Try free for 30 days
-
The Hydrogen Sonata
- Culture Series, Book 10
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 17 hrs and 12 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $30.38
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
Children of Time
- By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Narrated by: Mel Hudson
- Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Adrian Tchaikovksy's critically acclaimed stand-alone novel Children of Time is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden.
-
-
Enjoyable book with a rather swift ending.
- By emmoff on 30-05-2017
-
Revelation Space
- By: Alastair Reynolds
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 22 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nine hundred thousand years ago, something annihilated the Amarantin civilization just as it was on the verge of discovering space flight. Now one scientist, Dan Sylveste, will stop at nothing to solve the Amarantin riddle before ancient history repeats itself. With no other resources at his disposal, Sylveste forges a dangerous alliance with the cyborg crew of the starship Nostalgia for Infinity. But as he closes in on the secret, a killer closes in on him because the Amarantin were destroyed for a reason.
-
-
Shame the narration is so off-putting
- By Amazon Customer on 31-08-2019
-
Hyperion
- By: Dan Simmons
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor, Allyson Johnson, Kevin Pariseau, and others
- Length: 20 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.
-
-
doop.
- By Tom on 13-12-2016
-
A Hole in the Sky
- Arkship Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Peter F. Hamilton
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Klett
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sixteen-year old Hazel lives in the Daedalus, a starship that is flying in search of a new world. The ship has been traveling for 500 years, searching for a world to settle in after having to abandon its last world. Everyone on board Daedalus lives a very simple existence in farming villages. The age of machines supplying their needs was lost during a mutiny 500 years ago.
-
-
I wish I asphyxiated
- By Anonymous User on 22-04-2021
-
Empire in Black and Gold
- Shadows of the Apt, Book 1
- By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Narrated by: Ben Allen
- Length: 23 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Lowlands’ city states have lived in peace for decades, hailed as bastions of civilization. Yet that peace is about to end. A distant empire has been conquering neighbours with highly trained soldiers and sophisticated combat techniques. And the city states are its desirable new prize. Only the ageing Stenwold Maker – spymaster, artificer and statesman – foresees the threat, as the empires’ armies march ever closer. So it falls upon his shoulders to open the eyes of the cities’ leaders.
-
-
All medieval fighting and no plot.
- By Chris on 28-02-2022
-
Diaspora
- By: Greg Egan
- Narrated by: Adam Epstein
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Behold the orphan. Born into a world that is not a world. A digital being grown from a mind seed, a genderless cybernetic citizen in a vast network of probes, satellites, and servers knitting the Solar System into one scape, from the outer planets to the fiery surface of the Sun. Since the Introdus in the 21st century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software.
-
-
Ultra-deep Sci-fi.
- By villageidiot on 10-06-2016
-
Children of Time
- By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Narrated by: Mel Hudson
- Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Adrian Tchaikovksy's critically acclaimed stand-alone novel Children of Time is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden.
-
-
Enjoyable book with a rather swift ending.
- By emmoff on 30-05-2017
-
Revelation Space
- By: Alastair Reynolds
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 22 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nine hundred thousand years ago, something annihilated the Amarantin civilization just as it was on the verge of discovering space flight. Now one scientist, Dan Sylveste, will stop at nothing to solve the Amarantin riddle before ancient history repeats itself. With no other resources at his disposal, Sylveste forges a dangerous alliance with the cyborg crew of the starship Nostalgia for Infinity. But as he closes in on the secret, a killer closes in on him because the Amarantin were destroyed for a reason.
-
-
Shame the narration is so off-putting
- By Amazon Customer on 31-08-2019
-
Hyperion
- By: Dan Simmons
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor, Allyson Johnson, Kevin Pariseau, and others
- Length: 20 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.
-
-
doop.
- By Tom on 13-12-2016
-
A Hole in the Sky
- Arkship Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Peter F. Hamilton
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Klett
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sixteen-year old Hazel lives in the Daedalus, a starship that is flying in search of a new world. The ship has been traveling for 500 years, searching for a world to settle in after having to abandon its last world. Everyone on board Daedalus lives a very simple existence in farming villages. The age of machines supplying their needs was lost during a mutiny 500 years ago.
