportunity to enjoy a new battle between the fourth Doctor and the show‘s most celebrated and iconic aliens the Daleks. Baker’s Doctor had, of course, clashed with the pepper pots on two occasions on TV, in the classic Genesis of the Daleks in 1975 and in 1979 in the rather less classic Destiny of the Daleks. As a story, Energy falls somewhere between the two stools; it’s hardly as momentous as Genesis but neither is it as throwaway as Destiny. Told in two raucous breakneck 25-minute installments, the story has the pace of much modern Doctor Who in that it barely pauses for breath and, also like modern Doctor Who, it tries to give some of its characters some emotional depth, even if the Doctor and Leela themselves are much as they appeared on TV.

In Energy of the Daleks (a clunky title which can’t help but create mental images of Daleks enjoying a good work-out at the gym or trundling around a marathon course) the Doctor detects some unusual power readings (as he so often does) and the TARDIS arrives in London in the year 2025. There’s a satellite dish on top of the National Gallery and a base and giant solar panels on the moon. The GlobeSphere Corporation is making available limitless supplies of energy to the people of Britain – at a price. Caught up in a demonstration in Trafalgar square the Doctor and Leela are swiftly separated and, as the Doctor falls in with affable protestor Jack Coulsen (Mark Benton), Leela finds herself captured and at the mercy of the Daleks.

Writer Nicholas Briggs (who also provides the Dalek voices here and for the modern TV show) has crafted a simplistic, linear storyline which borrows heavily, if affectionately, from the canon of Dalek stories on TV. The Daleks’ human slaves the Robomen are back, the chief human bad guy is under the malign influence of the Daleks and the whole storyline – the Daleks are trying to shift the Earth’s axis in an attempt to destroy the planet – can’t help but bring to mind the 1964 story The Dalek Invasion of Earth. But of course the whole point of the Daleks is seeing them in action; here they’re just a lot of hysterical modulated voices and although it’s hard to imagine anyone out there who doesn’t know what a Dalek looks like, and we can picture them even as we listen to them, the story just misses that visceral thrill of actually seeing those familiar props gliding about randomly exterminating all and sundry.

Baker and Jameson are on good form, though. Considering they’re recreating a TV partnership which ended 34 years ago and this was their first audio recording together, they’ve both slipped back into their roles with ease. Their voices are a bit riper and occasionally a bit more breathless than they were in 1977 but otherwise they’ve effortlessly captured the Doctor’s twinkling, bohemian charm and Leela’s wide-eyed naivety in the face of things her primitive mind can scarcely comprehend.

These new fourth Doctor stories are really all about nostalgia – “It’s Saturday teatime in 1977 all over again” as Baker huskily intones at the end of the trailer for the next release. As a result the stories are more concerned with recreating a specific era in Doctor Who history rather than branching out in the creative new directions of the regular ‘old Doctor’ releases. And that’s no bad thing. Energy of the Daleks is a cracking little romp which suffers just a little by its brevity but can’t help but warm the cockles as it genuinely reminds us of that special time in the 1970s when Tom Baker had made Doctor Who more popular than ever and there always seemed to be fish fingers for tea.

Review: Butcher’s Nails / Author: Aaron Dembski-Bowden / Publisher: The Black Library / Release date: June 7^th

Butcher’s Nails is The Black Library’s latest in a series of audio dramas that fill in the gaps between parts of its bestselling Horus Heresy series. Thus far, they’ve focused on major characters in the series that perhaps haven’t had as much exposure as the fans wished. In Butcher’s Nails, the focus is on Angron, leader of the World Eaters legion, demi-god and lunatic midget with a pair of chainsaw powered axes.

After all, every pantheon of superhumans needs a short tempered, not terribly tall type who also happens to be willing to commit incredible acts of violence, and though the series is pretty much about the acts of near god-like beings commanding legions of space knights,  so far we’ve only seen a handful of these creatures. That said, it isn’t much of a surprise that he’s been underused; after all there’s only so many ways you can describe bloody murder, and over exposure risks the character swiftly becoming two-dimensional and dull.

