Sci-fi and Mystery Audiobook Resources
I know, I know. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with the reading – there are so many books out there and more just keep coming, damn it.
Over the past ten years I’ve taken more and more to listening to audiobooks and adaptations to catch up on the many classic sci-fi and mystery books available.
Three resources have proven particularly helpful for this:
· The Internet Archive – a “non-profit… digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form”. It really is an immense resource - you’ll find digitised texts, lps, and other formats as well as audiobooks and adaptations here, making it a really versatile collection – but also meaning you’ll find a fair bit of unrelated stuff slipping into your searches (Try searching for J. G. Ballard and you’ll see what I mean!). Thankfully there are multiple filters to help zero in on your target. You’ll also find LibriVox readings here (see below) as well as professional recordings.
· Fourble – “an ordered list of MP3 files hosted elsewhere on the web”, which you can also access as a podcast stream (if you have any real need to!). Fourble’s sources include Internet Archive but it often seems to retain audio files that have been deleted from their original source.
· LibriVox – almost 20 years old now, Librivox’s aim is “To make all books in the public domain available, narrated by real people and distributed for free, in audio format on the internet.” Of course, being voluntary audio recordings means there is variable quality on show when it comes to both the reading and the recording itself. Worst case scenario: audiobooks where each chapter is recorded by a different reader – you can get a few chapters in before hitting an unlistenable brick wall. For this reason I access the recording through LoyalBooks, where you’ll find helpful comments for each book from other users.
Here are a few of the sci-fi and mystery treasures I’ve so far unearthed on these sites – though you’ll find much, much more besides.
Agatha Christie BBC dramatisations on Fourble
Sherlock Holmes BBC Audio dramas on internet archive
Inspector Alleyn BBC Audio dramas on internet archive
Dashiell Hammett audiobooks on internet archive
Raymond Chandler audiobooks on internet archive
Arthur C. Clarke audiobooks on internet archive
Isaac Asimov collection on Fourble (NB includes alternate audio recordings for some books). For fans of sci-fi mysteries I particularly recommend the Daneel books, from Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn. For AI in general the I, Robot series provides a foundation (no pun intended) for many stories about AI written since. (The first is surprisingly lighter in tone than I expected, with often humorous outcomes of humanity’s early experiments with AI.)
H. G. Wells audiobooks on internet archive
Philip K. Dick audiobooks on internet archive
Mystery books / Sci-fi books on LoyalBooks. There’s some pretty loose definition of “mystery” going on here (The Three Musketeers and Crime and Punishment?! ), but see that as an opportuntity to try out other genres too.
If you know of any other audiobook resources, or have your own recommendations for science fiction or mystery audiobooks and adaptations on the sites above, please drop a comment below to share them.