Unidentified Funny Objects 6

By: Alex Shvartsman, Alan Dean Foster, Jack Campbell, Esther Friesner, Ken Liu, Jody Lynn Nye, Mike Resnick, Laura Resnick, Gini Koch

Narrated by: Escape Artists Inc, Marguerite Kenner, Alastair Stuart

SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY, HUMOR

* Cranky Goblin Cooks
* Unscrupulous Chemists
* Lecherous Space Pirates
* Disagreeable Alien Symbiotes
* Soul-Searching Snot Elementals

The Unidentified Funny Objects series serves an annual dose of funny, zany, and unusual science fiction and fantasy stories. All-new fiction from the genre's top voices!

Our sixth volume features a Mad Amos story by Alan Dean Foster, a Harry the Book tale by Mike Resnick, and an Alexander Outland short by Gini Koch. Jim Hines reimagines a Game of Thrones with goblins in it, Ken Liu begs a sentient AI to spare him, and Esther Friesner takes us on a tour of Chelm, complete with dragons and gratuitous footnotes. There are also tales of an interdimensional secret agent, a warrior-writer on a quest from an evil god, a necromancer intent on rehabilitating the image of his profession, and many more.

©2017 Alex Shvartsman (P)2019 Alex Shvartsman

Good stories, sub par narrator

The stories are varied and funny, with some of my favorite authors contributing, but the narrator(s) imo are totally unsuited to voicing these types of stories, making them a painful listen. I gave up at chapter 8.

Ug. Where did they find these readers?

There are many good writers in this collection. The readers, however, are pretty terrible. I don't know what happened, or how they found so many people who can't enunciate, don't know how to pause for breath, or actually find a way to vocalize different characters.

bad content badly read

wow. this is terrible. not funny. not interesting. terribly dated. (Craigslist anyone?) save your money and your time.

original fun

great for laughs and smiles, From orcs to space ships and aliens, a wide range of humor.

Bad shorts horribly narrated with zero effort

Everything about this showed zero effort or care for the listener.

The formatting:
There’s no table of contents for the twenty shorts, some only a few minutes long and a few almost an hour long. The female narrator is almost rabidly focused on enunciating, yet her over-emphasis makes the listen choppy … or it could be the VOLUMEcontrolCHANGES that happen abruptly during obviously re-recorded bits and pieces of each short. The male narrator is practically swallowing the mic, so you hear every gasp, swallow and thump of his lips during his even choppier narration and cringey cadence.

The writing:
It’s like the authors were given a pop quiz and forced to submit something written in a day. Several seemed to be about authors resenting editors, their craft, or readers and thus the shorts were more like rage-baiting listeners with fourth-wall-breaking agendas (ex: From This She Makes a Living by Esther Friesner at Ch5 or Agent of Chaos by Jack Campbell at Ch8). There were a scattering of shorts that I liked, but the ear torture drowned them like it drowned my short story loving soul.

The 6 of 20 (less than a third of the shorts with a total run time of less than a sixth of this book) that were decent:
Ch3 A Game of Goblins by Jim Hines - 41 min - cute GoT tribute
Ch6 Responses to Inquiries About My Craigslist Post for an Alien Spaceship by Tina Connelly - 7 min - people ask the weirdest things
Ch7 Tyler the Snot Elemental Scours the Newspaper For Change by Jack Sheppard - 15 min - mundane monsters
Ch13 A Mountain-man and a Cat Walk Into A Bar by Alan Dean Foster - 35 min - embrace the OTT
Ch16 Return to Sender by Melissa Meed - 4 min - Jack and the Beanstalk from a gossiper’s POV
⭐️Ch18 An Open Letter to Sentient AI by Ken Liu - 7 min - hahaha, take me to your leader! My favorite of the bunch.