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Rainbows End
- Narrated by: Eric Conger
- Length: 14 hrs and 46 mins
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Publisher's summary
Filled with excitement and Vinge's trademark potpourri of fascinating ideas, Rainbows End is another triumphantly entertaining novel by one of the true masters of the field.
Critic reviews
- 2007 Hugo Award winner, Best Novel
"This [is] top-drawer hard SF - fast-paced, packed with action, intellectually challenging and, above all, capable of invoking SF's grail: a genuine sense of wonder." (Publishers Weekly)
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- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Twelve-year-old Daniel, the new kid in town, soon learns the truth about his nice - but odd - new friends: one can fly, another can turn invisible, yet another controls electricity. Incredible. The superkids use their powers to secretly do good in the town, but they’re haunted by the fact that the moment they turn thirteen, their abilities will disappear - along with any memory that they ever had them. Is a memory-stealing supervillain sapping their powers?
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Author is Oddly Sexist
- By Ashley Weaver on 08-08-21
By: Matthew Cody
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The Spies That Bind
- A Gallagher Girls Prequel
- By: Ally Carter
- Narrated by: Rebecca Soler
- Length: 2 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The first day at a new school is tough for any kid, but it's especially scary when you're going to a school for spies. Cammie Morgan has spent her whole life dreaming of becoming a Gallagher Girl, but she has no idea what she’ll face when she arrives at The Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women. Secret passages? Check. Lab experiments that might make you lose your eyebrows (and other body parts)? Check. Classmates who are the smartest, strongest, most intimidating girls in the world? Double check.
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A fun listen
- By Mauma Tea on 01-08-19
By: Ally Carter
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Soon I Will Be Invincible
- A Novel
- By: Austin Grossman
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo, Paul Boehmer
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
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Doctor Impossible, evil genius and diabolical scientist, has tried to take over the world in every way imaginable, but this time is going to be different. He'll have to contend with Fatale, however, a rookie superhero on her first day with the Champions, the world's most famous superteam. She's a patchwork woman of skin and chrome, a gleaming technological marvel built for the next generation of warfare.
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Now that I have you at my mercy. . .
- By Brad W. on 07-02-07
By: Austin Grossman
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The Rising
- A Novel
- By: Heather Graham, Jon Land
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
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Twenty-four hours. That's all it takes for the lives of two young people to be changed forever. Alex Chin has the world on a plate. A football hero and homecoming king with plenty of scholarship offers, his future looks bright. His tutor, Samantha Dixon, is preparing to graduate high school at the top of her class. She plans to turn her NASA internship into a career. When a football accident lands Alex in the hospital, his world is turned upside down.
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a fun, action-packed listen
- By Midwestbonsai on 08-25-17
By: Heather Graham, and others
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InterWorld
- By: Neil Gaiman, Michael Reaves
- Narrated by: Christopher Evan Welch
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Joey Harker isn't a hero. In fact, he's the kind of guy who gets lost in his own house. But then one day, Joey gets really lost. He walks straight out of his world and into another dimension. Joey's walk between the worlds makes him prey to two terrible forces: armies of magic and science who will do anything to harness his power to travel between dimensions.
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A good listen
- By Gurmukh on 10-31-07
By: Neil Gaiman, and others
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The World Walker
- The World Walker Series, Book 1
- By: Ian W. Sainsbury
- Narrated by: Todd Boyce
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
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Performance
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Just outside Los Angeles, a prisoner hidden away for 70 years sits up, gets off the bed and disappears through a solid wall. In Australia, a magician impresses audiences by producing real elephants. Nobody realizes it's not an illusion. Across the world, individuals and organizations with supernatural power suddenly detect the presence of something even they can't understand. At the center of it all, Seb Varden, a 32-year old musician with a secret in his past, slits his wrists, is shot dead and run over on the freeway.
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Good Stuff
- By DobieChuck on 01-15-17
By: Ian W. Sainsbury
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WWW: Wake
- By: Robert J. Sawyer
- Narrated by: Jessica Almasy, Jennifer Van Dyck, A. C. Fellner, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 12 mins
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Caitlin Decter is young, pretty, feisty, a genius at math - and blind. Still, she can surf the net with the best of them, following its complex paths clearly in her mind. But Caitlin's brain long ago co-opted her primary visual cortex to help her navigate online. So when she receives an implant to restore her sight, instead of seeing reality, the landscape of the World Wide Web explodes into her consciousness, spreading out all around her in a riot of colors and shapes.
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A Great, if Incomplete, Concept
- By Seth H. Wilson on 04-14-09
By: Robert J. Sawyer
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In a future wracked by environmental catastrophe and social instability, physicist John Renfrew devises a longshot plan to use tachyons - strange, time-traveling particles - to send a warning to the past. In 1962, Gordon Bernstein, a California researcher, gets Renfrew's message as a strange pattern of interference in an experiment he's conducting.
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A Talent for War
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Everyone knew the legend of Christopher Sim. Fighter. Leader. An interstellar hero with a rare talent for war, Sim changed mankind's history forever when he forged a ragtag group of misfits into the weapon that broke the back of the alien Ashiyyur. But now, Alex Benedict has found a startling bit of information, long buried in an ancient computer file. If it is true, then Christopher Sim was a fraud.
