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The Star Diaries
- Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy
- Narrated by: David Marantz
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
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This collection of short stories centers around one character, space traveller Ijon Tichy. In these stories, Stanislaw Lem's "Candide of the Cosmos" encounters bizarre civilizations and creatures in space that serve to satirize science, the rational mind, theology, and other icons of human pride.
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Not what I Expected
- By Mark on 02-20-08
By: Julian Barnes
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In the Matter of Nikola Tesla
- By: Anthony Flacco
- Narrated by: Bernard Clark
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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This fictionalized story of the true-life genius Nikola Tesla - arguably the most influential inventor in history - offers a "young-to-old" portrayal in the form of "A Romance of the Mind". It reveals his impassioned inner life and his secret love for Karina, the muse no one else can see who brings him life-altering inspirations.
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Excellent fictionalization
- By C. Elliott on 06-17-13
By: Anthony Flacco
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The Fountains of Paradise
- By: Arthur C. Clarke
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Vannemar Morgan's dream is to link Earth to the stars with the greatest engineering feat of all time: a 24,000-mile-high space elevator. But first he must solve a million technical, political, and economic problems while allaying the wrath of God. For the only possible site on the planet for Morgans Orbital Tower is the monastery atop the Sacred Mountain of Sri Kanda.
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Hard
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 04-30-11
By: Arthur C. Clarke
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Doug Bradley's Spinechillers Audio Books, Volume 1
- Classic Horror Stories
- By: Charles Dickens, H. P. Lovecraft, Saki, and others
- Narrated by: Doug Bradley
- Length: 2 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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This volume features William F Harvey's original undead hand story "The Beast with Five Fingers" that sparked many movies including Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead". Poe's classic "The Tell Tale Heart" is joined by Lovecraft's creepy tale of alienation "The Outsider", and a chilling Dickens ghost story "The Signalman".
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Excellent stories and wonderful performance
- By Gavin Lees on 10-12-18
By: Charles Dickens, and others
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Molloy
- By: Samuel Beckett
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett, Dermot Crowley
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Written initially in French, later translated by the author into English, Molloy is the first book in Dublin-born Samuel Beckett's trilogy. It was published shortly after WWII and marked a new, mature writing style, which was to dominate the remainder of his working life. Molloy is less a novel than a set of two monologues narrated by Molloy and his pursuer, Moran.
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Nauseating, boring, hilarious, and magnificent
- By Gene on 02-21-05
By: Samuel Beckett
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The Tar-Aiym Krang
- A Pip & Flinx Adventure
- By: Alan Dean Foster
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Moth was a beautiful planet, the only one with wings - two great golden clouds suspended in space around it. Here was a wide-open world for any venture a man might scheme. The planet attracted unwary travelers, hardened space-sailors, and merchant buccaneers - a teeming, constantly shifting horde that provided a comfortable income for certain quick-witted fellows like Flinx and his pet flying snake Pip.
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The First of the Flinx and Pip Novels AT LAST!
- By Chris on 01-20-09
By: Alan Dean Foster
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The Complete Cosmicomics
- Translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, & William Weaver
- By: Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin - translator, Tim Parks - translator, and others
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 15 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Italo Calvino's beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of an ageless guide named Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells the story of the origins of the universe. Poignant, fantastical, and wise, these 34 dazzling stories - collected here in one definitive anthology - relate complex scientific and mathematical concepts to our everyday world.
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Moments of Greatness = Worth the Read
- By Amazon Customer on 08-06-18
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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Waldo & Magic, Inc.
- By: Robert A. Heinlein
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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North Power Air is in trouble. Their aircraft are crashing at an alarming rate and no one can figure out the cause. Desperate for an answer, they turn to Waldo, a crippled misanthropic genius who lives in a home in orbit around Earth, where the absence of gravity means that his feeble muscle strength does not confine him helplessly in a wheelchair. But Waldo has little reason to want to help the rest of humanity - until he learns that the solution to Earth’s problems also holds the key to his own.
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I'M NEVER IN A HURRY
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 02-13-16
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Good story, but maybe better ingested visually.
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Better Read then Heard
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Excellent!
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Good story, but maybe better ingested visually.
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The planet Quinta is pocked by ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. In stark contrast, the crew of the spaceship Hermes represents a knowledge-seeking Earth. As they approach Quinta, a dark poetry takes over and leads them into a nightmare of misunderstanding.
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Instruction Manual
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who can listen too this?
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Mediocre Mother to Gravity's Rainbow and the Truman Show?
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Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality.
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The most ridiculous narration
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What listeners say about The Star Diaries
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- BK
- 02-22-20
🌠stellar humor
A firework of ideas and fictional realities. David Marantz read the diaries of this extraordinary traveler Ion Tichy in a very convincing manner. St. Lem balanced and decorated the many philosophical aspects
with hyper-Cosmic humour. We are lucky that the man of many journeys didn't loose it due to the many severe challenges he had to face!
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- Richard
- 05-27-23
Moments of absolute ridiculous brilliance
A philosopher and commenter of modern society, Lem weaves tales of distant places that are close to home.
