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Finches of Mars

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Finches of Mars

By: Brian Aldiss
Narrated by: Peter Noble
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About this listen

"My final Science Fiction novel." (Brian Aldiss)

Brian Aldiss has announced that this book, Finches of Mars, will be his final science fiction novel. And what a way to end one of the most illustrious careers in the genre.

Set on the Red Planet, it follows a group of colonists and the problems they have in setting up a new society. Life can be sustained, but new life will not prosper - the women on the planet only ever give birth to stillborn children.

Exploring many of the author’s classic themes, this is a landmark novel in any genre.

©2014 The Executors of the Estate of Brian Aldiss (P)2019 Audible, Ltd Science Fiction Space Exploration Fiction Solar System Mars Interstellar
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The narrator is poorly suited to content. His bad, characture-ish accents and excruciating rendering of female characters really detract.

The book itself is bleak and tinged with what feels like sexism or perhaps just outright misanthropy. Clever enough, I suppose, but for me nihilist sentiment doesn't really add much to anything and is better left to the adolescent who might at least grow out of it.

Bleak, dull and poorly read

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Finches of Mars is not a good book. There’s no depth to it, no interesting ideas and it just doesn’t seem to have anything to say. I’d read reviews to that extent before purchasing the book but as I really enjoyed other books by Aldiss I decided to give it a shot. Unfortunately it’s just bad and not even bad enough to be entertaining. There’s a lot of sexism, some transphobia and it is without a doubt the horniest book I’ve ever read, with every single character have weird conversations about sex for no reason I could figure out. The ending of the book is odd but not even odd in a satisfying or interesting way. It’s almost a cop out but there’s not actually anything to cop out from, nothing really happens and the problems characters do face seem like they could be solved if they spent about 5 minutes thinking about them.

The narrator is fine but even a great narrator wouldn’t have made this book any better. The book is just boring and scattershot.

Just bad

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