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The Drowned World
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
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Publisher's summary
A new generation discovers "the most original English writer of the last century" (China Miéville, The Nation).
Appearing in audio for the first time, this neglected Ballardian masterpiece promises to be a touchstone for environmentalists the world over.
First published in 1962, J.G. Ballard’s mesmerizing and ferociously imaginative novel not only gained him widespread critical acclaim but also established his reputation as one of the finest writers of a generation. The Drowned World imagines a terrifying world in which global warming has melted the ice caps and primordial jungles have overrun a tropical London. Set during the year 2145, this novel follows biologist Dr. Robert Kearns and his team of scientists as they confront a cityscape in which nature is on the rampage and giant lizards, dragonflies, and insects fiercely compete for domination. Both an unmatched biological mystery and a brilliant retelling of Heart of Darkness - complete with a mad white hunter and his hordes of native soldiers - this “powerful and beautifully clear” (Brian Aldiss) work becomes a thrilling adventure with “an oppressive power reminiscent of Conrad” (Kingsley Amis).
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Just days before a massive exhibition opens at the popular New York Museum of Natural History, visitors are being savagely murdered in the museum's dark hallways and secret rooms. Autopsies indicate that the killer cannot be human.... But the museum's directors plan to go ahead with a big bash to celebrate the new exhibition, in spite of the murders.
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Non-Perishable
- By Snoodely on 05-26-10
By: Douglas Preston, and others
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The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack
- Burton & Swinburne, Book 1
- By: Mark Hodder
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 14 hrs
- Unabridged
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Sir Richard Francis Burton and Algernon Charles Swinburne are sucked into the perilous depths of a moral and ethical vacuum when Lord Palmerston commissions Burton to investigate assaults on young women committed by a weird apparition known as Spring Heeled Jack - and to find out why werewolves are terrorizing London's East End.
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Fun Steampunk but on the outlandish side
- By Robert L. on 02-08-12
By: Mark Hodder
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The Hidden Oasis
- By: Paul Sussman
- Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
- Length: 20 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Egypt 2153 BC: 80 priests set out under cover of darkness with a mysterious object.... Albania, 1986: A plane takes off bound for the Sudan. Somewhere over the Sahara it disappears.... The present: a mummified corpse is discovered in the dunes with a roll of camera film and a clay obelisk inscribed with a hieroglyphic sign.... Three unconnected events - or so it seems.
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Hot and Heavy in Egypt
- By Matthew on 05-10-10
By: Paul Sussman
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Stations of the Tide
- By: Michael Swanwick
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
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The Jubilee Tides will drown the continents of the planet Miranda beneath the weight of her own oceans. But as the once-in-two-centuries cataclysm approaches, an even greater catastrophe threatens this dark and dangerous planet of tale-spinners, conjurers, and shapechangers. From author Michael Swanwick—one of the most brilliantly assured and darkly inventive writers of contemporary fiction—comes a masterwork of radically altered realities and world-shattering seductions.
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Hard to categorize, hard to put down
- By Robert L. on 03-25-12
By: Michael Swanwick
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Omega Days
- Omega Days, Book 1
- By: John L. Campbell
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Eight million walking dead stalk the San Francisco Bay Area, with more on the way. Scattered refugees - a priest with a bloody past, a college girl turned sniper, escaped San Quentin inmates and others - will quickly learn the three most important rules of survival: Make your bullets count. Don't fall behind. Don't...get...bitten! Fast-paced and packed with zombie action, Book One of the Omega Days series lights off the apocalypse with a scream, and tears California to pieces!
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Disappointed
- By L on 06-19-14
By: John L. Campbell
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Atlantis
- Jack Howard Series, Book 1
- By: David Gibbins
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Marine archaeologist Jack Howard has stumbled upon the keys to an ancient puzzle. With a crack team of scientific experts and ex–Special Forces commandos, he is heading for what he believes could be the greatest archaeological find of all time - the site of fabled Atlantis - while a ruthless adversary watches his every move and prepares to strike. But neither Jack nor his adversary could have imagined what awaits them in the murky depths - not only a shocking truth about a lost world but an explosive secret that could have devastating consequences today.
