The Glory Road by Robert Heinlein

I keep trying to like Heinlein. I even succeed sometimes. I enjoyed Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. And I even kind of liked Citizen of the Galaxy. But The Glory Road is just blah.

It's a rather dull quest-story, that takes place in a parallel-world of some kind, though it opens in our world and follows a rather meandering plotline before getting to the fantasy part.Philosophically, it touches on the standard Heinlein themes - free sex and cultural relativity.

Mainly though, it's hard to overlook his strange mix of liberal philosophy and sexism. He's actually got a scene where the main guy threatens the main woman with a spanking, and she acts meek as a result. At first I thought it was tongue-in-cheek, like they were playing with each other, but no. Heinlein meant it to be read straight. Ick.

I could take the mild sexism in Stranger in a Strange Land, but this book was just too much. I got about halfway through before deciding that the plot or the characters weren't interesting enough for me to continue, so I returned it to the library. It's rare that I abandon a book like that, but I just couldn't take it anymore.

Into Space, Sterner St. Paul, 1930

LRC file
mp3 file, 64kbps
mp3 file, 128kbps

A story on the theme of The Lost Cosmonaut, from the days when space travel was utterly fantastic. The scientist attempts to travel through the moon using an antigravity technology. It's interesting that the author didn't consider rocketry to be a plausible technology. The control systems are unspecified "apparatus".

Another interesting thing about this story is that the inventor is not mad-obssessive, in the 19th century manner. Instead, he's simply pursuing research, and makes the mistake of not testing his invention before putting himself in it. While the story still focuses on the individual inventor (rather than the team, as in later sf), it is more focused on the idea of technology as progress, rather than striking a cautionary note.

There's a small bit of casual racism, but it isn't that egregious.

The Shadow - A Parable, by Edgar Allen Poe, 1850

LRC file

The Shadow is a nice short work, with great atmosphere. To modern ears, there's nothing particularly shocking about it - it's even a bit cliche. But you have to put yourself into the context of Poe's time, where even educated people thought there might be a legitimate reason to believe in the supernatural.

This story is set during a plague, where the main characters are sitting at some kind of wake for a dead companion. During the night, they experience a glimpse of what life after death might entail.

Librivox files with synced story text

Over the years, the suggestion has come up again and again to somehow have the ability to have the audio and text in sync, so that someone could follow along with the reading. This could be useful, for instance, to language learners, or new readers.

There is no standard yet defined by librivox, but I decided to offer lrc files to go with my own recordings. LRC files are "lyric" files, and generally you need a plugin to your media player in order to make use of them. I use Winamp, and there is a Visualization plugin available for free, that is very easy to install.

To view lyrics, you'll have to go into the Winamp preferences and set your Visualization to use this plugin.

The way it works is this:
* Download the lrc file that goes with a particular recording. Save it to the same folder as the mp3 file.

* Rename the file so that the main name (the filename minus the lrc extension) matches the filename of the mp3 file. For example, if the mp3 filename is warmlywemet_moore_ces_64kb.mp3 then you would rename the lrc file to be warmlywemet_moore_ces_64kb.lrc.

* Play the file in Winamp, and the text should appear in the Visualization panel. The plugin provides options to change the display -  you can set the font size, and whether to center the text or not. I have coded the lrc file for each line, so the plugin will highlight the current line as its being read.