Annabel Scheme

By: Robin Sloan

Narrated by: Robin Sloan

Length: 3 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

Annabel Scheme is a detective story set in an alternate San Francisco where the digital and the occult live side-by-side. It's a short listen, perfect for people who like Sherlock Holmes, Douglas Adams, ghosts and/or the Internet.

In Scheme's San Francisco, an indie rocker's new tracks are climbing the charts, even though the rocker herself is long dead. A devout gamer has gone missing, and the only trace of him that remains is inside his favorite game, the blockbuster MMORPG called World of Jesus. And the richest man in the city, the inventor of the search engine called Grail, might just have made a deal with a devil.

Meanwhile, Annabel Scheme has just hired herself a Watson, an A.I. assistant who's now learning the ropes on a case that will quickly transform into Scheme's biggest - and possibly her last.

Come on. Fog City is waiting.

©2009 Robin Sloan (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

It could have been better

I couldn’t bear to hear anymore. I appreciate that an author might want to narrate his story the way it was meant to be. However, there are times when that shouldnt be the case and this is one of those times. I couldn’t stand to hear anymore, no matter how much I tried. Perhaps if it was done a professional narrator, I would have recommended this Audible story but I can’t. So there.

An Able Scheme

Before Mr. Penumbra, Robin Sloan wrote the novella Annabel Scheme and self-published with the help of a Kickstarter campaign. After Mr. Punumbra put Sloan squarely (and deservedly) on the map, Annabel Scheme received new attention, including an audio edition that came out last year, with the author himself reading it.

Like Mr. Penumbra, this novella mixes modern technology with the archaic -- in this case, the occult, in a San Francisco that exists in a slightly alternate universe. Annabel Scheme is a private investigator who specializes in the digital and the occult, and Hu is her server, an artificial intelligence who can see the world through her surveillance earrings and communicate with her in English. Together, they take on a case of music recorded by dead people, and get caught up in a few other mysteries (distinctly reminiscent of another San Francisco writer I like a lot, Christopher Moore).

So it's all good fun, as you'd expect from Sloan if you're a Penumbra fan, and having Sloan narrate is a good choice, since he knows how to voice his characters, especially his first person AI narrator. His voice is not the most, uh, audiogenic shall we say, but it works. As much as I enjoyed the proceedings, I cannot go all in with five stars because I did find the story somewhat scattershot and I'm not sure exactly what actually happened in the end (on several fronts).

Hidden gem

The San Jose Mercury ran a 15 part serial that introduced me to Robin's world building. This is one of the foundation pieces of that world but stands delightfully alone. No spoilers, but let it be said this is a roller coaster ride, tight, packed with ideas and action with delightful characters scattered about. So many places to go from here.

Made me feel like I was experiencing it for the first time

I was a Kickstarter backer when Robin originally funded the writing of this novella. I've read it at least three times since then, but hearing it as an audiobook was like reading it for the first time all over again. Just wonderful.

Very original

A good ride for us gamers and geeks, no matter what your age. The theme mixes several genre types with a light air and twists and turns. I hope we see these characters again.

Very disconnected

I found this very disconnected and hard to follow. The author read it well. I just did not enjoy it.