Consider Phlebas: Booktrack Edition
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Narrated by:
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Peter Kenny
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By:
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Iain M. Banks
About this listen
Consider Phlebas: Booktrack Edition adds an immersive musical soundtrack to your audiobook listening experience!
The first audiobook in Iain M. Banks's seminal science fiction series, The Culture. Consider Phlebas introduces listeners to the utopian conglomeration of human and alien races that explores the nature of war, morality, and the limitless bounds of mankind's imagination.
The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender.
Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction.
Booktrack is an immersive format that pairs traditional audiobook narration to complementary music. The tempo and rhythm of the score are in perfect harmony with the action and characters throughout the audiobook. Gently playing in the background, the music never overpowers or distracts from the narration, so listeners can enjoy every minute. When you purchase this Booktrack edition, you receive the exact narration as the traditional audiobook available, with the addition of music throughout.
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The Ember War, book 1: The Earth is doomed. Humanity has a chance. In the near future, an alien probe arrives on Earth with a pivotal mission: to determine if humanity has what it takes to survive the impending invasion by a merciless armada. The probe discovers Marc Ibarra, a young inventor who holds the key to a daring gambit that could save a fraction of Earth's population. Humanity's only chance lies with Ibarra's ability to keep a terrible secret and engineer the planet down the narrow path to survival.
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A COUPLE OF BULLETS AND FOUL LANGUAGE TO DEFEND
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 12-10-16
By: Richard Fox
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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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Fortune's Pawn
- Paradox Series, Book 1
- By: Rachel Bach
- Narrated by: Emily Durante
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Devi Morris isn't your average mercenary. She has plans. Big ones. And a ton of ambition. It's a combination that's going to get her killed one day - but not just yet. That is, until she gets a job on a tiny trade ship with a nasty reputation for surprises. The Glorious Fool isn't misnamed; it likes to get into trouble, so much so that one year of security work under its captain is equal to five years everywhere else. With odds like that, Devi knows she's found the perfect way to get the jump on the next part of her plan.
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Easily the worst narration I've heard in 90 books
- By Matthew on 11-05-14
By: Rachel Bach
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Prador Moon
- A Novel of the Polity, Book 1
- By: Neal Asher
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Neal Asher takes on first contact, Polity style. This original novel recounts the first contact between the aggressive Prador aliens, and the Polity Collective as it is forced to retool its society to a war footing. The overwhelming brute force of the Prador dreadnaughts causes several worlds and space stations to be overrun. Prador Moon follows the initial Polity defeats, to the first draws, and culminates in what might be the first Polity victory, told from the point of view of two unlikely heroes.
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Narration Terrible; Prador’s Moon has Big Ideas and Epic Scale
- By For_the_Love_of_Books on 08-09-18
By: Neal Asher
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Inquisitor
- By: Mitchell Hogan
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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To Inquisitor Angel Xia, it was just another corporate killing on a backwater planet. But as the bodies begin to pile up and she finds herself a target, she realizes she's stepped on one toe too many. Barely escaping attempts on her life by powerful agents with seemingly limitless reach and influence, Angel senses even her co-Inquisitors can't be trusted. But as the web tightens, she receives a cryptic message from a computer program claiming to be a little girl in desperate need of her help.
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meh
- By James Cross on 08-17-15
By: Mitchell Hogan
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Mech Zero: The Dominant
- By: B. V. Larson
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 1 hr and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Death awaits the curious! Out along the rim of the galaxy hangs a loose configuration of some 60 stars known as the Faustian Chain. This whorl of sparkling suns is rich in planets and occupies an irregular volume of space some 20 light years in diameter. From an external viewpoint, the Chain presents a colorful display of plasma-streams, luminous nebulae and sparkling pinpoints of light.
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No hero's here
- By SteveM on 07-17-16
By: B. V. Larson
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The Razor
- By: J. Barton Mitchell
- Narrated by: Travis Baldree
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Brilliant engineer Marcus Flynn has been sentenced to 11-H37 - a hard labor prison planet better known as the Razor, where life expectancy is short and all roads are dead ends - alongside the galaxy's most dangerous criminals. At least until the Lost Prophet goes active. In a few hours, prison guards and staff are evacuated, the prisoners are left to die, and dark mysteries begin to surface. Only Flynn has the skills and knowledge to unravel them, but he will have to rely on the most unlikely of allies.
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If you draw ... you pull
- By Spooky Mike on 12-25-18
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The Last Exodus
- By: Paul Tassi
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The Earth lies in ruins in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial invasion, the land devastated by a desperate war with no winners between mankind and a race of vicious, intelligent creatures. The seas are drying up while the atmosphere corrodes and slowly cooks any life remaining on the now desolate rock. Food is scarce, trust even more so, and the only people left alive all have done horrific things to stay that way.
