Noumenon

By: Marina J. Lostetter

Narrated by: Celeste Ciulla

Length: 15 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

With nods to Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series, the real science of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, a touch of Hugh Howey's Wool, and told through echoes of Octavia Butler's voice, this is a powerful tale of space travel, adventure, discovery, and humanity that unfolds through a series of generational vignettes.

In 2088, humankind is at last ready to explore beyond Earth's solar system. But one uncertainty remains: Where do we go? Astrophysicist Reggie Straifer has an idea. He's discovered an anomalous star that appears to defy the laws of physics and proposes the creation of a deep-space mission to find out whether the star is a weird natural phenomenon or something manufactured. The journey will take eons. In order to maintain the genetic talent of the original crew, humankind's greatest ambition - to explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy - is undertaken by clones. But a clone is not a perfect copy, and each new generation has its own quirks, desires, and neuroses. As the centuries fly by, the society living aboard the nine ships (designated "Convoy Seven") changes and evolves, but their mission remains the same: to reach Reggie's mysterious star and explore its origins - and implications.

A mosaic novel of discovery, Noumenon - in a series of vignettes - examines the dedication, adventure, growth, and fear of having your entire world consist of nine ships in the vacuum of space. The men and women, and even the AI, must learn to work and live together in harmony, as their original DNA is continuously replicated and they are born again and again into a thousand new lives. With the stars their home and the unknown their destination, they are on a voyage of many lifetimes - an odyssey to understand what lies beyond the limits of human knowledge and imagination.

©2017 Little Lost Stories, LLC (P)2017 Recorded Books

Not like the rest

I have alot of other stories like it. I was pleased that it was not like the rest. It was a good use of my time.

More character study than science fiction

I found this book to be more of a character study of people placed in unusual and extremely stressful situations than a typical sci-fi novel. Granted, the characters were placed in these stressful situations by a science fiction plot line, but the science fiction is only 15% or so of the story and the character study is the rest. Not really my cup of tea.

Just not good science fiction

The narrator was horrible. Somehow, she always sounded condescending to me or thought I wasn't bright enough to understand the poor science in the story. The story lacked substance. I couldn't finish the book; it was so bad. I am a long-time Audible listener, and this ranks in the bottom ten percent of the books I've heard.

Great Epic SF

Loved this audiobook! It spans multiple generations of characters on a journey of Epic proportions.

Wrong Narrator for Genre

I gave up on the Audible version and just read the book. The narrator’s tone and inflections would be better suited to a fairytale than sci-fi.

The story is great, but the narration...

The story is great, but the narration drove me crazy.
Lostetter's writing is superb and occasionally inspired. The quality is right up there with David Brin, and I definitely recommend this book as a traditional printed novel. But I have an issue with the narration in this audiobook. Ciulla is great with voices, the characterization comes through, she does the voicing of different genders well, and I never was confused who was the viewpoint character or who was speaking the dialogue. Everything would be just fine, but her cadence almost drove me to abandon the book. She has pauses in her phrasing mid-sentence that simply ruins the story. It gives so much of the narration an artificial sense to it, as if a computer were adding a fraction of a second to the space between some words in a sentence. Even when she is reading the perspective of an AI, it sounds off. It seems so obvious to me, that I think if Ciulla revisited her approach, she could correct this strange tic in her performance. It's almost as if she is having an issue with cue-pickup, but the lag occurs mid-sentence. I heard it also in a story she narrated, Ancillary Justice, which I did abandon specifically because the narration ruined the story.

Thought-provoking Science Fiction

Noumenon is ambitious in scope, the kind of science fiction that favors big ideas over action (although there's some of that too). It's an engaging "generation ship" tale that explores questions about humanity, morality and artificial intelligence. I really enjoyed it.

The story is told in a series of connected vignettes and, consequently, the point of view shifts from character to character. I thought Celese Ciulla fared better reading some characters than others but overall, she does a solid job with the narration.

If you like robot voices.....

This story was an interesting combination of interstellar travel and sociology. I would have bought the hard copy had I seen it in a book store first.
The narrator however made such odd choices in her inflection that I really had to fight through it to follow along.
I had to give this just three stars overall for good story and poor narrator.

I wanted to love Noumenon, I really did ...

After listening to Noumenon for only a couple of chapters, I returned it to Audible for a refund. It just wasn't working for me. But a number of books later and after re-reading the many positive reviews, I decided to give it another try. 15 hours later, I can't say it was worth it. Not because the writing is bad (it's not) or the narrator is crappy (she's pretty good), but because of the missed potential ... the lie. I thought Noumenon was science fiction; a story about space travel and alien discovery. A multi-generational exploration into the unknown and how that journey might affect a crew or evolve its culture. But despite its cool cover art and alluring concept, Noumenon is none of those things.

Instead, it's a collection of remarkably contemporary and almost entirely independent social dramas, like listening to the Lifetime channel on TV roll out one socially relevant family drama after another (in this case, most all focused on prejudice). Sure, it's credibly done and at times even interesting, but the whole "space journey" thing is mostly a plot device to jump us into and out of the lives of different generations of clones, so that new dramas about prejudice can be told. Again that's fine, it's just not what I was expecting. What quickly became frustrating was the author's complete avoidance to even explore the sci-fi back story with any real depth. Hundreds of years into the future, multiple generations of space travel, but no evolution in thinking, culture, science, technology (what, no drones?), or any apparent growth within this self-contained and interdependent society. There's no sense of exploration, no tactical strategy, no intellectual analysis ... it's all just window dressing. And a lot of missed potential.

Would be 5 stars if it weren’t sexist

The story is excellent, with its creativity. However It suffers from the sexism of the old school authors like Asimov. Women are defined by their physical appearance while men have no limitation. Gender stereotypes like men showboat while women mother.