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Very good - but the cover and title are deceptive
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What listeners say about Rainbows End
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Steve
- 03-06-08
Great Discovery
One of my favorite things about Audible, are the surprises you find if willing to take a chance on mixed reviews.
This has been the best treat so far. My thanks to the readers who didn’t get it.
Having never even heard of Vinge, I was totally captivated by his near future extension of present day trends, and, the new tech he invents.
Story line and world view worked well together, no excessive fluff explaining concepts, but enough back story to keep everything together.
This is now one of my top 5 books, I just hope this glowing review doesn’t spoil it for a future treasure hunter.
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35 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Karl Story
- 01-10-08
Wonderful
A fantastic listen, full of great characters and ideas. If you like Neal Stephenson, William Gibson or Greg Bear (just to name a few) you will enjoy this book. Considered a post-cyberpunk masterpiece.
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20 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Kit McIlvaine (GirlPluggedN)
- 05-05-08
Stay Plugged In, San Diego
While those not used to traditional Science Fiction may find this read a little dense, it is SCIENCE Fiction. Based in a cyber mapped future, where practically everyone wears interfaces to the internet in their clothing, and information technology is used for good and evil, this story remains, at its heart, human. There is a reason this master crafted story won the Hugo- and that is because Vinge seems to not only understand the classic conflict of man vs machine, but he also realizes and typifies how much we love, hate and depend on being plugged in.
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12 people found this helpful
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Overall
- JACINTA
- 06-25-09
Dry, very dry
I was really excited at the beginning of this story. But by part 2 I was bored out of my brain. I know it's an award-winning novel, but for me there's far too much unnecessary dialogue and too few scene changes. It just doesn't move quickly enough for me. I gave up partway through part 2.
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11 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Andrew
- 02-10-08
Hard Core Speculative Fiction!
While not the most compulsive of narratives, “Rainbows End” will nevertheless be of great interest to hardcore fans of speculative fiction. Treading similar ground to Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge’s story set in the very near future pulses with ideas and possibility, yet lacks the formers wit and verve.
The story revolves around the central character of Robert Gu, Nobel prize winning poet, lost in the depths of Alzheimer’s. Of the three main narrative threads this is the strongest, and could have functioned as a novel on its own. Gu’s story is one of redemption, beautifully expressed, and worth the listeners effort. Of the other two threads, namely an earth shaking conspiracy and persona called “Rabbit”, I was ambivalent and found them to be hard work. Having said that, the unexplained “Rabbit” remained with me for several days, and after some reflection I wonder if the author was expressing something regarding the evolution of technology; aka Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noosphere” .
The narration was of a high standard and I could not but help think that the character of Robert Gu sounded just like the voice of the actor Jason Robarts.
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8 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Lowroad
- 03-14-09
Reads like a video game
This is about a world, not too far into the future, where technology is everywhere, viruses and consumer manipulation is on the order of the day and one's life is intimately entwined with virtual realities.
The book's strength is that it builds on today's video and internet games and extends it into the future to create a real/virtual world that you could well imagine could actually come about.
But this is the book's ultimate weakness as well. It ends up reading too much like a video game. Nothing seems real and the story ends up sounding like a juvenile virtual dream.
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7 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Phil Wheat
- 01-16-08
From the original Cyberspace Author
It's interesting to note how far thinking has come since Vernor Vinge's original "True Names" story about what we later came to call Cyberspace. In this novel, he gives us some glimpses into trends that are happening in social network software, computer hardware, bio-engineering and an entire raft of other things that are going on today. It's interesting to see how his thinking has changed from Cyberspace type visions to Augmented Reality and pervasive computing.
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7 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- DobieChuck
- 01-27-18
SF Down the Rabbit Hole
Really enjoyed this after I got past the uninspired narration... Top notch speculative sf w/ a bit of a Wonderland theme... Maybe a little slow to start but get moving, and the last third or so is fantastic, especially the last 2-3 hours... Good characters even if most aren’t terribly likeable, at least not to start... I loved the multiple literary sf references, most of all the less obvious throw away ones;). Little dense so wouldn’t recommend as a casual read... You’ll wanna cogitate and masticate over much presented if you’re into that sorta thing;) It is a better read than listen...
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6 people found this helpful
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Story
- chad
- 05-06-09
Disappointed
Even after reading through some of the the other luke warm reviews, I decided to go with this book. I generally like the techno-geeky genre other's don't relate to. But this story was busy, difficult to follow at times and the author seemed more interested in throwing in descriptions of his universe than developing the plot and characters.
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5 people found this helpful
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Performance
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Story
- Bostwickenator
- 01-05-18
Flat archetypes and bland images
For a book that relies heavily on a visually stunning setting the language in used is plain and unimaginative. The author tells you things are remarkable or beautiful he doesn't describe them. This makes it difficult to engage.
The characters are predictable and generally uninteresting with interpersonal drama that bodes and doesn't deliver.
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4 people found this helpful