Welcome to a world where big cities are dying, dead - or transformed into technological megastructures. Where once-thriving suburbs are now treacherous Wilds. Where those who live for technology battle those who would die rather than embrace it. It is a world of zero-footprint cities, virtual nations, and armed camps of eco-survivalists. METAtropolis is an intelligent and stunning creation of five of today's cutting-edge science-fiction writers: 2008 Hugo Award winners John Scalzi and Elizabeth Bear; Campbell Award winner Jay Lake; plus fan favorites Tobias Buckell and Karl Schroeder. Together they set the ground rules and developed the parameters of this "shared universe", then wrote five original novellas - all linked, but each a separate tale. Bringing this audiobook to life is a dream team of performers: Battlestar Galactica's Michael Hogan ("Saul Tigh"); Alessandro Juliani ("Felix Gaeta"); and Kandyse McClure ("Anastasia 'Dee' Dualla"); plus legendary audiobook narrators Scott Brick (Dune) and Stefan Rudnicki (Ender's Game). John Scalzi, who served as Project Editor, introduces each story, offering insight into how the METAtropolis team created this unique project exclusively for audio.
Metatropolis
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Editor Scalzi (Zoe's Tale) and four well-known writers thoughtfully postulate the evolution of cities, transcending postapocalyptic clichés to envision genuinely new communities and relationships. Self-sustaining walled cities struggle with their responsibilities to dying suburbs in Scalzi's Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis; goods are exchanged through multiple microtransactions in Tobias S. Buckell's Stochasti-City and a reputation economy in Elizabeth Bear's The Red in the Sky Is Our Blood. A lone man attempts to overthrow an early enclave in Jay Lake's In the Forests of the Night, while Karl Schroeder's To Hie from Far Celenia brilliantly combines steampunk, urban sociology and network theory as entire subcultures go off the grid. Each story shines on its own; as a group they reinforce one another, building a multifaceted view of a realistic and hopeful urban future. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
“Editor Scalzi (Zoe’s Tale) and four well-known writers thoughtfully postulate the evolution of cities, transcending postapocalyptic clichés to envision genuinely new communities and relationships.… Each story shines on its own; as a group they reinforce one another, building a multifaceted view of a realistic and hopeful urban future.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Scalzi and his contributors/collaborators have created a fascinating shared urban future that each of them evokes with his or her particular strengths. Originally an audio anthology, this stellar collection is a fascinating example of shared world building, well deserving of a parallel life in print.” —Booklist
“Scalzi and his contributors/collaborators have created a fascinating shared urban future that each of them evokes with his or her particular strengths. Originally an audio anthology, this stellar collection is a fascinating example of shared world building, well deserving of a parallel life in print.” —Booklist
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning Stories about a Possible Future,
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This review is from: METAtropolis (MP3 CD)
I haven't read SciFi in a long time, though I'm a lover of Star Wars, Star Trek, Battle Star Galactica and Stargate so I was eager to give this a listen, especially since I'm pretty familiar with three of the readers, Michael Hogan, Kandyse McClure and Alessandro Juiliani, as they're all BSG cast members.
The first story in the series started off a little slow, but they had a lot of info to get out to the listeners. These five stories take place about fifty years in the future, countries have collapsed and the lucky live in a loosely aligned system of city states. To live outside isn't good. The second story picks up the pace and it continues through out. At times the authors were just a tiny bit preachy about being green, but it didn't offend me and being green in these stories fits in. The future painted here is a bit bleak, but I could imagine myself living in it. These authors have woven a set of stories into a future that drew me in. They, with the help of the readers, made the whole think believable. If you're into science fiction, you'll enjoy this and even if you're not, I think you'll find more here to like then you might think and you'll certainly find a lot to think about.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
first and foremost... tell a story,
By
This review is from: METAtropolis (Audio CD)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
From a conceptual point of view, I liked the proposed vision of this work. The line up of authors had me excited. Upon listening, I grew frustrated and annoyed with the first 3 stories and eventually, got to enjoy the last 2 stories.
