The Game-Players of Titan
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Narrated by:
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Christopher Lane
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By:
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Philip K. Dick
About this listen
Years ago, Earth and Titan fought a war and Earth lost. The planet was irradiated and most of the surviving population is sterile. The few survivors play an intricate and unending game called Bluff at the behest of the sluglike aliens who rule the planet. At stake in the game are two very important commodities: land and spouses. Pete Garden just lost his wife and Berkeley, California, but he has a plan to win them back. That is, if he isn’t derailed by aliens, psychic traitors, or his new wife.
The Game-Players of Titan is both satire and adventure, examining the ties that bind people together and the maddening peccadilloes of bureaucracy, whether the bureaucrats are humans or aliens.
©1991 Laura Coehlo, Christopher Dick, Isa Hackett (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Joanna Flynn was lucky to be alive. But when the doctors told her she would suffer no lasting effects from the near-fatal accident, they were wrong. For that night the nightmares about Caroline began. As the dreams become more torturous, Joanna sets out to investigate this mysterious woman - a journey that takes her 3,000 miles from home to a picturesque town where everybody seems to have a conflicting opinion of the woman who haunts her dreams.
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Retribution.
- By N.Templar on 10-15-17
By: Kay Hooper
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The Keep
- The Adversary Cycle, Book 1
- By: F. Paul Wilson
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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"Something is murdering my men." Thus reads the message received from a Nazi commander stationed in a small castle high in the remote Transylvanian Alps. Invisible and silent, the enemy selects one victim per night, leaving the bloodless and mutilated corpses behind to terrify its future victims. When an elite SS extermination squad is dispatched to solve the problem, the men find something that's both powerful and terrifying. Panicked, the Nazis bring in a local expert on folklore - who just happens to be Jewish - to shed some light on the mysterious happenings.
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At long last, The classic horror novel on Audible
- By Shieldslinger on 07-22-20
By: F. Paul Wilson
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A Feast of Carrion
- By: Keith McCarthy
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett
- Length: 13 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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St Benjamin's Medical School is the greatest of its kind, any death occurring within its walls would have created ripples within the academic world, but the death of Nikki Exner is far from being ordinary. Raped, and then grotesquely executed, her theatrical murder horrifies everyone. John Eisenmenger, a former forensic pathologist, finds himself dragged unwillingly into the case. Teaming up with solicitor Helena Flemming, Eisenmenger sets out to discover what really did happen to Nikki Exner.
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excellent book
- By Yves on 06-27-09
By: Keith McCarthy
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When Gravity Fails
- Marid Audran Trilogy, Book 1
- By: George Alec Effinger
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
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For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can't refuse.The 200-year-old godfather of the Budayeen's underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time.
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Neuromancer in the Middle East
- By David on 07-28-13
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Psycho
- By: Robert Bloch
- Narrated by: William Hootkins
- Length: 3 hrs and 11 mins
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When the Bates Motel looms up out of the storm, Mary Crane thinks it is her salvation. The rooms are musty but clean. The manager, Norman Bates, seems like a nice enough fellow, if a little strange. Then Mary decides to take a shower, and the nightmare begins....
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Nice short book
- By Samantha on 06-26-23
By: Robert Bloch
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The Danger
- By: Dick Francis
- Narrated by: Tony Britton
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Kidnapping is Andrew Douglas's business: they take them, he finds them. But it isn't so simple when Alessia Cenci, golden-girl jockey, disappears, followed by the young child of a derby winner and the senior steward of the Jockey Club. From Italy to England to Washington, D.C., Andrew's caseload is suddenly, violently overflowing. And he must fight triply hard to keep his own name off the growing list of victims.
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Good but disturbing
- By oseedee on 06-08-23
By: Dick Francis
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The Naked Face
- By: Sidney Sheldon
- Narrated by: William Roberts
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Hanson died quickly—with a knife in his back. Carole was next—covered with acid and tortured to death. Now it's Judd's turn—a New York pschoanalyst, he'd known them both. Two faceless executioners on a murderous mission, searching for a secret which is unknown to Judd. Not safe at home or at work, Judd feels his professional grip slipping while he faces constant threat of imminent attack. To whom can he ultimately turn?
