The Year's Top Short SF Novels 5

By: Cory Doctorow, Ken Liu, John P Murphy, Jay O'Connell, William Preston, Alastair Reynolds

Narrated by: Tom Dheere, Nancy Linari

Length: 15 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.

In The Man Who Sold the Moon by Cory Doctorow, hardware geeks and Burning Man fanatics band together to overcome challenges such as crowdfunding a space mission, falling in love, battling cancer, and perfecting an open source engineering marvel in order to put a 3-D printing robot that creates ceramic building panels from sand on the moon. The Man Who Sold the Moon won the 2015 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best short science fiction.

In The Regular by Ken Liu, a cybernetically enhanced private investigator keeps her emotions in check with a piece of hardware called The Regulator while she searches for the murderer of a prostitute whom she suspects is a serial killer.

Claudius Rex, by John P. Murphy, is a sci-fi whodunit comedy that pays tongue-in-cheek homage to Rex Stout and Isaac Asimov. A humble PI partners with an arrogant AI to solve the murder of the AI's creator. Ai!

In Of All Possible Worlds by Jay O'Connell, an old timeline wizard coaxes a younger man to become his apprentice in an attempt to edit Earth's history so that the planet will escape the ravages of the Long Night and ensure that our timeline is the best of all possible worlds.

In Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key by William Preston, the US government brings a telepathic interrogator who is a veteran of the American war in Iraq to a secret complex in Texas to get a handle on an enigmatic prisoner known as "The Old Man". A test of wills ensues between the two in this homage to Doc Savage.

Finally, in The Last Log of the Lachrimosa by Alastair Reynolds, set in the Revelation Space universe, a crew investigates a cave on a volcanic planet in the hopes of salvaging valuable abandoned tech only to discover that the cave is defended by a horrific psychological weapon.

©2014 Cory Doctorow, Ken Liu, John P Murphy, Jay O'Connell, William Preston, and Alastair Reynolds (P)2015 AudioText

Among my favorite collections of all time.

I love short SF novels with unusual are original premises. The stories by John Murphy, Jay O'Connell, Ken Liu and Cory Doctorow are my favorites.

good stories the bad audio

the stories were all pretty good but the audio quality for half the books is intolerable. all of the ones read by the male readers were fine. but
I had to skip an entire book buy female reader

Most of these are great.

A couple good mysteries, the first in the book was quite good. Corey Doctorow’s story is probably the stand out. Very readable and fun with great characters. All the stories are read by different readers, of varying quality. I did skip one mystery story/reader in there, I just couldn’t let into it. Very much worth the buy.

Narrator sounds like Tony Danza

Is there anything you would change about this book?

The reader

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

Remove the reader

How did the narrator detract from the book?

He made it impossible to listen to. His accents are terrible particularly his "NYC" street accent from the first story. And let's not forgot Mr. Peabody (of Bullwinkle fame) from that same story. What kind of voice actor is this?

Did The Year's Top Short SF Novels 5 inspire you to do anything?

Never listen to the narrator again.

Any additional comments?

Redo this book with John Lee

4 out of 5 stories are excellent, couldn't get through 1

The anthology is worth it for 4 out of the 5 stories. The "Man Who Sold the Moon" is one of my all time favorites! However, I would recommend skipping "Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key". I listened to an hour of it hoping it would go somewhere and it just never did. I believe it appears 3rd in order.

Audio distortion

It sounds like the worst mp3 compression ever.
Like the narrator is speaking through a long metal pipe.