The City Who Fought

Brainship

By: Anne McCaffrey

Narrated by: Constance Towers

A huge space station on the fringes of human space, SSS-900 is controlled by the brain of Simeon, a shellperson who relieves his daily monotony by replaying computer simulations of great battles. When a battered, jury-rigged ship appears to threaten the station, they rescue the people who are fleeing from the vicious Kolnari pirates. As the Kolnari take over the station, the stationers and the Bethelites from the rescued ship must devise ways to work together to fight the invaders. Luckily, Simeon's love of wargaming has unexpected uses, and he clandestinely builds his trap for the Kolnari. Will Simeon become the only thing standing between ruthless alien pirates and total destruction?

©2022 Anne McCaffrey (P)2022 Phoenix Books

Absolute perfection

Fully rounded characters. Well built universe fascinating story line and JOAT makes everything seem realistic this series will let you laugh and cry with the storyline in an enjoyable escape life as we know it .

Abridged!

Do you have any additional comments?

This is one of my favorite "shell person" novels, but the abridgement cut too much of the character development and other pieces that add so much to the story. I wish that there was a complete version.

This is abridged!

This book was great. This audiobook not so much. It cut out significant scenes and left a lot of things unexplained. I’m not sure I would purchase another one of these without worrying that it will be abridged and I won’t find out until halfway through the story.

Wow this is scaled back...

Never in all my years have I seen a story butchered so much due to time constraints. The general gist of the story is there, but it’s as if someone is telling it in the third person secondhand. The book is great ,But this does not do it justice. The narration is good. Overall I won’t give it one star due to the memory of McCaffrey.

too chopped up

when I bought this, I did not realize it was an abridged edition. so much is missing from the original book, it was bitterly disappointing. too much essential character development was chopped out. the original story was a favorite of mine. this was just a disappointment.

Great Concept, Awesome story.

What a great concept and storyline. Anne did an awesome job with the details, and I felt Conctance captured the charecters well. Great value at under ten bucks!

Heavily abridged

I have read this story and could follow along with the storyline of the audio. Without having been familiar with the book I doubt I would have understood much of who was who in the beginning. The editing left plot holes that weren’t in the text.

I would recommend skipping this one due to all that was left out when it was abridged. Pity as the original was a good book

Extremely abridged

This is an abridged version from the era when people couldn't be bothered to read good books, so the 3-hour abridged audiobook was invented (fitted on two double-sided 45-minute cassettes) so that pretentious people could get the gist of a book by trudging through a horribly condensed recording during that commute into the city, then later claim, "I read [title of popular book]!"

I read this book in print several years ago and loved it, then listened to this abridged recording and hated it. So much detail was left out that the story was actually difficult to follow, and it was quite boring.

Don't bother wasting any money or time on this rubbish rendition of a great book. Beware of older audiobooks running right around 3 hours which aren't explicitly labeled UNABRIDGED.

Abridged version missing a lot

Story misses a lot of the character development that made this a good book. The reader was good

Cropped and chopped

I am a huge Anne McCaffrey fan and was enormously disappointed in how this book was edited and read. Key parts of the story line which developed the characters and showed the development of their relationship were missing. The delivery was nearly monotone. This was a huge disappointment. I don't care for abridged editions of anything, but this was worse than most.