Audible.com and Starplex
by Rob - March 30th, 2009.Filed under: Audible, Starplex.
W00t! I’m thrilled to announce that Audible.com has just bought audiobook rights to my novel Starplex — without doubt, the hardest hard-SF novel I’ve ever written.
Starplex was the only novel in its year to be nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula, and it won Canada’s Aurora Award and CompuServe’s Homer Award, and was a finalist for Japan’s Seiun Award.
This brings to eleven the number of my novels that have, or will have, unabridged audiobook editions. I’m absolutely thrilled, needless to say.
Asimov’s Science Fiction: “Sawyer’s latest should gladden the hearts of readers who complain that nobody’s writing real science fiction anymore, the kind of story that has faster-than-light spaceships and far-off planets and interstellar combat and all the neat things they gobbled up so greedily when `Doc’ Smith was dealing them out. Here’s a story with plenty of slam-bang action but no shortage of material to attract thinking readers, either. Sawyer deftly juggles half a dozen sweeping questions of cosmology (not to mention everyday ethics and morality) while keeping the story moving ahead full speed. His scientific ideas are nicely integrated into the plot, yet they also hint at larger metaphorical levels. Enjoy.”
Analog Science Fiction and Fact: “Mind-boggling. A complaint often heard these days is that there’s not enough `sense of wonder’ in today’s science fiction. Robert J. Sawyer’s Starplex ought to lay that complaint to rest for quite a while.”
Gregory Benford, author of Timescape: “Complex but swift, inventive but real-feeling, with ideas coming thick and fast. For big-time interstellar adventure, look no farther.”
The Halifax Chronicle-Herald: “Starplex appears to be traditional science fiction — it takes place aboard a spaceship, and several characters are extraterrestrial — but it’s actually a rumination on several very deep questions, including: Where did we come from? Where are we going? And the deepest of the deep, Is there a God?”
Library Journal: “An epic hard-science adventure tempered by human concerns. Highly recommended.”
Science Fiction Chronicle: “Excellent hard SF, with Sawyer tossing stars, people and time travel around with reckless abandon. One of the best SF novels of the year.”
Sci-Fi Weekly: “An audacious engineering effort that makes Larry Niven’s Ringworld look like a high-school science project.”
The Toronto Star: “Here, at last, is an ambitious attempt to exploit the possibilities that the genre is capable of.”
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site