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Aurora
- Narrated by: Ali Ahn
- Length: 16 hrs and 56 mins
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Publisher's summary
Our voyage from Earth began generations ago. Now we approach our destination. A new home. Aurora.
Brilliantly imagined and beautifully told, Aurora is the work of a writer at the height of his powers.
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The Men Who Shoot at Feral Hogs
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Robotic performance, potentially interesting story
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Performance
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Howard Falcon almost lost his life in an accident as the first human astronaut to explore the atmosphere of Jupiter - and a combination of human ingenuity and technical expertise brought him back. But he is no longer himself. Instead he has been changed into an augmented human: part man, part machine, and exceptionally capable.
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Almost stopped listening. Glad I didn't.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Great story, mediocre audio book.
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The Engines of God
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Conceptually intriguing, but uneven writing style
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Performance
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No Sense of Conclusion
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Gateways
- Original New Stories Inspired by Frederik Pohl
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It isn’t easy to get a group of bestselling SF authors to write new stories for an anthology, but that’s what Elizabeth Anne Hull has done in this powerhouse book. With original, captivating tales by Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, David Brin, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Joe Haldeman, Harry Harrison, Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, Gene Wolfe, and others, Gateways is a SF event that will be a must-buy for SF readers of all tastes, from the traditional to the cutting edge; from the darkly serious to the laugh-out-loud funny.
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Spectacular.
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Welcome to Ringworld, an intermediate step between Dyson Spheres and planets. The gravitational force created by a rotation on its axis of 770 miles per second means no need for a roof. Walls 1,000 miles high at each rim will let in the sun and prevent much air from escaping. Larry Niven's novel, Ringworld, is the winner of the 1970 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1970 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the 1972 Ditmars, an Australian award for Best International Science Fiction.
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Genuinely Creative
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Emanuel Goldsmith, a famous poet, murdered eight people, then disappeared. Three people want to find him: an aspiring writer, an embittered scientist who wants to use him, and a policewoman who needs to put him in custody before the Selectors, a vigilante organization, get to him first.
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fantastic, a whole new experience on audio
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Performance
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Story
Twenty years after the discovery of artificial wormholes launches Earth space exploration to unforeseeable heights, Starplex Director Keith Lansing investigates a mysterious vessel that soon threatens the station with intergalactic war.
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Tribute to Arthur C. Clarke
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By: Robert J. Sawyer
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The Reality Dysfunction
- Night's Dawn Trilogy, Book 1
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In AD 2600, the human race is finally beginning to realize its full potential. Hundreds of colonized planets scattered across the galaxy host a multitude of prosperous and wildly diverse cultures. Genetic engineering has pushed evolution far beyond nature's boundaries, defeating disease and producing extraordinary spaceborn creatures. Huge fleets of sentient trader starships thrive on the wealth created by the industrialization of entire star systems, and throughout inhabited space the Confederation Navy keeps the peace.
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Finally on Audible!! My favorite Hamilton series!
- By Patrick on 04-05-16
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A World Out of Time
- By: Larry Niven
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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After more than two hundred years as a corpsicle, Jaybee Corbell awoke in someone else’s body and under threat of instant annihilation if he made a wrong move while they were training him for a one-way mission to the stars. But Corbell bided his time and made his own move. Once he was outbound, where the society that ruled Earth could not reach him, he headed his starship toward the galactic core.
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Do you know how people get old?
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 11-13-12
By: Larry Niven
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Lockstep
- By: Karl Schroeder
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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When 17-year-old Toby McGonigal finds himself lost in space, separated from his family, he expects his next drift into cold sleep to be his last. After all, the planet he' s orbiting is frozen and sunless, and the cities are dead. But when Toby wakes again, he' s surprised to discover a thriving planet, a strange and prosperous galaxy, and something stranger still - that he' s been asleep for 14,000 years. Welcome to the Lockstep Empire, where civilization is kept alive by careful hibernation. Here cold sleeps can last decades and waking moments mere weeks.
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A Great Idea, Poorly Served
- By D. M. ROBISON on 04-01-14
By: Karl Schroeder
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Marsbound
- By: Joe Haldeman
- Narrated by: Liza Kaplan
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Young Carmen Dula and her family are about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime - they're going to Mars. Once on the Red Planet, however, Carmen realizes things are not so different from Earth. There are chores to do, lessons to learn, and oppressive authority figures to rebel against.