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Solid plausible fiction -- a touch too technical
- By GH on 06-01-15
By: David Gibbins
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The Hollow Man
- By: Dan Simmons
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Jeremy Bremen has a secret. All his life he's been cursed with the ability to read minds. He knows the secret thoughts, fears, and desires of others as if they were his own. For years, his wife, Gail, has served as a shield between Jeremy and the burden of this terrible knowledge. But Gail is dying, her mind ebbing slowly away, leaving him vulnerable to the chaotic flood of thought that threatens to sweep away his sanity. Now Jeremy is on the run - from his mind, from his past, from himself - hoping to find peace in isolation.
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Genius writing, great book
- By David Shear on 02-28-14
By: Dan Simmons
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Altered Carbon
- By: Richard K. Morgan
- Narrated by: Todd McLaren
- Length: 17 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 25th century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person's consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or "sleeve") making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.
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Altered Carbon
- By Jake Williams on 09-22-07
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Stormbreaker
- The First Alex Rider Adventure
- By: Anthony Horowitz
- Narrated by: Nathaniel Parker
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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They said his uncle Ian died in a car accident. Alex Rider knows that's a lie, and the bullet holes in his uncle's car confirm the truth. But nothing can prepare him for the news that the uncle he always thought he knew was really a spy for Britain's top-secret intelligence agency. Enlisted to find his uncle's killers and complete Ian's final mission, Alex suddenly finds himself caught in a deadly game of cat and mouse, with no way out.
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Okay action story held up by an great narrator
- By Mary Fan on 08-13-13
By: Anthony Horowitz
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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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Ijon Tichy, Lem's Candide of the Cosmos, encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in space that serve to satirize science, the rational mind, theology, and other icons of human pride.
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who is making these narrator calls?
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Dark and thought-provoking
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When a light aircraft crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, the young pilot who struggles to the surface minutes later seems to have come back from the dead. Within hours everything in the dormitory suburb is transformed. Vultures invade rooftops, luxuriant tropical vegetation overruns the quiet avenues, and the local inhabitants are propelled by the young man’s urgent visions through ecstatic sexual celebrations toward an apocalyptic climax. In this characteristically inventive novel Ballard displays to devastating effect the extraordinary imagination that has established him as one of the 20th century’s most visionary writers.
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A Vision-based Parable of Virtue and Vice
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If you like Ballard, don't buy this audibook!
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A collection of the author's articles and reviews, giving an insight into some of the most important literary, artistic, and scientific movements and events of the last 30 years.
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This science fiction novel describes the epic voyage of the spacecraft Leonora Christine. From practically the very first minute, Tau Zero sets scientific realities in dramatic tension with the very real emotional and psychological states of the travelers, exploring the effect of time contraction due to traveling at near-light speed on the human psyche. This tension is a dynamic that Anderson explores with great success over the course of the novel, as 50 crewmembers settle in for the long journey together.
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Not What I Hoped For
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A vicious boredom ruled the world
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The Gods Themselves
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Only a few know the terrifying truth - an outcast Earth scientist, a rebellious alien inhabitant of a dying planet, a lunar-born human intuitionist who senses the imminent annihilation of the Sun... They know the truth - but who will listen? They have foreseen the cost of abundant energy - but who will believe?These few beings, human and alien, hold the key to the Earth's survival.
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Asimov's Best Stand Alone Novel
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Station Eleven (Television Tie-in)
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- By: Emily St. John Mandel
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- Unabridged
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Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.
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gah!
- By Stacy on 10-08-14
What listeners say about The Drowned World
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- redmond
- 05-14-24
Didn’t live up to the hype for me
A good post apocalypse short story. I just didn’t take away anything new or groundbreaking. Maybe it’s because I am reading it in 2024 not the time it was written. Maybe it’s because something similar to this story is so ingrained as a nice version of the probable future.
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- Ajbartman
- 07-03-19
Great read from the 60s. Classic Stuff.
Will listen to this one again. I could feel the topical forest. Great take on the future.... from the 60s.
