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Diaspora
- Narrated by: Adam Epstein
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
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Behold the orphan. Born into a world that is not a world. A digital being grown from a mind seed, a genderless cybernetic citizen in a vast network of probes, satellites, and servers knitting the Solar System into one scape, from the outer planets to the fiery surface of the Sun. Since the Introdus in the 21st century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software.
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- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In a moving story of sacrifice and triumph, human scientists establish a relationship with intelligent lifeforms - the cheela-living on Dragon's Egg, a neutron star where one Earth hour is equivalent to hundreds of their years. The cheela culturally evolve from savagery to the discovery of science, and for a brief time, men are their diligent teachers.
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Classic Hard Science Fiction
- By Daniel Cascaddan on 01-12-18
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2001
- A Space Odyssey
- By: Arthur C. Clarke
- Narrated by: Dick Hill
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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It has been 40 years since the publication of this classic science-fiction novel that changed the way we look at the stars and ourselves. From the savannas of Africa at the dawn of mankind to the rings of Saturn as man adventures to the outer rim of our solar system, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a journey unlike any other.
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The Movie Makes More Sense Now
- By Douglas on 12-10-08
By: Arthur C. Clarke
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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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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
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- By: Timothy Ferris
- Narrated by: Timothy Ferris
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
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Anyone can get started in astronomy, just by going outside on a dark night with a star chart and learning their way around. Timothy Ferris tells us what's been seen out there - the Ring nebula, the Silver Coin galaxy, the Virgo supercluster, and how to find them.
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About astronomy as well as astronomers
- By Gary on 04-09-03
By: Timothy Ferris
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Seveneves
- A Novel
- By: Neal Stephenson
- Narrated by: Mary Robinette Kowal, Will Damron
- Length: 31 hrs and 55 mins
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A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.
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Odd narrator choice
- By Josh Mitchell on 05-30-15
By: Neal Stephenson
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The Enceladus Mission
- Ice Moon 1
- By: Brandon Q. Morris
- Narrated by: Doug Tisdale Jr.
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In the year 2031, a robot probe detects traces of biological activity on Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons. This sensational discovery shows that there is indeed evidence of extraterrestrial life. Fifteen years later, a hurriedly built spacecraft sets out on the long journey to the ringed planet and its moon. The international crew is not just facing a difficult twenty-seven months: if the spacecraft manages to make it to Enceladus without incident it must use a drillship to penetrate the kilometer-thick sheet of ice that entombs the moon.
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Robotic performance, potentially interesting story
- By Opa on 02-21-19
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Proxima: Book 1
- By: Stephen Baxter
- Narrated by: Kyle McCarley
- Length: 17 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The very far future: The galaxy is a drifting wreck of black holes, neutron stars, and chill white dwarfs. The age of star formation is long past. Yet there is life here, feeding off the energies of the stellar remnants, and there is mind, a tremendous galaxy-spanning intelligence each of whose thoughts lasts a hundred thousand years. And this mind cradles memories of a long-gone age when a more compact universe was full of light... The 27th century: Proxima Centauri, an undistinguished red dwarf star, is the nearest star to our sun. How would it be to live on such a world?
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No Sense of Conclusion
- By Lisa Davidson on 04-24-16
By: Stephen Baxter
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Sync
- How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life
- By: Steven Strogatz
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 13 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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At once elegant and riveting, Sync tells the story of the dawn of a new science. Steven Strogatz, a leading mathematician in the fields of chaos and complexity theory, explains how enormous systems can synchronize themselves, from the electrons in a superconductor to the pacemaker cells in our hearts. He shows that although these phenomena might seem unrelated on the surface, at a deeper level there is a connection, forged by the unifying power of mathematics.
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Engaging, but maybe better suited for non-audio
- By Ryan on 05-26-12
By: Steven Strogatz
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A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function.
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What a wild, wacky, awesome book!
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What listeners say about Diaspora
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ben
- 12-08-13
Fabulous Story, Disappointing Performance
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
I would recommend the story to a friend if they were up to the conceptual challenges the plot contains. Egan's intricacy of detail is extremely worth persevering with, but it's dense and some passages require close scrutiny. I would not, however, recommend this recording to a friend (see later answers).
Who was your favorite character and why?
This is hard Sci-Fi. It's characters are not its strong feature. As such it's heavily concept driven, and you read it for those, not for character-development. In the constraints of the genre however, I thought they were all suited to their roles, but I don't have a favourite.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
I originally read this as an e-book. I was fascinated to know how a professional narrator would move through this story, dealing with its esoterica: from the subject-specific jargon to the neutral personal pronouns. This would be a challenging read for any narrator; we are immersed in a world and assume the viewpoints of its inhabitants, who don't think it's strange at all. Egan creates this effect beautifully. So far I've skipped through the audiobook only, but so far I've been appalled. The pace is slow and is sufficiently lacking in phrasing as to make it an uncomfortable listening experience, to the point where it is difficult to know what words belong with what. It also makes what was quite a surreal read positively dreary and painful. The books own conventions were clearly poorly understood, leading to uneven emphasis, and a general plodding relentlessness to the delivery. A book with Diaspora's object and Diaspora's target audience, requires much more pre reading, linguistic and typographical care, and general attention to detail than has been demonstrated by this performance.
