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Solar Lottery
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
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Publisher's summary
In 2203 anyone can become the ruler of the solar system. There are no elections, no interviews, no prerequisites whatsoever - it all comes down to the random turns of a giant wheel. But when a new Quizmaster takes over, the old one still keeps some rights, namely the right to hire an unending stream of assassins to attempt to kill the new leader.
In the wake of the most recent change in leadership, employees of the former ruler scurry to find an assassin who can get past telepathic guards. But when one employee switches sides, troubling facts about the lottery system come to light, and it just might not be possible for anyone to win.
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Gonzo giggleworthy geekitude
- By Noah Smith on 11-11-10
By: Charles Stross
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Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds
- The First Adventure of Alacrity Fitzhugh & Hobart Floyt
- By: Brian Daley
- Narrated by: Brian Holsopple
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Mankind was beginning its third leap into the Galaxy, but Old Earth had so long kept to herself that her people were unable to travel safely among the rough-and-tumble cultures that had evolved on distant worlds. That annoyed Earth's rulers, for Hobart Floyt--a minor Terran bureaucrat-- had been left a mysterious inheritance by the deceased ruler of a small but wealthy interstellar empire.
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Best Sci Fi Fun anywhere!
- By A. Foxter on 07-07-15
By: Brian Daley
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To the Stars
- By: L. Ron Hubbard
- Narrated by: Robert Caso, Jim Meskimen, R.F. Daley, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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How far is too far? Alan Corday is about to find out. Corday is shanghaied aboard a craft bound for the stars...on a journey at the speed of light, the world he leaves behind fast vanishing into the past. And nothing in the dark, forbidding reaches of space can prepare him for the astounding discovery he will make upon his return from the stars.
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To the Stars
- By John on 12-01-04
By: L. Ron Hubbard
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Make Room! Make Room!
- By: Harry Harrison
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In a New York City groaning under the burden of 35 million inhabitants, detective Andy Rusch is engaged in a desperate and lonely hunt for a killer everyone has forgotten. For even in a world such as this, a policeman can find himself utterly alone.
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Unable to see
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 01-21-12
By: Harry Harrison
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Footfall
- By: Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 24 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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They first appear as a series of dots on astronomical plates, heading from Saturn directly toward Earth. Since the ringed planet carries no life, scientists deduce the mysterious ship to be a visitor from another star. The world's frantic efforts to signal the aliens go unanswered. The first contact is hostile: the invaders blast a Soviet space station, seize the survivors, and then destroy every dam and installation on Earth with a hail of asteriods.
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Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle at Their Best
- By Flatlander on 06-24-10
By: Larry Niven, and others
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At Any Price & Rolling Hot
- Hammer's Slammers Series
- By: David Drake
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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This two-story compiliation, read by Stefan Rudnicki, offers two stories from David Drake's popular Hammer's Slammers series. In At Any Price, Col. Alois Hammer's indomitable Slammers are called in to support human colonists against a native uprising in this novel-length adventure. But even though the natives' off-world weapons are no match for the Slammers, their ability to teleport gives them a frightening advantage! In Rolling Hot, the battle-crazed troop of recruits and vets, led by Captain Ranson, must cover 300 miles of hostile enemy territory.
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Not a cohesive story or stories
- By Jeffery on 01-19-21
By: David Drake
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Sleepwalk
- By: John Saul
- Narrated by: Angela Dawe
- Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Another terrifying, classic horror novel from best-selling author John Saul. An insidious madman haunts the peaceful town of Borrego, New Mexico. His goal is singular, as is the focus of his hate and rage. The teenagers of the town seem to have gone too far, and now he will strike back - while they sleep and even during their waking hours - and silence them forever.
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Loved it.
- By Karen R. Anderson on 02-22-19
By: John Saul
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The Sheriff of Yrnameer
- A Novel
- By: Michael Rubens
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet Cole: hapless space rogue, part-time smuggler, on a path to being full-time dead. His sidekick just stole his girlfriend. The galaxy's most hideous and feared bounty hunter wants to lay eggs in his brain. And the luxury space yacht Cole just hijacked turns out of be filled with interstellar do-gooders, one especially loathsome stowaway, and a cargo of freeze-dried orphans.
