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Ratner's Star
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 15 hrs and 53 mins
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Publisher's summary
One of DeLillo's first novels, Ratner's Star follows Billy, a genius adolescent who is recruited to live in obscurity, underground, as he tries to help a panel of estranged, demented, and yet lovable scientists communicate with beings from outer space. It is a mix of quirky humor, science, and mathematical theories as well as the complex emotional distance and sadness people feel.
Ratner's Star demonstrates both the thematic and prosaic muscularity that typifies DeLillo's later and more recent works, like The Names.
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In the near future, a signal is detected coming from the Alpha Centauri system. Mysterious, unintelligible data streams in for ten years. Heather Davis, a professor in the University of Toronto psychology department, has devoted her career to deciphering the message. Her estranged husband, Kyle, is working on the development of artificial intelligence systems and new computer technology utilizing quantum effects to produce a near-infinite number of calculations simultaneously.
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Novel alien first contact
- By Michael G Kurilla on 05-28-12
By: Robert J. Sawyer
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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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Bend Sinister
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America, and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.
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A fantastic fairytale of fascism
- By Darwin8u on 12-12-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Gateways
- Original New Stories Inspired by Frederik Pohl
- By: Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, and others
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 17 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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It isn’t easy to get a group of bestselling SF authors to write new stories for an anthology, but that’s what Elizabeth Anne Hull has done in this powerhouse book. With original, captivating tales by Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, David Brin, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Joe Haldeman, Harry Harrison, Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, Gene Wolfe, and others, Gateways is a SF event that will be a must-buy for SF readers of all tastes, from the traditional to the cutting edge; from the darkly serious to the laugh-out-loud funny.
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Spectacular.
- By Steve Reid on 08-21-15
By: Greg Bear, and others
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Man Plus
- By: Frederik Pohl
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris, Robert J. Sawyer
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Roger Torraway watched in horror as the monster lurched, toppled over and died. Project Man Plus had gone suddenly and drastically wrong. The race to colonize Mars was too important, too costly, and America was already too committed, for plans to be scrapped. They would have to make a new Martian. And Roger Torraway was it, candidate for the endless surgery, operation after painful operation, that would enable him to survive on that faraway planet.
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More timely now than ever
- By Sandy R on 06-28-10
By: Frederik Pohl
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I, Robot
- By: Isaac Asimov
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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They mustn't harm a human being, they must obey human orders, and they must protect their own existence...but only so long as that doesn't violate rules one and two. With these Three Laws of Robotics, humanity embarked on a bold new era of evolution that would open up enormous possibilities, and unforeseen risks.
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Thank you
- By Fredrik on 06-11-04
By: Isaac Asimov
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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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Waldo & Magic, Inc.
- By: Robert A. Heinlein
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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North Power Air is in trouble. Their aircraft are crashing at an alarming rate and no one can figure out the cause. Desperate for an answer, they turn to Waldo, a crippled misanthropic genius who lives in a home in orbit around Earth, where the absence of gravity means that his feeble muscle strength does not confine him helplessly in a wheelchair. But Waldo has little reason to want to help the rest of humanity - until he learns that the solution to Earth’s problems also holds the key to his own.
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I'M NEVER IN A HURRY
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 02-13-16
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What listeners say about Ratner's Star
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 04-03-21
5 stars for Ratner
Another mind bender by DD... if you like his stuff this is a must... radical
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- Nick W.
- 03-03-20
The Chimeras of the Scientific Mind
This is not a book for everybody. And it is not science fiction do much as a farcical observation anout scientific endeavor and the human beings who engage in it.
Billy is a sort of innocent straight- man /voice of reason, and the novel leads him through absurd encounters with the antic and sometimes almost frightening denizens of the strange isolated environment of the novel, a multi-nationally funded research center engaged in a variety of ridiculous almost post-modern fields of study, primarily the interpretation of a message received by radio telescopes from a distant star.
I wouldn’t duscourage anyone from reading this, but I suspect many readers will not connect with it.
It is dense, beautiful, silly and profound, overflowing with beautiful language and pregnant with endless ideas, and written on the kind of beautiful indulgent prose DeLillo more sparingky employed in his later novels. It is bubbling with information and I sight, and reading it is a lavish treat for readers who have a fairly broad experience of scientific language and a live for the sheer beauty of words and concepts.
It has little plot, it is mostly a series of quirky characters, weird encounters, and descriptive language so wonderfully crafted that it reminds us of what the written word can do at its best.
I love this book, and the right people will, also. It has no action, to speak of, no real story arc, no predictable outcome or single resolution. It’s beautiful, dense, challenging, hilarious, thought-provoking, profound, absurd, and oddly sad.
It’s like Monty Python, in that you will like it, or you will not like it. There will be little middle ground.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Kindle Customer
- 01-31-23
mathematics in wonderland
If you just watched White Noise and want more Don DeLillo,.....well, this isn't the book to start on. Try Libra or End Zone or Running Dog.
Ratner's Star is structured like Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass---hence the titles Adventures and Reflections for the two main parts.
Lots of oblique visits with new characters each chapter that you never see again.
In Tom LeClair's analysis In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel, he has a chart similar to the famous schema for Joyce's Ulysses. Each chapter has a mathematician, a concept, an Era and a specific math reference. For example, chapter 6 is titled Convergence Inward, with Period 18th century and Euler and Lagrange dominating. Mathematical specialization is the reference, with Limits the Concept. There is a thick book on the History of Mathematics on DeLillo's shelf.
As a conventional mystery, Ratner's Star disappoints. The signal from space turns out to be a Maguffin. The solution doesn't make sense, but the problem is more likely to be with me than the author. In Gravity's Rainbow, the main character disappears from the novel three-quarters of the way through. I'm sure DeLillo had his reasons.
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- Darwin8u
- 12-25-20
Sitting alone in a room isn't enough.
"Sitting alone in a room isn't enough. We should turn out the lights as well. The only way to survive is to curtail one's perspective, to exist as close to one's center as possible."
- Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star
I'm going to have to chew on this one. Which means two things. I'll either run off and never return or chew, swallow and excrete something in good time. IT is a tangle for me. Clearly, parts I loved; parts I think I understood; and parts that are absolutely off the charts. I can see this novel reappearing in parts of the Underworld, Zero K, Point Omega, etc. DeLillo loves exploring Man on the edge.
I should also note, as far as Delillo's published novels, I am now a DeLillo completist. I still have a few more short stories, a few more plays, and Amazons by Cleo Birdwell to read, but if I was checking off his 'also by' books in the front of his most recent book, I'm a completist. I'll call it a small 'c' complete and leave it there. I just ordered a copy of Amazons so I can check that off and am scrambling around trying to locate his early short-stories.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Kelly
- 06-14-19
SciFi and I don't mix well.
This is another try at science fiction for me. I keep hoping to find more books in the genre that I will love, but so far I can count on one hand the number of them that I have loved. This one is not among them.
DeLillo has many ideas, and it is obvious that he is intelligent and well-informed. In this novel, he experiments with mathematics, science and logic. He obviously did his research, and his discussion of the world of science is at times quite beautiful. It is difficult and dense and yet somehow the science felt accessible to me. I like this part of the book. Unfortunately that was the only part of the book that I enjoyed though. I simply didn't connect with the characters in any way, and didn't care about the story either.
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