My message to the authors is to remember first and foremost to tell a good story. I felt like, for several of the authors, the priority was to bash me over the head with beliefs about global warming, capitalism, and what I am doing wrong today that will cause the terrible conditions the world is in in the stories. And that took me right out of the story... instead as I listened, I questioned beliefs and conclusions in the underlying structure of the universe in the stories and was busy doing that and not caught up in the plot. Whatever the authors' intents were, this is how it came through to me. For me... the last 2 stories were enjoyable and well written. Whether or not I agreed with the underlying premise, I enjoyed the stories, got caught up in the plot, and was exposed in a pleasant way to the universe that it felt like the first 3 authors were trying to force feed to me. Whether or not all 5 stories are messages I and others need to hear clearly, the last 2 stories had a much better chance of being 'heard'.
22 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Up and down - the ups are solid, the downs are low, so low I nearly quit listening,
By
This review is from: METAtropolis (Audio CD)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Metatropolis is a collection of short stories about a fictional future world in which the United States government is much weaker and local governments have had to shoulder most of the responsibility for governing. We get to see 4 future settings in this anthology - Cascadia in the American Northwest, Detroit, New St. Louis and Scandinavia. While the U.S. government is much weaker, the role of technology has grown much stronger. There are virtual on-line worlds and cellphones are everywhere and even more plugged in than they are now. The five authors sat down and mapped out the ground rules of this future world and than separated to write their stories. John Scalzi edited the collection and was the last one to write a story. He specifically tailored his story to fill in the blanks left by the other four.
So far, so good but what about the individual stories? What's good is pretty good, what's bad is real, real bad. The first story is "In the Forests of the Night," by Jay Lake. It is bad. The worst of the bunch. The story concerns a messiah-like figure called Tyger Tyger who arrives at Cascadia, a city of anti-technology greens in the Cascades in the Washington/Oregon area. The messiah-figure concept was done poorly, the anti-capitalist, anti-technology, anti-religion angle was silly (for example, in one scene creationists storm the geology department of a university and kill all of the geologists). I doubt that Lake actually understands the meaning of the political term "Libertarian" and he certainly overuses the phrase "reputation economics" - in fact the concept is bantered around in the book so often that you'd think this was a new idea. Nah - just overuse of a cool-sounding phrase. The government of Cascadia is so loose and yet so complicated that it reminded me of the peasant collective government in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Special Edition) described by Dennis the Peasant ("Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed!"). Lake's premise that you can hide an entire city under the basalt and loam (two more overused words in this story - buy a thesaurus, man!) and keep all of the heat created by people just living hidden from heat-detecting satellites is so silly that I have to wonder why this wasn't sent back for a re-write. 1 star for this story. The second story is set in Detroit. It is "Stochasti-City," by Tobias Bickell. I enjoyed this one. It explored the conditions of America in this world the authors created and the story was in and of itself interesting as well. 4 stars "The Red in the Sky is Our Blood" by Elizabeth Bear is the third story. It is forgettable except that I noted that it was the victim of long soliloquies about the evils of globalization. 1 star. "Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis" by John Scalzi is the fourth story, and in my opinion, the best of the bunch by far. It had the most important thing that any story has to have - good characters. As a bonus, the slacker is kinda likable and we do get to learn even more about the world these authors created because, as I already noted, he specifically tailored his story to fill in the blanks left by the other four. 5 stars. "To Hide from Far Celenia" is the last story. Written by Karl Schroeder, it builds on the notion that people can and will retreat into a video game world. This is not news - people do that now with online games. There are already online economies. They'll do it even more with the addition of 3D video glasses that overlay the online world over the real one. The story just didn't really go anywhere and the authors comments on economics are a joke. Too many long monologues - at points it was like listening to a half-baked graduate dissertation on economics and computer technology. I only finished it because I had already invested so much time listening to the other stories. I have to give it 1 star. So - 5 stories with scores of 1 + 4 + 1 + 5 + 1. That equals 12. 12/5 = 2.4 Total score 2 out of 5 stars.
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