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METAtropolis

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METAtropolis

By: Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, John Scalzi, Karl Schroeder
Narrated by: Michael Hogan, Scott Brick, Kandyse McClure, Alessandro Juliani, Stefan Rudnicki, John Scalzi
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About this listen

Welcome to a world where big cities are dying, dead - or transformed into technological megastructures. Where once-thriving suburbs are now treacherous Wilds. Where those who live for technology battle those who would die rather than embrace it. It is a world of zero-footprint cities, virtual nations, and armed camps of eco-survivalists.

Welcome to the dawn of uncivilization.

METAtropolis is an intelligent and stunning creation of five of today's cutting-edge science-fiction writers: 2008 Hugo Award winners John Scalzi and Elizabeth Bear; Campbell Award winner Jay Lake; plus fan favorites Tobias Buckell and Karl Schroeder. Together they set the ground rules and developed the parameters of this "shared universe", then wrote five original novellas - all linked, but each a separate tale.

Bringing this audiobook to life is a dream team of performers: Battlestar Galactica's Michael Hogan ("Saul Tigh"); Alessandro Juliani ("Felix Gaeta"); and Kandyse McClure ("Anastasia 'Dee' Dualla"); plus legendary audiobook narrators Scott Brick (Dune) and Stefan Rudnicki (Ender's Game).

John Scalzi, who served as Project Editor, introduces each story, offering insight into how the METAtropolis team created this unique project exclusively for digital audio.

©2008 Joseph E. Lake, Jr., Tobias S. Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, John Scalzi, Karl Schroeder (P)2008 Audible, Inc. Anthologies Anthologies & Short Stories Science Fiction Science Fiction Anthology

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Critic reviews

  • 2009 Hugo Award nominee, Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
  • 2009 Audie Award nominee, Original Work

“Each story shines on its own; as a group they reinforce one another, building a multifaceted view of a realistic and hopeful urban future.” (Publishers Weekly)
“Scalzi and his contributors/collaborators have created a fascinating shared urban future that each of them evokes with his or her particular strengths.... This stellar collection is a fascinating example of shared world-building.” (Booklist)
"This impressive group of writers imagines what happens when the world moves beyond cities as a locus of human civilization. The range of narrators...brings a unique narrative style to the production. Of the five narrators, all well chosen for the stories, Allessandro Juliani proves to be the best with his rendering of Scalzi's piece." (AudioFile)
All stars
Most relevant
If you collected together all the ‘what I will do after the revolution’ tweets from hammer and sickle twitter into a super thread and turned it into a book this would be it.

Jacobin comment section wrote a book

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A loose shared world of the near-ish future. Generally dystopian, but not without a fair bit of hope that people want to improve the world for themselves and others.

My favorite was the one by Elizabeth Bear.

See my reviews of the individual stories.

5 interesting stories

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The stories are dense, but describes a very interesting future that doesn’t actually feel so far off. The first two stories are… how do I say this… they come off fancy. Like the writers really want to be word-artists, but actually it just comes off heavy handed and prose-for-prose’s-sake bullshit. I really struggled to stay focused during these, glimpsing at the underlying narratives that were genuinely interesting, just covered by layers of word-gunk. But Scalzi’s story is a great read!, combining trademark straight-forwardness and expanding and alluding to the interesting shared universe of this book.

And then there’s the last story.. phew, the narrator is hard to listen to (in the literal sense: at times full-on incomprehensibly garbling the words), and the story has a density that’s hard to parse at first. But goddamn it delivers so much in its mind-expanding story.

All told the book is well worth the read, despite some struggle along the way to stay focused.

Not a easy read but worth it

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Metatropolis is set in a kind of post apocalyptic future, however it doesnt follow a bang but the world as we know it seems to have disappeared in a whimper. As such the future isnt a dramatic and depressing realisation of mans weakness. Many of the characters regard there world with a kind of mild disinterest (much like we do today). I was surprised just how often one of the stories in this collection described to me the fully formed idea that had only started to occur in my own head.

The stories are well written and have a concise and efficient feeling as good short stories should. Each narration is as good as the last, I can still hear the phrase "arrived on the wings of a storm" in my head when I think about it.

I thoroughly recommend this book.

Thoughts written down before i thought them

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Two stories unreadable, two okay and one really good. Depends whether you prefer Edgar Rice Burroughs or William Gibson

A mixed bag

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