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METAtropolis
- Narrated by: Michael Hogan, Scott Brick, Kandyse McClure, Alessandro Juliani, Stefan Rudnicki, John Scalzi
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
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Publisher's summary
Welcome to a world where big cities are dying, dead - or transformed into technological megastructures. Where once-thriving suburbs are now treacherous Wilds. Where those who live for technology battle those who would die rather than embrace it. It is a world of zero-footprint cities, virtual nations, and armed camps of eco-survivalists.
Welcome to the dawn of uncivilization.
METAtropolis is an intelligent and stunning creation of five of today's cutting-edge science-fiction writers: 2008 Hugo Award winners John Scalzi and Elizabeth Bear; Campbell Award winner Jay Lake; plus fan favorites Tobias Buckell and Karl Schroeder. Together they set the ground rules and developed the parameters of this "shared universe", then wrote five original novellas - all linked, but each a separate tale.
Bringing this audiobook to life is a dream team of performers: Battlestar Galactica's Michael Hogan ("Saul Tigh"); Alessandro Juliani ("Felix Gaeta"); and Kandyse McClure ("Anastasia 'Dee' Dualla"); plus legendary audiobook narrators Scott Brick (Dune) and Stefan Rudnicki (Ender's Game).
John Scalzi, who served as Project Editor, introduces each story, offering insight into how the METAtropolis team created this unique project exclusively for digital audio.
Critic reviews
- 2009 Hugo Award nominee, Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
- 2009 Audie Award nominee, Original Work
“Each story shines on its own; as a group they reinforce one another, building a multifaceted view of a realistic and hopeful urban future.” (Publishers Weekly)
“Scalzi and his contributors/collaborators have created a fascinating shared urban future that each of them evokes with his or her particular strengths.... This stellar collection is a fascinating example of shared world-building.” (Booklist)
"This impressive group of writers imagines what happens when the world moves beyond cities as a locus of human civilization. The range of narrators...brings a unique narrative style to the production. Of the five narrators, all well chosen for the stories, Allessandro Juliani proves to be the best with his rendering of Scalzi's piece." (AudioFile)
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Story
The chartered Zarathustra Company had it all their way. Their charter was for a Class III uninhabited planet, which Zarathustra was, and it meant they owned the planet lock stock and barrel. They exploited it, developed it and reaped the huge profits from it without interference from the Colonial Government. Then Jack Holloway, a sunstone prospector, appeared on the scene with his family of Fuzzies and the passionate conviction that they were not cute animals but little people.
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An old and much loved friend
- By Carl on 07-04-09
By: H. Beam Piper
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Lost Planet Homicide
- By: Larry Correia
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 2 hrs and 31 mins
- Original Recording
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When the biggest colony ship in human history was sent to settle a paradise world, an accident hurtled it deep into uncharted space. A thousand light years from Earth, with no way home and no way to call for help, the colonists’ only hope for survival was the one barely habitable planet in range, a nightmare world they named Croatoan. Landing on the only five mountain peaks tall enough to rise above the lethal acid clouds, the settlers carved a civilization from the rock.
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Awesome
- By Justin H on 10-22-21
By: Larry Correia
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Agent to the Stars
- By: John Scalzi
- Narrated by: Wil Wheaton
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The space-faring Yherajk have come to Earth to meet us and to begin humanity's first interstellar friendship. There's just one problem: They're hideously ugly and they smell like rotting fish. So getting humanity's trust is a challenge. The Yherajk need someone who can help them close the deal. Enter Thomas Stein, who knows something about closing deals. He's one of Hollywood's hottest young agents.
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excellent
- By C. Paget on 12-28-10
By: John Scalzi
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Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories
- By: Tobias S. Buckell
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross, Jasmin Walker, William DeMeritt, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Traffic is piling up, and strange things are headed your way in this new story collection by World Fantasy Award-winning author Tobias S. Buckell. In these twenty-four stories you’ll find inhabitants of a small town who won’t vaccinate against a zombie plague, a lone sentry keeping motorists from stumbling into something ancient and evil, a man who puts stranded ghosts to rest, an ex-soldier traveling the seas who trades his new life of hardship for a return to swords and blood, and many more tales of speculative fiction.
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What a ride.
- By Ariel Sollis on 04-09-23
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Rip-Off!
- By: John Scalzi, Jack Campbell, Mike Resnick, and others
- Narrated by: Wil Wheaton, Scott Brick, Christian Rummel, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In Rip-Off!, 13 of today’s best and most honored writers of speculative fiction face a challenge even they would be hard-pressed to conceive: Pick your favorite opening line from a classic piece of fiction (or even non-fiction) - then use it as the first sentence of an entirely original short story.
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When is a rip-off not a rip-off?
