The Year's Top Short SF Novels 5
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You know that feeling when you’re at work and you’ve had enough of people, and then the boss walks in with yet another job that needs to be done right this second or the world will end, but all you want to do is go home and binge your favorite shows? And you're a sentient murder machine programmed for destruction? Congratulations, you're Murderbot. Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable AI you’ll listen to this century.
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Wildcat colonies are illegal, unauthorized, and secret - so when an injured stranger shows up at the wildcat colony New Seattle, the colony leaders are understandably suspicious of who he is and what he represents. His story of how he’s come to their colony is shocking, surprising, and might have bigger consequences than anyone could have expected. Walk the Plank is a tale from John Scalzi's The Human Division, a series of self-contained but interrelated short stories.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 899
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You know that feeling when you’re at work and you’ve had enough of people, and then the boss walks in with yet another job that needs to be done right this second or the world will end, but all you want to do is go home and binge your favorite shows? And you're a sentient murder machine programmed for destruction? Congratulations, you're Murderbot. Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable AI you’ll listen to this century.
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- Length: 1 hr and 20 mins
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A mysterious plague ushers in an intergalactic war that ravages the galaxy for decades. A soldier and a pilot are tasked to deliver a package. A messenger and a refugee decide to work together on a dying alien planet. A love letter is lost that could be the key to a new future. A dark comedy about the messages we carry in our bones.
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Ouch - couldn't get passed the voices..
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The Year's Top Short SF Novels
- By: Stephen Baxter, Geoffrey A. Landis, David Moles, and others
- Narrated by: Tom Dheere, Adam Epstein, Nicola Barber
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 57
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Short novels may well be the perfect length for science-fiction stories. They are movie-length tales that resonate with moxie while fully exploring characters, new worlds, and ideas. The stories in this unabridged audio collection are the best-of-the-best short science-fiction novels published in 2010 by current and emerging masters of this form.
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5 out of 5 stars
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fantastic
- By wendy on 02-14-12
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Salvation Lost
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- By: Peter F. Hamilton
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 15 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 412
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 371
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 369
The comparative utopia of 23rd-century Earth is about to go dreadfully awry when a seemingly benign alien race is abruptly revealed to be one of the worst threats humanity has ever faced. Driven by an intense religious extremism, the Olyix are determined to bring everyone to their version of god as they see it. But they may have met their match in humanity, who are not about to go gently into that good night or spend the rest of their days cowering in hiding.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Nothing better for me than the Hamilton/Lee combo.
- By OlliespotBookReviews on 10-29-19
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The B-Team
- The Human Division, Episode 1
- By: John Scalzi
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 2 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,465
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,331
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,340
Colonial Union Ambassador Ode Abumwe and her team are used to life on the lower end of the diplomatic ladder. But when a high-profile diplomat goes missing, Abumwe and her team are last minute replacements on a mission critical to the Colonial Union’s future. As the team works to pull off their task, CDF Lieutenant Harry Wilson discovers there’s more to the story of the missing diplomats than anyone expected... a secret that could spell war for humanity.
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Whole Series – Just OK
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Walk the Plank
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- By: John Scalzi
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,095
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 985
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 987
Wildcat colonies are illegal, unauthorized, and secret - so when an injured stranger shows up at the wildcat colony New Seattle, the colony leaders are understandably suspicious of who he is and what he represents. His story of how he’s come to their colony is shocking, surprising, and might have bigger consequences than anyone could have expected. Walk the Plank is a tale from John Scalzi's The Human Division, a series of self-contained but interrelated short stories.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Boring Hard-to-Follow Transcript
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We Only Need the Heads
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CDF Lieutenant Harry Wilson has been loaned out to a CDF platoon tasked with secretly removing an unauthorized colony of humans on an alien world. Colonial Ambassador Abumwe has been ordered to participate in final negotiations with an alien race the Union hopes to make allies. Wilson and Abumwe’s missions are fated to cross - and in doing so, place both missions at risk of failure.