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Fun, Light-hearted SF
- By Martin Moore on 08-30-09
By: Michael Rubens
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Cold City
- Repairman Jack: Early Years Trilogy, Book 1
- By: F. Paul Wilson
- Narrated by: Alexander Cendese
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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If you've never read a Repairman Jack novel, this is the place to begin. It's 1990. A twenty-one-year-old named Jack has dropped out of college, leaving his old life behind to build a new one in New York City. Manhattan's rough edges are jagged enough to shred any unwary newcomer, but perhaps not one who is determined to stay off the grid, at any cost, in the busiest metropolis on earth. And to do so, he'll have to take jobs of a less than legal nature.
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Fun, as long you don't think too much
- By Andrew Pollack on 01-17-14
By: F. Paul Wilson
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2113
- Stories Inspired by the Music of Rush
- By: John McFetridge - editor, Kevin J. Anderson - editor
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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The music of Rush, one of the most successful bands in music history, is filled with fantastic stories, evocative images, thought-provoking futures and pasts. In this anthology, notable, best-selling, and award-winning writers each chose a Rush song as the spark for a new story, drawing inspiration from the visionary trio Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart.
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I'm a RUSH fan, but ...no..not this book
- By NBP on 07-15-17
By: John McFetridge - editor, and others
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Titans
- By: Edward W. Robertson
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Rob Dunbar is the world's best history professor. And with good reason: he's been alive for 3,000 years, keeping his existence a secret since before the days of Athens. But a stranger named Baxter has a better use for Rob's vast expertise. Baxter's looking to found a mining company in the Asteroid Belt. In exchange for Rob's help, he'll try to unravel the mystery of Rob's origin. As they're getting their outfit off the ground, they come under covert attack by HemiCo, a powerful Mars-based corporation.
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Great book
- By Adam on 09-29-16
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We can't destroy Jones
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Holy sh*t
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Relevant reading for 2020
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Counter-Clock World
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In Counter-Clock World, time has begun moving backward. People greet each other with "goodbye", blow smoke into cigarettes, and rise from the dead. When one of those rising dead is the famous and powerful prophet Anarch Peak, a number of groups start a mad scramble to find him first - but their motives are not exactly benevolent, because Anarch Peak may just be worth more dead than alive, and these groups will do whatever they must to send him back to the grave.
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Our Man in the Graveyard
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The Simulacra
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On a ravaged Earth, fate and circumstances bring together a disparate group of characters, including a fascist with dreams of a coup, a composer who plays his instrument with his mind, a First Lady who calls all the shots, and the world’s last practicing therapist. And they all must contend with an underclass that is beginning to ask a few too many questions, aided by a man called Loony Luke and his very persuasive pet alien.
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In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
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The Man Who Japed
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If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution
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Ragle Gumm has a unique job: Every day he wins a newspaper contest. And when he isn’t consulting his charts and tables, he enjoys his life in a small town, in 1959. At least, that’s what he thinks. But then strange things start happening. He finds a phone book where all the numbers have been disconnected, and a magazine article about a famous starlet named Marilyn Monroe, whom he’s never heard of. Plus, everyday objects are beginning to disappear and are replaced by strips of paper with words written on them, like "bowl of flowers" and "soft-drink stand".
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Mediocre Mother to Gravity's Rainbow and the Truman Show?
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Valis
- Valis, Book 1
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What is VALIS? This question is at the heart of Philip K. Dick's groundbreaking novel, the first book in his defining trilogy. When a beam of pink light begins giving a schizophrenic man named Horselover Fat (who just might also be known as Philip K. Dick) visions of an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire still reigns, he must decide whether he is crazy or whether a godlike entity is showing him the true nature of the world.
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Life changing
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Earth is trapped in the crossfire of an unwinnable war between two alien civilizations. Its leader is perpetually on the verge of death. And on top of that, a new drug has just entered circulation - a drug that haphazardly sends its users traveling through time. In an attempt to escape his doomed marriage, Dr. Eric Sweetscent becomes caught up in all of it. But he has questions: Is Earth on the right side of the war? Is he supposed to heal Earth’s leader or keep him sick? And can he change the harrowing future that the drug has shown him?
