Robert Charles Wilson has 9 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 651 ratings. The most-rated is The History of Ancient Egypt.
The History of Ancient Egypt
Summary
Ancient Egyptian civilization is so grand our minds sometimes have difficulty adjusting to it. It lasted 3,000 years, longer than any other on the planet. Its Great Pyramid of Cheops was the tallest building in the world until well into the 19th century and remains the only Ancient Wonder still standing. And it was the most technologically advanced of the ancient civilizations, with the medical knowledge that made Egyptian physicians the most famous in the world. Yet even after deciphering its hieroglyphs, and marveling at its scarabs, mummies, obelisks, and sphinxes, Egyptian civilization remains one of history's most mysterious, as "other" as it is extraordinary. This chronological survey presents the complete history of ancient Egypt's three great Kingdoms: the Old Kingdom, when the pyramids were built and Egypt became a nation under the supreme rule of the pharaoh and the rules of Egyptian art were established; the Middle Kingdom, when Egypt was a nation fighting to restore its greatness; and the New Kingdom, when all the names we know today-Hatshepsut, Tutankhamen, Ramses the Great, Cleopatra, and others-first appeared. Professor Brier's 48 lectures glisten with the kind of vivid anecdotes and human glimpses that make this ancient world breathe again. "The fun of history is in the details," he notes. "Knowing that Ramses the Great was crippled by arthritis for the last decade of his long life makes us more sympathetic to the boastful monarch who fathered more than 100 children. If we understand what it was like to be a miner sent to the turquoise mines in the Sinai mountains in the summer, we will feel a kinship with our long-dead counterparts." PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.
©1999 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)1999 The Great Courses
Spin
Summary
One night when he was 10, Tyler stood in his backyard and watched the stars go out. They flared into brilliance, then disappeared, replaced by an empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives. The "sun" is now a featureless disk - a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. The world's artificial satellites have fallen out of orbit. Eventually, space probes reveal that the barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time passes faster outside the barrier - more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death of the sun is only about forty years away. Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a religion out of the fears of the masses. Earth sends terraforming machines, then humans, to Mars...and immediately an emissary returns with thousands of stories about the settling of Mars. Then an identical barrier appears around Mars. Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.
©2005 Robert Charles Wilson (P)2008 Macmillan Audio
The Caves of Steel
Summary
A millennium into the future two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. Isaac Asimov's Robot novels chronicle the unlikely partnership between a New York City detective and a humanoid robot who must learn to work together. Like most people left behind on an over-populated Earth, New York City police detective Elijah Baley had little love for either the arrogant Spacers or their robotic companions. But when a prominent Spacer is murdered under mysterious circumstances, Baley is ordered to the Outer Worlds to help track down the killer. The relationship between Life and his Spacer superiors, who distrusted all Earthmen, was strained from the start. Then he learned that they had assigned him a partner: R. Daneel Olivaw. Worst of all was that the "R" stood for robot - and his positronic partner was made in the image and likeness of the murder victim!
©1954 Isaac Asimov (P)2014 Random House Audio
Axis
Summary
Wildly praised by readers and critics alike, Robert Charles Wilson's Spin won science fiction's highest honor, the Hugo Award, for Best Novel. Now, in Spin's direct sequel, Wilson takes us to the "world next door" - the planet engineered by the mysterious Hypotheticals to support human life, and connected to Earth by way of the Arch that towers hundreds of miles over the Indian Ocean. Humans are colonizing this new world - and, predictably, fiercely exploiting its resources, chiefly large deposits of oil in the western deserts of the continent of Equatoria. Lise Adams is a young woman attempting to uncover the mystery of her father's disappearance 10 years earlier. Turk Findley is an ex-sailor and sometimes-drifter. They come together when an infall of cometary dust seeds the planet with tiny remnant Hypothetical machines. Soon, this seemingly hospitable world will become very alien indeed - as the nature of time is once again twisted, by entities unknown.
©2007 Robert Charles Wilson (P)2008 Macmillan Audio
The Chronoliths
Summary
Scott Warden is a man haunted by the past - and soon to be haunted by the future. In early 21st-century Thailand, Scott is an expatriate slacker. Then, one day, he inadvertently witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar in the forested interior. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base, freezing ice out of the air and emitting a burst of ionizing radiation. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory - 16 years in the future. Shortly afterwards, another, larger pillar arrives in the center of Bangkok - obliterating the city and killing thousands. Over the next several years, human society is transformed by these mysterious arrivals from, seemingly, our own near future. Who is the warlord "Kuin" whose victories they note? Scott wants only to rebuild his life. But some strange loop of causality keeps drawing him in, to the central mystery and a final battle with the future.
©2002 Robert Charles Wilson (P)2009 Audible, Inc.
