Aurora
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Narrated by:
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Ali Ahn
About this listen
A major new novel from one of science fiction's most powerful voices, Aurora tells the incredible story of our first voyage beyond the solar system.
Brilliantly imagined and beautifully told, it is the work of a writer at the height of his powers.
Our voyage from Earth began generations ago.
Now we approach our new home.
Aurora.
©2015 Kim Stanley Robinson (P)2015 Hachette AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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"This ambitious hard SF epic shows Robinson at the top of his game... [A] poignant story, which admirably stretches the limits of human imagination."—Publishers Weekly
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- By Tungsten on 04-02-16
By: Greg Bear
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Starplex
- By: Robert J. Sawyer
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett, Robert J. Sawyer
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Twenty years after the discovery of artificial wormholes launches Earth space exploration to unforeseeable heights, Starplex Director Keith Lansing investigates a mysterious vessel that soon threatens the station with intergalactic war.
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Tribute to Arthur C. Clarke
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 06-23-12
By: Robert J. Sawyer
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The Reality Dysfunction
- Night's Dawn Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Peter F. Hamilton
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 41 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In AD 2600, the human race is finally beginning to realize its full potential. Hundreds of colonized planets scattered across the galaxy host a multitude of prosperous and wildly diverse cultures. Genetic engineering has pushed evolution far beyond nature's boundaries, defeating disease and producing extraordinary spaceborn creatures. Huge fleets of sentient trader starships thrive on the wealth created by the industrialization of entire star systems, and throughout inhabited space the Confederation Navy keeps the peace.
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Finally on Audible!! My favorite Hamilton series!
- By Patrick on 04-05-16
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A World Out of Time
- By: Larry Niven
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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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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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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Marsbound
- By: Joe Haldeman
- Narrated by: Liza Kaplan
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Expendable
- League of Peoples, Book 1
- By: James Alan Gardner
- Narrated by: Christine Marshall
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Under the benevolent leadership of the League of Peoples, there is no war, little crime, and life is sacred...unless you're an Explorer. The ugly, the flawed, the misfit, the deformed, they are the unwanted, flung to the farthest corners of the galaxy to investigate hostile planets and strange, vicious creatures. Out there, there are a thousand different - and terrible - ways to die.
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FU@@ING EXPLORERS
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 03-06-15
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Fear the Sky
- The Fear Saga, Book 1
- By: Stephen Moss
- Narrated by: R.C. Bray
- Length: 20 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Audie-nominated narrator of The Martian. In eleven years' time, a million members of an alien race will arrive at Earth. Years before they enter orbit, their approach will be announced by the flare of a thousand flames in the sky, their ships' huge engines burning hard to slow them from the vast speeds needed to cross interstellar space. These foreboding lights will shine in our night sky like new stars, getting ever brighter until they outshine even the sun, casting ominous shadows and banishing the night until they suddenly blink out.
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Audible Where Are The Rest?!
- By ByEqualMeasure - julie on 09-14-15
By: Stephen Moss
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very long
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Quit listening about a third of the way in.
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Needs 6 stars
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Disappointed in the judgmental tone
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Its all
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It is a stark and inhospitable place, where the landscape itself poses a challenge to survival, yet its strange, silent beauty has long fascinated scientists and adventurers. Now Antarctica faces an uncertain future. The international treaty which protects the continent is about to dissolve, clearing the way for Antarctica’s resources to be plundered, its eerie beauty to be savaged. As politicians wrangle over its fate, major corporations begin probing for its hidden riches.
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Narrator ruins an otherwise interesting book.
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In Aurora, Illinois, Aubrey Wheeler is just trying to get by after her semi-criminal ex-husband split, leaving behind his unruly teenage son. Then the lights go out—not just in Aurora but across the globe. A solar storm has knocked out power almost everywhere. Suddenly, all problems are local, very local, and Aubrey must assume the mantle of fierce protector of her suburban neighborhood.
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The Best of Us
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New York 2140: Booktrack Edition
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New York 2140: Booktrack Edition adds an immersive musical soundtrack to your audiobook listening experience! As the sea levels rose, every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island. For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city. There is the market trader, who finds opportunities where others find trouble. There is the detective, whose work will never disappear - along with the lawyers, of course. There is the internet star, beloved by millions for her airship adventures....
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On the North Pole of Pluto there stands an enigma: a huge circle of standing blocks of ice, built on the pattern of Earth's Stonehenge - but 10 times the size, standing alone at the farthest reaches of the Solar System. What is it? Who came there to build it? The secret lies, perhaps, in the chaotic decades of the Martian Revolution, in the lost memories of those who have lived for centuries.
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An unusually realistic (& depressing) dystopia.
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A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.
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Odd narrator choice
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The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson
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Adventurers, scientists, artists, workers, and visionaries - these are the men and women you will encounter in the short fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson. In settings ranging from the sunken ruins of Venice to the upper reaches of the Himalayas to the terraformed surface of Mars itself, and through themes of environmental sustainability, social justice, personal responsibility, sports, adventure, and fun, Robinson's protagonists explore a world which stands in sharp contrast to many of the traditional locales and mores of science fiction, presenting instead a world in which Utopia rests within our grasp.
