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Way Station
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's summary
More than a hundred years before, an alien named Ulysses had recruited Enoch as the keeper of Earth's only galactic transfer station. Now, as Enoch studies the progress of Earth and tends the tanks where the aliens appear, the charts he made indicate his world is doomed to destruction. His alien friends can only offer help that seems worse than the dreaded disaster. Then he discovers the horror that lies across the galaxy.
BONUS AUDIO: Way Station includes an exclusive introduction by Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Mike Resnick.
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- Narrated by: Karissa Vacker, Sile Bermingham, Maxwell Caulfield, and others
- Length: 24 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Hot on the heels of Gardner Dozois's acclaimed anthology The Book of Swords comes this companion volume devoted to magic. How could it be otherwise? For every Frodo, there is a Gandalf... and a Saruman. For every Dorothy, a Glinda... and a Wicked Witch of the West. What would Harry Potter be without Albus Dumbledore... and Severus Snape? Figures of wisdom and power, possessing arcane, often forbidden knowledge, wizards and sorcerers are shaped - or misshaped - by the potent magic they seek to wield.
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some stinkers mostly good
- By M.T. on 12-11-18
By: Gardner Dozois - editor, and others
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Lamp Black, Wolf Grey
- A Novel
- By: Paula Brackston
- Narrated by: Marisa Calin
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Artist Laura Matthews finds her new home in the Welsh mountains to be a place so charged with tales and legends that she is able to reach through the gossamer-fine veil that separates her own world from that of myth and fable. She and her husband, Dan, have given up their city life and moved to Blaencwm, an ancient longhouse high in the hills. Here, she hopes that the wild beauty will inspire her to produce her best art and will give her the baby they have longed for.
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Just plain silly
- By Jennifer S Lewis on 08-10-18
By: Paula Brackston
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The Stolen Child
- By: Keith Donohue
- Narrated by: Andy Paris, Jeff Woodman
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Seven-year-old Henry Day is kidnapped and renamed "Aniday" by changelings, ageless beings who inhabit the woods near his home. The changelings also leave behind one of their own, who flawlessly impersonates Henry except for one noteworthy detail: the new Henry is a prodigiously talented pianist.
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Not Anything Close to the Hype
- By Jon on 06-20-06
By: Keith Donohue
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This Census-Taker
- By: China Miéville
- Narrated by: Matthew Frow
- Length: 4 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a profoundly traumatic event. He tries - and fails - to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape. When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over. But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether?
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Only Feeding the Darkness
- By Darwin8u on 01-14-16
By: China Miéville
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The Martian Chronicles
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor - of crystal pillars and fossil seas - where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn - first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars...and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.
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The Original. Great Stories, Great Narrator.
- By Troy on 04-05-16
By: Ray Bradbury
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Grass
- By: Sheri S. Tepper
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 18 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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What could be more commonplace than grass or a world covered over all its surface with a wind-whipped ocean of grass? But the planet Grass conceals horrifying secrets within its endless pastures. And as an incurable plague attacks all inhabited planets but this one, the prairie-like Grass begins to reveal these secrets - and nothing will ever be the same again.
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Speculative & Creative, Yet well Paced and Unique
- By Zach Wilson on 04-17-17
By: Sheri S. Tepper
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A Critique of it's genre and a superior example
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A very special kind of story.
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People work; folk play. That is how it has been in this country for as long as Sam can remember. He is happy, and he understands that this is the way it should be. People are bigger than folk. They are stronger. They do not need food or water. They do not need the warmth of a fire. All they need are jobs to do and a blacksmith to fix them when they break. The people work so the folk can drink their moonshine, fish a little, and throw horseshoes. But once Sam starts to wonder why the world is like this, his life will never be the same.
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Excellent. But more could have been explored.
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Earth is long since dead. On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rule their world as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Only one dares oppose them: he who was once Siddhartha and is now Mahasamatman. Binder of Demons, Lord of Light.
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How could a performance be so wrong?
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meditative classic
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It's Carnival time and the Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance, and pageantry. Masked "Midnight Robbers" waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. To young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favorite costume to wear at the festival - until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgiveable crime. Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half-Way Tree....
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Even Through the Dimensions, Girls Are Not Safe
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Radiance
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Severin Unck's father is a famous director of Gothic romances in an alternate 1986 in which talking movies are still a daring innovation due to the patent-hoarding Edison family. Rebelling against her father's films of passion, intrigue, and spirits from beyond, Severin starts making documentaries, traveling through space and investigating the levitator cults of Neptune and the lawless saloons of Mars.
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Unexpected and tons of fun
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The Visitors
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Forestry student Jerry Conklin is fly-fishing when something huge lands on his car, crushing it into the earth. It looks like a big black box-about fifty feet high and two hundred feet long-and the object stirs up quite a commotion among the townspeople of Lone Pine, Minnesota. One of them even shoots at it-and quickly pays for it with his life.
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Space travel has been abandoned in the 22nd century. It is deemed too dangerous, expensive, and inconvenient - and now the all-powerful Fishhook company holds the monopoly on interstellar exploration for commercial gain. Their secret is the use of "parries", human beings with the remarkable telepathic ability to expand their minds throughout the universe.