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Paint by numbers
- By sonofapharmacist on 08-19-19
By: Paul Tassi
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Echopraxia
- By: Peter Watts
- Narrated by: Adam J Rough
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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It's the eve of the 22nd century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans. And it's all under surveillance by an alien presence. Daniel Bruks is a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational.
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A Must Read
- By Taylor Lewis on 12-21-15
By: Peter Watts
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War of the Spheres
- By: James Millington, B. V. Larson
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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When humanity reaches for the stars, our probes are destroyed. They crash into an incredibly advanced piece of technology: a massive force-field. Unknown beings have placed a barrier around our star and planets, enclosing us within. We’re locked inside a Great Sphere. Was this invisible obstacle built to imprison us - or to protect us? No one knows the truth, but it soon becomes clear the barrier has leaks. Aliens infiltrate and try to sabotage our efforts to escape our cage.
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misleading summary...
- By Neil Kresl on 04-04-19
By: James Millington, and others
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Surprisingly meh
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Finally an Iain M. Banks book on audible...
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A man lies in a coma after a near-fatal accident. His body broken, his memory vanished, he finds himself in the surreal world of the bridge - a world free of the usual constraints of time and space, a world where dream and fantasy, past and future, fuse. Who is this man? Where is he? Is he more dead than alive? Or has he never been so alive before?
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Sci-fi fans might skip, but it’s fantastic and well crafted
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What a wild, wacky, awesome book!
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STILL AMAZINGLY GOOD AFTER 62 YEARS
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The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender. Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it....
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Visionary but half-cooked intro to Culture 'verse
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The Algebraist
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It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year.
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Surprisingly meh
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There is a world that hangs suspended between triumph and catastrophe, between the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, frozen in the shadow of suicide terrorism and global financial collapse. Such a world requires a firm hand and a guiding light. But does it need the Concern: an all-powerful organization with a malevolent presiding genius, pervasive influence and numberless invisible operatives in possession of extraordinary powers?
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Finally an Iain M. Banks book on audible...
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Sci-fi fans might skip, but it’s fantastic and well crafted
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What a wild, wacky, awesome book!
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The Stars My Destination
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Marooned in outer space after an attack on his ship, Nomad, Gulliver Foyle lives to obsessively pursue the crew of a rescue vessel that had intended to leave him to die.
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STILL AMAZINGLY GOOD AFTER 62 YEARS
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Nine hundred thousand years ago, something annihilated the Amarantin civilization just as it was on the verge of discovering space flight. Now one scientist, Dan Sylveste, will stop at nothing to solve the Amarantin riddle before ancient history repeats itself. With no other resources at his disposal, Sylveste forges a dangerous alliance with the cyborg crew of the starship Nostalgia for Infinity. But as he closes in on the secret, a killer closes in on him because the Amarantin were destroyed for a reason.
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Defeated
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Behold the orphan. Born into a world that is not a world. A digital being grown from a mind seed, a genderless cybernetic citizen in a vast network of probes, satellites, and servers knitting the Solar System into one scape, from the outer planets to the fiery surface of the Sun. Since the Introdus in the 21st century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software.
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Fabulous Story, Disappointing Performance
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a seriously dark bit of work
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Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a law enforcement officer with the Panoply. His beat is the multifaceted utopian society of the Glitter Band, that vast swirl of space habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone, the teeming hub of a human interstellar empire spanning many worlds. His current case: investigating a murderous attack against one of the habitats that left 900 people dead, a crime that appalls even a hardened cop like Dreyfus.
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Best yet of the Revelation Space series
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Twenty years ago, it was as if someone turned on a light. The future blazed into existence with each deliberate word that William Gibson laid down. The winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer didn't just explode onto the science fiction scene - it permeated into the collective consciousness, culture, science, and technology.Today, there is only one science fiction masterpiece to thank for the term "cyberpunk," for easing the way into the information age and Internet society.
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Story? Classic. Narrator? Ugh.
- By Sage on 11-11-14
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Hyperion
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On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.
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The Shrike Awaits. Enter The Time Tombs...
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Shards of Earth
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Idris has neither aged nor slept since they remade him in the war. And one of humanity's heroes now scrapes by on a freelance salvage vessel, to avoid the attention of greater powers. After Earth was destroyed, mankind created a fighting elite to save their species, enhanced humans such as Idris. In the silence of space they could communicate, mind-to-mind, with the enemy. Then their alien aggressors, the Architects, simply disappeared - and Idris and his kind became obsolete. Now, 50 years later, Idris and his crew have discovered something strange abandoned in space.
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Not sure what the point was [Spoilers]
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In a world policed by telepaths, Ben Reich plans to commit a crime that hasn't been heard of in 70 years: murder. That's the only option left for Reich, whose company is losing a 10-year death struggle with rival D'Courtney Enterprises.Terrorized in his dreams by The Man with No Face and driven to the edge after D'Courtney refuses a merger offer, Reich murders his rival and bribes a high-ranking telepath to help him cover his tracks. But while police prefect Lincoln Powell knows Reich is guilty, his telepath's knowledge is a far cry from admissible evidence.
