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    The Coming
    The Coming
    The Coming
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Coming

    Written by Joe Haldeman

    Narrated by Kevin Orton

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Joe Haldeman has penned several best-selling novels, including The Forever War (C1146). After receiving a message from deep space, astronomer Aurora "Rory" Bell anticipates extraterrestrial visitors on New Year's Eve. But with Earth teetering on the edge of another world war, Rory soon begins to wonder if the message was a hoax. And when the message is leaked to the public, a media frenzy ensues. "A large-scale story [that] provides food for thought as well as fast-paced action."-Library Journal
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateApr 27, 2012
    ISBN9781464036156
    Author

    Joe Haldeman

    Joe Haldeman began his writing career while he was still in the army. Drafted in 1967, he fought in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer with the Fourth Division. He was awarded several medals, including a Purple Heart. Haldeman sold his first story in 1969 and has since written over two dozen novels and five collections of short stories and poetry. He has won the Nebula and Hugo Awards for his novels, novellas, poems, and short stories, as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Locus Award, the Rhysling Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. His works include The Forever War, Forever Peace, Camouflage, 1968, the Worlds saga, and the Marsbound series. Haldeman recently retired after many years as an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and his wife, Gay, live in Florida, where he also paints, plays the guitar, rides his bicycle, and studies the skies with his telescope. 

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    Reviews for The Coming

    3/5

    108 ratings3 reviews

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    • 1/5
      The editors of a literary magazine I'm a member of use an abbreviation that would apply to this novel: TLDGA (Too Long Doesn't Go Anywhere). You don't often see this kind of novel but when you do it's hard not to classify it as: author used text to put his own fascination and fetishes on paper. Sometimes this works to great effect, such as Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, but in those cases the author knows to give the reader plenty of entertainment and other unrelated materials. Haldeman however foregoes that and just let's loose on his own fascinations from the get go. Roughly and vaguely this science fiction novel is about first contact. More specifically and more importantly this is a novel written by an author with an obsession of bodily functions.Besides a litany of graphic scenes and paragraphs I could have done without, the author mainly experiments with narrative. Chapters are standalone points of view of a single character and the novel is chain of ever changing perspectives, or rather that's what it wants to be. Instead it reads as a rapid chaos fire. I could barely keep up trying to figure out who this character was I was reading about again since it only had a 1 page chapter about 10 chapters back.I stopped reading this book because not only is it tedious, it's frustrating and insulting to the reader. In fact this novel made me angry since I felt stuck at the end of a fire hose that starts at the author's mind and which spouts personal sexual and body interaction preferences directly into my brain.
    • 2/5
      The Coming is a near-future first-contact story. It begins with a message from an alien craft in deep space-- "We're coming."-- then follows a host of characters through the three months between the message and the arrival of the ship.The problem is there isn't much of an idea here. The book is about the anticipation of an imminent first contact, but when it finally comes, it proves to be a minor plot twist that might, maybe, be interesting enough to support a short story. The sort of twist you might get at the end of a half-baked episode of the Twilight Zone. Worse, from the perspective of the last page, most of the many, many characters are revealed as irrelevant to the story. Were they added to pad the book up to novel length? That's how it feels.Fortunately, the book is quick enough that its emptiness isn't painful. Haldeman's writing is always clear and pointed. The characters who get developed are interesting, and some aspects of his 50-year future are interesting. (Especially his vision of the near-future news media.) On the other hand, there are features of his near-future that are tantalizing but unexplained. Society is terribly homophobic. Why? How did we get there from here?The structure of the book makes it a compulsive read. The narrator's eye transfers from character to character as they interact. So we might begin following an astronomer as she talks to her husband, and then follow him to his neighborhood bar, and then follow his bartender after he leaves, and so on. It makes the pacing feel whiplash-frantic while still allowing lots of detail. It's a neat technique I've never seen employed in quite this way.Still, no amount of frantic pacing can make up for the lack of substance.(An irrelevant aside: The President of the USA is eerily like Sarah Palin-- eerily because the book was published in 2000, when no one outside of Wasilla had heard of Palin.)
    • 5/5
      In the middle of the 21st Century, Aurora Bell is an Astronomy professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville. One day, she receives a message from outer space ("We're Coming") that seems to herald the arrival of alien visitors. The alien ship is traveling at just under the speed of light, and will arrive on New Year's Day, three months from now.Earth of the mid-21st Century is not prepared for any sort of invasion. Global warming has begun to alter Earth's climate. Much of Long Island is under water, and in Florida, going outside for any length of time without sunscreen is a bad idea. Europe is again on the brink of war. The American President, Carlie LaSalle, is an airbrushed creation of the political consultants and media managers. She tends to look at everything in terms of a conspiracy against her; the general consensus is that she has approximately six working brain cells.LaSalle orders the deployment of a space-based laser carried on a shuttle to destroy the alien ship if it starts firing on Earth. Such a laser could also be pointed downward, like at some European city, getting Europe very upset at America. If They (whoever they are) have light-speed space travel, and intetrstellar capabilities, won't they have defenses against orbiting laser systems? Even worse, if Earth gets them angry, won't they have the ability to severely damage, or destroy, the Earth? On the other hand, who ever heard of a one-ship "invasion?" Grayson Pauling, the President's Science Advisor, is totally opposed to LaSalle's plan, opposed enough to sneak several pounds of plastic explosive into a Cabinet meeting. Amid all this, Bell is less and less convinced that aliens are coming. A longer message, detailing just where and when they will land, is in present-day colloquial English. Something is heading for Earth, but what?This is another solid, you-won't-go-wrong story from Haldeman. It is more about Earth several decades from now than about Alien Contact, but it is still a gem of a novel.