Anathem
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Narrated by:
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Oliver Wyman
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Tavia Gilbert
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William Dufris
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Neal Stephenson
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By:
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Neal Stephenson
About this listen
Fraa Erasmus is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the "Saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals.
Over the centuries, cities, and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs, bloody violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet always the avout have managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. Erasmus, however, has no fear of the outside - the Extramuros - for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.
Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite of Apert, the fras and suurs prepare to venture outside the concent's gates - opening them wide at the same time to welcome the curious "extras" in.
During his first Apert as a fra, Erasmus eagerly anticipates reconnecting with the landmarks and family he hasn't seen since he was "collected". But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the perilous brink of cataclysmic change.
Powerful unforeseen forces threaten the peaceful stability of mathic life and the established ennui of the Extramuros - a threat that only an unsteady alliance of Saecular and avout can oppose - as, one by one, Raz's colleagues, teachers, and friends are all called forth from the safety of the concent in hopes of warding off global disaster.
Suddenly burdened with a worlds-shattering responsibility, Erasmus finds himself a major player in a drama that will determine the future of everything - as he sets out on an extraordinary odyssey that will carry him to the most dangerous, inhospitable corners of an unfamiliar planet...and far beyond.
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A Gift of Time
- By: Jerry Merritt
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 11 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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When Micajah Fenton discovers a crater in his front yard with a broken time glider in the bottom and a naked, virtual woman on his lawn, he delays his plans to kill himself. While helping repair the marooned time traveler's glider, Cager realizes it can return him to his past to correct a mistake that had haunted him his entire life. As payment for his help, the virtual creature living in the circuitry of the marooned glider, sends Cager back in time as his 10-year-old self.
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The Gift of Time is a Gift!
- By As happy as a monkey with two bananas in his hands on 12-07-17
By: Jerry Merritt
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Interworld
- By: Neil Gaiman, Michael Reaves
- Narrated by: Christopher Evan Welch
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times best seller by award-winning writers Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves.Joey Harker isn't a hero…Joey Harker is the kind of guy who gets lost in his own house. But one day, Joey gets really lost. He walks straight out of his world and into another dimension.This walk between worlds makes Joey prey to armies of magic and science, both determined to harness Joey's power to travel between dimensions.
By: Neil Gaiman, and others
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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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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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Unfiction
- By: Gene Doucette
- Narrated by: Brad Wills
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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When Oliver Naughton joins the Tenth Avenue Writers Underground, headed by literary wunderkind Wilson Knight, Oliver figures he'll finally get some of his wild imaginings out of his head and onto paper. But when Wilson takes an intense interest in Oliver's writing and his genre stories of dragons, aliens, and spies, things get weird. Oliver's stories don't just need to be finished: they insist on it.
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Perfectly Captured Tone and Well Matched Wit
- By Ian on 08-04-17
By: Gene Doucette
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Ringworld
- By: Larry Niven
- Narrated by: Tom Parker
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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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
- By Kennet on 05-25-03
By: Larry Niven
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Starfire
- By: B.V. Larson
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 13 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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On June 30, 1908, an object fell from the sky, releasing more energy than a thousand Hiroshima bombs. A Siberian forest was flattened, but the strike left no significant crater. The anomaly came to be known as the Tunguska Event, and scientists have never agreed whether it was the largest meteor strike in recorded history - or something else. Alien artifacts have been uncovered since the 1908 event, and a new star drive is discovered.
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Het
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 04-09-17
By: B.V. Larson
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Coyote
- A Novel of Interstellar Exploration
- By: Allen Steele
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim, Allen Steele
- Length: 17 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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The crime of the century begins without a hitch. On July 5th, 2070, as it's about to be launched, the starship Alabama is hijacked - by her captain and crew. In defiance of the repressive government of The United Republic of Earth, they replace her handpicked passengers with political dissidents and their families. These become Earth's first pioneers in the exploration of space...
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Poorly read
- By Amazon Customer on 09-09-08
By: Allen Steele
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Forty Signs of Rain
- Science in the Capital, Book 1
- By: Kim Stanley Robinson
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim, Kim Stanley Robinson
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The best-selling author of the classic Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt returns with a riveting new trilogy of cutting-edge science, international politics, and the real-life ramifications of global warming as they are played out in our nation's capital - and in the daily lives of those at the center of the action. Hauntingly realistic, here is a novel of the near future that is inspired by scientific facts already making headlines. BONUS AUDIO: Includes an exclusive introduction by author Kim Stanley Robinson.
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Its all
- By steve on 01-07-09
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The Ark
- Children of a Dead Earth, Book 1
- By: Patrick S. Tomlinson
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Humankind has escaped a dying Earth and set out to find a new home among the stars aboard an immense generation ship affectionately named the Ark. Bryan Benson is the Ark's greatest living sports hero, enjoying retirement working as a detective in Avalon, his home module. The hours are good, the work is easy, and the perks can't be beat. But when a crew member goes missing, Bryan is thrust into the center of an ever-expanding web of deception, secrets, and violence.
