Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Noumenon cover art

Noumenon

By: Marina J. Lostetter
Narrated by: Christopher Ragland,Laurence Bouvard,Madeleine Rose
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £13.00

Buy Now for £13.00

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

Outland cover art
The Lead Cloak cover art
Golden Fleece cover art
Fluency cover art
Schild's Ladder cover art
Earthcore (Dramatized Adaptation) cover art
Revelation Space cover art
Forbidden The Stars cover art
The Year's Top Short SF Novels 7 cover art
The Ark cover art
Children of Time cover art
Hyperion cover art
Treason cover art
Ocean of Storms cover art
HALO: The Fall of Reach cover art
Red Mars cover art

Summary

With nods to Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series, the real science of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves and a touch of Hugh Howey's Wool, this is a powerful tale of space travel, adventure, discovery and humanity.

In 2088 humankind is at last ready to explore beyond Earth's solar system, and astrophysicist Reggie Straifer knows where we should go. He's discovered a distant anomalous star that appears to defy the laws of physics. It could be a weird natural phenomenon, or it could be alien.

Convoy 7's mission to discern the nature of the star's strange qualities will use vast resources and take centuries, so in order to maintain the genetic talent of the first crew, clones will be used for the expedition. But a clone is not a perfect copy, and each generation has its own quirks, desires, and neuroses.

As the centuries pass, their society changes and evolves, but their mission remains the same: to reach Reggie's mysterious star and explore its origins - and implications.

A mosaic of discovery, Noumenon successfully examines aspects of the human condition with a touch that is both thrilling and poignant.

©2017 Little Lost Stories (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers

What listeners say about Noumenon

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    89
  • 4 Stars
    74
  • 3 Stars
    42
  • 2 Stars
    15
  • 1 Stars
    6
Performance
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    103
  • 4 Stars
    72
  • 3 Stars
    18
  • 2 Stars
    16
  • 1 Stars
    3
Story
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    82
  • 4 Stars
    58
  • 3 Stars
    44
  • 2 Stars
    19
  • 1 Stars
    8

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Reminscent of the best of Foundation

The heart of Noumenon, the reason it works and the most evocative thing about it, is its structure. This is true of both the convoy and the book.

The titular Noumenon is a convoy of nine ships sent to a distant star to analyse anomalous signals. Even with the sub-dimensional FTL travel, it will be a generational mission, over centuries. In order to give the mission the best chance of success, potential crewmembers are analysed and selected, not just for launch, but forever: they will be continually cloned, replaced by themselves, maintaining the balance and make-up of the crew. This single decision has ramifications for the society and the mission down the generations

Like Asimov's early Foundation books (and Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, though the sections here are longer than that book), Noumenon the book presents a series of events of the evolving society, each chapter skipping ahead in time to new characters (albeit familiar from cloning) and showing us how earlier decisions, earlier actions have played out. The solution to a problem in one chapter becomes the cause of the problem in the next, and at each step the characters must solve the problem as best they can for the here and now, with whatever knowledge and limited foresight they have.

Threaded throughout and tying everything together is the convoy's AI, ICC, the only truly consistent crewmember and the one charged with maintaining society and ensuring the success of the mission.

Like Foundation, Noumenon creates such a plausible sequence of events that you stop seeing it as a work of fiction and begin to believe it as a detailed future history. You're pulled along not by seeing what happens to an individual character, but by seeing the ramifications of earlier stories. It's as powerful a work of hard social science fiction as Foundation ever was, and that's the highest recommendation I can give it.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

26 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

sociology not science fiction

An interesting look at a society's evolution but missed many opportunities for good science fiction

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

5 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Very little sci-fi for a si-fi book

Started with a good idea , lost it in the middle and stretched the end.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Stopped midway - boring as hell

Some review compared it with "Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson - well, it's nothing alike! Seveneves was brilliantly written with a very catchy plot, good sense of humor and interesting characters. Even though the reader's performance was sometimes overacted, I still couldn't stop listening. This one is not very well performed either, but on top of that it's plain boring on top of boring. I was waiting and waiting for something that could catch my brain and ear for no avail, until I just stopped it midway. There is so much bad scifi written in the World, that I don't want to waste my time on one more. It kind of reminded me of "The Magellanic Cloud" by Stanislav Lem - an author I admire overall, but he wrote this book apparently just to please the communist regime and it was as bad and boring. Waste of my audible credits...

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Avoid unless you're being paid to write a review

For as far as I could put up with listening to it, this book is naive and pointless. The storyline is disjointed. The story itself seems utterly pointless with pedestrian dialogue based on flawed progression of the story, truly awful characterisation, and hopeless, if any, comprehension of science. On top of which, as an audiobook, the narration was terrible too. Perhaps this would be better read.

n.b. Apparently, unless it's the Audible marketing department getting a bit ahead of themselves, this is considered by some, a classic. Not me unfortunately.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Aspiring to be dull

This is an extraordinarily dull book. So dull that I could not manage to maintain focus on the turgid and stereotyped politics on the ship. Despite a promising first hour or two it descends into a predictable story of on board politics.
Performances are pedestrian, storylines do not surprise or excite.
I would write more but this book has left me with barely the will to return it and swop it for something, indeed anything, else!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

great multi generational space story

I really liked this story, some very goodnand new ideas (to me anyway)
looking forward to next installment

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars

Not bad but don't compare to Arthur C. Clarke

It was entertaining but the premise of the book is abandoned by chapter 6 and the rest is anti-climatic. A poor man's Rendezvous with Rama. I might read the sequel just to see if it actually gets back to the premise that was originally promised.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Incredibly Disappointing

A series of short stories with no point. No resolution. Fine - It’s the first of a series - but it isn’t remotely self contained. Won’t be reading the rest. I recommend avoiding this.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

A superbly entertaining story

Following the different generations of a convoy of human clones tasked with travelling to a star and back, Noumenon is the story of a society changing for better and for worse. It's also the story of ICC, the Inter Convoy Computer changing from an expert system with a personality overlay, to a sentient AI whose primary goal is the success of the mission.

In one sense the novel lacks coherence and getting to know characters is impeded by them dying off, but the constant of ICC pulls that together and gives us someone to root for.

I enjoyed it and will read the succeeding novels in the trilogy.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!