- By Julie W. Capell on 11-24-13
By: John Scalzi, and others
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Crystal Rain
- By: Tobias S. Buckell
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Long ago, so the stories say, the old-fathers came to Nanagada through a worm's hole in the sky. Looking for a new world to call their own, they brought with them a rich mélange of cultures, religions, and dialects from a far-off planet called Earth. Mighty were the old-fathers, with the power to shape the world to their liking - but that was many generations ago, and what was once known has long been lost.
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Looooooooooong lead in before the action starts.
- By KCK on 11-21-15
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A Very Scalzi Christmas
- By: John Scalzi
- Narrated by: Khristine Hvam, Dina Pearlman, Kevin T. Collins, and others
- Length: 2 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times best-selling and Hugo Award-winning author John Scalzi gift-wraps 15 short takes on the holiday season - interviews with holiday notables, "informational" articles about TV specials and Christmas carols, short stories and poems, and even a couple of nods to Thanksgiving and New Year’s - and puts them all into a stocking stuffer-sized package that makes the perfect gift for friends, family, or yourself.
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Very Scalzian indeed!
- By Andre Wallace Simonsen on 12-03-19
By: John Scalzi
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Just One Damned Thing After Another
- An Audible Original Drama
- By: Marty Ross
- Narrated by: Gemma Whelan, Ben Miles, Jonathan Bailey, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
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Time travel meets history in this Audible Original drama. When Max, a recent ancient history graduate, is offered a mysterious job at St Mary's Historical Research Institute, she quickly comes to realise this isn't any old stuffy research library. At St Mary's the historians don't just study the past - they revisit it. What begins as an academic exploration of events, such as the Peterloo Massacre, takes a dark and dangerous turn, and the historians of St Mary's soon learn that it's not just history they're fighting....
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Might be tough for longtime series fans
- By Lora Feeley on 05-20-17
By: Marty Ross
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No Kindness Too Soon
- By: Sylvain Neuvel
- Narrated by: Melanie Nicholls-King, Deepti Gupta, Neil Hellegers, and others
- Length: 2 hrs and 34 mins
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A mysterious radio signal is picked up from a neighboring star system. A group of experts is brought to the floor of the Grand Canyon to investigate its origin and its meaning as the planet suffers one natural disaster after another. Cut off from the rest of the world, they must question everything, including each other, if they hope to solve the mystery.
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The very kindness I needed...
- By Deb A. on 08-13-22
By: Sylvain Neuvel
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The B-Team
- The Human Division, Episode 1
- By: John Scalzi
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 2 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Colonial Union Ambassador Ode Abumwe and her team are used to life on the lower end of the diplomatic ladder. But when a high-profile diplomat goes missing, Abumwe and her team are last minute replacements on a mission critical to the Colonial Union’s future. As the team works to pull off their task, CDF Lieutenant Harry Wilson discovers there’s more to the story of the missing diplomats than anyone expected... a secret that could spell war for humanity.
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Obumwe said, Eagan said, Wilson said, Rickney said
- By A Fitts on 01-18-13
By: John Scalzi
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The Method
- By: James Patterson, Michael B. Silver
- Narrated by: Zachary Quinto, Stephanie Beatriz, Lil Rel Howery, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 42 mins
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James Patterson leads you into the darkest recesses of the mind with this chilling, immersive audio thriller. We meet Brent Quill, a frustrated actor trying to take his game to the next level. When he learns about the intensive Method acting process, he dives in deep—and immediately lands the lead role in a TV series about a brutal serial killer. But when the Method’s controversial techniques start to take over Brent’s psyche, the lines between real life and acting begin to blur dangerously. How far will Brent go to “become” the character?
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Fantastic performance of a quick thriller
- By Lucy A. Pithecus on 10-13-22
By: James Patterson, and others
What listeners say about METAtropolis
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- james
- 10-27-08
Not a wasted credit
(rewritten to exclude apostrophes or quotation marks, which Audible processes incorrectly.)
I like the concept of a shared world and overall this is an entertaining audiobook, but like any anthology some stories are better than others.
In the Forests of the Night by Jake Lake was an extended pseudospiritual/political rant that never answers the most obvious question, i.e. who is Tygre?
I liked Stochasti-city by Tobias Buckell at least in part because it is read by Scott Brick but also because it is entertaining and interesting although the ideas of ex-military street mercs and repurposing abandoned urban real estate were done (better) decades ago by William Gibson.
The Elizabeth Bear story elicited an enthusiastic meh. The characters just were not that compelling and there was not much of a plot to resolve.
John Scalzi is a good writer with a good sense of humor and a lighter tone was needed by this point. His story was funny, but at times it comes across like a 1980s comedy film: slacker hero saves the world through pranking. Not a spoiler, because you see it coming a mile away.