The trick then, is to surround the diminutive mass-murderer with a cast of interesting characters; though Butcher’s Nails is at its heart the story of one very angry super-being dealing with its own destructive nature, it’s also a tale of epic space battles, betrayal and secrets.  A combination of strong production values, skilled voice acting and a powerful script help to bring this dark tale to life. The gratuitous use of chainsaw sound effects doesn’t hurt either, though it really shines in its depiction of ship-to-ship combat, which is over-the-top, ridiculous and the sort of fun that we demand from these stories.

The Black Library has gotten very good at producing compelling audio dramas, and Butcher’s Nails is no different; this is essentially a short story narrated in a skilled and compelling way. That’s no bad thing, though it does make less of an audio drama and more like a very well presented audio book. It also suffers slightly from a limited library of backing music; players of the Dawn of War video games may be a little bit too familiar with the score, and though this isn’t terribly jarring, it would be nice to hear other tunes in the background.

Those unfamiliar with the story’s writer, Aaron Dembski-Bowden, may find this a useful place to find out more about his work; it’s a good example of his style presented in a clever way. It’s also a reasonable taster of the Horus Heresy in general, though it contains spoilers for other books in the series.

Review: Blake’s 7 – The Liberator Chronicles – Box Set One / Author: Simon Guerrier, Nigel Fairs, Peter Anghelides / Publisher: Big Finish Productions / Release date: 29th Feb

After the cancelation of the television reboot of Blake’s 7, fans have felt a little lost. Into this void step the remarkably well equipped people at Big Finish. To provide us with a consolation prize of the highest standard, rather than taking the basic principles behind Blake’s 7 and starting again as the new television series intended, we have a faithful continuation and gap plugging collection of tales.

The Blake’s 7 relaunch will contain novels and a host of other media but the range opens with a box set of three stories all taking the Doctor Who: Companion Chronicles format as their inspiration; where one original member of the cast takes the lime light and acts as both narrator and protagonist, while a second cast member plays their own roll.

The first story is the Avon centric Turing test. A tale of Android life which leaps from audio with such authority as to startle the listener into believing that this is a missing story from the television show itself. Paul Darrow was born to play Avon and has the sort of understated dislike for the human race that gives him more depth than we saw on screen.

In the second story,Solitary, Michael Keeting’s Villa is firmly at its centre with a secondary character who, like Fourteen in the first story, has all the makings of a seventh crew member. Villa awakes to find that he is in the ships brig and has had his memories scrambled. An equally dark and atmospheric tale about federation power and the use such power is put to with the intimately human level that was the trademark of the most moving of Blake’s 7 tales.

With the third and final tale, Counterfeit, the crew infiltrate a Federation mining complex with a buried secret – Roj Blake takes the stage and Gareth Thomas gives his interpretation of a roll that has dominated his career for over thirty five years. Time has, understandably, changed Thomas’ voice and he sounds the most different from his 1970’s persona than the other performers. More a RADA reading than channelling a desperate dissident. However he may simply have had a cold. The third story is the weakest of the three as some of the action takes place away from the central reader and removes the listener from the immediate action, just enough to show the medium’s short comings.

Big Finish have an unwritten remit to provide the atmosphere of the shows they are continuing while using the audio medium’s strengths to tell tales that work better than if we could have seen them circa 1978. They have succeeded on practically every level. The only downside of this is that these are not full scale audio dramas; sadly, licensing issues mean that the ‘enhanced reading’ style is the best we can hope for, for the time being.

These stories all fit so perfectly into the first series of Blake’s 7 that this reviewer has gone back to his trusty (and dusty) VHS and started a rewatch of this classic show. A show where the Federation was evil and the dark side of humanity reigned supreme.

There will be more Blake’s 7 in the coming years and I hope that Volume Two is more slanted at the female members of the cast/crew and helps develope more than the small screen ever allowed. If there aren’t releases that features Servalan, Callly, Jenna and the others, then I for one will be disappointed.

Special Features: According to the producer there are no extras on this release due to a tight work schedule and the hectic nature of the recording. This is a shame but should not distract from the overall enjoyment of these three enormously strong and atmospheric tales.