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Meh.
- By Wes Parker on 03-19-09
By: Joe Haldeman
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Expendable
- League of Peoples, Book 1
- By: James Alan Gardner
- Narrated by: Christine Marshall
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Under the benevolent leadership of the League of Peoples, there is no war, little crime, and life is sacred...unless you're an Explorer. The ugly, the flawed, the misfit, the deformed, they are the unwanted, flung to the farthest corners of the galaxy to investigate hostile planets and strange, vicious creatures. Out there, there are a thousand different - and terrible - ways to die.
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FU@@ING EXPLORERS
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 03-06-15
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Fear the Sky
- The Fear Saga, Book 1
- By: Stephen Moss
- Narrated by: R.C. Bray
- Length: 20 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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From the Audie-nominated narrator of The Martian. In eleven years' time, a million members of an alien race will arrive at Earth. Years before they enter orbit, their approach will be announced by the flare of a thousand flames in the sky, their ships' huge engines burning hard to slow them from the vast speeds needed to cross interstellar space. These foreboding lights will shine in our night sky like new stars, getting ever brighter until they outshine even the sun, casting ominous shadows and banishing the night until they suddenly blink out.
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Audible Where Are The Rest?!
- By ByEqualMeasure - julie on 09-14-15
By: Stephen Moss
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In the Ocean of Night
- Galactic Center, Book 1
- By: Gregory Benford
- Narrated by: Maxwell Caulfield
- Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 2019. NASA astronaut Nigel Walmsley is sent on a mission to intercept a rogue asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Ordered to destroy it, he instead discovers that it is actually the shell of a derelict space probe - a wreck with just enough power to emit a single electronic signal….
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Like some Space with your Soaps?
- By Bradley on 05-15-12
By: Gregory Benford
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Distress
- By: Greg Egan
- Narrated by: Adam Epstein
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Investigative reporter Andrew Worth turns down a documentary on a mysterious new mental illness - "Distress," or acute clinical anxiety syndrome, for another assignment. He's on his way to the artificial island of Stateless, where the world's top physicists are gathering to decide on a new TOE, or Theory of Everything, to replace Einstein's outmoded legacy.
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A good book ruined by a poor (and strange) reading
- By David on 12-06-13
By: Greg Egan
What listeners say about Aurora
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-25-15
Best story and narration, I've heard in long while
I really loved this story about humans, our ambitions and frailties. Excellent and thought-provoking stuff :-)
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2 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 06-14-19
Surprisingly good!
A page-turner, for sure. Intelligent hard scifi, just the way I like it! What a pleasant surprise, since I didn't know what to expect.
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- Terence Blake
- 07-29-15
NO STARSHIP, NO CRY
This is a very involving story, and very intelligent writing. The narrator is excellent, and makes the book even more enjoyable.
Supposedly “hard-science” sf: hard for the accurate description of the constraints of space travel, but it also contains "soft-science" elements that add a lot of interest to the story. Perhaps it should be called “speculative fiction” in the sense of half science fiction and half philo-fiction. I had never read any of Kim Stanley Robinson’s books before AURORA, and I think that it a good introduction to his work. I have now begun reading RED MARS and I am already coming across many of the same concepts that AURORA develops in more concentrated form. The range of knowledge mobilised in this novel is encyclopaedic, but I never found the story dull. I would distinguish the pace of the action, which was sometimes slow, from the pace of the invention (action, ideas, and style) which is always engrossing. So I found the novel enjoyable and thought-provoking, and never slow-moving.
The text is multi-layered: a hard science attempt to spell out concretely what voyage to a “nearby” solar system in a generational ship would be like; a more philosophical reflection on the mysteries of consciousness, the self, and free will; an exploration of the human propensity for “living in ideas” and making bad choices based on fantasy or ideology, a deployment of biological and ecological science beyond the mere fascination with technological prowess; a vision of human thinking and behavior as determined by errors and biases that cognitive science is only now beginning to understand.
The whole story is a science-inspired deconstruction of the fantasy of traveling to the stars, by taking that fantasy literally. Yet the story is metaphorical too: the starship is a prison, and our own ideas are a prison. The novel seeks to establish that what Robinson calls the “technological sublime” does not take us outside of our (mental and physical) prison, but just transports it elsewhere. The whole book is a plea for the use of science as enrichment of our present life rather than as escapism, into some beyond.