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It needed the visuals of the paper book.
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The good news is that you have just awakened into Eternal Life. You are going to live forever. Immortality is a reality. A medical miracle? Not exactly. The bad news is that you are a scrap of electronic code. The world you see around you, the you that is seeing it, has been digitized, scanned, and downloaded into a virtual reality program. You are a Copy that knows it is a copy. The good news is that there is a way out.
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Amazing book. Amazingly bad narrator.
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Anathem
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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.
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I love Neal, but Good lord... ugh!
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Falling Free
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Leo Graf was just your average highly efficient engineer: mind your own business, fix what's wrong, and move on to the next job. But all that changed on his assignment to the Cay Habitat, where a group of humanoids had been secretly, commercially bioengineered for working in free fall. Could he just stand there and allow the exploitation of hundreds of helpless children merely to enhance the bottom line of a heartless mega-corporation?
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Don't read this one first
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The Darkness That Comes Before
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In a world scarred by an apocalyptic past, evoking a time both 2,000 years past and 2,000 years into the future, untold thousands gather for a crusade. Among them, two men and two women are ensnared by a mysterious traveler, Anasûrimbor Kellhus - part warrior, part philosopher, part sorcerous, charismatic presence - from lands long thought dead. The Darkness That Comes Before is a history of this great holy war, and like all histories, the survivors write its conclusion.
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Finally in audiobook!
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What listeners say about Consider Phlebas: Booktrack Edition
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- SeattleTyler
- 01-02-23
Booktrack adds immersion with headphones
This review is merely to address the added background music, playing throughout the reading. With headphones it plays wonderfully alongside the read. I recommend the headphone experience. As for those claiming it was “too loud”, or “too distracting”- I found those claims ludicrous in my experience. Great addition to audiobooks.
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- Anonymous User
- 06-14-22
Great start, then peters out
Terrific opening, tons of potential, just never quite developed into the story it could've been. A little heavy on invented words, but hangs together well enough. This could've been up there with the sprawling classics of sci-fi, but seems to have been aborted prematurely. Enjoyable all the same, with some interesting concepts and not too much manufactured drama, but dragged a little towards the middle/end.
Narration is extremely fast, found I was missing bits until I kicked it down to 80% speed, which seemed to be just right.
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- H.Slammer
- 03-13-22
Peter Kenny brings the masterpiece to life
Peter Kenny brings this space opera masterpiece to life with an inspired performance. A perfect introduction into the banks universe and introduction into the culture told from the perspective of their enemy.
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- Carlis Moore
- 12-08-20
This Reminds Me of Tekken But Sci-Fi
This novel has some cool Sci-Fi ideas that would become a lot more commonplace in the years since it's writing, but first and foremost it's kind of an action novel about a whole bunch of not particularly nice or _good_ people that make a relatable snapshot of various aspects of humanity. I found myself surprised many times at who I was cheering for or what I was hoping would happen and ultimately had a great time touring around all the places.
The ending kinda sucks unfortunately. I don't remember the last time I felt so attacked at the end of an otherwise solid book.
The background music and sound effects on this particular version of the audiobook were unobtrusive and did help with the atmosphere. Though I read this over the course of two or three weeks. The bgm might be more grating in a
longer listening sessions.
I enjoyed my start with the Culture series and I look forward to reading the rest soon.
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- 1637
- 02-09-21
A True galactic feel
This is one of but a few books that really brings home the feeling of scale that a galactic war in my opinion would have.
It is impersonal, it is vast and the story just melts away so fast to be lost in the infinity.
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- Jessi
- 06-18-24
Great book, sorta sad.
I was hooked early on, it is an exciting read. Was a bit tragic at the end. I’ll probably listen or read again.
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- John C. Ryan
- 03-04-21
amazing performance! story was good but had issues
the book track is very very good! and the performance is simply wonderful! I loved the book when it was riding high it was amazing! the best parts of the tory were absolutely gripping, however, every once in awhile it goes off on a strange tangent that doesn't add anything to the story. liked it a ton, I've heard book 2 in the series "playerof games" is better and also a good way to start.
may edit this review when I finish that
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- Anonymous User
- 10-18-21
Reconsider Phlebas
Good story with diverse characters. The “music” was distracting, not adding to the experience. Not sure I like a story where most characters die.
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- Simon Michael
- 01-22-22
Excellent, except soundtrack
Excellent book, excellent performance even if some of these bad-ass characters sometimes sounded a little too polite-english for my taste! :)
The "soundtrack" is just ambient music, very rarely with some actual sound effects vaguely related to the action. Slightly false advertising. It sometimes adds to the experience, sometimes detracts. I wished to be able to switch to the plain narration at times to stay more immersed.
Still recommended, either version.
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- Denise Wright
- 03-12-23
Yawn
Very long drawn out anti-climatic. Narrator was fine, no sound effects just music meh
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