The Ship Who Searched

Brainship

De: Anne McCaffrey

Narrado por: Constance Towers

Hypatia Cade—a headstrong, smart, and spunky 7-year-old girl—falls ill after contracting an alien virus that renders her a quadriplegic. Robbed of her mobility, Tia's only hope to be free of the prison of her body is to train to be one of the legendary star travelers, a brainship—a cyborg human being and interstellar spacecraft. Following her training, she must find the right partner to be her brawn, the human element every brainship requires.

When the disease that debilitated Tia threatens thousands more, selecting a brawn who is her true soul mate may allow Tia to find the origin of the terrible plague—and perhaps even a cure.

©1999 Anne McCaffrey (P)1999 Phoenix Books, Inc.

Prefer unabridged but not too bad

The abridged version leaves out much of the soul searching and parentheses that Ms Lackey indulges in, which is good. But this version, as other readers have said, goes a little - just a little - too far. The scene where Hypatia chooses a 'brawn' is cut drastically and looses it's coherance. The bits with the bear are cut too much. Lars is cut too much. Etc. The book is cut to a little more that two hours. A three hour version would be much better.

The story is still enjoyable

However, as others have commented, the abridgement is very poorly done, with characters making reference to comments made earlier in the story that were cut, and, in one case, a character "replies" to a question that was not asked.

As this is a story I know very well (I have lost count of the number of times I've reread it), I'm frustrated by the editing. While some of the edits don't noticeably interrupt the flow of the tale, others are so glaringly obvious, I find myself pausing the book for a period of time.

I love all the Brain Ship Books

I’ve read the actual paper back copies of the entire book. My only regret with the audio version is that it isn’t the entire book. I think the narrator’s voice is perfect for this book. At least as far as Hypatia goes. Listening to the abridged version does make me want to go out and buy the actual print version, which of course I already had long before I ever heard of Audible. Excellent job, in any case!

One of my favorite brain ship books

My favorite. of all the MCCaffrrey series. This one had some new twists on the brain/brawn relationship

My trust in the quality of audiobooks on amazon is greatly diminished

This audiobook with Constance Towers as the narrator is just terrible. Instead of “abridged”, it should say is hacked and slashed. Both parts that gave the story it's special something and parts that connected the different scene changes were haphazardly skipped. It was common for there to not even be a 1 second pause between one scene and the next, leaving you confusion as to how things had just progressed.

This book is my favorite of the Brain Ship series, so i am upset that this book has been so mangled by the “editing.” If i did not know the original work, i may have become too confused to be able to follow this glitchy version of the story.