Interview with Allen Steele and podcast of his 2010 novelette "The Emperor of Mars"

Thanks to the No. 168 issue of UK-based award-wining StarShipSofa: The Audio Science Fiction Magazine you can listen to at least two aural delights. First, a fascinating 34-minute interview with award-winning American science fiction author Allen Steele. Second, an excellent 47-minute podcast of “The Emperor of Mars,” a novelette by Steele that was published in the June 2010 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine.

Narrated by Nathan Lowell with cool cover art by Andreas Rocha, “The Emperor of Mars” revolves round Jeff Halbert, a roughneck stationed on a near-future Mars, who, after suffering severe emotional trauma, develops some unusual reading habits, which lead to some rather erratic behavior as he evolves into Emperor Jeffery the First, sovereign monarch of the Great Martian Empire, warlord and protector of the red planet!

 

Allen M. Steele is also the author of several other pieces of Martian SF, including “Live from the Mars Hotel” (1988), “Red Planet Blues” (1989), Labyrinth of Night: a Novel of Mars (1992), “A Letter from St. Louis” (1996), “Zwarte Piet's Tale” (1998), and “A Walk Across Mars” (2002).