Philip Wylie has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is After Worlds Collide.
When Worlds Collide
Summary
A runaway planet hurtles toward Earth. As it draws near, massive tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions wrack our planet, devastating continents, drowning cities, and wiping out millions. In central North America, a team of scientists race to build a spacecraft powerful enough to escape the doomed Earth. Their greatest threat, they soon discover, comes not from the skies but from other humans. A crackling plot and sizzling, cataclysmic vision have made When Worlds Collide one of the most popular and influential end-of-the-world novels of all time.
©1932, 1933 Edwin Balmer & Philip Wylie (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
After Worlds Collide
Summary
After Worlds Collide picks up the story of its predecessor, When Worlds Collide. This sequel tells the story of the survivors' progress on the new world Bronson Beta after the destruction of Earth by a rogue planet.
©1933, 1934 Edwin Balmer & Philip Wylie (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Tomorrow!
Summary
This book may change your life. It may save it. It is one of the most important - and most shocking - books ever written. Tomorrow! is a story of average, nice Americans living in the neighboring cities of Green Prairie and River City in Middle America. It is - until the sudden blitz - the story of the girl next door and her boyfriend; of the accountant who saw what was coming, and the rich old lady who didn’t; of engaging young kids, babies, “hoods,” a bank official who “borrowed” from a customer’s account. Then, at the height of the Christmas shopping season, Condition Red is sounded, and this down-to-earth story of America’s Main Street becomes a shattering, vivid experience of the nightmare that human beings have cooked up for themselves. Tomorrow! can be listened to as a novel of pure suspense - if you dare. It is a thriller in which the apocalyptic technology of today is superimposed on the future. But the novel is also designed to show Philip Wylie’s conclusions about America’s dangerous vulnerability to dread, hysteria, and panic, as well as his recommendations about what must be done.
©1954 Philip Wylie (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
The End of the Dream
Summary
In The End of the Dream, venerated science-fiction author Philip Wylie trains his sights on the ultimate catastrophe - the destruction of the world through human beings’ unheeding and willful poisoning of the atmosphere, the land, the seas and rivers, and finally of the human race itself. The End of the Dream describes a horrific future when toxic chemicals, mutated creatures, and noxious gases all contribute to the eventual death of the human race and of the Earth itself through a choking, painful, and pitiless exposure to foul air, disease, and the eruptions of outraged nature. Shortly before his death in 1971, Wylie wrote this warning on the dangers of pollution in the hope that constructive action against environmental disasters might yet be possible. Although many positive changes have taken place in the intervening for 40 years, Wylie’s haunting tale still points out many unaddressed abuses - abuses that still have the potential to cause enormous damage to the ecosystem and humanity. The End of the Dream is still relevant today - its dire tableau highlights now as earlier the problems and choices we continue to face.
©1972 Frederik B. Wylie as Executric of the Estate of Philip Wylie (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
The Spy Who Spoke Porpoise
Summary
A circus performer turned superspy is caught up in a Cold War web of conspiracy and death when the body of a murdered CIA agent is discovered in a Hawaiian marine park. By any definition, Ringling Wallenda Grove is an extraordinary man. The son of expatriate Russian former circus owners, he mastered the arts of acrobatics, animal training, and magic at a young age; distinguished himself as an officer in World War II; and went on to amass a fortune of several million dollars before going into semiretirement. But there is another side to this man that few know about. R. W. Grove is a master spy, having honed his trade as a postwar intelligence agent with the OSS. Now the murder of a company agent, whose body was found floating among the aquatic animals in Honolulu's popular Sea Life Park, is pulling Grove back into the game. A deadly international conspiracy is afoot, involving the nation's most bitter and dangerous enemies, and it centers on a covert CIA operation code-named Zed - an undertaking so secretive that even the president can know nothing about it. Renowned for his provocative, stunningly realized speculative fiction, Philip Wylie joined the ranks of John le Carré, Len Deighton, Robert Ludlum, and other masters of the espionage thriller when he first published The Spy Who Spoke Porpoise. Brimming with action, intrigue, and ingenious twists and turns, the novel brilliantly captures the fears, anxieties, paranoia, and rampant conspiracies that hallmarked the Cold War era.
©1969 Philip Wylie (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
The Disappearance
Summary
"The female of the species vanished on the afternoon of the second Tuesday of February at four minutes and fifty-two seconds past four o'clock, Eastern Standard Time. The event occurred universally at the same instant, without regard to time belts, and was followed by such phenomena as might be expected after happenings of that nature." On a lazy, quiet afternoon, in the blink of an eye, our world shatters into two parallel universes as men vanish from women and women from men. After families and loved ones separate from one another, life continues in very different ways for men and women, boys and girls. An explosion of violence sweeps one world that still operates technologically; social stability and peace in the other are offset by famine and a widespread breakdown in machinery and science. And as we learn from the fascinating parallel stories of a brilliant couple, Bill and Paula Gaunt, the foundations of relationships, love, and sex are scrutinized, tested, and sometimes redefined in both worlds. The radically divergent trajectories of the gendered histories reveal stark truths about the rigidly defined expectations placed on men and women and their sexual relationships and make clear how much society depends on interconnection between the sexes.Written over a half century ago yet brimming with insight and unsettling in its relevance today, The Disappearance is a masterpiece of modern speculative fiction.
©1951 Philip Wylie (P)2012 Audible, Inc.