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Old Venus
- A Collection of Stories
- Narrated by: Diana Rigg, Full Cast, Michael Dorn, Stephen Fry, Jake Stormoen, W. Morgan Sheppard, Gethin Anthony, Wil Wheaton, Janis Ian, Ron Donachie, Various
- Length: 22 hrs and 17 mins
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Publisher's summary
Sixteen all-new stories by science fiction's top talents, collected by best-selling author George R. R. Martin and multiple-award-winning editor Gardner Dozois.
From pulp adventures such as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Carson of Venus to classic short stories such as Ray Bradbury's "The Long Rain" to visionary novels such as C. S. Lewis' Perelandra, the planet Venus has loomed almost as large in the imaginations of science fiction writers as Earth's next-nearest neighbor, Mars. But while the Red Planet conjured up in golden-age science-fiction stories was a place of vast deserts and ruined cities, bright-blue Venus was its polar opposite: a steamy, swampy jungle world with strange creatures lurking amid the dripping vegetation. Alas, just as the last century's space probes exploded our dreams of Mars, so too did they shatter our romantic visions of Venus, revealing, instead of a lush paradise, a hellish world inimical to all life.
But don't despair! This new anthology of 16 original stories by some of science fiction's best writers - edited by number-one New York Times best-selling author George R. R. Martin and award-winning editor Gardner Dozois - turns back the clock to that more innocent time, before the hard-won knowledge of science vanquished the infinite possibilities of the imagination.
Featuring all-new stories by:
- Eleanor Arnason
- Elizabeth Bear
- David Brin
- Tobias S. Buckell
- Michael Cassutt
- Joe Haldeman
- Matthew Hughes
- Gwyneth Jones
- Joe R. Lansdale
- Stephen Leigh
- Paul McAuley
- Ian McDonald
- Garth Nix
- Mike Resnick
- Allen M. Steele
- Lavie Tidhar
- And an Introduction by Gardner Dozois
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My disappointment regarding Black Rain.
- By Chris on 03-03-20
By: Graham Brown
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The Infernal City
- Elder Scrolls Series #1
- By: Greg Keyes
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Four decades after the Oblivion Crisis, Tamriel is threatened anew by an ancient and all-consuming evil. It is Umbriel, a floating city that casts a terrifying shadow-for wherever it falls, people die and rise again. And it is in Umbriel's shadow that a great adventure begins and a group of unlikely heroes meet. A legendary prince with a secret. A spy on the trail of a vast conspiracy. A mage obsessed with his desire for revenge. And Annaïg, a young girl in whose hands the fate of Tamriel may rest.
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Umbriel is coming
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By: Greg Keyes
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Expendable
- League of Peoples, Book 1
- By: James Alan Gardner
- Narrated by: Christine Marshall
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
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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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Pathfinder Tales: Beyond the Pool of Stars
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- Narrated by: Steve West
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Mirian Raas comes from a long line of salvagers, adventurers who use magic to dive for sunken ships off the coast of tropical Sargava. When her father dies, Mirian has to take over his last job: a dangerous expedition into deep jungle pools, helping a tribe of lizardfolk reclaim the lost treasures of their people.
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Wonderful!
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In the Ocean of Night
- Galactic Center, Book 1
- By: Gregory Benford
- Narrated by: Maxwell Caulfield
- Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
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It is 2019. NASA astronaut Nigel Walmsley is sent on a mission to intercept a rogue asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Ordered to destroy it, he instead discovers that it is actually the shell of a derelict space probe - a wreck with just enough power to emit a single electronic signal….
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Like some Space with your Soaps?
- By Bradley on 05-15-12
By: Gregory Benford
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The Event
- By: Nathan Hystad
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Cities all around the world reported strange alien vessels descending. Some saw them as the heralds of a new age; others fired everything they had at them. All were taken as the beams lashed down and drew them into the sky. Dean was left behind, seemingly the last man on Earth. A trail of clues left by his dead wife guides Dean on a perilous journey across America and beyond to learn the truth behind the mysterious ships and save humanity from its doom.
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Did not inspire me to get the next book.
- By MD on 12-13-18
By: Nathan Hystad
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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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Into the Out Of
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Earth is being invaded by the shetani - spirit creatures so small and stealthy that only one man knows about the increasing peril. The potential savior is an African elder named Olkeloki who is capable of fighting evil both in this world and the spirit one. But to be successful he must recruit the help of two others: government agent Joshua Oak, and a feisty young woman named Merry Sharrow. Only the three of them can keep the shetani from destroying reality as we know it.
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Another Great Book by a Master Storyteller!
- By Tracy Michael Herring on 05-03-21
By: Alan Dean Foster
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The Best Horror of the Year, Volume 4
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With tales from Laird Barron, Stephen King, John Langan, Peter Straub, and many others, and featuring Datlow’s comprehensive overview of the year in horror, now, more than ever, The Best Horror of the Year provides the petrifying horror fiction readers have come to expect - and enjoy.
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Only a few decent stories in this bunch.
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The Ninth Rain
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- By: Jen Williams
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Jen Williams, acclaimed author of The Copper Cat trilogy, featuring The Copper Promise, The Iron Ghost and The Silver Tide, returns with the first in a blistering new trilogy. The great city of Ebora once glittered with gold. Now its streets are stalked by wolves. Tormalin the Oathless has no taste for sitting around waiting to die while the realm of his storied ancestors falls to pieces - talk about a guilt trip. Better to be amongst the living, where there are taverns full of women and wine.
