Noumenon

By: Marina J. Lostetter

Narrated by: Celeste Ciulla

With nods to Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series, the real science of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, a touch of Hugh Howey's Wool, and told through echoes of Octavia Butler's voice, this is a powerful tale of space travel, adventure, discovery, and humanity that unfolds through a series of generational vignettes.

In 2088, humankind is at last ready to explore beyond Earth's solar system. But one uncertainty remains: Where do we go? Astrophysicist Reggie Straifer has an idea. He's discovered an anomalous star that appears to defy the laws of physics and proposes the creation of a deep-space mission to find out whether the star is a weird natural phenomenon or something manufactured. The journey will take eons. In order to maintain the genetic talent of the original crew, humankind's greatest ambition - to explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy - is undertaken by clones. But a clone is not a perfect copy, and each new generation has its own quirks, desires, and neuroses. As the centuries fly by, the society living aboard the nine ships (designated "Convoy Seven") changes and evolves, but their mission remains the same: to reach Reggie's mysterious star and explore its origins - and implications.

A mosaic novel of discovery, Noumenon - in a series of vignettes - examines the dedication, adventure, growth, and fear of having your entire world consist of nine ships in the vacuum of space. The men and women, and even the AI, must learn to work and live together in harmony, as their original DNA is continuously replicated and they are born again and again into a thousand new lives. With the stars their home and the unknown their destination, they are on a voyage of many lifetimes - an odyssey to understand what lies beyond the limits of human knowledge and imagination.

©2017 Little Lost Stories, LLC (P)2017 Recorded Books

Not like the rest

I have alot of other stories like it. I was pleased that it was not like the rest. It was a good use of my time.

More character study than science fiction

I found this book to be more of a character study of people placed in unusual and extremely stressful situations than a typical sci-fi novel. Granted, the characters were placed in these stressful situations by a science fiction plot line, but the science fiction is only 15% or so of the story and the character study is the rest. Not really my cup of tea.

Stunning writing. amazing concept. fantastic story

this series is the king of sci fi.
i cannt even imagine creating a story that truly goes on for hundreds of thousands of years.
the imagination it took to create this baffles me.
there are twists and turns and mysteries.. its all so exciting its been keeping me going at work.
if you enjoy scifi, please do urself a favor and read these books. they are stellar

Just not good science fiction

The narrator was horrible. Somehow, she always sounded condescending to me or thought I wasn't bright enough to understand the poor science in the story. The story lacked substance. I couldn't finish the book; it was so bad. I am a long-time Audible listener, and this ranks in the bottom ten percent of the books I've heard.

The story is great, but the narration...

The story is great, but the narration drove me crazy.
Lostetter's writing is superb and occasionally inspired. The quality is right up there with David Brin, and I definitely recommend this book as a traditional printed novel. But I have an issue with the narration in this audiobook. Ciulla is great with voices, the characterization comes through, she does the voicing of different genders well, and I never was confused who was the viewpoint character or who was speaking the dialogue. Everything would be just fine, but her cadence almost drove me to abandon the book. She has pauses in her phrasing mid-sentence that simply ruins the story. It gives so much of the narration an artificial sense to it, as if a computer were adding a fraction of a second to the space between some words in a sentence. Even when she is reading the perspective of an AI, it sounds off. It seems so obvious to me, that I think if Ciulla revisited her approach, she could correct this strange tic in her performance. It's almost as if she is having an issue with cue-pickup, but the lag occurs mid-sentence. I heard it also in a story she narrated, Ancillary Justice, which I did abandon specifically because the narration ruined the story.