Anathem
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Narrated by:
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Oliver Wyman
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Tavia Gilbert
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William Dufris
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Neal Stephenson
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By:
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Neal Stephenson
About this listen
Fraa Erasmus is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the "Saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals.
Over the centuries, cities, and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs, bloody violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet always the avout have managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. Erasmus, however, has no fear of the outside - the Extramuros - for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.
Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite of Apert, the fras and suurs prepare to venture outside the concent's gates - opening them wide at the same time to welcome the curious "extras" in.
During his first Apert as a fra, Erasmus eagerly anticipates reconnecting with the landmarks and family he hasn't seen since he was "collected". But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the perilous brink of cataclysmic change.
Powerful unforeseen forces threaten the peaceful stability of mathic life and the established ennui of the Extramuros - a threat that only an unsteady alliance of Saecular and avout can oppose - as, one by one, Raz's colleagues, teachers, and friends are all called forth from the safety of the concent in hopes of warding off global disaster.
Suddenly burdened with a worlds-shattering responsibility, Erasmus finds himself a major player in a drama that will determine the future of everything - as he sets out on an extraordinary odyssey that will carry him to the most dangerous, inhospitable corners of an unfamiliar planet...and far beyond.
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Robot believers at the far end of the galaxy endeavor to create a true religion, but their efforts could be shattered by a shocking revelation. Far in the future, on the remote planet End of Nothing, sentient robots are engaged in a remarkable enterprise. They call their project Vatican-17: an endeavor to create a truly universal religion presided over by a pope, whose extreme godliness and infallible artificial intelligence are fed by telepathic human Listeners who psychically delve into the mysteries of the universe.
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Great Early Science Fiction (Not The Best Title)
- By Blake on 11-02-23
By: Clifford Simak
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The Year's Top Short SF Novels 5
- By: Cory Doctorow, Ken Liu, John P Murphy, and others
- Narrated by: Tom Dheere, Nancy Linari
- Length: 15 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.
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Narrator sounds like Tony Danza
- By Sean on 03-05-16
By: Cory Doctorow, and others
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METAtropolis
- By: Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, and others
- Narrated by: Michael Hogan, Scott Brick, Kandyse McClure, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Armed camps of eco-survivalists battle purveyors of technology in this exclusive, original production featuring five sci-fi masters and five all-star narrators.
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Not a wasted credit
- By james on 10-27-08
By: Jay Lake, and others
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Lockstep
- By: Karl Schroeder
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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When 17-year-old Toby McGonigal finds himself lost in space, separated from his family, he expects his next drift into cold sleep to be his last. After all, the planet he' s orbiting is frozen and sunless, and the cities are dead. But when Toby wakes again, he' s surprised to discover a thriving planet, a strange and prosperous galaxy, and something stranger still - that he' s been asleep for 14,000 years. Welcome to the Lockstep Empire, where civilization is kept alive by careful hibernation. Here cold sleeps can last decades and waking moments mere weeks.
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A Great Idea, Poorly Served
- By D. M. ROBISON on 04-01-14
By: Karl Schroeder
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Variable Star
- By: Robert A. Heinlein, Spider Robinson
- Narrated by: Spider Robinson
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
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At his death in 1988, Robert A. Heinlein left a legacy that almost single-handedly defined modern science fiction. But one of Heinlein's masterpieces was never finished. In 1955, he began work on Variable Star, a powerful and passionate tale of two young lovers driven apart by pride, power, and the vastness of interstellar time and space. Now, the Heinlein estate has authorized award-winning author Spider Robinson to expand his outline into a full-length novel. And the result is vintage Heinlein.
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Spider WHO
- By Randall on 04-25-09
By: Robert A. Heinlein, and others
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Soon I Will Be Invincible
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Doctor Impossible, evil genius and diabolical scientist, has tried to take over the world in every way imaginable, but this time is going to be different. He'll have to contend with Fatale, however, a rookie superhero on her first day with the Champions, the world's most famous superteam. She's a patchwork woman of skin and chrome, a gleaming technological marvel built for the next generation of warfare.
