Regular price: $28.00
In her childhood, Rose Franklin accidentally discovered a giant metal hand buried beneath the ground outside Deadwood, South Dakota. As an adult, Dr. Rose Franklin led the team that uncovered the rest of the body parts which together form Themis; a powerful robot of mysterious alien origin. She, along with linguist Vincent, pilot Kara, and the unnamed Interviewer, protected the Earth from geopolitical conflict and alien invasion alike. Now, after 10 years on another world, Rose returns to find her old alliances forfeit and the planet in shambles.
Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you're not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent. Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down.
"Are you happy with your life?" Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious. Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits. Before a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend."
Adrian Tchaikovksy's critically acclaimed stand-alone novel Children of Time is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden.
The Galahad, a faster-than-light spacecraft, carries 50 scientists and engineers on a mission to prepare Kepler 452b, Earth's nearest habitable neighbor at 1400 light years away. With Earth no longer habitable and the Mars colony slowly failing, they are humanity's best hope. After 10 years in a failed cryogenic bed - body asleep, mind awake - William Chanokh's torture comes to an end as the fog clears, the hatch opens, and his friend and fellow hacker, Tom, greets him...by stabbing a screwdriver into his heart. This is the first time William dies.
Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet.
In her childhood, Rose Franklin accidentally discovered a giant metal hand buried beneath the ground outside Deadwood, South Dakota. As an adult, Dr. Rose Franklin led the team that uncovered the rest of the body parts which together form Themis; a powerful robot of mysterious alien origin. She, along with linguist Vincent, pilot Kara, and the unnamed Interviewer, protected the Earth from geopolitical conflict and alien invasion alike. Now, after 10 years on another world, Rose returns to find her old alliances forfeit and the planet in shambles.
Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you're not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent. Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down.
"Are you happy with your life?" Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious. Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits. Before a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend."
Adrian Tchaikovksy's critically acclaimed stand-alone novel Children of Time is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden.
The Galahad, a faster-than-light spacecraft, carries 50 scientists and engineers on a mission to prepare Kepler 452b, Earth's nearest habitable neighbor at 1400 light years away. With Earth no longer habitable and the Mars colony slowly failing, they are humanity's best hope. After 10 years in a failed cryogenic bed - body asleep, mind awake - William Chanokh's torture comes to an end as the fog clears, the hatch opens, and his friend and fellow hacker, Tom, greets him...by stabbing a screwdriver into his heart. This is the first time William dies.
Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet.
All Systems Red is the tense first science fiction adventure novella in Martha Wells' series The Murderbot Diaries. For fans of Westworld, Ex Machina, Ann Leckie's Imperial Raadch series, or Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. The main character is a deadly security droid that has bucked its restrictive programming and is balanced between contemplative self-discovery and an idle instinct to kill all humans.
Not too long from today, a new, highly contagious virus makes its way across the globe. Most who get sick experience nothing worse than flu, fever, and headaches. But for the unlucky one percent - and nearly five million souls in the United States alone - the disease causes "Lock In": Victims fully awake and aware, but unable to move or respond to stimulus. The disease affects young, old, rich, poor, people of every color and creed. The world changes to meet the challenge.
When Micajah Fenton discovers a crater in his front yard with a broken time glider in the bottom and a naked, virtual woman on his lawn, he delays his plans to kill himself. While helping repair the marooned time traveler's glider, Cager realizes it can return him to his past to correct a mistake that had haunted him his entire life. As payment for his help, the virtual creature living in the circuitry of the marooned glider, sends Cager back in time as his 10-year-old self.
When Ivan Pritchard signs on as a newbie aboard the Mad Astra, it's his final, desperate stab at giving his wife and children the life they deserve. He can survive the hazing of his crewmates, and how many times, really, can near-zero g make you vomit? But there's another challenge looming out there, in the farthest reaches of human exploration, that will test every man, woman and AI on the ship - and will force Ivan to confront the very essence of what makes him human.
Dive into the mysteries of Area X, a remote and lush terrain that has inexplicably sequestered itself from civilization. Twelve expeditions have gone in, and not a single member of any of them has remained unchanged by the experience - for better or worse.
In Borne, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined city half destroyed by drought and conflict. The city is dangerous, littered with discarded experiments from the Company - a biotech firm now derelict - and punished by the unpredictable predations of a giant bear. Rachel ekes out an existence in the shelter of a run-down sanctuary she shares with her partner, Wick, who deals his own homegrown psychoactive biotech.
From best-selling author Neal Stephenson and critically acclaimed historical and contemporary commercial novelist Nicole Galland comes a captivating and complex near-future thriller combining history, science, magic, mystery, intrigue, and adventure that questions the very foundations of the modern world.
Nothing ever changes in Sanders. The town's still got a video store, for God's sake. So why doesn't Eli Teague want to leave? Not that he'd ever admit it, but maybe he's been waiting - waiting for the traveler to come back. The one who's roared into his life twice before, pausing just long enough to drop tantalizing clues before disappearing in a cloud of gunfire and a squeal of tires. The one who's a walking anachronism, with her tricorne hat, flintlock rifle, and steampunked Model A Ford.
