Showing results by narrator "Mike Vendetti" in All Categories

In short, Elmer is a drunken, womanizing hypocrite who becomes a Baptist minister, a position from which he is soon ejected. He then links up with star revivalist Sharon Falconer, who is heavily based on Aimee Semple McPherson. Throughout his career, Gantry moves through many settings and scenarios illustrating aspects of the American religion. With religion as entertainment and show business, both Elmer and Sharon are consummate performers. They are always on.

Eric Branson and his team have dealt their enemies a decisive blow, wiping out an entire unit of rogue soldiers and liberating refugees from the largest detention camp in the region.

Time travel may have its consequences. We can only speculate. Philip K. Dick takes us there.

Imagine a smartphone app that would expose the evil thoughts of people around you. In this story from 1919, a scientist stumbles across a membrane that does just that to his color photography. The images can't hurt one physically, but oh, what they do to the mind.

T.S. Elliot was likely the best read of any of his contemporaries. In his poetry, we often find an allusion to the works of other great writers. In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" he makes reference to Dante Shakespeare and "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvel. Prufrock, as the name implies, is an indecisive wimp, whereas Marvel in his seduction poem, has his eye on the prize, and makes no bones about it.

"Behind the Curtain" is short, also simple, a tale of revenge in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe. The author even mentions Poe in her story, and her two characters, Santallos, the narrator, and Quentin, his guest, drink Amontillado. Santallos is a collector of Egyptian antiquities, including mummies and mummy cases. You might say he's wrapped up in his hobby, so much so that he neglects his wife. Naturally, she falls into the arms of the younger man, Quentin. Santallos concocts a fiendish kind of revenge.

Roberta, AKA Robert is having identity issues since her sex change because Robert just won't go away.

There were ten humanoid robots somewhere in the United States, each one carrying a fragment of a TC bomb. TC! The race for sheer horror in bomb-ery had ended there. TC! Total Conversion! The sun was no longer a synonym one could use. Total conversion made the sun a penny candle.

The grid has been down for seven months now, and law and order has completely given way to anarchy and violence. Seventeen-year-old Mitch Henley has returned to his family's backwoods homestead to avoid the dangers of the cities and towns and look after his little sister while they wait hopefully for their parents' return.

Written as a sequel to Second Variety, this is an exciting and thought-provoking view into a different world than the one left in "Second Variety". We have a fascination with time travel. But what could go wrong? Give this a listen, and see what you think.

"Time Pawn" is a novelette by Philip K. Dick published in Thrilling Wonder Stories. Vol. 44, no. 1, summer 1954. Travel with award-winning audiobook narrator, Mike Vendetti, and Dr. Parsons to our world in the distant future where everyone and everything is perfect. But wait; there's more!

Charming and thought-provoking, this short story from American master of science fiction Ray Bradbury and narrated by Mike Vendetti follows the misadventures of a group of elderly women who have poured their life savings into a final trip to an outer-space paradise, only to find out that the promised journey doesn't pan out quite the way they expected it to.

Kurt Vonnegut creates a near-perfect world. There are no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, and no wars. All diseases were conquered. So is old age. Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers. The population of the United States is stabilized at forty-million souls. Have a problem? Not really, just call the Federal Bureau of Termination. Nothing to it. Just pick up the phone and call 2BR02B. Thus the title, "To be or not to be".

Imagine being trapped in the millisecond between the past and the future. All Dave Miller wanted to do was commit suicide in peace, but here he was. Trapped.

Communication is the key to getting along. Space travel makes communication with alien races imperative, but before the language problem could be resolved the war started. A highly intelligent cat-like race able to communicate telepathically is discovered that offers to help. But wait how can you trust an alien or anyone that can hear your thoughts?

Back from his final deployment with the US Marines, Alan Carson is hiking across New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness to ponder his future and put the war in his past. When his best friend and squad leader, Sergeant Kurt Timms, took a Taliban bullet because of bad intel, Alan made a promise to his dying friend. He would come here to see the rugged mountains that were Kurt’s boyhood stomping grounds. But deep in a trackless canyon, miles from any trail, Alan finds something else: the body of a dead man at the foot of a cliff, an ancient cave…and a passageway too intriguing to ignore.

A cat walking across a room swerves suddenly and walks carefully around something we can't see. We shrug, smile, and remark that cats are always doing that. Our hitherto amiable dog suddenly develops the irritating habit of barking and growling violently at certain innocent passersby. We still shrug, wonder what's got into the mutt, and pass it off. Mr. Dick argues with frightening urgency that if we are wise, we wilt immediately investigate these oddities of animal behavior.

A chilling ghost story by Lord Dunsany, a.k.a. Edward Plunkett, resolves itself thusly: If two straight lines cut one another, the opposite angles are equal. Let AB and CD cut one another at E. Then the angles CEA and CEB equal two right angles (prop. xiii.). Also, CEA and AED equal two right angles, proving that ghosts don't exist.

One of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, two hitmen from Chicago arrive at a diner to await the arrival of Ole Anderson a former boxer who "messed up" in Chicago. Dressed like twins complete with sawed-off shotguns under their overcoats, they plan to execute Anderson when he comes into the diner for dinner.

Like many of Stevenson's tales, Markheim is a chilling examination of good and evil that resists easy moralizing.