The Iron Heel

This project belongs to Matt Soar. It was started in Mon­tréal in Novem­ber 2009 and fin­ished in France in mid-​May 2010. This new record­ing of London’s vision­ary book The Iron Heel was prompted by the announce­ment of a com­pe­ti­tion, hosted by SFFau­dio, to cre­ate an audio­book from a Sci­ence Fic­tion work in the pub­lic domain.

The entire expe­ri­ence has been intrigu­ing, if not uncanny: The story, about an over­bear­ing, immoral gov­ern­ment char­ac­ter­ized by decep­tion, tor­ture, and war­mon­ger­ing, against a back­ground of civil­ian exploita­tion and reli­gious zealotry, is mainly remark­able for the fact that it was writ­ten a hun­dred years ago — rather than, say, five.

Per­haps the only aspects of The Iron Heel that really age it are its breath­lessly roman­tic hero­ine, occa­sion­ally pro­saic lan­guage, and the author’s fleet­ing use of dubi­ous terms to describe eth­nic minori­ties. These quib­bles aside, I’m really glad I took the time to record it, and hope you enjoy it too.