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Now that I have you at my mercy. . .
- By Brad W. on 07-02-07
By: Austin Grossman
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A Gift of Time
- By: Jerry Merritt
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
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When Micajah Fenton discovers a crater in his front yard with a broken time glider in the bottom and a naked, virtual woman on his lawn, he delays his plans to kill himself. While helping repair the marooned time traveler's glider, Cager realizes it can return him to his past to correct a mistake that had haunted him his entire life. As payment for his help, the virtual creature living in the circuitry of the marooned glider, sends Cager back in time as his 10-year-old self.
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The Gift of Time is a Gift!
- By As happy as a monkey with two bananas in his hands on 12-07-17
By: Jerry Merritt
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InterWorld
- By: Neil Gaiman, Michael Reaves
- Narrated by: Christopher Evan Welch
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
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Joey Harker isn't a hero. In fact, he's the kind of guy who gets lost in his own house. But then one day, Joey gets really lost. He walks straight out of his world and into another dimension. Joey's walk between the worlds makes him prey to two terrible forces: armies of magic and science who will do anything to harness his power to travel between dimensions.
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A good listen
- By Gurmukh on 10-31-07
By: Neil Gaiman, and others
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Marsbound
- By: Joe Haldeman
- Narrated by: Liza Kaplan
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
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Young Carmen Dula and her family are about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime - they're going to Mars. Once on the Red Planet, however, Carmen realizes things are not so different from Earth. There are chores to do, lessons to learn, and oppressive authority figures to rebel against.
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Meh.
- By Wes Parker on 03-19-09
By: Joe Haldeman
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Proxima: Book 1
- By: Stephen Baxter
- Narrated by: Kyle McCarley
- Length: 17 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The very far future: The galaxy is a drifting wreck of black holes, neutron stars, and chill white dwarfs. The age of star formation is long past. Yet there is life here, feeding off the energies of the stellar remnants, and there is mind, a tremendous galaxy-spanning intelligence each of whose thoughts lasts a hundred thousand years. And this mind cradles memories of a long-gone age when a more compact universe was full of light... The 27th century: Proxima Centauri, an undistinguished red dwarf star, is the nearest star to our sun. How would it be to live on such a world?
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No Sense of Conclusion
- By Lisa Davidson on 04-24-16
By: Stephen Baxter
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A World Out of Time
- By: Larry Niven
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
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After more than two hundred years as a corpsicle, Jaybee Corbell awoke in someone else’s body and under threat of instant annihilation if he made a wrong move while they were training him for a one-way mission to the stars. But Corbell bided his time and made his own move. Once he was outbound, where the society that ruled Earth could not reach him, he headed his starship toward the galactic core.
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Do you know how people get old?
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 11-13-12
By: Larry Niven
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Not perfect, but worth a listen.
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A solid sci-fi novel
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The rock could use a bit more polishing
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kinda meh
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Achaeans and robots and post-humans, oh my
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Gothic Horror Hard Science Fiction
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Es ist nur ein Spiel. Aber es geht um sehr viel Geld. Und für manche bald um ihr Leben...
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great storry! fantastically narrated!
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Et tu, Neal?
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Bad first novel by great writer
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At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it. To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation - complete for the first time, and the first ever directly from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani ( Battlestar Galactica), Lem’s provocative novel comes alive for a new generation.
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A comment on negative reviews
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Three remarkable journeys into the stars: Worlds of Exile and Illusion includes Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions. These three spacefaring adventures mark the beginning of grand master Ursula K. Le Guin’s remarkable career. Set in the same universe as Le Guin’s groundbreaking classics The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, these first three books of the celebrated Hainish series follow travelers of many worlds and civilizations in the depths of space.
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A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function.
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What a wild, wacky, awesome book!
