(Rated: +2, Fair) Airborn written by Kenneth Oppel and produced by Full Cast Audio. It took some time to warm up to the art form of a full cast reading, but eventually I embraced it wholeheartedly. My mini review is below the fold.
Airborn is a classic young adult romantic adventure tale. Think Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne mixed up with a dose of post-steampunk steroids and Space 1889 without the space (yet). On the whole, the story is enjoyable. Oppel isn’t nearly as subtle at dropping plot elements into the story as he could be. It’s generally obvious what they will ultimately be used for and there are few, if any, ah-hah moments when some surprise unfolds and you marvel at his clever story telling. But that failing is perhaps somewhat forgivable in view of the young adult audience for the book. The adventure is entertaining and the setting is, dare I coin it, skypunk? A sort of steampunk plus one additional age of engineering, with ornithopters and great dirigibles powered by internal combustion engines and communicating by wireless. (Let’s perpetuate the ridiculous suffixation of punk to create a genre, why not?) There are some woefully unforgivable moments of non-science. He asks you to suspend a lot of disbelief in favor of setting flavor, which is all well and fine, but he then crosses the line in places. Matt and Kate’s escape from the hydrium cave is a big one (a balloon full of hydrium will not be buoyant in a cave full of hydrium, unless hydrium is just plain magic (which it sort of must be given the weight he has it hold aloft)). But, those moments aside, the book is nonetheless pro-science at it’s heart, which is a good thing given the intended audience and especially given the penchant for current science fiction writing to be, in fact, anything but.
But enough about Oppel, it’s Full Cast Audio that is the real magic here. Indeed, in places the production succeeds in spite of Oppel owing to FCA’s efforts to enhance the atmosphere of the story. I discover more and more how a good reader can deliver even a poorly written story in an entertaining, worthwhile audio production. James Marster’s readings of the Dresden Files books serve as good example of this. I would never bother with the print version of those books, but the audiobooks were downright addictive. Here, you have a whole cast of excellent readers and well-picked musical interludes as well and the underlying text is not nearly so bad (and the result is equally if not more addictive).
Oh, and it deservedly won an Auddie, what more could you ask for?