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- Jim "The Impatient"
- 11-05-16
EGO AGAINST ID
MESMERIC INFLAMED DISK OF THE SPECTRAL SUN
This is the kind of book most editors and academia love. Nothing wrong with that, but if your just a regular Joe like me, you would like a plot. The language is beautiful and it is fun to daydream about this type of world. The first hour fulfilled that and it was great. To go from a poem to a novel, I need characters, a plot and something happening. This book had none of that. It was just a reaction to the watered world.
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32 people found this helpful
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- Michael
- 12-04-16
Prophetic story about climate change
One of Ballard's smaller-scale novels, though I believe it is linked to a series of books with similar, environmentally themed stories. Amazing that he foresaw how important climate change would be, years before most people had even heard of the idea.
The writing of this thoughtful, psychological novel is very high quality, and I enjoyed listening to it, especially as read by the narrator. His pace and inflection are perfect, and the accents that he created for the dialogue are amazing. It's really a performance, not just a reading.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Bruno
- 04-14-23
Great performance, curious story
I’ve been looking forward to read this novel for a long time, unfortunately I was not impressed. Each chapter’s plot seems to get lost in the description of the scenario, the whole book was a big beat around the bush with only a couple of interesting moments. What made me listen to it till the end was the performance, brilliant! Compelling and poignant.
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- O.
- 09-24-23
Martin Amis Intro is Wrong
Ballard's last few novels very much predicted the world that we--or rather some of us--have lived in: technocrat neokiberalism gone amok, propped up by a media that doesn't really even pretend (very hard) to be honest anymore. We should be so lucky to live in the emotionally vacuous techno-psycho hellscapes from the last four Ballard novels. The Drowned World is nowhere as good as High-Rise, Unlimited Dream Company, Super-Cannes, or Ballard's later disaster novels The Drought or Hello America. But it's still the work of a surrealist master who wrote about death-dream isolation as no one else has ever done. The Amis introduction comes from a jealous Ballard wanna-be whose novels have none of the originality and unique strangeness that make Shanghai Jim's works feel like unnerving apocalypse poetry for the shellshocked survivors, or an infernal visitor-in-shadows, like quiet, coiled, complacency-shattering dream snakes with crimson eyes and ocean blue diamonds for scales. We're here for Ballard's artistry, not for the superfluous, egotistical introduction that has stunk up this audiobook as bad as did Neil Gaiman's unwanted LGB opening story to the Elric works of Ballard's friend Michael Moorcock.
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- jesse david scarbrough
- 03-27-24
Timelessness
Muy bien timely story for or Society and fun and recommended read maybe movie material
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- Julie W. Capell
- 08-09-15
Lyrical, strange, lovely, haunting
This was one of the more unusual books I have ever read. Most science fiction tends to be focused on a scientific idea, which the author extrapolates out to the future to examine what the repercussions of this idea might be. Usually the repercussions examined are societal, or governmental, or even economic. But in this book, the repercussions are entirely personal. In about two short sentences, Ballard quickly dispenses with the “science,” explaining that there were some sun spots, these made the sun get hotter, all the ice on the Earth has melted, the continents have been drowned and all that is left of mankind is living near the north pole. The rest of the book follows various characters as they react to this new world, each in their own way, although all seem to be quite mad. Playing with the idea that Jurassic weather would bring up Jurassic memories from deep within the human brain, the author does a terrific job depicting how the hallucinogenic dreams and uterine longings of each character mesmerize them and draw them ever further into the growing jungle. There are many gorgeous descriptions of the landscape, the sunlight and the rising waters and the way nature is swallowing up the buildings, roads and other artifacts of human civilization. Even the somewhat cardboard villain serves an important purpose, showing that these artifacts are useless and trying to hold onto the past is a futile gesture. It is a lyrical and strange and lovely and haunting book with images I will not soon forget.
[I listened to this as an audio book read by Julian Elfer, who did an excellent job.]
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8 people found this helpful
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- Jessica D. Atherton
- 02-12-16
great book
This is a great book. It made my long drive shorter. I recommend it to who likes a bit of sci-fi and potential romance
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2 people found this helpful
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- Dr. Joe de Beauchamp
- 02-17-22
JG Ballard
I found this book easier to go through on the audible, then having read the book in the past. When I read the book in the past some of Ballard's words were quite difficult to get through. I find his fiction extremely good, and hope you try this book.
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