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A nice treat for Kim Stanley Robinson fans
- By Anonymous User on 06-13-14
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The Light of Other Days
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The Light of Other Days tells the tale of what happens when a brilliant, driven industrialist harnesses the cutting edge of quantum physics to enable people everywhere, at trivial cost, to see one another at all times: around every corner, through every wall, into everyone's most private, hidden, and even intimate moments. It amounts to the sudden and complete abolition of human privacy - forever.
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When Seeing All is not Understanding All
- By Lisa Callihan on 11-30-08
By: Arthur C. Clarke, and others
What listeners say about Aurora
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- ewreirct
- 07-14-15
Beautiful
I'm a longtime fan of Robinson... and this is one of his best. It's not often I wish I could unhear a book just to have the pleasure of hearing it again. Aurora is a slow meditation on not only the physics, engineering and biology involved in space travel, but also on the psychology behind the desire to explore and escape. Really lovely writing and narration.
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70 people found this helpful
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- Eugene R. White
- 10-22-15
Tried to like this, but came away disappointed
I have enjoyed many of Kim Stanley Robinson's books in the past. Maybe I had different expectations regarding this generation ship story. I suppose it conflicted with my desire for some "happy ending" scenario. The science is very accurate, the Ship voice was excellent --- but the overall story was just depressing. The end -- maybe I missed the point -- was just disappointing. If you are looking for escapist SF -- it is not here. This is a VERY realistic look at how a generation ship journey may turn out.
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17 people found this helpful
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- Mark T
- 09-27-17
Never quite got the point
This is a long audible book, and I made it all the way to the end. But I never actually figured out why I was reading it, or what I was getting from it. I have to learn that a lot of the 2:1 deals on Audible are that way for a reason!
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1 person found this helpful
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- Ryan
- 08-11-15
Desperately needs a storyeditor
First off, my compliments to Ali Ahn and the producers. I think "Aurora" has the best production value of any audiobook I've listened to yet.
This was my first exposure to KSR. I'm fine with fine-grained investigation of ecological collapse, the science of sustainability and long-distance space travel. These were selling points, not impediments to muscle my way through.
But I spent the majority of the book waiting for it to get going, waiting for the book to telegraph its main plot and give me characters I can sink into. It just never happened for me. Is the writing great? Absolutely! But with minor exceptional sequences, I found myself behind the eyes of unlikeable characters making weak choices that celebrate defeatism. Fledgling plot lines are given insufficient light and attention (look, a gardening metaphor!), minor characters fail to manifest in believable ways and the story simply limps on in search of dramatic conflict and I just couldn't care.
From other reviews, KSR merits another day in court, but I think I'll pay more attention to plot description and less attention to the hyperbolic adjectives like "masterful!" that sprinkled the cover. It's bad enough to be bored but when I'm chewing on a decision to abandon the story half-way through, it's tough to accept.
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- crashkicker
- 05-02-18
The first half is great. The second... blah.
Great story but it loses it's way halfway through. The Martian did a better job of "sciencing" and then the beach stuff at the end... I don't get it.
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- Ed
- 12-27-18
went long
the ideas of the book are great but excessive amounts of descriptions of things that dont move the story along
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- tracycali
- 01-08-20
Interesting twist on a somewhat tired trope
Broadly speaking the generation ship adventure genre has probably been beat to death at this point. Aurora provides an interesting perspective that is more evolutionary than revolutionary. it's an oft-told tale that in this case doesn't quite elicit much empathy with the characters. Their development and evolution seems strained and forced. In spite of all attempts to get the reader/listener engaged in the lives of the crew, the most interesting character in the narrative is "Ship". Nonetheless there are some interesting plot points and plot devices that kept me slogging through it. in summary, there's worse ways to burn a listening credit. Just don't expect much in the way of character development or post-listen satisfaction.
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- Steven Raymond
- 03-26-18
Technically intriguing; slow pacing
What did you love best about Aurora?
The technological hurdles were very thought provoking that brought out ideas and problems which had never occurred to me at all. I was glad that KSR was willing to submit & explore that the Religion of Science may not be able to invent a way around every problem and technical challenge. Or that such inventions are not sufficient to meet our every need.
What did you like best about this story?
I loved discussions about the technology- none of it seemed too over-the-top but reasonable approximations of what can be done now with just some tech progression you would expect. Honestly it seems like by 2545 tech would be even better, but not a big complaint.
What aspect of Ali Ahn’s performance would you have changed?
Every young man's voice sounded the same.
Any additional comments?
The pacing was too slow. 14hrs is kinda long for me, although I just finished Red Mars first and found Aurora a lot more engaging. The last 1/6th of the story could be trimmed to 15 minutes and not have lost much.
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- jfuentes7622
- 07-10-16
Very unpredictable and well written
I kept thinking I could predict what would happen next, though I failed over and over.
The ending is how I have seen some 70's movies with the earth is great and wonderful.
My regret is that the people left behind pretty much get dropped off, pretty much never heard from again. So there are gaps here and there.
Good book.
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- Dylan
- 08-30-15
Solid book, go for it
The narration was decent. The ship's voice was done very well, but the other characters lacked variety in voice. Additionally the dialogue felt stilted and forced. Though part of that was the writing. A great book with a few flaws, but definitely worth a read. The characterization of the ship is fantastic in its own right.
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