Audio Book Science Fiction

Try these (most of them can be found at Recordedbooks.com or Amazon.com):

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Berserker by Fred Saberhagen
Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard (the movie was horrible, but the books is a lot of fun)
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (this is an incredible time travel story)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney (classic sci-fi thriller)
Time and Again by Jack Finney (another great time travel novel, with incredible attention to detail--a great mystery story, too)

2007-07-01 14:10:19 by Baby Raptor

At their peak, over thirty million Americans read pulp fiction stories and novels every month. These readers shared a passion for adventure that ...

I travel a lot and plan to start to listen to audio-books. I love science fiction films but never really explored the written genre.

Now that I have a chance to delve into sci-fi novels I find that I cannot find a decent list of the best sci-fi novels available on audio-book.

Can you help?

It depends on what type of science fiction you like, in part. I can tell you that Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books are on audio (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) as are Orson Scott Card's Ender books and Connie Willis' wonderful Doomsday Book. . . whether available at this second in time, I don't know; they were at my library.

Recorded Books has a list of what they have available now:

http://www.recordedbooks.com/index.cfm?f useaction=rb.show_genre&gen_id=321
BTW, Recorded Books does have Joe Haldeman's Forever War and I saw a Connie Willis listed as available now.


Audio books are a little harder to list like this because they become unavailable in ways print books don't. For example, I listened to Willis' book on tape. I don't know if it's still available as an audio download or on cd. Contracts with authors sometimes specified the exact format the publisher could use, and when formats changed, the publisher may not have had the rights to the book as a cd, for example.

Another problem is that SF as a genre isn't as widely popular as, say, mysteries or inspirational fiction. (No flames, please; I speak not judgmentally but as one who has looked at offerings from Recorded Books, Books on Tape, BBC audio, etc. and found fewer titles in that genre; also if you check out their standing order plans, you'll see they offer mystery, inspirational, non-fiction, Christian, teen, children's, African American, Southern, etc. but not SF-- or at least not the last time I checked.) I'm not putting down SF as a genre. The people who love it are devoted but it doesn't seem to cross over as easily to mainstream as, say, mysteries.


Plus the line between SF and Fantasy is a bit blurry sometimes. . . more than a bit. Right now fantasy is a bigger seller so you'll see more Fantasy listed as science fiction-- Piers Anthony I think of as more fantasy, for example, and Robert Jordan. Anyway, there aren't as many SF books on audio as some other genres-- unless you want to count things like J.D. Robb's "in Death" series, which are basically mysteries set slightly in the future. (I tend to think of SF as what used to be called "hard SF"-- i.e., techno-heavy.)

Good luck! Hope you find something you like.