We Only Need the Heads is a tale from John Scalzi's The Human Division.
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2 out of 5 stars
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* said;* said;* said;* said;* said;
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A Voice in the Wilderness
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Albert Birnbaum was once one of the biggest political talk show hosts around, but these days he’s watching his career enter a death spiral. A stranger offers a solution to his woes, promising to put him back on top. It’s everything Birnbaum wants, but is there a catch? And does Birnbaum actually care if there is? "A Voice in the Wilderness" is a tale from John Scalzi's The Human Division, a series of self-contained but interrelated short stories set in the Old Man's War universe.
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See Review for "The B-Team"
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A novella set in the universe of James S. A. Corey's best-selling Expanse series, Auberon explores a new world and the age-old dangers that humanity has carried with it to the stars. Auberon is one of the first and most important colony worlds in humanity's reach, and the new conquering faction has come to claim it. Governor Rittenaur has come to bring civilization and order to the far outpost and guarantee the wealth and power of the Empire. But Auberon already has its own history, a complex culture, and a criminal kingpin named Erich with very different plans.
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Tight, Clean, Pure Expanse Perfection
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Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change-the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens-while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story (the basis for the 2016 movie Arrival), a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection.
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Amazing collection of short stories
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Watchlist
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We are being watched. That this statement no longer shocks is itself shocking. Post-Snowden, we know that the government - everywhere - has been reading our emails, listening to our phone calls, and watching whatever we do on the Internet. The only thing concealed is the nature of our watchers. In Watchlist, some of today's most prominent and promising fiction writers from around the globe respond to, reflect on, and mine for inspiration the surveillance culture in which we live.
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Having traveled the width of the galaxy to unearth details of its own murderous transgressions, as well as those of the GrayCris Corporation, Murderbot is heading home to help Dr. Mensah - its former owner (protector? friend?) - submit evidence that could prevent GrayCris from destroying more colonists in its never-ending quest for profit. But who's going to believe a SecUnit gone rogue? And what will become of it when it's caught?
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Please ma'am, may i have moar Murderbot?
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The Forever
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Jon Ryan is irreverent, cocky, funny, and walks with a swagger. The cocky fighter pilot turned astronaut is also Earth's only chance for survival. The planet Jupiter, thrown off orbit, will destroy Earth in less than a century. Jon volunteers for the most ambitious, desperate mission ever conceived: His consciousness must be transferred into an experimental android host, where he'll live an immortal - and lonely - life. Jon's only companion on his 50-year voyage is his ship's irritable AI.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Magical fix to all problems & grotesque side plots
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The Last Emperox
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 2,528
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The collapse of The Flow, the interstellar pathway between the planets of the Interdependency, has accelerated. Entire star systems - and billions of people - are becoming cut off from the rest of human civilization. This collapse was foretold through scientific prediction...and yet, even as the evidence is obvious and insurmountable, many still try to rationalize, delay and profit from, these final days of one of the greatest empires humanity has ever known.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Solid End To a Trilogy
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Rogue Protocol
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Sci-fi's favorite antisocial AI is back on a mission. The case against the too-big-to-fail GrayCris Corporation is floundering, and more importantly, authorities are beginning to ask more questions about where Dr. Mensah's SecUnit is. And Murderbot would rather those questions went away. For good. Martha Wells' Rogue Protocol is the third in the Murderbot Diaries series, starring a humanlike android who keeps getting sucked back into adventure after adventure, though it just wants to be left alone, away from humanity and small talk.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great, but...
