Today I got the Dead Mech trilogy from my parents for my birthday. It’s a sci-fi zombie apocalypse story that takes place over three books. The first two; Dead Mech and The Americans have been created as podcasts but the third, Metal and Ash, was begun as a podcast but after five episodes the create decided it wasn’t worth his time.

Years ago I found How To Succeed In Evil by Patrick E. McLean on Podiobooks.com, I can’t remember how but I found it and I thought it was a great story. Since then the story has been rewritten from a 12 episode podcast into two full books so far. The first book has been done as a podcast and I think it only covers the first three or four original podcasts. I love knowing the two different versions of events and stories. Like a fork in the narrative where the stories take different directions.

So I’ve listened to the original and rewritten versions of How to Succeed in Evil and its two side stories, a total of just over 14 hours. This takes us up to late 2009 in my story podcast listening. Over a year later a new podcast pops up on this feed but for a different story: Unkillable. So I listen to the preview of this and I really like it. The main character starts off dead and continues from there. Some people died, some people don’t and some people you expect to die but they just won’t.

Again about a year after Unkillable ends another podcast pops up on this feed. So I do some searching and find The Seanachai, A collection of one off stories and short series by Patrick. So far from this one guy I have 210 podcasts giving me a total of 28 hours of stories.

In March 2012 I was chatting to a guy called George online and we got talking about the film “I, Robot” and the Three Laws of Robotics, if you wanna know what they are you can look them up. For a few years I got a free copy of “I, Robot” and decided to read it. It’s written Isaac Asimov by the way. In April 2012 I get my first job and I’m freaking out. To stop me freaking out I need a distraction. I borrowed my dad’s Kindle cos it’s got a load of books on it and I find The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov. It’s good Friday and I spent the whole day reading this book to keep me calm.

I remembered that I got How to Succeed in Evil from Podiobooks.com so I head over there and search the Sci-fi Section and found Dead Mech. I listen to the first episode and think it’s kinda rough. It doesn’t flow so well and the writing is a little odd but the story sounded interesting. 50 ton battle mechs (walking robots) controlled by a zombie, this was new to me. I downloaded the first few episodes and though they were great so I downloaded the rest of them. After finishing the podcast series I went to Jake’s website and subscribed to his podcast feed which had the second book, The Americans on. Between Dead Mech, The Americans and Metal and Ash I have 35 hours story and his ravings. I got these three stories for my birthday today since the third one won’t be podcast. Dead Mech is kinda rough as it’s his first drabble novel but The Americans is a fantastic book.

Jake Bible’s books are pretty cool. An interesting thing about the Dead Mech trilogy is that he doesn’t describe what things look like in great detail. It wasn’t until it was mentioned in his Q&A at the end of the Dead Mech podcast that I noticed. It doesn’t say about skin, eye or hair colour of the characters. What I imagine the characters is based on there personality and voice in the podcast. Because of this I won’t want to see a film or graphic novel because it won’t be what I imagined. I’ve taken his story and created it in my imagination. Another thing I like his portrayal of gay characters. “These two men love each other, so what?”. I mean, key characters are homosexual but that’s not their main thing. They aren’t tokens there to fill a tick box. They’re just normal characters. As normal as you can get in a zombie wasteland.