They saved the best for last. To Hie from Far Cilenia by Karl Schroeder is the most thought-provoking of the set. It was a quirky combination of The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson and Spook Country by William Gibson with a heavy dose of Stephensonian fascination with currency. Being a huge fan of both Stephenson and Gibson, it worked for me. The fact that Stefan Ruknicki is a brilliant reader helps too.
The whole collection owes a lot to Gibson, even the various green movements (anybody remember the Sandbenders?), but Gibson was less heavy-handed than these stories. It does put a nice big flashing date stamp on the era at least. Half the science fiction books in the 80s were about nuclear Armageddon, half today are about environmental Armageddon.
Anyway, it serves as a good screenshot of contemporary writing and is worth a listen.
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89 people found this helpful
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Overall
- B Daigle
- 12-03-08
Great narration, stories hard to get into
Not much else to say but as this review is titled. The narration was great, but most of the stories were difficult to really get into.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Paul
- 10-21-11
A lesson to John Scalzi...
This was introduced as a new idea of tied in short stories set in a world where the United States is on the verge of economic collapse caused by Republican/Conservative political policies and environmental collapse as the earth is ravaged by global warming (once again due to Republican policies).
The idea of a themed set of short stories has been done in Sci Fi before. Such sci-fi classics like Assimov's "I Robot" and Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles", which are now monumental classics in the sci fi world and are often required reading in many schools.
Though these books are now dated an the timelines when these stories were to come to reality have long passed, they are still classics and are still treasured by sci fi enthusiasts. What Scalzi needs to learn from these two classic writers is a lesson of arrogance.
Bradbury and Assimov were not so arrogant as to suggest that their vision was how it was actually going to be, as Scalzi does in his interstory narratives.
Scalzi's world is a utopian vision based on Joseph Baratz model of Kibbutz aggrarian communes, hippy communes, collectivism and outright Marxism disguised as anarchism, with tiny cameras and satellites watching your every move - and we're supposed to think this is an intelligent answer to a new and more ideal world.
You have government counselors assigning you to a pig tending job from a goverment accepted job bank of job openings based on your aptitude... and if you don't accept your social duty and agree to your pig tending job, there was always life outside the walls of your community. Sound familiar? The Soviet Union had such walls - and they assigned their citizens to jobs and one room apartments.
In this book, the Soviet Union is like a capitalist wet dream as in some of the communes in this book, you can't even own personal property! In this world, you can't drive an electric car without people tearing up your car and calling you a "footprinter"... It is such a screwed up place that people are wearing reality augmenting glasses. You have walk or ride a bicycle everywhere. And we're supposed to think "Wow... This is cool!"
Saying that. Based on the setup, the stories were well done. Ignoring the politics, I loved the stories. They were performed by the best narrators and the plots were great. The same stories could have been told with a little less political finger pointing and a little less environazi arrogance. All the same, I look forward to the next book.
So the stories get 3 stars for sheer arrogance and political fingerpointing. Everything else about the stories was 5 star.
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4 people found this helpful
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- CJ
- 08-30-12
Sad, Depressing
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
Definitely not! The authors apparently imagine a future filled with violence; where there is not enough anything to go around. That is such a "I bought into the nonsense" point of view! There is enough in this world to go around for thousands of years to come!
What could the authors have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?
Make it more up-beat; more optimistic.
Did METAtropolis inspire you to do anything?
It just made me angry.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Meena
- 04-30-10
A good book
This was the best audiobook I've listened to! Mr Susskind assumes very little physics knowledge but still manages to not talk down to the listener and clearly explain complex concepts. In addition, he has many fascinating, illuminating stories about many of the great luminaries of the physics world, from drinking a beer with Feynman in a small bar in NYC in the 1960s to touring San Francisco's steep hills with Stephen Hawking. This was a great audiobook!
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-26-13
Great extrapolative science fiction
Great stories set in a common universe, not far from our own in time. You recognize a lot of the metatrends in our society, and it is cleverly thought out 20 years into the future.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Kenneth Patterson
- 12-20-20
Fantastic sci-fi!
Some of the best sci-fi I have ever read and is very much award-worthy. I highly recommend it.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Dr. Mc.
- 12-10-20
Bravo!
This is engaging, thoughtful, well written science fiction at its best. I can’t gush enough about this book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- deborah
- 10-24-20
half great
i really liked 2 of the 4 stories and would like them as full books
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- Josh
- 11-12-19
Thought provoking and hopeful futurism
I found METAtropilis to push the conceptual limit of science fiction; at least according to my experience. The future it depicts is extremely plausible, while also not being anything I’ve considered before. The performance was compelling and enjoyable.
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