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An old SciFy story but a good one.
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By: Clifford Simak
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Time and Again
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Twenty years ago, Asher Sutton vanished somewhere in the star system 61 Cygni, an inaccessible corner of the universe that humankind has thus far been unable to explore. Now Asher has returned to Earth, having impossibly survived catastrophic damage to his spacecraft. But the star traveler is not the same man he was when he began his journey two decades earlier. He is, in fact, no longer completely human. And he isn't alone.
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Insightful and beautifully written
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It's been 30 years since the apocalypse and 15 years since the murder of the last human being at the hands of robots. Humankind is extinct. Every man, woman, and child has been liquidated by a global uprising devised by the very machines humans designed and built to serve them. Most of the world is controlled by an OWI - One World Intelligence, the shared consciousness of millions of robots uploaded into one huge mainframe brain.
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This Book has Magic
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The Book of Phoenix
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Phoenix was grown and raised among other genetic experiments in New York's Tower 7. She is an "accelerated woman" - only two years old but with the body and mind of an adult, Phoenix's abilities far exceed those of a normal human. Still innocent and inexperienced in the ways of the world, she is content living in her room speed reading ebooks, running on her treadmill, and basking in the love of Saeed, another biologically altered human of Tower 7.
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Well written but........
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The Goblin Reservation
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The hunt for his killer leads a dead professor of supernatural phenomena into the perilous intrigues of aliens, fairy folk, and time travelers in this classic of science fiction. Until the day he was murdered, Professor Peter Maxwell was a respected faculty member of the College of Supernatural Phenomena. Imagine his chagrin when he turns up at a Wisconsin matter transmission station several weeks later and discovers he's not only dead but unemployed.
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Perhaps my #1 favorite Science Fiction Book
- By Signalshifter on 10-15-16
By: Clifford Simak
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This Immortal
- By: Roger Zelazny
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Conrad Nomikos has a long, rich personal history that he'd rather not talk about. And, as Arts Commissioner, he's been given a job he'd rather not do. Escorting an alien grandee on a guided tour of the shattered remains of Earth is not something he relishes—especially when it is apparent that this places him at the center of high-level intrigue that has some bearing on the future of Earth itself!
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UGH...and I can't return it
- By Katakismet on 01-08-24
By: Roger Zelazny
What listeners say about Way Station
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- DJM
- 10-14-09
I wanted this to be great.
I have very fond memories of Way Station. It was one of the first "hard" science fiction stories I read as a teenager and it opened up the possibilities of the genre for me. I was captivated by the ideas in the book and it sent me on a journey through the world of science fiction that I have never abandoned. Nevertheless, I was disappointed listening to this, much as I was eight years ago when I checked it out of a local library. The story presents some fascinating ideas and conflicts as you would expect in a winner of a Hugo Award. But Simak really does not do a very credible job of developing the ideas and resolving the conflicts. In particular, his handling of the conflict with the government is unbelievable, even for someone who was writing during a time when the government was viewed much less critically. Unlike some others, I liked the narrator and it is worth a listen. But, if I am honest with myself, and rating it as if I was approaching it for the first time, it is not a five star story.
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3 people found this helpful
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- 4thace
- 06-18-19
A ray of hope during the Cold War
This book about a secret connection with the superadvanced Galactic group of species was written during a period of international tension at the highest point of the Cold War. Many people were pessimistic about the survival of our own species, and it shows through. The main character comes from a time long before this, having been recruited by his friend the alien he calls "Ulysses" back in the 19th century. The reflections he has on serving as a soldier in the US Civil War. gives the author an opportunity to muse about war and weapons, and to set up a contrast with the superadvanced technologies he encounters with the creatures who pas through his "way station." It is a side effect of the station techology that causes aging to stop, which ends up providing a plausible reason for his neighbors in the country to grow suspicious. But in the end it is a strongly optimistic work, unlike Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz which comes from around the same era with many of the same concerns.
I had a few problems with the way the main character was set up. Despite his extraordinary origin and his more than a century in the service of Galactic Central operating the transit station on Earth, Enoch is not a fascinatingly complex character. He is content to do what he needs to do to carry out his job, learning everything he can learn about in the process, and living essentially as a hermit otherwise. I thought he sort of came off as a stand in for the author, mostly free of faults or internal turmoil. The one bad thing he does in the story is a simple bit of carelessness in planning a funeral plot, nothing worse than that, and the author has to work hard to portray this as a serious faux pas when it comes to presenting ourselves to the judgement of the Galaxy. He is always decent, courageous under stress, and inclined to ruminate over things rather than acting impetuously. Besides visits from his alien friend Ulysses on occasion, he has what amoutns to a set of imaginary friends he talks to in the evenings, and a close relation with the mail carrier he is dependent upon to provide most of his daily needs. More tenuous is a romantic attraction he has to the mysterious deaf neighbor girl Lucy who seems to symbolize the best qualities of humanity, meekness, gentleness, and a sort of mystical intuition with other living creatures. For the majority of the book, Lucy displays no agency, until a moment at the climax where she seems to seize the alien plot Macguffin, an act that essentially catapults her to cosmic significance.