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Nearly there
- By Michaela on 05-11-16
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The Invaders Plan
- Mission Earth, Volume 1
- By: L. Ron Hubbard
- Narrated by: Full Cast
- Length: 3 hrs and 8 mins
- Abridged
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They are the Voltarians of Voltar - an empire 110 planets strong. They are already among us. And the invasion is about to begin...in a hundred years or so. Or is it? The truth is far more sinister. Undercover, underground, and out of sight, the invaders plan what may in fact be a massive diversion. In the darkest recesses of Voltar’s Coordinated Information Apparatus (otherwise known as the CIA), a tyrant of terror sets out to exploit the invasion in order to seize power. All that stands in his way is a planet that doesn’t exist.
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overly abridged
- By Pielle Szabo on 01-10-17
By: L. Ron Hubbard
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Achaeans and robots and post-humans, oh my
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Es ist nur ein Spiel. Aber es geht um sehr viel Geld. Und für manche bald um ihr Leben...
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great storry! fantastically narrated!
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Bad first novel by great writer
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At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it. To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation - complete for the first time, and the first ever directly from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani ( Battlestar Galactica), Lem’s provocative novel comes alive for a new generation.
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A comment on negative reviews
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A very pleasant surprise
- By Simon on 06-17-17
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Hyperion
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On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.
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The Shrike Awaits. Enter The Time Tombs...
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What listeners say about Anathem
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- No_name
- 08-28-18
bad reading
talking about great emotional resonance, that inspires, in a dead pan boring voice that sounds like a 1995 Microsoft sam text to speech.
other than the start, its an interesting book
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5 people found this helpful
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- unknovvnMike
- 11-28-19
Philosophy means love of Knowledge
While the theorics can get heavy, it's worth multiple readings to get the nuances. I would recommend at least two.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- J.W.
- 10-12-08
Wonderful.
In many ways Stephenson's writing seems to have gotten even better since the days of Snow Crash and Diamond Age (not to say it wasn't good then). The characters in Anathem are more three dimensional and the dialog more natural. Also, although the book bleeds erudition and is filled with abstraction, it doesn't have that annoying characteristic often found in sci-fi in which breakneck action is clumsily broken by digressions into "ideas" that the author is "playing with."
Stephenson does make extensive use of made-up words. The made-up terms represent real ideas, most (or all) of which we are familiar with, but you can't call a Platonic ideal a by that name on a different world that has no connection to Earth, can you? The novel deals with math, logic, science, and philosophy of science, and many important ideas have to be renamed for the story to work. Don't worry though, it is usually quite clear from the fictional name what Earth word is equivalent. For example:
Consent = convent or monestary
Cnois = gnosis or knowledge
Syntax = binary device or computer
Again, don't worry about the terminology and history at the beginning. Listen to the first 4 hours and you will realize that most new words are obvious from their root or synonyms, and proper names don't really matter. It's a large book and takes time to get going, but it's wonderful and one of Stephenson's best works (and one of the best books I've read on Audible in the last year or two.
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- Donna
- 08-26-13
Most engaging book in years.
What did you love best about Anathem?
This is a story which grows with each telling. I have listened to it probably 30 times now and each time something new is revealed. The story is fresh and the characters are interesting. Most of all, I love the language. I grew up with a brother who made up his own vocabulary and only he and my cousin could understand it. Although this has mainly normal english speech, the addition of off the wall words is a treat.
Any additional comments?
I have to be honest, I always preview the narrators before I consider a book for listening. This book has numerous, interesting characters and the narrator nails them. After while, I knew who was speaking just from the voice. This made the book even more enjoyable.
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- Erik
- 05-17-19
Has its moments
Like it’s been said, the beginning and intro is a bit hard to get into but eventually the story picks up and it’s a good one. I love some philosophical dialogue in a story but it goes overboard here on many occasions. This continues without and sometimes goes on for long sections that are very easy to get lost in. Particularly since there is language developed specifically for this book making it even more difficult to follow along at times. Overall a good story, held back by being great IMO
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- LA Parent
- 12-05-19
4*, long long long story
Some of the narration was too loud, but overall pleasing.
The story itself was too complicated to be well served by solely an audio version. Had to fandom search names of characters, places, etc. Definitely not a bed time audiobook for me.
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- Amyloo
- 11-12-14
I adore this book
What did you love best about Anathem?
What I like best: The world that Stephenson created; Erasmus and many of the other characters but especially him; the wild wide-ranging nature of the setting.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Anathem?
A small moment: Fra Jad insisting that the office supply store must have some comprehension of geometry.
Any additional comments?
I gave the performance only 4 stars because the section introducer annoyed me: She seemed to have to be trying to remember to enunciate, and pronounced concent conSENT.
Overall I truly adore the book and have pushed it on my son, who liked it too. I have listened to it many times, and will dip into it to listen to a favorite section, usually only to get caught up all over again and want to hear the whole thing.
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- Malcolm
- 11-03-08
Brilliant
A fascinating book extremely well read. I can always count on two or three enjoyable listens out of a Neal Stephenson book. I would buy Mr. Stephensons Grocery list if it were sold on Audible and read by these narrators.
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-13-17
Get it!
Yes, it like most of Stephensons books, slow to start and full of strange terminology. But welll worth the listen.
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- t_j
- 03-05-17
Amazing depth!
What a book. There is greatness in the world! Amazing stuff Neil!!!!!! Keep up the good work. You r doing some really strong stuff!!
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