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March 31, 2021 by Exangel

by Chris Farago.

There’s a lot of mental pacing going on with this science fiction business, trying to suss out the proper changes to make to this world to make it different enough to be attention-grabbing for whatever audience one presumes to present it to. There are full universes where the air is solid and men are made of jade; there is a planet quite like ours where commas and periods have been reversed, and no one seems to notice. I shot that man in Reno, but it was so I could watch him live. Charles Xavier is neither a character in a novel nor in a comic book, but instead a stillborn tortoise with the powers of invisibility, time travel, and flight. Cold fusion is a birthright, each child having a handheld generator thrust into their possession on their tenth birthday to do with as they please. An awful man is given control of powerful armies by millions of like-minded awful followers, but he is fettered by his own incompetence. A single leaf on a single oak turns red instead of yellow, and the world is set on edge.

That cult classic pirate/sci fi mash up GREENBEARD, by Richard James Bentley, is now a rollicking audiobook, available from Audible.com. Narrated and acted by Colby Elliott of Last Word Audio, you’ll be overwhelmed by the riches and hilarity within.

“Captain Sylvestre de Greybagges is your typical seventeenth-century Cambridge-educated lawyer turned Caribbean pirate, as comfortable debating the virtues of William Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, and compound interest as he is wielding a cutlass, needling archrival Henry Morgan, and parsing rum-soaked gossip for his next target. When a pepper monger’s loose tongue lets out a rumor about a fleet loaded with silver, the Captain sets sail only to find himself in a close encounter of a very different kind.

After escaping with his sanity barely intact and his beard transformed an alarming bright green, Greybagges rallies The Ark de Triomphe crew for a revenge-fueled, thrill-a-minute adventure to the ends of the earth and beyond.

This frolicsome tale of skullduggery, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery upon Ye High Seas is brimming with hilarious puns, masterful historical allusions, and nonstop literary hijinks. Including sly references to Thomas Pynchon, Treasure Island, 1940s cinema, and notable historical figures, this mélange of delights will captivate readers with its rollicking adventure, rich descriptions of food and fashion, and learned asides into scientific, philosophical, and colonial history.”