Luke Kondor

Pleasing collection comprising mostly short fiction pieces, with a few short essays at the end. The short stories have a delightful uncanny tone, and reflect the strangeness around the corner of the ordinary. Some have a cartoony melancholy to them, a few a direct umbilical to the economic weirdness of serial television tales about chilling suburbia. There’s a comforting adherence to genre storytelling in the execution, which makes it a great book to curl into, but enough of a teasing play with convention to keep things interesting. The essays at the end are a nice addition, dealing on the whole with the mysteries of creativity and motivation.… (mehr)

A fair dose of inter-cosmic shenanigans blended with earthly mundanities all curdled into a cauldron of knockabout fun. Firstly, there is some alien intervention of the confused kind, where a traveller from another realm ends up somehow inhabiting prime hipster space. This being a challenging starting point for any entity, there follows a vibrant quest to phone home, filled with the obstacles of modern hipster life, and a (I would call him a sidekick but I don’t think he’d appreciate that) vocally expressive feline named Gary.

This book is fun to read, with several threads featuring different characters, all entertaining in their parallel perspectives. I especially liked the expressive nature of one character as he utilised the tyranny of self-help doctrines to embolden his increasingly psychotic leanings.

Easy to breeze through, genuinely inventive in parts, imaginative in an innocent Jackanory way sometimes, and the goodnatured and self aware humour is a constant companion.

The threads could’ve been tightened up a bit, as there were some characters that held my attention more successfully than others. This can, of course, be put down to personal taste also. Hence a strong 3.5, but still very much worth taking a chance on especially for fans of Douglas Adams and Grant Naylor.… (mehr)

My original The Hipster from Outer-Space audiobook review and many others can be found at Audiobook Reviewer.

I wasn't sure what to expect from The Hipster from Outer Space and wasn't entirely convinced it would be the right audiobook for me. I can honestly say I've never listened to anything quite like this in my life. It is an immensely imaginative, surrealistic and satirical science fiction story, and I loved it!

Moomamu is ancient alien who has experienced a lot. Different cultures, different planets. But when he wakes up in London and finds himself occupying the body of a human, a hipster, he just wants to get back home because life on earth is rather perplexing. Fortunately, he meets Gary. Gary is a cat. A cat that speaks. Returning home isn't straightforward, though. There is a psychopath with an obsession for self-help tapes and then the matter of having to save the earth and humankind.

Obviously, this is totally wacky and absurd but it was an awful lot of fun and great entertainment for 9 hours. Luke Kondor has a nice style of writing that is easy to engage with and with his very creative mind and brilliant sense of humor his story held my attention for the entire time.

The story is told from different perspectives, which required a bit of concentration initially to keep up with all the different characters and to work out how it all fitted together.

The highlight for me was the way the author imagined how a creature from outer space would view our modern society and experience our daily lives, from commuting to coffee shops to living with pets etc. Lots of irony and fun. There is a bit of swearing, but it was right for the characters. The violence wasn't over the top or gratuitous.

This is book 1 of a trilogy and while there is no huge cliffhanger, the ending leaves the plot and some of the characters' fates wide open. The other two books haven't been released yet. I would certainly be interested in listening to future sequels. Especially, if narrated by Ian McEuen, whom I hadn't listened to before. His absolutely fantastic narration really enhanced my enjoyment of this story. He excelled at the many unique and distinctive voices that were all completely suitable for the particular characters. Apart from Moomamu and Gary, the cat (superb voicing), my other favorite was the self-help guy. Brilliant performance with the right nuances of malice, laughter, whispering and different accents. Pacing and delivery were spot-on. The quality of the production was excellent.

If you want to try something totally different, something quirky and witty, with awesome, well-developed characters, then I can recommend this.

Audiobook was provided for review by the narrator.… (mehr)