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Stowaway to Mars

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Stowaway to Mars

By: John Wyndham
Narrated by: Olivia Dowd
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Summary

Aircraft designer Dale Currance undertakes a journey to Mars in an effort to capture the prize being offered to the first man to complete an interplanetary journey, but a female stowaway throws his plans into disarray.

An international prize of one billion has been offered to the first man to complete an interplanetary trip, and Dale Curtance, a millionaire adventurer, emerges as the British entrant. With a hand-picked crew, he blasted off from Salisbury Plain in the spaceship Gloria Mundi, destination—the planet Mars. Once free of Earth's atmosphere, they discover a stowaway—a woman. Her extraordinary story helps them prepare for the dangers they encounter on the Red Planet, and the fantastic world that exists there.

©1935 John Wyndham (P)2022 Audible, Ltd Adventure Science Fiction Space Exploration Fiction Solar System Mars Interstellar
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A great performance and a fairly interesting novel.
Many of the concepts, especially regarding traditional gender roles, are extremely dated.
The book starts off painfully slow with characters that becomes completely irrelevant about halfway through.
There is some great world building with the discoveries on Mars. Including genuinely interesting ideas around the societal impact of AI and self governing machines.
Unfortunately the book ends in a shockingly abrupt, lazy and boring way.

Dated but pretty good

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There is a lot here that is classic Wyndham but he proves not to be as skilled on writing on extraplantary adventures as some of his contempories. Wynham's interest of how changes and technology challenges and changes comes through but this 1930s novel has not aged well and makes an awkward listen at times.

A novel that has classic Wyndham elements but...

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A good story but very dated in how the technology and society are shown. The way women are handled by today's standards is terrible. However a good underlying story.

Excellent narration and characterization by Olivia Dowd.

Dated but an illustration scifi's roots.

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Has failed to stand the test of time in the way that his more well known titles have, not because the story itself is out of date - in fact it is quite interesting hearing thoughts of what the future would entail from the point of view of a person in the 1930s - but because the ideas that are put under the microscope and debated in the book are now so dated. A large part of the book revolves around the idea that machines could one day become intelligent, which was probably quite a revelatory leap of thinking and perhaps difficult to grasp as a concept when this was written, but is now such an obvious and accepted reality that we don’t need to spend so much time being persuaded that this may become reality. Overall well narrated, and easy background listening, but it’s not going to live long in your memory.

Stowaway to mars

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There were elements of misogyny which were very disturbing but perhaps true to the period in which it was written. I felt the plot came to a hurried end. Not the best from John Wyndham - the sequel has not been included.

Science Fiction/Romance

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