Robinson wants to enlarge our scientific vision: he tries to be encyclopedic, and to break with the hegemony of physics and technology in our thinking and imagination. So he includes not just hard physics, but also biology, sociology, systems thinking, philosophy of mind and of language, and cognitive science. Factoring in these considerations gives a very different approach to the generational starship than was customary in classical, physics-obsessed science fiction. This makes the book a stimulating and powerful read.
However, in AURORA politics suffers, as it is subordinated to Robinson’s reflections on biology and cognitive science. This scientistic explanation of human behaviour generates what some people decry as the “pessimism” or the "conservatism" of the vision embodied in the book. I do not think that this vision is pessimistic or conservative. Technological realism is not pessimism, even if it obliges us to relinquish a fantasy we cherish. Ecological responsibility is not conservatism, even if it obliges us to evaluate actions in terms of sustainability. Ultimately the book does not reduce, but enlarges and enriches.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Tezby
- 10-22-19
Unusual choices, hyper detailed, epic...
Early in the book, a character instructs an AI that's guiding a generation ship to its destination that it needs to learn how to tell a story. After a few false starts, the AI gets the hang of it and the point of view switches from the humans onboard, to the AI telling the story. It's a bold and unusual choice, as the narrator slowly evolves in sophistication from basic description, through comically inept speculation on what the humans might be feeling until, towards the end of the novel, the AI has a firm grasp on the art of story telling as well as an acute self-awareness.
The subtle production of this audio book, with a slight phasing on Ali Ahn's voice in the early stages of the AI's development is done very well, and then to a much more normal 'human' sounding voice. Ahn's performance is overall one of the best I've listened to, with the one minor complaint that all her male voices sound like slightly pushy teenagers [even when they are in their 80s!]
That aside, this is an excellent book that takes detailed descriptions of the arcane functions of a generation ship to a new, almost absurd level. There are long disquisitions on the importance of elemental balance of soil, air and water on board, and diversions into questions of the function of machines, the techniques for deceleration, and so on. Personally, I like this kind of thing when it's well done, and for long stretches Robinson's book becomes an abstract meditative drone of detail. To Ahn's credit, she makes the prose warm and enjoyable.
Many have commented on the ending of the book and, without spoiling anything, I'd simply say that while it makes thematic sense and links back to the book's opening - and the main character's emotional arc - it's also long enough to feel strangely unnecessary. Still, the descriptions at the end of the book were enough to keep me involved.
High recommended.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Jon
- 11-18-15
Hard Science Fiction
Would you try another book from Kim Stanley Robinson and/or Ali Ahn?
no
Would you recommend Aurora to your friends? Why or why not?
yes
How could the performance have been better?
The performance became very very monotonous. Trying to create the sound of a quantum computer the sound engineer has decided to add some kind of chorus effect to the voice of the narrator and this coupled with her slow monotonous tone became massively distracting and annoying as time went by.
Do you think Aurora needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?
No
Any additional comments?
If you like science fiction where the emphasis is on the 'science' Kim Stanley Robinson is the man for you. Every idea he comes up with has a clear scientific justification and plausibility. He must have undertaken huge amounts of research from the gravitational effects of living on a moon orbiting a large planet to the ecological effects of being ecologically isolated on a long space voyage. Science is never used to mystify or bamboozle. However all this scientific rigour comes at a price, his pacing and story telling is glacially slow and sometimes painful.
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- AG
- 03-01-20
Just boring
I expected listening a thrilling space story, but it was the opposite. Endless boring ravings about personal, political and sociological issues of no interest. A story that gets nowhere. Characters paper-thin. To worsen everything, the tone and rhythm of the reader seem ideal for getting children to sleep. At two thirds of the book I quit.
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- Anonymous User
- 11-29-18
Great story let down with a terrible end
I found myself fast forwarding the ending. All the soul of the story just winked out without much fanfare, and left you on a beach with no real reason to stick around. No pay off for time invested.
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- Pete N
- 04-11-20
Narration choice
The story of Aurora, to the extent I could get through it, is fascinating and compelling. But, and it's an insurmountable but, I cannot get past the narration. I have found it one-dimensional, listless and lacking in almost any characterisation. I tried it at 1.2x the speed, hoping for improvement somehow, but to no avail. For me, a potentially amazing book has been reduced to the point that I have ditched the audio and will read it instead.
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