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Last/Best Self-help Book for Couples and Suicides
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Clans of the Alphane Moon
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For years, the third moon in the Alphane system was used as a psychiatric hospital. But when war broke out between Earth and the Alphanes, the hospital was left unguarded and the inmates set up their own society, made up of competing factions based on their particular mental illnesses. When Earth sends a delegation to take back the colony, they find enclaves of depressives, schizophrenics, paranoiacs, and others uniting to repel what they see as a foreign invasion.
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One of my favorite
- By M.Biblioswine on 05-06-21
By: Philip K. Dick
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Eye in the Sky
- By: Philip K. Dick
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- Unabridged
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When a routine tour of a particle accelerator goes awry, Jack Hamilton and the rest of his tour group find themselves in a world ruled by Old Testament morality, where the smallest infraction can bring about a plague of locusts. Escape from that world is not the end, though, as they plunge into a Communist dystopia and a world where everything is an enemy. Philip K. Dick was aggressively individualistic, and no worldview is safe from his acerbic and hilarious takedowns.
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Báb's Treatise Between the Two Fern-like Sanctuaries
- By Darwin8u on 01-31-15
By: Philip K. Dick
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A Maze of Death
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Benjamin L. Darcie
- Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Delmak-O is a dangerous planet. Though there are only 14 citizens, no one can trust anyone else and death can strike at any moment. The planet is vast and largely unexplored, populated mostly by gelatinous cube-shaped beings that give cryptic advice in the form of anagrams. Deities can be spoken to directly via a series of prayer amplifiers and transmitters, but they may not be happy about it. And the mysterious building in the distance draws all the colonists to it, but when they get there each sees a different motto on the front.
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JJ Abrams YOU are a book thief.
- By Darwin8u on 08-24-13
By: Philip K. Dick
What listeners say about Solar Lottery
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- M.Biblioswine
- 01-10-22
Beautiful
While not one of PKD’s first rate works, the book is mighty close to it and a thing of beauty in its own right.
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- Darwin8u
- 03-21-16
Dick's First Novel Seems All Grown Up.
"I'm a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I'm so sick I think everybody else is sick and I'm the only healthy person. That's pretty bad off, isn't it?”
― Philip K. Dick, Solar Lottery
I figured Super Tuesday was an appropriate time to listen to PKD's first novel about lottery elections, random assassins, autocratic leaders, corruption, serfs, mad women, social control, telepathic security, idealism, cults, and the search for our galaxy's 10th planet.
It is hard to believe this was Dick's first novel. It seems so grown up; not quite ripe, but close enough to still be edible and enjoyable. It combines Dick's early space novels with his later, funky techno-politico-religious cynicism.
01 function minimax(node, depth, maximizingPlayer)
02 if depth = 0 or node is a terminal node
03 return the heuristic value of node
04 if maximizingPlayer
05 bestValue := −∞
06 for each child of node
07 v := minimax(child, depth − 1, FALSE)
08 bestValue := max(bestValue, v)
09 return bestValue
10 else (* minimizing player *)
11 bestValue := +∞
12 for each child of node
13 v := minimax(child, depth − 1, TRUE)
14 bestValue := min(bestValue, v)
15 return bestValue
Probably my favorite bit of this whole novel was Dick's bending of the idea of Minimax, a form of Nash Equilibrium and game theory. The election of a leader by random is offset by the almost simultaneous election of an assassin. In Dick's Zero-sum future, the random probability of a stupid leader is offset and minimized by the election of an average (or better than average) assassin. Thus, dumb leaders die quickly, good leaders last longer.
The climax of this novel involves both the epitome of game theory and the inevitable corruption. This might have been just a three-star novel, but for someone who loves economics, game theory, and good SF, this one needed/demanded a one-star upgrade.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Darryl
- 09-27-12
a little too disjointed for me
some PKD seems a little slap dash and for me this is one. there are several good ideas but i didn't feel they were coherently worked out and i was left feeling like there were 2 or 3 short stories jammed together and not completed satisfactorily. And the overall structure of the future society needed fleshing out for me, bits and pieces floated about, and in the end i had no clear vision of it, which tends to negate the plot line as such. there are several nice moments, but still can't recommend it when you can get Policeman, Androids, Valis and Scanner as well as High Castle instead. Still I will continue on with PKD.
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- Randall Flagg
- 01-05-17
Not one of his best
I love PKD but this is not one of his best books. The story is weak and the ending weaker still. Look elsewhere.
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