Traveling in Audio Space #3

I’m looking forward to getting back to recording some chapters for the audiobook of my SF satire, Traveling in Space.  

As I’ve reported on in previous posts (Traveling in Audio Space #1 and Traveling in Audio Space #2) I am producing and directing the audiobook for my publisher, Blüroof Press.  It’s been slow-going as my reader/performer Jeff Cannata

and my recording guru and editor Peter Lonsdale 

Photo by Gabrielle Davis

have busy schedules doing what they do. Jeff is not only one of the hosts of the internet’s popular The Totally Rad Show, 

Fan Art by *Daniel Mead

he’s always traveling for this that and the other

and putting in fine performances on the Los Angeles Stage. 

Peter has been at Disney putting in late hours editing a new animated TV show D7 

which I can’t tell you anything about except that it sounds like it may become a very popular show, indeed.  

And me, of course, I’ve been on assignments for a super secret agency -- 

Drawing by Brad Bird 1980

but the less said about that the safer for all of us.


The last session we had was a real revelation of Jeff’s talents. I am, obviously, a fan of Jeff’s (I’ve directed him in several staged readings at the Writers Guild), 

Jeff Cannata and James Cromwell in the reading of Ray Bradbury's "The Better Part of Wisdom." - Photo by Michael Jones

but I was a bit worried as we got to this session as it was of chapters where the tone of the book suddenly changes.

Traveling in Space is a comic novel my publisher describes as “A unique science fiction first contact novel from the point-of-view of the aliens; a 21st Century Gulliver's Travels with Homo sapiens as the Lilliputians.”  But it is also a novel of ideas, as the reviews have pointed out:

"Superbly entertaining and unique...thought provoking." -- The Mindquest Review of Books

"Many of the aliens' encounters with human beings are downright funny...much to think about and I'm sure that "Traveling in Space" will play on my mind for some time to come" -- Russell Blackford, Neworld Review & Metamagician and the Hellfire Club blog

"A unique spin of science fiction... With much humor and much to think about...not to be overlooked" -- Midwest Book Review


A good way to spur thinking in such a work is to contrast the comic -- outsized characters, extreme situations, ironic absurdities -- with horrors. In the case of TIS, one of the horrors is a scene of genocide, reported on by one of the aliens who have “stumbled” across Earth while traveling in space.

Jeff’s performance of this scene I found riveting -- which makes it hard to be dispassionate as you are trying to direct. But then that’s the way, maybe the fun, of a creative endeavor -- mixing the passionate with the analytical. Jeff has that wonderful ability to move from the comic to the serious, 

making both very real and immediate.

And now we come to another session. Peter is ready to man the board.

And Jeff is ready to face the mic.

And I’m ready to throw at Jeff some long “reports” from the various alien “factfinders” to read -- all in their very individual voices. It will be like a vocal Cirque du Soleil. But I’m confident that Jeff is limber enough for it.


You can read about Traveling in Space and all my books on the My Books section of this blog.