Press Enter Audiobook By John Varley cover art

Press Enter

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for $0.00
Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 3 months. Cancel anytime.

Press Enter

By: John Varley
Narrated by: Peter Ganim
Try for $0.00

$0.00/mo. after 3 months. Offer ends July 31, 2025 at 11:59PM PT. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $9.95

Buy for $9.95

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel
This Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novella is part murder mystery, part romance, and more than a little bit scary.

Victor Apfel, a troubled war vet, gets an odd, pre-recorded phone message, instructing him to go inside the house next door. He opens the door to find his neighbor shot through the head. But is it suicide - or murder? And is it possible that a computer is to blame?

©1984 Davis Publications (P)2008 Audible, Inc. Anthologies & Short Stories Crime Fiction Science Fiction Murder

Critic reviews

  • Hugo Award, Best Novella, 1985
  • Nebula Award, Best Novella, 1984
  • All-Time Best Novellas (Locus Magazine)
All stars
Most relevant  
A lots of other reviewers are missing out, I think, by judging this as a failure to reflect the modern day. But it’s not trying to do that: it’s trying to be a story set in the middle of the ‘80s, in the middle of Southern California, with a science fictional horror just out of sight behind the familiar scenery of that time. And it succeeds wonderfully at it.

Victor Appel is one of John Varley’s best narrators, to my taste, altogether plausible as a man who’s spent his whole life alone and suffering after wartime abuse. Hacker Lisa Fu reminds me a lot of people I knew at Caltech in that era, including the hacker’s wordplay on t-shirts. The minor characters also feel solid and right for their places.

The antagonist is not - so nearly as I know - part of reality then or now. But Varley builds up the threat and its context with care, and people have certainly *tried* to make such things happen for decades. So though it’s now a period piece, this novella is a really, really good period piece.

Peter Ganim was an excellent choice of narrator. He includes the text with Victor’s constant weariness, then unobtrusively turns it off for Lisa and moves it into a different register for Detective Osborne. I’ll be looking for more by him.

A classic of sf horror

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
IF YOU WISH TO KNOW MORE PRESS ENTER ???

Victor Apfel, a lonely middle-aged veteran of the Korean War, gets a recorded phone call asking him to come to his reclusive neighbor???s house to take care of what he finds there. The voice promises that he???ll be rewarded. Victor would like to ignore the message, but he gets another call every 10 minutes. When Victor arrives at Charles Kluge???s house, he finds Kluge dead and slumped over his computer keyboard, so he calls another neighbor ??? a computer operator named Hal (har, har) ??? and the cops. When the computer screen asks them to PRESS ENTER, they do, and this initiates Kluge???s strange interactive suicide note. Things get weirder when Victor finds a large deposit in his bank account and the cops find no record anywhere of Charles Kluge. Even the IRS didn???t know about him.

The police investigator doesn???t think it???s a suicide, so they hire a Vietnamese computer programmer named Lisa Foo to figure out what Kluge was up to. When she drives up in her silver Ferrari, she brings a little joy to Victor???s lonely existence. As the two of them get to know each other, both start to deal with troublesome issues such as Victor???s serious medical condition and the horrors of the wars they???ve lived through and the racism those experiences engendered. (The focus on the geo-politics of Southeast Asia during the middle 20th century is a refreshing change from the Western focus of most science fiction.)

Press Enter, which won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for Best Novella in 1985, works on so many levels ??? it???s a romance, murder mystery, psychological drama, and horror story. It???s exciting, moving, and scary. Though Press Enter is set in the early 1980s, it feels nostalgic rather than dated. Discussions comparing and contrasting the computer to the human brain feel current, as does Lisa???s understanding that her skill with computer programming gives her power over others ??? power that could corrupt her.

I read Audible Frontier???s version of Press Enter which is 3 hours long and is narrated by Peter Ganim, who does a nice job, as usual. Press Enter is going to stay with me, and not just because I have a son who???s about to leave for college to study computer programming (shudder). I was enthralled from the first sentence to the last.

If you wish to know more, PRESS ENTER.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Great story, and performance would be great, EXCEPT for the mispronunciation of a key name

The 'g' should be soft, not hard. The repeated mispronunciation of the key name/phrase detracts horribly from the story - it is an essential element!

The post amble description by Audible lists three people associated with the production of the story. Apparently, none of them had the professional wherewithal to check with the author, and had no background at all with science fiction or computer science, and so missed this key point. Very sad, it hurts the telling of this great story

Its pronounced 'kluuj', not kluG

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Really this book is so terrible, so awful, I just couldn't believe that a story could be so bad. Uuugh.
I forgot to post a review when I read it. I was just so p’d that I wanted to have nothing to do with the damn thing. I wanted to forget it all together. and i had.
then today I just stumbled across it in my library and I knew I had to post something. I knew I was needed to help my fellow readers. I knew I needed to step up and save you from purchasing this POS!!!
unfortunately i don't remember any of the details to prove my case. But i just can't go back and listen to it any more. it is the worst story i have heard to date. if you want proof i got nothing, no specifics. all i can recommend is that you could look at my other reviews to see how my tastes run, and if we think alike then trust me...
Leave now and forget you saw the publishers review that made you think it sounds interesting. It is not. I am doing you a favor here… DON’T DO IT, DON’T BUY IT.

press enter aaaaaand... DELETE

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
A massive award winner that is too dated and uninteresting. Written in the early 1980s, the book has to explain what a cursor is. It worries about artificial intelligence and the possibility of a system that is basically what the internet turned out to be. I just never cared, especially about the 50-year-old hero who gets to have repeated sexual bouts with a 25-year-old, huge-breasted Vietnamese woman. Bechdel test: Fail. Grade: C+

If tempted anyway, the narration is excellent.

Dated, uninteresting

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It's an interesting mystery by itself, but without knowing it's from 1984 you might be wondering a bit about the strange computer slang and references to middle-aged Korean war veterans.

Good, but dated computer references

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.