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Really Good!!
- By MetaSpiritualMichael91 on 02-11-17
By: Sidney Sheldon
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False Pretenses
- By: Catherine Coulter
- Narrated by: Renee Raudman, Paul Costanzo
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet Elizabeth Carleton, a fascinating woman who is not only a famous concert pianist, but is also married to a wealthy international business tycoon, Timothy Carleton. She is the envy of all until her perfect life falls apart literally in a heartbeat: Timothy Carleton is stabbed in the chest with an ice pick and Elizabeth is accused of his murder. Things rapidly go from bad to worse until a surprise witness appears to give her an airtight alibi. The jury finds her not guilty. The only thing is: She’s never met the man who testified on her behalf.
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Not her best work
- By Terri on 01-21-15
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Stealing Shadows
- By: Kay Hooper
- Narrated by: Cristine McMurdo-Wallis
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
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From best-selling author Kay Hooper comes a thrilling tale with a paranormal bent and a touch of romance. Cassie Neill has a powerful but troubling gift. She can see inside the minds of serial killers as they are planning their crimes. Tormented by her ability, she takes refuge in a secluded North Carolina town. But there’s no escaping her visions, and when a body surfaces just where she predicted, Cassie is suddenly a suspect.
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Good story, bad narration
- By MEOWx4 on 08-14-12
By: Kay Hooper
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The Bad Seed
- By: William March
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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There's something special about eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. With her carefully plaited hair and her sweet cotton dresses, she's the very picture of old-fashioned innocence. But when their neighborhood suffers a series of terrible accidents, her mother begins to wonder: Why do bad things seem to happen when little Rhoda is around?
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loved it
- By CoCo B.M.J on 07-23-19
By: William March
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We can't destroy Jones
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In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
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In the future, most of humanity lives in massive underground bunkers, producing weapons for the nuclear war they’ve fled. Constantly bombarded by patriotic propaganda, the citizens of these industrial anthills believe they are waiting for the day when the war will be over and they can return above ground. But when Nick St. James, president of one anthill, makes an unauthorized trip to the surface, what he finds is more shocking than anything he could imagine.
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Not One of Dick's Best
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Post nuclear apocalyptic surburban middle class
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When a repairman accidentally discovers a parallel universe, everyone sees it as an opportunity, whether as a way to ease Earth’s overcrowding, set up a personal kingdom, or hide an inconvenient mistress. But when a civilization is found already living there, the people on this side of the crack are sent scrambling to discover their motives. Will these parallel humans come in peace? Or are they just as corrupt and ill-intentioned as the people of this world?
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Relevant reading for 2020
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Our Friends from Frolix 8
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In Our Friends from Frolix 8, the world is run by an elite few. And what determines whether one is part of the elite isn’t wealth or privilege, but brains. As children, every citizen of Earth is tested; some are found to be super-smart New Men and some are Unusuals with various psychic powers. The vast majority are Undermen, performing menial jobs in an overpopulated world.
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Unhatched eggs sat on by a cosmic chicken
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Vulcan's Hammer
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After the 20th century’s devastating series of wars, the world’s governments banded together into one globe-spanning entity, committed to peace at all costs. Ensuring that peace is the Vulcan supercomputer, responsible for all major decisions. But some people don’t like being taken out of the equation. And others resent the idea that the Vulcan is taking the place of God. As the world grows ever closer to all-out war, one functionary frantically tries to prevent it. But the Vulcan computer has its own plans....
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All Your Base Are Belong to Us!
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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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What listeners say about The Game-Players of Titan
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-04-18
Philip K. Dick at his best!
Reviews of this book seems to be somewhat divided, but in my opinion it belongs to Dicks best. The style is realistic, sometimes humorous, and somewhat similar to his mainstream novels. This works very effectively as a contrast to the bizarre and dreamlike storyline. At the beginning of the book I wondered if the author would really be able to make the rather unlikely background concept convincing, but after a while it felt just right and very much Philip K. Dick. The story gradually turns into a compelling psychedelic and surreal drama that keeps you reading till the end, which incidentally also feels just right for a Philip K. Dick novel. The struggle to separate reality from illusion and paranoia is, as often with Dick, a central theme in the book. Drugs and alcohol also play an important part. The reading is fine, with the central character Pete, who probably includes a lot of Dick himself, being convincingly portrayed.
