Old Venus

A Collection of Stories

De: George R.R. Martin - editor, Gardner Dozois - editor

Narrado por: Diana Rigg, Full Cast, Michael Dorn, Stephen Fry, Jake Stormoen, W. Morgan Sheppard, Gethin Anthony, Wil Wheaton, Janis Ian, Ron Donachie, Various

Sixteen all-new stories by science fiction's top talents, collected by best-selling author George R. R. Martin and multiple-award-winning editor Gardner Dozois.

From pulp adventures such as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Carson of Venus to classic short stories such as Ray Bradbury's "The Long Rain" to visionary novels such as C. S. Lewis' Perelandra, the planet Venus has loomed almost as large in the imaginations of science fiction writers as Earth's next-nearest neighbor, Mars. But while the Red Planet conjured up in golden-age science-fiction stories was a place of vast deserts and ruined cities, bright-blue Venus was its polar opposite: a steamy, swampy jungle world with strange creatures lurking amid the dripping vegetation. Alas, just as the last century's space probes exploded our dreams of Mars, so too did they shatter our romantic visions of Venus, revealing, instead of a lush paradise, a hellish world inimical to all life.

But don't despair! This new anthology of 16 original stories by some of science fiction's best writers - edited by number-one New York Times best-selling author George R. R. Martin and award-winning editor Gardner Dozois - turns back the clock to that more innocent time, before the hard-won knowledge of science vanquished the infinite possibilities of the imagination.

Featuring all-new stories by:

• Eleanor Arnason
• Elizabeth Bear
• David Brin
• Tobias S. Buckell
• Michael Cassutt
• Joe Haldeman
• Matthew Hughes
• Gwyneth Jones
• Joe R. Lansdale
• Stephen Leigh
• Paul McAuley
• Ian McDonald
• Garth Nix
• Mike Resnick
• Allen M. Steele
• Lavie Tidhar
• And an Introduction by Gardner Dozois

©2015 George R.R. Martin, Gardner Dozois (P)2014 Random House Audio

Entertaining

Mixed quality of stories, but that could be personal preference. Good voice performances. The last story had the most relaxed & unique style and was the most memorable.

A few gems

There’s a lot here… And some of it is quite good. Some of it seems to suffer from following the subject matter too closely… Retro and pulp doesn’t mean in substantial. This was definitely a mixed bag for me.

Overall amazing

I love collections of Science fiction. Short or otherwise they always seem to posit such wonderful worlds that we can explore. This book was awesome, a few of the stories were not to great in my opinion, but overall this book has some amazing tales in it.

Excellent book

If you could sum up Old Venus in three words, what would they be?

The stories in, "Old Venus", were all very good, and there was lots of them. I can never remember specific stories, but I know there was some that were so action packed that I felt like I was watching a movie thriller. Rather then thinking about them as being on Venus, which we now no is uninhabitable, I just imagined them being about distant planets in distant galaxies. This was my favorite, "Audible", selection so far. I look forward to more like this.

A Feast for Lovers of Planetary Romance

I'm not going to review or critique any of the actual stories or the vocal performances, because they're all fantastic.

But there's something that really pisses me off about this audiobook: The Table of Contents menu. The entire audiobook has been divided into 228 "chapters" that average between about 5 and 8 minutes long, each one labeled only with a number; not the introduction, not the credits, and none of the story titles. I find this baffling, since somebody spent money when it came to the voice talent they hired (Steven Fry, to name one), which is absolutely stellar. Was it laziness that caused such an oversight in formatting? Did they simply think that nobody would care? I find it was really inconsiderate to the reader.