When a spaceship landed in an open field in the quiet mill town of Sorrow Falls, Massachusetts, everyone realized humankind was not alone in the universe. With that realization everyone freaked out for a little while. Or almost everyone. The residents of Sorrow Falls took the news pretty well. This could have been due to a certain local quality of unflappability, or it could have been that in three years the ship did exactly nothing other than sit quietly in that field, and nobody understood the full extent of this nothing the ship was doing better than the people who lived right next door.
Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly she has power; on the streets of 18th-century Cairo, she's a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trade she uses to get by - palm readings, zars, healings - are all tricks, sleights of hand, learned skills, a means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles and a reliable way to survive. But when Nahri accidentally summons an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior to her side during one of her cons, she's forced to question all she believes.
The Ruhar hit us on Columbus Day. There we were, innocently drifting along the cosmos on our little blue marble, like the Native Americans in 1492. Over the horizon came ships of a technologically advanced, aggressive culture, and BAM! There went the good old days, when humans got killed only by each other. So, Columbus Day. It fits. When the morning sky twinkled again, this time with Kristang starships jumping in to hammer the Ruhar, we thought we were saved.
Forced to land on a planet they aren't prepared for, human colonists rely on their limited resources to survive. The planet provides a lush but inexplicable landscape - trees offer edible, addictive fruit one day and poison the next, while the ruins of an alien race are found entwined in the roots of a strange plant. Conflicts between generations arise as they struggle to understand one another and grapple with an unknowable alien intellect.
An inventive debut in the tradition of World War Z and The Martian, told in interviews, journal entries, transcripts, and news articles, Sleeping Giants is a literary thriller fueled by a quest for truth - and a fight for control of earthshaking power.
A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near her home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square hole, its walls glowing with intricate carvings. But the firemen who come to save her peer down upon something even stranger: a little girl in the palm of a giant metal hand.
Seventeen years later, the mystery of the bizarre artifact remains unsolved - its origins, architects, and purpose unknown. Its carbon dating defies belief; military reports are redacted; theories are floated, then rejected.
But some can never stop searching for answers.
Rose Franklin is now a highly trained physicist leading a top-secret team to crack the hand's code. And along with her colleagues, she is being interviewed by a nameless interrogator whose power and purview are as enigmatic as the provenance of relic. What's clear is that Rose and her compatriots are on the edge of unraveling history's most perplexing discovery - and figuring out what it portends for humanity. But once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, will the result prove to be an instrument of lasting peace or a weapon of mass destruction?
VAST NETWORKS OF INFORMATION NO ONE IS AWARE OF
I am giving this five stars, mostly for it's entertainment value. It is not the best I have listened to lately, but it kept my attention. It is a little hard to describe, as the mood of the book changed. It started out with a cool concept and seemed to take itself pretty serious. By the end it seemed a bit frivolous or maybe a satire on the subject, edging on Rocky and Bullwinkle I am not a fan of whole books done through interviews and the action being something remembered instead of live, but I still liked this and the core story. I also thought that there was great character development. I also liked the full cast and they certainly made the listening better than reading.
87 of 104 people found this review helpful
Reminds me a bit of Crichton's work with the manner of injecting scientific explanations into the story. Also feels a bit like a novelization of xcom games and Gundam robot shows. Voice work is pretty good, though one voice was somewhat irksome.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
Any additional comments?
Overall, a fast-paced and exciting SF opener. The book started out feeling solid, but not special (large and ancient artifact found in South Dakota that defies current scientific knowledge; assemblage of a team to decipher its meaning and find other artifacts). But as the chapters slid by, all told via interviews, journal entries and reports, characters started to be more fully sketched, individuals showed menace and ruthless focus, and a larger mystery appeared. This middle section was masterful, with Neuvel revealing enough to keep the story moving, but with large enough gaps to make you wonder how far characters would go and why the artifacts exist. This showing with little telling made the book tense and particularly fascinating. Toward the end of the book this breaks down a bit, with a number of details being explicitly lay out, and in that straightforward narrative some of the magic and suspense is lost. Still entertaining and I will continue the series, but a bit more left to the imagination (and a bit less laid out by conveniently interviewed strangers with too many answers) might have better served the narrative.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
Any additional comments?
Sleeping Giants was an amazing audiobook. The whole book is written as a case file, so it’s interviews and journal entries performed by a full cast audio (Audible version). It took about an hour for me to understand what exactly was happening in the story, but then I was hooked. Pieces of a giant metal robot have been found on Earth, and they’re suspected to be the remains of aliens on Earth thousands (or maybe millions) of years ago. The main players in the story are the lead scientist, a mathematician, and a couple of military pilots. And the un-named interviewer. It’s so interesting!
