The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 6 (Unabridged)
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2.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
This is an unabridged audio collection of the "best of the best" science fiction stories published in 2013 by current and emerging masters of the genre, edited by Allan Kaster, as narrated by top voice talents.
In "Zero for Conduct," by Greg Egan, an Afghani teenager, living in a near-future Iran with her exiled grandfather, makes a game-changing superconductor discovery. A young girl struggles to survive on a planet, with a stringent class structure, where Doors are used to go off-world in "Exile, Interrupted," by C. W. Johnson. "Pathways," by Nancy Kress, follows a teenage girl from a small Kentucky mountain town, in a near-future U. S., struggling with her family and culture as she seeks treatment for Fatal Familial Insomnia.
In "Entangled," by Ian R. MacLeod, an Indian woman, in a Britain turned upside down by a disease that links people's minds, searches for answers to her personal catastrophe. In "The Irish Astronaut," by Val Nolan, an astronaut brings the ashes of a colleague, who dies in the Aquarius disaster, to Ireland for final burial. In "Among Us," by Robert Reed, a government agency goes to extraordinary lengths to identify and track the aliens among us.
"A Map of Mercury," by Alastair Reynolds, showcases the plight of a failed artist dispatched to retrieve an artistic genius from a collective of cyborgs parading across the face of Mercury. In "Martian Blood," by Allen M. Steele, a researcher from Earth goes on an expedition into the untamed regions of Mars to extract blood from its natives. "The She-Wolf's Hidden Grin," by Michael Swanwick, set in the same milieu as Gene Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," follows the childhoods of two sisters on a planet far from Earth. Finally, in "The Best We Can," by Carrie Vaughn, a frustrated scientist pursues first contact among an apathetic populace.
Customer Reviews
I really wanted to like it….
What I need is a setting on my computer that will instantly shut it down whenever I click on a book with words like “stories” or “tales” in its title.
I’m SO attracted to short stories, I grew up on some fantastic anthologies of works by great authors, but these past few years have been disappointing whether the collection is that of a single contemporary author or a new arrangement of older material. They’ve been the literary equivalents of dumpsters - mostly garbage with a couple objects of interest and sometimes a gem that someone probably regrets having parted with. This collection has a few objects of interest, but no gems, IMO. Nothing that I can say that would, alone, almost make the price of the collection worth it.
I counted four pretty good stories in this book, but I can’t be sure since the material kept putting me to sleep. I think part of the problem with some collections, like this one, is the editorial decision to hold the better pieces back in the story line-up. By the time I got to them my interest level had plummeted - I just wanted the book to be finished.
If you love sci-fi short stories and want to give this book a go, what you should do is click through to the last piece, “Entangled”, and then listen to the stories in reverse order. Seriously. I think it would be a more engaging collection that way.
Suit yourself.
2014 was not a good year for Science Fiction
I found most of these stories dull and uninteresting. The only two that I enjoyed are: “Among Us” and “A Map of Mercury”.
Also, the audio quality is poor: Sounds like a bad VoIP phone connection.