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Belisarius is a quantum man, an engineered Homo quantus who fled the powerful insight of dangerously addictive quantum senses. He found a precarious balance as a con man, but when a client offers him untold wealth to move a squadron of warships across an enemy wormhole, he must embrace his birthright to even try. In fact, the job is so big that he'll need a crew built from all the new sub-branches of humanity. If he succeeds, he might trigger an interstellar war, but success might also point the way to the next step of Homo quantus evolution.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Mouth noises overshadow the story
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Fall; or, Dodge in Hell is pure, unadulterated fun: a grand drama of analog and digital, man and machine, angels and demons, gods and followers, the finite and the eternal. In this exhilarating epic, Neal Stephenson raises profound existential questions and touches on the revolutionary breakthroughs that are transforming our future. Combining the technological, philosophical, and spiritual in one grand myth, he delivers a mind-blowing speculative literary saga for the modern age.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Tedious & Mannered 2nd Half
- By Barry McWilliams on 06-24-19
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The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories
- By: Gregory Benford, Gwyneth Jones, Shariann Lewitt, and others
- Narrated by: Tom Dheere, Nancy Linari, Henrietta Meire
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 23
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 19
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 18
An unabridged audio collection spotlighting the "best of the best" hard science fiction stories published in 2016 by current and emerging masters of the genre, edited by Allan Kaster, as narrated by top voice talents.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Only a few good stories
- By Jeppe on 03-22-18
Publisher's Summary
Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.
In The Man Who Sold the Moon by Cory Doctorow, hardware geeks and Burning Man fanatics band together to overcome challenges such as crowdfunding a space mission, falling in love, battling cancer, and perfecting an open source engineering marvel in order to put a 3-D printing robot that creates ceramic building panels from sand on the moon. The Man Who Sold the Moon won the 2015 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short science fiction.
In The Regular by Ken Liu, a cybernetically enhanced private investigator keeps her emotions in check with a piece of hardware called The Regulator while she searches for the murderer of a prostitute whom she suspects is a serial killer.
Claudius Rex, by John P. Murphy, is a sci-fi whodunit comedy that pays tongue-in-cheek homage to Rex Stout and Isaac Asimov. A humble PI partners with an arrogant AI to solve the murder of the AI's creator. Ai!
In Of All Possible Worlds by Jay O'Connell, an old timeline wizard coaxes a younger man to become his apprentice in an attempt to edit Earth's history so that the planet will escape the ravages of the Long Night and ensure that our timeline is the best of all possible worlds.
In Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key by William Preston, the US government brings a telepathic interrogator who is a veteran of the American war in Iraq to a secret complex in Texas to get a handle on an enigmatic prisoner known as "The Old Man". A test of wills ensues between the two in this homage to Doc Savage.
Finally, in The Last Log of the Lachrimosa by Alastair Reynolds, set in the Revelation Space universe, a crew investigates a cave on a volcanic planet in the hopes of salvaging valuable abandoned tech only to discover that the cave is defended by a horrific psychological weapon.
What members say
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Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Sean
- 03-05-16
Narrator sounds like Tony Danza
Is there anything you would change about this book?
The reader
How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?
Remove the reader
How did the narrator detract from the book?
He made it impossible to listen to. His accents are terrible particularly his "NYC" street accent from the first story. And let's not forgot Mr. Peabody (of Bullwinkle fame) from that same story. What kind of voice actor is this?
Did The Year's Top Short SF Novels 5 inspire you to do anything?
Never listen to the narrator again.
Any additional comments?
Redo this book with John Lee
4 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Ivan
- 02-27-17
4 out of 5 stories are excellent, couldn't get through 1
The anthology is worth it for 4 out of the 5 stories. The "Man Who Sold the Moon" is one of my all time favorites! However, I would recommend skipping "Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key". I listened to an hour of it hoping it would go somewhere and it just never did. I believe it appears 3rd in order.
2 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- John
- 10-04-17
good stories the bad audio
the stories were all pretty good but the audio quality for half the books is intolerable. all of the ones read by the male readers were fine. but
I had to skip an entire book buy female reader
1 person found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Steven DeBusk
- 04-20-19
Most of these are great.
A couple good mysteries, the first in the book was quite good. Corey Doctorow’s story is probably the stand out. Very readable and fun with great characters. All the stories are read by different readers, of varying quality. I did skip one mystery story/reader in there, I just couldn’t let into it. Very much worth the buy.