Moving Mars

By: Greg Bear

Narrated by: Sharon Williams

Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins

Publisher's summary

Greg Bear is "a writer who is rapidly redefining the shape of the modern hard science-fiction novel" (Keith Ferrell, Omni magazine), and in Moving Mars he explores one very plausible scenario for the future of Earth's neighboring planet.

Mars is a colonial world governed by corporate interests on Earth. The citizens of Mars are hardworking, brave, and intelligent, but held back by their lack of access to the best education, and the desire of Earthly powers to keep the best inventions for themselves.

The young Martians - the second and third generation born on Mars - have little loyalty to Earth and a strong belief that their planet can be independent. The revolution begins slowly, but matures to its inevitable conclusion.

©2008 Greg Bear (P)2008 Brilliance Audio

Critic reviews

• Hugo Award Winner, Best Novel, 1996

"It all adds up to a blowout of a book, perhaps the best of the recent Mars novels, and certainly one of the best sf novels of the year." (Publishers Weekly)
"Moving Mars is an accomplished, thoroughly mature novel that should be placed at the top of anyone's `to be read' stack." (Science Fiction Age)
"Stunning and remarkable invention and extrapolation." (Kirkus Reviews)

Despite...

...the poor sound quality I have to recommend Moving Mars. I'd read the book 2 - 3 times before so I was looking forward to the audio version. The reader sounded pretty muffled, but once you get past that it's an enjoyable listen.

Digital artifacts in audio

Parts of this book are hard to follow due to poor audio quality and very noticeable digital artifacts in the audio stream. Come on, Audible! You can do better than this!

Great story/book. I've heard it several times

The only problem with this version is the sound often becomes muddled. I had a hard time understanding some of what the reader was speaking.

One of my favorites

This has always been one of my favorite books and I was very happy that Audible added it to it's library (the original tapes were dual track and had terrible sound quality). Greg Bear is one of those hard science authors that can write compelling believable characters and not bury you under a high tech facade. The science itself is amazing and high concept. Bear tends to write more contemporary, near future Scifi these days and I love his books, but Moving Mars is top form traditional Scifi.

Good book, odd recording

The story is interesting. As usual in a hard science fiction book, there's a fair amount of discussion of technicalities, but it's very interesting. Bear's writing style is a bit mechanical, he is in no way a prose stylist and his characters are a bit on the stiff side, but both are used well to drive the story. My only complaint is the recording itself. It sounds like it's been compressed to within an inch of its life, it occasionally sounds like its being read by a computer. It's also muffled sounding like it was first recorded on cassette. It's not horrible but its annoying, particularly if you listen on headphones.

Great book and performance

This is a fascinating story if a bit unbelievable. It is a traditional Greg Bear SCI-FI story about a future of Mars that is different then any others I have read. This is the fourth Mars book that won an award in the 1990s I guess as a result of all the Mars Lander activity during that decade. The characters are well developed story very engaging.

The audio performance is very good with alot of effort to emulate voices in suits, remote communications,etc. Overall, I really enjoyed this story.

Audio is a concert of flatulence. Great story.

The audio recording is the worst I've ever heard on Audible. It was mostly inaudible without max volume and EQ tweaking.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that some parts of it sounds like they duct taped a phone to the inside of a dry toilet bowl and closed the lid and had the narrator perform the story on the other end of the phone while the engineering team recorded the muffled sounds that came out of the toilet bowl after they echoed off the bathroom walls.

The story is particularly creative, the science is relatively solid given the speculative nature of the narrative's future.

Even though the audio was pretty much a minor crime against the humanities (*smirk emoji*), the story itself was the enjoyable brainy read I've come to expect from GB.

Darwin's Radio is still my favorite but I've enjoyed everything else he's written. Audio issues aside, I've enjoyed this novel at least as much as any other GB novel I've read/listened to. <<== grade school grammar teachers from the 70's, I just ended a sentence with a preposition, deal with it - it's proper English. LOL. (Not that I care about grammar so much - I'm a descriptivist that leans towards a linguistic anarchism - I just love seeing natural born sentences ending with a preposition in the wild and hope to provide sanctuary from prepositional genocide executed by editors & others still pedaling 18th century hokum & Latin infatuations.)

Should you listen to this audiobook - ummm - that's a crapshoot. Had I known how gods awful the recording was, I'd have just bought the ebook & read it. In all honesty - until they can fix the audio, Audible shouldn't even offer it for sale. I consider it a waste of a credit. And even if it was only a dollar, I'd have to think hard about wasting my dollar. The audio is atrocious.

Bad accents

Could have done without the gross fake Asian accent. Ruined the audio book. Totally unnecessary.

Great story, terrible audio

Biggest problem i have with the audio is that I was muffled. There is no other way to put it. It took me a long time to get used to it. Limited by the tech in the 90's maybe? I have other older audiobooks that doesn't sound as bad from even earlier.

Narration was monotone. the accents were actually kind of offensive. I am Chinese and when I heard the stereotypical "Chinese accent" i cringed. Although it was only one instance that I remembered, it's enough to leave an unpleasant impression.

Amazing book scuttled by terrible audio recording

This book is one of my all time favorites. Such a shame that the audio quality was so terrible. Everything sounded muffled and incredibly difficult to make out even at high volumes. Especially the effects added onto the character's voices during spacewalks made it so hard to understand.

That being said, it's one of my favorite stories from my favorite writer of science fiction, Greg Bear. Just read the book on the Kindle and skip this audio recording! Unless Audible can replace it with a version that has higher fidelity.