Brain Wave
by Poul Anderson (Ballantine, 1954)
audiobook read by Tom Weiner (Blackstone, 2011)
Old-school SF ‘what if?’ story, imagining the (near-catastrophic) consequences of a world-wide boost to intelligence. Weiner’s audiobook reading goes some way towards bestowing neglected characterisation, but for the most part this is a thought experiment explored woodenly by Anderson through third-person marionettes.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
by Walter M. Miller Jr. (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1959)
audiobook read by Tom Weiner (Blackstone, 2011)
Award-winning but over-hyped. A drawn-out, wasteland-without-hope, of-its-time fix-up novel exploring notions of—and interactions between—religious belief, cyclical history, information systems and nuclear apocalypse. Miller builds detailed (if bleak and self-indulgent) scenarios. All three sections come to weigh portentously upon the reader.