Read by Tom
Dheere and Nancy Linari
playing
time: nearly 16 Hours/ ISBN: 9781884612752
Regular price: $49.99 / 14
CDs
The Year's Top Short SF Novels 5 is also available as an e-book for $5.99 on the
Kindle
here and the Nook
here and for iBooks through iTunes.
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 story-telling. 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 3D 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
U.S. 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.
