Doorways in the Sand

De: Roger Zelazny

Narrado por: Andrew J. Andersen

Can You Hear Me Fred?

Fred Cassidy leads an idyllic life. As long as he remains a full time college student without a degree, he is provided a very generous stipend from his uncle's estate.

But after thirteen years of happy undergrad existence everything is about to change.

Cassidy's home is broken into and ransacked. When he enters he is assaulted by a former professor wanting to know where the alien artifact known as the star stone is. Cassidy manages to escape, only to discover that he is also being pursued by hired criminals, Anglophile zealots, government agents, and aliens.

Cassidy has no idea where the star stone is but he realizes that unless he finds it, one of these factions will eventually catch up to him and most likely kill him.

Doorways in the Sand is fast paced, humorous, and has the most lyrical prose of any of Zelazny's novels. It's simply a joy to listen to, and was nominated for both a Hugo and Nebula Award for best novel.

©2020 Amber LTD (P)2024 Tantor

it gets better every time

like all Zelazny works, every time I listen to it I get something new. The narrator does a very good job in spite of missing some pronunciations. His inflections and timing are excellent.

twists and turns

Another great story by Zelazny. Twist and turns, sweet ans sour, but always a pleasure.

Great tale, merely adequate reading

In getting a reader to give us the science in the first-person tale of Fred Cassidy, polymath and doctorate-dodging perennial undergrad, it might have been wiser to find someone with the background to pronounce terms of science - 'riant' and 'tapetum' are a couple that come to mind - and even the occasional wincer like 'fassimilly' for 'facsimile', which is a fairly standard word. Fred's wit is sly and subtle; the reader is neither. He's probably good at most mainstream American popular literature that doesn't require much in the way of higher education, but this was a bad match.

Love that Roger Zelazny “voice”

This tale breathes and could have been written yesterday. Zelazny’s Ernest irreverence is always refreshing. Fun.

Great Hugo winning book.

This is a great book written in Zelazny’s classic style. Outstanding prose that left me with the word “doodlehum” (hoodlum) embedded in my mind for the decades since I first read it. Lots of action and humor.

As a writer, I am awestruck.

Since I began writing in earnest, I’ve read and listened to books not just as a reader, but as a writer, noting twists of plot and turns of phrase. If I really wanted to, sure, I could find things to criticize in Zelazny’s book. But the sheer artistry with which he writes, his consummate skill at descriptions of vignettes and emotions, are nothing short of breathtaking to me. To use culinary metaphors, there are writers I enjoy like fine wines or thick tomahawk steaks, but Zelazny mixes the ridiculous and the sublime, like a somehow-edible Faberge egg, soft-boiled and served in a fine porcelain egg cup with a fine wine, while the torch-and-pitchfork-bearing mob pound at the gate.

With Doorways in the Sand, Zelazny once again demonstrates why he’s a writer’s writer, with the kind of skill we all hope to have when we grow up, no matter how old we already are.

I thought I had it on shuffle.

I thought I had it on shuffle but it's just confusing. I like Roger Zelazny, particularly his first 5 Amber novels which I reread every few years. I got this to listen to at the gym and most of the time I was lost as to what was happening which meant I didn't enjoy it much. Okay narration.