If this book were a movie would you go see it?
I think that this book would be totally ruined by a movie adaptation. It's so in-the-mind that to have the details dished up for you would completely miss the point.
Any additional comments?
One of the best Hard Science Fiction stories I've read in years. One of the most mediocre audio-performances as well. Had I known I would have saved my credit for another title. May it be a lesson to me to preview things before checking out.
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33 people found this helpful
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- Jason W. Bowen
- 05-03-15
Love Egan, don't care for the narrator
What disappointed you about Diaspora?
The ve/vis pronouns take a little getting used to, but other than that no complaints.
Would you be willing to try another one of Adam Epstein’s performances?
This is the second book I've tried to get through by Adam Epstein and I would not be willing to try another of his attempts at narration. The voices he does are overly cartoonish and grating and he mispronounces words constantly. If he's going to narrate so many of Greg Egan's books, he could take a few minutes to figure out how to properly pronounce things.
Any additional comments?
Thankfully someone else narrates my favorite of Egan's books, Schild's Ladder.
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17 people found this helpful
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- KV
- 05-13-17
Sucks.
The narrator just kills your soul. DULL, monotonous, with no sense of emotion, bizarre cadence, like some stoned high school kid reading an essay in class.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Emily Marie Adams
- 04-07-15
Narration is a deal breaker
I have no idea how good the story is, as the narration is so horrible that I couldn't listen to more than 15 minutes. It is monotone and halting, like the reader doesn't understand what he's reading, or is reciting a recipe. Very disappointing.
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- J R
- 08-06-18
One-third Amazing, One-third OK, One-third Poor
"Diaspora" by Greg Egan (1997) is of mixed quality. The novel was written to fit around a short story that Egan published earlier, "Wang's Carpets." That short story appears as Chapter 11.
From the start of the book through the end of Chapter 6 (Parts 1 and 2), Diaspora offers some of the best science fiction I've listened to. It is chock full of fascinating ideas, the plot is engaging and exciting, and you care deeply about the characters.
Chapter 11, "Wang's Carpets," is another bright, high point in the audiobook.
Unfortunately, these high-quality sections only make up about a third of the novel. The remaining chapters are of much lower quality, and that quality gradually diminishes further as the end of the novel approaches. The important characters become less and less relateable, and Egan spends too much time philosophizing over fictional mathematics and physics. The last third of the book is a wild goose chase, whose ultimate conclusion is deeply unsatisfying and more than faintly ridiculous. I was left feeling cheated, as though Egan demonstrated his tremendous ideas and ability, then strung me along, promising more and failing to deliver.
It is difficult to assign a star rating to a book with both excellent and disappointing segments. I ultimately decided to award four stars, which I consider a generous rating for a book that was one-third excellent, one-third mediocre, and one-third poor.
While some reviewers complained about the narrator, I found nothing wrong with Adam Epstein's narration. It seemed perfectly normal and acceptable to me, and I found his use of voices to distinguish different characters helpful (and similar to what other audiobook narrators do).
If you wish to experience the good parts of Diaspora, you are in luck: Parts 1 and 2 (chapters 1 through 6) stand on their own as a self-contained story. You can listen to these chapters and then stop. Or, if you prefer, you can read from chapter 1 through chapter 11, which will cover all of the book's high points while avoiding the worst parts, which come near the end. If you proceed all the way through, you will find that nuggets of value become increasingly scarce, lost in a seemingly five-dimensional scape of bland text.
If you are interested in Diaspora, consider "Blindsight" by Peter Watts, a story that has a similar style but is strong from beginning to end.
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- Adam Stricker
- 06-20-18
Great book, Terrible performance
one of the worst reading performances I've ever heard, did some serious damage to the book
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7 people found this helpful
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- James Fields
- 05-22-16
Adam's Curse
Strike three of the Kindle-Audible sale books. Egan is very interesting...until you hear it from the mouth of this reader.
If only the energy of his introductions flowed into his reading of the text...might be able to listen to this.
But...you get what you paid for (and I paid $1.99 for this...and the other two)
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6 people found this helpful
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- Jason
- 04-23-14
Do you have the program to enjoy this book?
Very "hard" sci-fi, Diaspora's main characters are AIs, the protagonist being "born" early on. They can run points of view that allow them to enjoy a work of art as if it were someone else perceiving it for instance. There's no faster than light travel and this isn't a space opera, it's an introspective tale of exploration.
If you're frustrated with science fiction that let action get in the way of rigorous explanations of the science behind what's going on, this book is for you!
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3 people found this helpful
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- Michael Fuchs
- 10-28-20
Horrible Narration. Deep Mathematical Fantasy.
Gave up 2 hours in. Kept waiting for something of interest in the story. Kept waiting for the narrator to break from the soulless, monotonous, emotionless voice. From what I can tell, trying to listen past the lousy reader, this seems like a short story blown out into a novel by merging it with mathematics text books. Boring, pointless, impossible to listen to.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Ilia R.
- 03-01-20
Extremely hard science fiction
It's science fiction for scientists and engineers. Demands a background in biology, physics and mathematics. Also, it's got a sad vibe to it. However, the ideas expressed in the book are unique, truly magnificent.
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1 person found this helpful