I don’t read a lot of science fiction, but this book was amazing. It was more focused on how humans would act in the face of the known existence of aliens instead of being a sci-fi alien story. I like to call this type of science fiction “near science fiction,” meaning that it could happen right now today. It’s not focused on a futuristic world or space travel. It’s similar to The Martian or Dark Matter where it takes present day society and then introduces a sci-fi element to it.
My favorite character in this book was Kara, one of the pilots. She’s spunky and disrespectful of authority. She does what she wants and she mouths off. The actress who played her was perfect. She reminded me of Julia Styles in all of her mid-90s movies (think 10 Things I Hate About You). I got a kick out of listening to her, and I was routing for her the whole way.
I read this book back in March right before the sequel was released, so it was perfect timing. I didn’t have to wait long to learn what happened next. Even still, there isn’t a huge cliffhanger at the end, so if you don’t get to the sequel right away, it’s not too terrible. Mostly, I just wanted more of the characters once I finished this book, and I was happy that I got that right away.
Blog: Opinionated Book Lover
4 of 5 people found this review helpful
This is my first review of an Audible offering after nearly a decade and scores of purchases. Why am I now motivated to write this? As a service to humanity... danger! Stay away!
I found the story line sophomoric and characters acting more like they're in a high school drama production than highly skilled professionals trying to understand alien artifacts. I also found the transcribed interview device unconvincing and it quickly felt like it was just a way for the author to avoid the effort required to create a narrative.
6 of 8 people found this review helpful
The concept is certainly interesting, but the story fails to engage.
The most interesting character is the nameless man controlling things, but this doesn't quite work as he is too "nameless", and his position within the overall story is not well defined. Given that, I do like the way his dialogue is written; eschewing language contractions gave his speech a strange, formal air that appeals to me.
The other characters tend to be sketched too lightly to really engage with, with the result that they sometimes come off as whiney more that anything else.
I guess they may develop in subsequent books (the cliffhanger is a bit heavy-handed for my liking), and, if so, then the author needs to work on this.
Finally, an important plot point about two thirds of the way through the book was so ridiculous as to annoy me for the remainder.
As others have said, this both feels too long for the story presented, and not long enough as the characters need more development.
17 of 24 people found this review helpful
I don't review books I don't like, so I'll make this exception brief. This book is a narrative on rails. You know all the stops before you arrive. All the characters appear in order of importance. The story stops at the writers beckoning to pursue whatever back story functions as the safest book fat between scenes of [insert plot location] going [select collision type].
If a giant death robot's processor algorithm used search terms to render a readme for its top 5 command options, it would read like this book after fifty compression cycles.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
I started this really wanting to like it. I had just finished "We are Legion (We are Bob)", which I loved, and was hoping to continue on a train of fun scifi. Not all YA novels read like a YA novel - this one really did (... it *is* YA, isn't it?).
There's very little depth to the characters, crushes and relationships pop up in conversations in which they don't belong, and the dialogue puts so many context clues around every "SAT word", they might as well put those phrases into Mr. Smith's 4th period spelling test. A huge leap forward in exposition happens when a mysterious man shows up and just explains everything. I could go on.
This seems to be a popular book and I heard its movie rights have already been sold....? At best, this might be one of those few "See the movie, skip the book" situations.
Two stars because I actually finished it after almost stopping it three times (though, to be fair, I kept waiting for it to be as good as everyone says), and the ensemble cast does a great job with the material they have. The book is fine and all, and probably great for teens, but I won't be spending a credit on the sequel.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
"Sometimes the perfect multicast can really make a book, as is the case with Neuvel's debut. The voices here forged in me a fierce sense of loyalty for the characters I came to care about, and utter hatred for one that was truly evil (who I don't think I would have hated nearly enough if it was the voice in my own head narrating) - and you will loathe her - she is the absolute worst. The unnamed central narrator evolved from someone who was initially off-putting to someone I was desperate to hear speak; he became a reassuring fatherly presence. Overall, the production quality elevated this one from a simple story (which I really shouldn't call "simple" since Sleeping Giants is a geo-political mystery/thriller epistolary novel with alien technology) to an immersive experience that made it feel, above all else, very personal. I was in the trenches with these guys. I can't wait for the next in the series."
15 of 22 people found this review helpful
The premise is awesome, so awesome that I pre ordered the book and waited eagerly for it to be available.
It's super short and the story seems so rushed, sub plots that should have been expanded were left behind to accelerate a much larger plot that was pretty weak. I was expecting a start to a great new science fiction universe or at least a thrilling science fiction narrative similar to contact or the Martian. What I got was a rejected script for an episode of stargate sg1.
The characters were fine, they could have been great, the story jumped around a lot and I barley got to know them, which is a shame.
Worst of all the ending was so unfulfilling, and the attempt at a cliffhanger ending was foiled by the lack of character development. I just did not know enough about them to care about what was happening.
Super disappointed by this book, more so by the fact that it could have been one of the all time great scifi books.
On a better note, the cast reading the book was great, I usually don't like ensemble casts, this book might get me to look further into them.
37 of 55 people found this review helpful