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- GREGORY
- 11-10-16
Story of a space-traveling Candide
One of the most entertaining and insightful satires written in any genre. I've read only maybe half a dozen books that made me LOL and this one is one of them. I read it some thirty years ago and much of the satire was lost on me but know in my late fifties I can appreciate every reference. Very good translation which is a feat in case of Lem's satirical writing because it relies heavily on made up names and words. The subject matter, the human condition, is universal. I love how he ignores the details that so many writers are overthinking and give their books pedantic and overworked quality. If there was ever a movie made I would see it done in a steampunk fashion. I recommend this book to older readers who enjoy deadpan humor delivery and lived long enough to need a less than serious approach to our human foibles.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Isaac Sharp
- 05-06-14
Eh... It lost me
Is there anything you would change about this book?
Started good. Kinda Douglas Adams-esque scifi parody, but got pretty repetitive.
And it is full of pseudo-scientific jargon that is at first amusing (again, a la Adams) but at a certain point just makes it really hard to follow.
What about David Marantz’s performance did you like?
Great performance, just not a great book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- mistercat
- 06-11-21
Great stories of fabular space travel
Many reviewers don't seem to realize this was first published in 1957 and the idea are very prescient. Stanislaw Lem was a polymath with excellent credentials in science and its philosophies. He managed to combine science fiction themes with the humor of folk fables. This is not "Douglas Adams meets anybody". You will find little in the way of snappy dialog. It is the IDEAS that are funny and the matter-of-fact way Ijon Tichy deals with highly unlikely problems in space and time travel. His roots are more in Baron von Munchhausen's wild stories.
I must say the performance was marred by the unfortunate hilarity of the reader pronouncing "ennui" as though he were pronouncing the alphabet letters "N" "U" "E". He also gets stuck in a monotone in some of the longer philosophical passages which is a problem with idea-laden exposition.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Elissa
- 09-24-22
not my favorite
some good ideas, buta little "all over the place". not the best from the author.
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- Joe Kraus
- 12-29-18
Gulliver in Space
Not long ago I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven, and it disappointed me, among other reasons, because it put so much weight on the “science” half of science-fiction. I felt as if throughout the novel, she was trying to appease the doubters, the critics who question whether ‘speculative literature’ ever has a claim to be taken seriously.
Lem is doing the exact opposite. His space hero, Ijon Tichy, is a goofy stand-in for the free play of imagination. He’s a space explorer who, using technology as ever-changing as the campy Batman of the 1960s, ventures on one silly adventure after another.
The first of the adventures should be more than enough to hook anyone. Tichy is flying through a distant galaxy when he discovers that the equivalent of his space-rudder has jammed. He then finds that, to fix it, he will need a second pair of hands, one to hold the item in place and the other to tighten the wrench. Alone, and in despair, he takes a nap only to be awakened by himself – a version of himself from the future a day in advance. It turns out (with the sort of vague reference to science that LeGuin would have found beneath her) that his ship is approaching the speed of light as it nears a star, and that has put him into a time loop.
Lem might have left us to wonder at his cleverness, but he takes things much further. Tichy at first refuses to trust his future self. Then, when later opportunities arise, he constantly frustrates his efforts to fix the space ship. He gets into fights, ambushes himself, anticipates what he will soon want to do but guesses wrong, and finally forms a kind of parliament of all his future selves on the ship.
Silly as such a story is, though, it’s simultaneously allegorical in at least two dimensions.
The dimension that’s more readily accessible is biting. At the same time as the entire book is a celebration of the capacity of the human imagination (certainly as Lem exercises it), it’s a critique of our capacity to work together to solve our problems. The perpetual bete noir here is bureaucracy, the lumbering ways in which we attempt to order our mutual efforts. The second story for instance, has Tichy appointed as Earth’s delegate to an interstellar association of civilizations. When he arrives, though, the association has to go through a lengthy deliberative process, demanding reports on Earth’s good conduct.
That’s a consistent concern throughout the stories, and it’s easy to imagine Lem drew on frustration with the communism of his Polish childhood. Funny as the perpetual insight is – bureaucracy kills the spirit that makes us human – it clearly has an edge.
The other dimension of allegory here grows out of that notion, but – as I read this 40 years later and a continent away – I’m conscious of missing much of the historical, political, and social import. I sense it, but I feel a little as if I’m hearing someone else’s inside jokes. Even through translation, I recognize the rhythm of a master joke-teller, but I find myself a beat slow. I am aware, always, that this is coming to me second-hand, that I am watching the man perform and then pausing to read the subtitles before I can fully laugh.
You get some wonderful details here – aliens that our dim-witted Tichy mistakes for vending machines, or potatoes that, adrift in space, become predatory and rapacious – but I did find some of the later stories running together. Maybe because I was missing some of the barbs at the ends of the hooks Lem throws out there, I felt as if I’d gotten the best of this before it was over.
Still, I recognize a deep cleverness here. Aware that there are parts of this out of my reach without footnotes, I still enjoy it. This is science fiction as it was first born, as Gulliver’s Travels first showed it can be, and that – even before its other virtues – makes me recommend it.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Antons
- 01-31-18
No 24th voyage.
There is no 24th voyage, which IMHO, is the best and the most intimidating of them.
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5 people found this helpful
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- devin
- 03-22-16
Amazing book
I would recommend this to anyone that loves science. Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy is the best comparison. However, Lem wrote this before Adams wrote his book. The book is funny, clever and takes little bit of scientific understanding to appreciate. I would recommend this to adults not kids because kids probably won't find it as funny. Overall, this is a great book it's very silly and clever.
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- Vitaly
- 09-06-16
A true masterpiece
This book is a true masterpiece. Lem was, beyond any doubt, the best sci-fi writer of all time
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