The last ten or twenty percent of the novel is rather different from what went on beforehand. For me, it makes it hard for me to rate it as a four-star book. It becomes more of an action adventure story. At one point, Enoch struggles hand-to-hand with an evil nameless alien criminal, a literal rat-fink, who just happens to choose Enoch's station with essentially no forethought or planning until Enoch acts to save the day. The novel had been shaping up to be a sort of a political intrigue organized by alien factions out to consign the Earth to her own misery (because of Enoch's carelessness), but now a new opportunity to obtain some fantastic alien wisdom presents itself just at a time when we are on the brink of nuclear annihilation. I lived through the 1960s myself, and can understand this desire for a way out of our predicament, but still this felt a little too pat for me.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Kristi R.
- 03-20-13
Civil War Soldier meets aliens and lives forever!
What made the experience of listening to Way Station the most enjoyable?
This was a gentle story about a man who met an alien and became an innkeeper for those space travelers that needed a spot to stay during their travels. It was different than most science fiction stories and I liked it's message.
What other book might you compare Way Station to and why?
If you think of 2001 a Space Odyssey this book would be a precursor. I would compare him to the obelisk of the aliens in 2001.
Which scene was your favorite?
When the deaf mute girl handles the artifacts and charms the aliens.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
I didn't laugh or cry but I smiled a lot. That is why I call this a "gentle" book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- thomas
- 03-19-14
How Did I Ever Miss Reading This Book...
Would you listen to Way Station again? Why?
I would. This is a quiet book filled with some big ideas. Most of the action occurs internally, so in many ways this is both a psychological and anthropological view of man and his place in the world/universe. I loved this book and cannot believe that I never read it before. I am glad I did.
What other book might you compare Way Station to and why?
In tone, but not subject matter it reminded me of the works of Ursula LeGuin, particularly The Dispossessed. Different subject matter entirely, but a quiet story where the action takes place within the characters and their relationship to society.
It also reminded me of some early Asimov and Ray Bradbury. This is an optimistic book and harkens back to an era when Sci Fi was optimistic as well.
What about Eric Michael Summerer’s performance did you like?
He did a great job. He let he story unfold without hurrying and let Enoch speak in a contemplative manner that suited him perfectly/
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
"Movies Stink Read the Book"
Seriously .... this is a very well written book. Simak was a journalist by trade and it shows. The story is uncomplicated but it suites the simple nature of the protagonist and his situation. It reminded me of older Sci Fi that was written for the story itself. Devoid of fighting, hyperbolic action the story serves the intent of the narrative arch. This is not an action packed, page turner; it is a simple rumination on the human spirit.
Any additional comments?
I have to give Audible credit, they continue to release books that are not only popular, but speak to the rich history of Science Ficiton. I consider this book to be foundation to any fan or amateur student of the genre. Highly recommend.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Edmond Woychowsky
- 02-07-19
A Hugo Award Winning Classic
A favorite of mine for decades. I first read it when I was 10 and find myself being drawn back again and again.
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- Kindle Customer
- 10-05-17
Philosophizing classic.
If you liked flatland and the man from earth, you'll enjoy this one a lot.
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- Kindle Customer
- 05-03-16
Redo
Needs to be up dated not rewrote just wrote in a modern way. thanks for the chance to voice my opinion.
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- Cheryl
- 03-14-12
Love the story - a classic
Would you listen to Way Station again? Why?
I would listen to this story again as I am a fan of Simak.
Did Eric Michael Summerer do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?
The reader does a great job differentiating the characters and setting a nice pace to the story.
Any additional comments?
I wish the book was divided in to chapters rather than all the recording in one continuous file.
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- Maximus
- 02-28-16
Incredible story that has excursions within it...
In a late night, last minute purchase after swiping through book after book, I just said 'screw it, this'll do!'... Turned out to be one of the best SciFi books I've come across, ever. No spoilers - no regrets - click, buy, listen, love! -MAXIMUS
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- Michael G Kurilla
- 05-20-18
Earth as galactic transfer station
Clifford D Simak's Way Station is a Hugo award winning novel from the 60's. A civil war veteran in a remote farming region becomes the station master for a transportation hub in our section of the galaxy. Given that he only ages during the one hour a day he is outside his modified "house", he's still around after 100 years and comes to the attention of the government. His interactions with various alien races are presented, but eventually he faces some critical decisions about the future of the whole planet as well as reorienting the galaxy with its spiritual sense.
Simak offers a unique mode of travel, that is reminiscent of a Star Trek transporter. The aliens are varied, unique, and offer diversity beyond the standard humanoid-like body frame. While the engagement with government officials is a bit crude and naive, the potential solution to planetary annihilation that requires a sort of stupid bomb is novel and creative. It's clear that Simak was responding to the geopolitical situation of the the day and looking for an external solution for global strife.
The narration is first rate with a good range of character distinction. Pacing is in line with the pastoral setting of the story.
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