-
-
I wish I asphyxiated
- By Anonymous User on 22-04-2021
-
Empire in Black and Gold
- Shadows of the Apt, Book 1
- By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Narrated by: Ben Allen
- Length: 23 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Lowlands’ city states have lived in peace for decades, hailed as bastions of civilization. Yet that peace is about to end. A distant empire has been conquering neighbours with highly trained soldiers and sophisticated combat techniques. And the city states are its desirable new prize. Only the ageing Stenwold Maker – spymaster, artificer and statesman – foresees the threat, as the empires’ armies march ever closer. So it falls upon his shoulders to open the eyes of the cities’ leaders.
-
-
All medieval fighting and no plot.
- By Chris on 28-02-2022
-
Diaspora
- By: Greg Egan
- Narrated by: Adam Epstein
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Behold the orphan. Born into a world that is not a world. A digital being grown from a mind seed, a genderless cybernetic citizen in a vast network of probes, satellites, and servers knitting the Solar System into one scape, from the outer planets to the fiery surface of the Sun. Since the Introdus in the 21st century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software.
-
-
Ultra-deep Sci-fi.
- By villageidiot on 10-06-2016
-
Columbus Day
- Expeditionary Force, Book 1
- By: Craig Alanson
- Narrated by: R.C. Bray
- Length: 16 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
We were fighting on the wrong side of a war we couldn't win. And that was the good news. The Ruhar hit us on Columbus Day. There we were, innocently drifting along the cosmos on our little blue marble, like the native Americans in 1492. Over the horizon come ships of a technologically advanced, aggressive culture, and BAM! There go the good old days, when humans only got killed by each other. So, Columbus Day. It fits. When the morning sky twinkled again, this time with Kristang starships jumping in to hammer the Ruhar, we thought we were saved.
-
-
Beer cans are all the rage
- By Jotham on 04-03-2017
-
The Star Fraction
- The Fall Revolution 1
- By: Ken Macleod
- Narrated by: Stephen Crossley
- Length: 14 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Moh Kohn is a security mercenary, his smart gun and killer reflexes for hire. Janis Taine is a scientist working on memory-enhancing drugs, fleeing the US/UN's technology cops. Jordan Brown is a teenager in the Christian enclave of Beulah City, dealing in theologically-correct software for the world's fundamentalists - and wants out.
-
-
overly complicated
- By C. Harrison on 09-05-2023
-
Cryptonomicon
- By: Neal Stephenson
- Narrated by: William Dufris
- Length: 42 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the US Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detachment 2702 - commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe - is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. In the present, Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia....
-
-
Neil Stevenson is a genius
- By Rhiannon on 09-12-2016
-
Anathem
- By: Neal Stephenson
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman, Tavia Gilbert, William Dufris, and others
- Length: 32 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fraa Erasmus is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the "Saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities, and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs, bloody violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community.
-
-
All world building, no narrative.
- By Anonymous User on 14-10-2019
-
All Systems Red (Dramatized Adaptation)
- The Murderbot Diaries, Book 1
- By: Martha Wells
- Narrated by: Alejandro Ruiz, Bradley Foster Smith, Holly Adams, and others
- Length: 2 hrs and 33 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern. On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid—a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.”
-
-
Original and thoughtful
- By Anonymous User on 28-02-2024
-
We Are Legion (We Are Bob)
- Bobiverse, Book 1
- By: Dennis E. Taylor
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
There's a reason We Are Legion was named Audible's Best Science Fiction Book of 2016: Its irresistibly irreverent wit! Bob Johansson has just sold his software company for a small fortune and is looking forward to a life of leisure. The first item on his to-do list: Spending his newfound windfall. On an urge to splurge, he signs up to have his head cryogenically preserved in case of death. Then he gets himself killed crossing the street. Waking up 117 years later, Bob discovers his mind has been uploaded into a sentient space probe with the ability to replicate itself.
-
-
So much better than I expected
- By Rob on 13-09-2017
Publisher's Summary
The novels of Iain M. Banks have forever changed the face of modern science fiction. His Culture books combine breathtaking imagination with exceptional storytelling, and have secured his reputation as one of the most extraordinary and influential writers in the genre.