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- Dubi
- 05-08-15
Titanic Fun
Flying talking cars. Telepathic, precognitive and telekinetic abilities. Benevolent alien invaders who look like giant slugs. Nearly ubiquitous sterility depopulating a planet of nearly immortal humans. Drugs, psychosis, hallucination. Welcome to one of the many worlds of PKD. What makes this world that much more unique is the game of Bluff, a board game reminiscent of the Game of Life in which the stakes are all too real -- wives, lives, property, social status.
Written in 1963 and featuring a weapon of mass destruction invented by the East Germans and detonated by Red China, TGPoT can be easily interpreted in the context of its Cold War era -- how suburban Americans adapt to being conquered by "alien" invaders (50s-60s sci-fi aliens always acting as analogues for the Red Menace, the Communist threat). Also in the context of the time, the dawn of the hippie era, the book (in part) can be read as a prescient analysis of free love and drug use (much like David Ely's Seconds, written in the same year and made into a memorable movie a couple of years later).
But most of all, TGPoT is just plain fun. Never mind the jumble of ideas and themes, the SF analogies of real-life social and political currents, which are not always coherent. PKD's characters just love to play the game, they live to play the game, and in the end they have to play the game of their lives, literally. Looking well past 1963 to present-day issues, there are universal elements at play of how ordinary lives are manipulated by social, economic and political forces that sometimes seem like nothing more than a cruel high-stakes game.
I started out reading PKD's unparalleled Androids (the basis for Blade Runner) but have since been disappointed by his other novels, even the most widely praised (High Castle). This one was just too much fun to deny. Definitely worth a listen.
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- Darwin8u
- 11-16-16
Game, set, match!
"Anyhow, Pete Garden, you were psychotic and drunk and on amphetamines and hallucinating, but basically you perceived the reality that confronts us…"
― Philip K. Dick, The Game-Players of Titan
Books seem to float into my life in pairs, like aces, kings, or quite often twos. I guess I could count "The Game-Players of Titan" as my second gambling novel in a month. The first was Jonathan Lethem's A Gambler's Anatomy: A Novel. There is something fascinating by the whole literary genre of game novels (King, Queen, Knave, The Glass Bead Game, Oscar and Lucinda, The Gambler, Daniel Deronda*, The Music of Chance*, and more).
Games of chance and skill allow good writers to look into some of life's big questions of causation, death, love with the ability to dance between the coldness of luck/chance and the warmth of skill. Philip K. Dick uses the basics of a game of chance to introduce the idea of a group of people on Earth who gamble not for small stakes, but for cities and counties. Pots are filled with Berkeley and Detroit instead of watches and coins. Add to this mix, drugs, paranoia, aliens, and the pot both thickens and grows.
I usually walk away from a Dick novel amazed in the same way I'm amazed at Darwin. You see what he did, understand the idea almost instantly, and kick yourself for not being born first and thinking in a way that produces the end result. Dick seems naturally talented at looking at the world from a slightly warped perspective. He seems to both float in a latescent (lactescent?) zone by himself, but at the same time he is able to hold onto the teats of the world tight enough to squeeze out an amazing story every couple years. There is a reason I keep coming back to PKD -- either he is crazy or I am.
* I have yet to read these.
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15 people found this helpful
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- 80sNight
- 10-16-23
One of the best performances
Christopher Lane does a phenomenal job reading this work, capturing PKD’s wryness and humor as well as his gravity and world building. A truly excellent story
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Story
- M.Biblioswine
- 01-14-22
Good stuff
Admittedly not one of the great novels. But, it is awfully good. I’m glad I have it. This story takes on the feel of a detective tales
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Performance
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- TNJ
- 04-21-24
Totally unique
Great performance by the reader. Insane one of a kind story by Dick. If you enjoy this one try Dr. Bloodmoney or Clans of the Alphane Moon. There is nothing else like them
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