In a story that is both deep and wide, an artificial intelligence gains sentience, turns malevolent, and becomes a danger to all living things. This is a gross oversimplification of the plot, which involves love, physics, social networks, genocide, and alien civilizations. Peter Larkin reads at a quick pace and performs amazing feats of acting. His narration is authoritative, and his character voices are charming and layered. He even makes different races of aliens sound easily identifiable. But this labyrinthine tale may be too complex for most listening situations. Much of the story is revealed obliquely through characters’ back stories, and being able to “flip back a couple pages” would be helpful. G.D. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
Space is really, really, really big. You think you know this, but you don’t. You have probably heard before that something like one million Earths would fit inside the sun. Wow, you think. Big. Kind of makes you feel insignificant, right? But a million, that’s not that many. Apple sells 13 million iPhones in three days […]
What makes a science fiction story a space opera? Well, it needs to take place in space obviously, though not necessarily all of the time. Hanging out solely in an arcology on a climate-blasted Earth, or even in a domed city on Mars, doesn’t cut it. Actually, the more space the better; though there are certainly exceptions, […]