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Couldn’t put it down!
- By Renae on 09-09-22
By: Jen Williams
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The Breakers Omnibus
- Books 1-3 and Prequel Novella
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Books 1-3 and the prequel novella of the Breakers series.
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So glad I downloaded this one.
- By Stevie Havoc on 11-16-15
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Coyote
- A Novel of Interstellar Exploration
- By: Allen Steele
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- Length: 17 hrs and 36 mins
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The crime of the century begins without a hitch. On July 5th, 2070, as it's about to be launched, the starship Alabama is hijacked - by her captain and crew. In defiance of the repressive government of The United Republic of Earth, they replace her handpicked passengers with political dissidents and their families. These become Earth's first pioneers in the exploration of space...
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Poorly read
- By Amazon Customer on 09-09-08
By: Allen Steele
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InterWorld
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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
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Primordia
- In Search of the Lost World
- By: Greig Beck
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A journey into the deepest, darkest jungles of the Venezuelan Amazon...and a primeval place and time that mankind was never meant to exist in. Ben Cartwright, former soldier, home to mourn the loss of his father, stumbles upon cryptic letters from the past between author Arthur Conan Doyle and his great-great-grandfather who vanished while exploring the Amazon jungle in 1908. Amazingly, these letters lead Ben to believe that his ancestor’s expedition was the basis for Doyle’s fantastical tale of a lost world inhabited by long-extinct creatures.
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Return to the Lost World
- By Richard S. Swol on 07-14-18
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What listeners say about Old Venus
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Robert
- 11-29-15
Excellent book
If you could sum up Old Venus in three words, what would they be?
The stories in, "Old Venus", were all very good, and there was lots of them. I can never remember specific stories, but I know there was some that were so action packed that I felt like I was watching a movie thriller. Rather then thinking about them as being on Venus, which we now no is uninhabitable, I just imagined them being about distant planets in distant galaxies. This was my favorite, "Audible", selection so far. I look forward to more like this.
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- Cosmo Peters
- 02-09-23
Exactly what I was looking for
I had just finished re-listening to Sky People, a very retro action adventure on a Venus teeming with dinosaurs, cavemen, and sinister Russians, so Old Venus was exactly what I needed to keep scratching that retro sci-fi itch.
I will say, about a third of the authors on this collection didn't really understand the assignment. Some stories are much more modern sci-fi, with none of the wonder and wistfulness for a mysterious Venus of the past.
That said, most of the stories are good and the good ones really rip! Loaded with deadly jungles and oceans, sinister and sexy aliens, and death ray shoot outs, Old Venus is a very enjoyable collection of science fiction with a distinctly vintage flavor.
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- David
- 09-20-15
Varied but overall solid
I love the idea for this collection, and most of the stories are solid, with few even being excellent, and the generic range is impressive. My main problem was that there are simply too many stories, and after a while I started to get bored of swamps, amphibians, sleazy Russian colonists and rain. For this reason my favourite story was David Brin's, which has a much more imaginative take on the Venusian setting. The editors should probably have culled the weaker stories to produce a tighter and less repetitive collection.
The other problem is that many of these stories don't really have much to do with the idea of planet Venus and would work equally well if you crossed out 'Venus' and replaced it with 'Arglethorpe IV' or anything else; I suspect that the authors took a story they were already working on and just changed the setting.
The readers are mostly very good - I particularly enjoyed Harry Lloyd's work and Stephen Fry was a fun surprise. It's time for Roy Dotrice to retire though - at least, his quavery voice is utterly unsuited to a gung-ho action story.
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- josh
- 05-18-15
lots of good storys
What did you love best about Old Venus?
most of it was interesting. the intro was great.
Any additional comments?
its alright. a good book to get in between something you really like. a nice rest from deep listening. and some good stories too.
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- P. R. Reeb
- 08-21-22
Excellent Readers
Production quality is excellent. Beautifully read! Too think of a time when the stars held mystery and romance… these stories recall that time. The 22 hours go by fast.
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- alexander
- 11-29-17
Overall amazing
I love collections of Science fiction. Short or otherwise they always seem to posit such wonderful worlds that we can explore. This book was awesome, a few of the stories were not to great in my opinion, but overall this book has some amazing tales in it.
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- Morgen
- 11-14-17
Vintagey Sci-fi in Space
I listen to a lot of anthologies, and I enjoyed this one quite a bit. All of the stories have a different feel but maintain a vintage grit about them... highly reminiscent of Pulp space sci-fi from the 50s or 60s, but with a better quality of character development.
The different imaginings of a colonized Venus are for the most part intensely entertaining. If you liked this one you should check out other anthologies by George RR Martin. Likewise if you like other anthologies by George you will probably enjoy this one as well.
AUDIBLE 20 REVIEW SWEEPSTAKES ENTRY
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- cmb58
- 12-15-22
Ordered for Chapter 60 plus
Jake Stormoen does an incredible job here, voicing characters fluidly. The intensity of the story is subtle and deep.
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-19-21
Couldn't get past narrator voice.
couldn't finish. do not recommend. voice was so boring and dull, despite the potential for fun story telling.
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1 person found this helpful