The Scavenger species are circling. It is, truly, the End Days for the Gzilt civilisation.
An ancient people, organised on military principles and yet almost perversely peaceful, the Gzilt helped set up the Culture ten thousand years earlier. Now they've made the collective decision to follow the well-trodden path of millions of other civilisations: they are going to Sublime, elevating themselves to a new and almost infinitely more rich and complex existence.
But, amid preparations, the Regimental High Command is destroyed. Vyr Cossont, a former soldier for the Gzilt, appears to have been involved, and she is now wanted - dead, not alive. Aided only by an ancient, reconditioned android and a suspicious Culture avatar, Cossont must complete a final mission; she must find the oldest person in the Culture, a man over nine thousand years old, who might just hold the key to understanding what happened . . .
The final days of the Gzilt civilisation may prove its most perilous.
The Culture series:
Consider Phlebas
The Player of Games
Use of Weapons
Excession
Inversions
Look to Windward
Matter
Surface Detail
The Hydrogen Sonata
The State of the Art
Other books by Iain M. Banks:
Against a Dark Background
Feersum Endjinn
The Algebraist
Critic Reviews
"Nobody does it better." (Sunday Times)
"The standard by which the rest of SF is judged." (Guardian)
"Essential for SF fans." (Library Journal)
More from the same
Narrator
What listeners say about The Hydrogen Sonata
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- George Theodoridis
- 19-02-2021
A master of SF running out of puff
I rate Iain very very highly as a writer of SF, but this must be his least compelling novel. It never seemed to get going or present anything compelling in the area of plot, description, character or sci fi ideas. He seems to be suffering the writerly equivalent of glandular fever - plodding on without vigour. I ran out of puff myself with 5 hrs still to go.
Kenny's narration in this, as in other Culture novels, delivers a calibrated British insouciance so reflective of culture Minds, and is a pleasure in its own right.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Barry
- 04-06-2023
sublime perfection
loved this like all I.M.B culture novels. sad though. I've been saving this final novel for a few years never wanting to read/hear the last culture novel, admitting it's all over, I was not disappointed.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jim hill
- 19-01-2023
a fitting end to banks immortal series.
a review requires atleast 15 words words words words words that are unique and different from eachother
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Aaron Lavack
- 13-01-2023
A sweet farewell
Iain m banks’ final book. It’s got the feeling of a farewell, and can perhaps be read as a reflection on mortality. Or just as another excellent entry in his culture series. Better than some of his books, though probably not his best, it’s still a good read, and feels like a fitting bookend to his corpus.
If you’ve enjoyed his other work then give it a read. If not - perhaps start with player of games or use of weapons.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Anonymous User
- 06-11-2021
the void
Yet another void left internally after completing a good series. The feeling is bittersweet however "the Algebraist" should be a fond reminder of this universe and writing style.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Brad
- 02-10-2019
Peter Kenny
Peter Kenny is the only one who should narrate Iain m Banks. He has become the voice of the culture. I listened to both versions of 'The Algerbreist' done by other people, and neither performance was up to Peter Kenny's standard.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Kindle Customer
- 26-01-2019
Brilliant but missing something
*Mild tone spoilers* I got to the end and sort of found myself wondering what the point of it all was. Nothing of great importance is effected by the protagonists of the story. No great justice is done, and while tragic things happen there is little sense of tragic culmination. Even romantic subplots don't really go anywhere. It all just sort of fizzles. Arguably this is a sort of philosophical point being made by the story, but that doesn't make it less disappointing.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Mark Honeyman
- 05-10-2018
Outstanding
Excellent Culture novel superbly read by Peter Kenny. Kenny is incredible. Highly recommended. RIP Iain.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Dallas
- 15-09-2018
The Easiest 5 star ever.
I will listen to this work again, probably a few times. four more words needed.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Elliot
- 08-06-2018
Intriguing but not outstanding.
An interesting book, not as gripping as Consider Phlebas, and the characters aren’t as memorable, except a small selection. However, the narration is as always second to none, and it is an intriguing in depth look into the Minds of the Culture.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!