Vortex
Summary
Vortex tells the story of Turk Findley, the protagonist introduced in Axis, who is transported 10,000 years into the future by the mysterious entities called “the Hypotheticals”. In this future, humanity exists on a chain of planets connected by Hypothetical gateways; but Earth itself is a dying world, effectively quarantined. Turk and his young friend Isaac Dvali are taken up by a community of fanatics who use them to enable a passage to the dying Earth, where they believe a prophecy of human/Hypothetical contact will be fulfilled. The prophecy is only partly true, however, and Turk must unravel the truth about the nature and purpose of the Hypotheticals before they carry him on a journey through warped time to the end of the universe itself. Vortex is thrilling and complex science-fiction novel from Hugo Award-winning author Robert Charles Wilson.
©2011 Robert Charles Wilson (P)2011 Macmillan Audio
The Affinities
Summary
In our rapidly-changing world of "social media", everyday people are more and more able to sort themselves into social groups based on finer and finer criteria. In the near future of Robert Charles Wilson's The Affinities, this process is supercharged by new analytic technologies - genetic, brain-mapping, behavioral. To join one of the 22 Affinities is to change one's life. It's like family, and more than family. Your fellow members aren't just like you, and they aren't just people who are likely to like you. They're also the people with whom you can best cooperate in all areas of life - creative, interpersonal, even financial. At loose ends both professional and personal, young Adam Fisk takes the suite of tests to see if he qualifies for any of the Affinities, and finds that he's a match for one of the largest, the one called Tau. It's utopian - at first. Problems in all areas of his life begin to simply sort themselves out, as he becomes part of a global network of people dedicated to helping one another - to helping him. But as the differing Affinities put their new powers to the test, they begin to rapidly chip away at the power of governments, of global corporations, of all the institutions of the old world. Then, with dreadful inevitability, the different Affinities begin to go to war - with one another. What happens next will change Adam, and his world, forever.
©2015 Robert Charles Wilson (P)2015 Macmillan Audio
Burning Paradise
Summary
From Robert Charles Wilson, the author of the Hugo-winning Spin, comes Burning Paradise, a new tale of humans coming to grips with a universe of implacable strangeness. Cassie Klyne, 19 years old, lives in the United States in the year 2015 - but it's not our United States, and it's not our 2015. Cassies world has been at peace since the Great Armistice of 1918. There was no World War II, no Great Depression. Poverty is declining, prosperity is increasing everywhere; social instability is rare. But Cassie knows the world isn't what it seems. Her parents were part of a group who gradually discovered the awful truth: That for decades - back to the dawn of radio communications - human progress has been interfered with, made more peaceful and benign, by an extraterrestrial entity. That by interfering with our communications, this entity has tweaked history in massive and subtle ways. That humanity is, for purposes unknown, being farmed. Cassie's parents were killed for this knowledge, along with most of the other members of their group. Since then, the survivors have scattered and gone into hiding. Cassie and her younger brother Thomas now live with her aunt Nerissa, who shares these dangerous secrets. Others live nearby. For eight years they have attempted to lead unexceptional lives in order to escape detection. The tactic has worked. Until now. Because the killers are back. And they're not human.
©2013 Robert Charles Wilson (P)2013 Macmillan Audio
Magic Time
Summary
The epic climax of the Magic Time saga finds former lawyer turned visionary leader Cal Griffin continuing his quest across the changed face of America, where machines no longer run and magic holds sway. Accompanied by his loyal band of followers, fierce warrior Colleen Brooks, expatriate Russian physician Doc Lysenko, and bipolar street wizard Herman "Goldie" Goldman, Cal follows a trail of clues he hopes will lead him to the Source of the Change that overthrew the world, and to his abducted sister, Christina, who was transformed into one of the powerful, enigmatic beings known as flares. Facing the most harrowing challenges of his life, Cal encounters old friends and foes, plus new ones such as Lady Blade of the Oglala Lakota, tracking her Storm-fled husband; the grunter boy Inigo Devine, emissary from a dread region and bearing a frightful secret; Mama Diamond, the elderly Japanese-American stone and bone dealer, who discovers an awesome, dragon-born talent within herself; and Jeff Arcott, Theo Siegel, and Melissa Wade, the triumvirate of brilliant grad students that just might have found the trick to getting everything running again, but at a terrible cost. In this gripping tale of families torn apart and seeking reunion, of men and women haunted by past griefs and phantom futures, of unimaginable beauties and magnificent horrors, Cal Griffin and his friends find themselves called to rise above all limits of strength and endurance, armed with little more than forgiveness, compassion, and an unshakable determination to heal the world and one another, in the depths of the Ghostlands.
©2004 Marc Scott Zicree (P)2005 Blackstone Audiobooks