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What listeners say about Anathem
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- No_name
- 08-28-18
bad reading
talking about great emotional resonance, that inspires, in a dead pan boring voice that sounds like a 1995 Microsoft sam text to speech.
other than the start, its an interesting book
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- unknovvnMike
- 11-28-19
Philosophy means love of Knowledge
While the theorics can get heavy, it's worth multiple readings to get the nuances. I would recommend at least two.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- J.W.
- 10-12-08
Wonderful.
In many ways Stephenson's writing seems to have gotten even better since the days of Snow Crash and Diamond Age (not to say it wasn't good then). The characters in Anathem are more three dimensional and the dialog more natural. Also, although the book bleeds erudition and is filled with abstraction, it doesn't have that annoying characteristic often found in sci-fi in which breakneck action is clumsily broken by digressions into "ideas" that the author is "playing with."
Stephenson does make extensive use of made-up words. The made-up terms represent real ideas, most (or all) of which we are familiar with, but you can't call a Platonic ideal a by that name on a different world that has no connection to Earth, can you? The novel deals with math, logic, science, and philosophy of science, and many important ideas have to be renamed for the story to work. Don't worry though, it is usually quite clear from the fictional name what Earth word is equivalent. For example:
Consent = convent or monestary
Cnois = gnosis or knowledge
Syntax = binary device or computer
Again, don't worry about the terminology and history at the beginning. Listen to the first 4 hours and you will realize that most new words are obvious from their root or synonyms, and proper names don't really matter. It's a large book and takes time to get going, but it's wonderful and one of Stephenson's best works (and one of the best books I've read on Audible in the last year or two.
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- Donna
- 08-26-13
Most engaging book in years.
What did you love best about Anathem?
This is a story which grows with each telling. I have listened to it probably 30 times now and each time something new is revealed. The story is fresh and the characters are interesting. Most of all, I love the language. I grew up with a brother who made up his own vocabulary and only he and my cousin could understand it. Although this has mainly normal english speech, the addition of off the wall words is a treat.
Any additional comments?
I have to be honest, I always preview the narrators before I consider a book for listening. This book has numerous, interesting characters and the narrator nails them. After while, I knew who was speaking just from the voice. This made the book even more enjoyable.
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- Erik
- 05-17-19
Has its moments
Like it’s been said, the beginning and intro is a bit hard to get into but eventually the story picks up and it’s a good one. I love some philosophical dialogue in a story but it goes overboard here on many occasions. This continues without and sometimes goes on for long sections that are very easy to get lost in. Particularly since there is language developed specifically for this book making it even more difficult to follow along at times. Overall a good story, held back by being great IMO
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- LA Parent
- 12-05-19
4*, long long long story
Some of the narration was too loud, but overall pleasing.
The story itself was too complicated to be well served by solely an audio version. Had to fandom search names of characters, places, etc. Definitely not a bed time audiobook for me.
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- Amyloo
- 11-12-14
I adore this book
What did you love best about Anathem?
What I like best: The world that Stephenson created; Erasmus and many of the other characters but especially him; the wild wide-ranging nature of the setting.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Anathem?
A small moment: Fra Jad insisting that the office supply store must have some comprehension of geometry.
Any additional comments?
I gave the performance only 4 stars because the section introducer annoyed me: She seemed to have to be trying to remember to enunciate, and pronounced concent conSENT.
Overall I truly adore the book and have pushed it on my son, who liked it too. I have listened to it many times, and will dip into it to listen to a favorite section, usually only to get caught up all over again and want to hear the whole thing.
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Overall
- Malcolm
- 11-03-08
Brilliant
A fascinating book extremely well read. I can always count on two or three enjoyable listens out of a Neal Stephenson book. I would buy Mr. Stephensons Grocery list if it were sold on Audible and read by these narrators.
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-13-17
Get it!
Yes, it like most of Stephensons books, slow to start and full of strange terminology. But welll worth the listen.
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- t_j
- 03-05-17
Amazing depth!
What a book. There is greatness in the world! Amazing stuff Neil!!!!!! Keep up the good work. You r doing some really strong stuff!!
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