Moonseed

The NASA Trilogy, Book 3

By: Stephen Baxter

Narrated by: Kevin Kenerly

It started the night Geena and Henry broke up. What was that strange light in the sky? A new star? A comet? Neither. It was the death of Venus.

As if to commemorate the end of NASA’s golden couple, our neighbor planet exploded into a brilliant cloud of dust and debris, showering the Earth with radiation and bizarre particles as big as bacteria - a 10-dimensional superstring nanovirus that literally eats rock, transforming it into liquid, and then into molecule-size black holes that devour the very fabric of space-time.

Feasting on Edinburgh’s primeval basalt, Moonseed is steadily eating its way toward Earth’s core. The death toll rises by the hour, as buildings collapse into streets that flow like water, as hundred-foot tsunamis obliterate Seattle and Vancouver, and as volcanoes sprout like weeds across the planet’s quickly decaying mantle.

NASA “rock-jockey” Henry Meacher and his Japanese colleague, Blue, race to cut off the virus and save what is left of the Earth. Meanwhile Henry’s ex, Geena, straps in with a Russian cosmonaut for a daredevil Moon voyage, ultimately reuniting with Henry and searching for the lunar ice deposits that might make possible the greatest evacuation since Noah braved the Flood.

And a mother and her young son clamber for the last solid ground in the liquefying Scottish Highlands, under the baleful stars of a dying universe....

Audacious beyond comparison, grand in conception, and gripping in execution, Moonseed is the first modern novel to do justice to the awesome terror and promise implicit in quantum physics. Like all of Baxter’s work, it blazes new paths from which science fiction will surely follow in the years to come, and becomes required listening for anyone wishing to understand the awesome promise - and threat - revealed by modern science.

©1998 Stephen Baxter (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

Excellent book with excellent narration!

One of the top ten in my 750 library!
Great science in a fictional setting with one of the best narrations I’ve heard!

I wanted to like this. I really did.

The performance was terrific, but try as I might, I could not connect with the characters. The sudden shifts from one scene to another were jarring and, at times, made following the story a frustrating affair.

The concept was fantastic, it just didn’t land with me.

Excellent novel ruined by terrible narration.

A big letdown. Have waited a long time for this to become available on audible. One of my favourite books by one of my favourite authors, only for it to be ruined by terrible pronunciation,

Listen up audible, novels set primarily in Scotland should never be narrated by someone who is evidently not prepared to learn how to correctly pronounce place names.

Edinburgh, capital city of Scotland, my home town and the setting for a large part of this book is NOT pronounced 'Edinburrow', it is pronounced 'Edin-buh-ruh'. Other place names throughout the story are similarly savaged by the tidal wave of ignorance and disrespect exhibited by the narrator. Quite frankly audible you should be demanding that the narrator return his fee to you for this appallingly shoddy offering.

A Sci-Fi Masterpiece

Why aren’t more fans of SF aware of Baxter’s dystopian masterpiece, Moonseed? (As of Sept ‘21 it has only 5 ratings and 3 reviews). Moonseed is book 3 of the NASA trilogy, however, listening to the first two certainly isn’t a prerequisite; it’s a stand-alone story.
If you’re hunting for an outstanding, riveting SF-based story (ala Clarke, Asimov, et al) and stumble across this review, then I highly recommend spending your credit here. The story is fantastic, it’s chock-full of deep actual and theoretical science (modern geology, cosmology astronomy, etc), and the writing is superb. The narrator is neither great nor terrible, but it really doesn’t matter in this case — The strength of the story far outweighs the narration.

Not bad

The last 4 or 5 hours are pretty hard to believe. Interesting story until then, still, it didn’t ruin the book for me.

To the reviewer that said they have a 750+ book library and thought this narrator was one of the best they’ve heard, that’s harder to believe than the ending of this book. Narrator was by no means terrible but don’t expect an RC Bray, Ray Porter or Mark Boyett.