Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Starbound
    Starbound
    Starbound
    Audiobook8 hours

    Starbound

    Written by Joe Haldeman

    Narrated by Annie Henk, George Guidall and Jefferson Mays

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and John W. Campbell Award winner Joe Haldeman has given the world such science fiction masterpieces as The Forever War and Forever Peace. Here he tells the tale of Carmen Dula's six-year journey through space to the home of The Others, where she represents Earth in hopes of forging a peace accord. But due to Relativity, 50 Earth years have passed since Carmen left. And while humans have been busy constructing an enormous flotilla of warships, The Others possess power and technology far beyond anything Earth can imagine. ". important and entertaining ."-Library Journal
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJul 2, 2010
    ISBN9781449814557
    Starbound
    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. 

    More audiobooks from Joe Haldeman

    Related to Starbound

    Titles in the series (2)

    View More
    View More

    Related audiobooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Inhibitor Phase

      Aug 11, 2021

      Inhibitor Phase
      2 min read

    • Article

      Children Of Ruin

      May 22, 2019

      Children Of Ruin
      1 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Mar 25, 2024

      Books
      5 min read

    • Article

      In Search Of . . .

      Feb 1, 2019

      In Search Of . . .
      7 min read

    • Article

      Gaia, the Scientist: What if the first woman scientist was simply the first woman?

      Dec 29, 2021

      Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Universality” issue in April, 2021. There exists a social hierarchy within science that strikes people who are not mi

      7 min read

    • Article

      A Symposium On The Mysterious

      Sep 1, 2023

      A Symposium On The Mysterious
      24 min read

    • Article

      How the Lark Got Her Crest

      May 30, 2023

      How the Lark Got Her Crest
      15 min read

    • Article

      Documentary Brings Goodall’s Story to Vivid Life in ‘Jane’

      Oct 20, 2017

      We are so used to seeing reenactments in documentaries of this sort that to see footage of real chimpanzees is both unnerving and exhilarating.

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Age of the Entangled Self

      May 27, 2022

      The Age of the Entangled Self
      3 min read

    • Article

      Six Phases Of The Moon

      Jun 1, 2023

      Six Phases Of The Moon
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Stars Are a Comforting Constant: A poet blends the personal with the cosmic.

      Dec 1, 2016

      The first time I saw a meteor, I’d slipped outside to lie in the grass after everyone else had gone to sleep. The daytime commotion of my cousins’ and siblings’ games and my Poppop’s blaring polka music often drove me to tears. As an introvert, I wan

      4 min read

    • Article

      Bright Passage

      Mar 8, 2022

      Bright Passage
      19 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Mar 13, 2023

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      Retriever of Souls

      Nov 25, 2021

      What they don’t say is that, sometimes God will call you to the wilderness, gesture toward the trees, and then, hang back and wave you on alone. —“Prayer for the Wretched Among Us” from The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded At nig

      18 min read

    • Article

      Cricket League

      Sep 1, 2020

      Cricket League
      7 min read

    • Article

      Animal Planet

      May 3, 2020

      Animal Planet
      3 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Mar 1, 2019

      I was like you once, a sealed plastic bag of water filters floating on the sea. I thought my numbers proved my time and space on earth. I thought having children was a way of creating more love. I thought thoughts I was ashamed to speak in case they

      15 min read

    • Article

      Growing Up

      Mar 24, 2022

      Growing Up
      5 min read

    • Article

      Entry Points

      Mar 8, 2022

      WHEN FINALLY it was time for our daughter to be born and I headed out on the Green Line from Copley Square to the Brigham, I had only the one book I’d brought with me to work that morning in my backpack, Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. I’

      3 min read

    • Article

      Breastfeeding Beats Chestfeeding

      Nov 16, 2022

      I sat across the table from the late April Ashley at a pre-pandemic Oldie lunch and thought her amazing. She was a beautiful old lady - she died in 2021 - as she once had been a beautiful young man. She made history as one of the first openly transge

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Starbound

    3.5/5

    88 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Reviewing the full trilogy, (here be spoilers)...#1 - MarsboundQuite a good book and a very good opener to the trilogy. One of the more interesting aspects was the way Haldeman subtly managed to change the voice of the protagonist as she grew up from a teenage girl into a young woman. At the beginning of the story, Carmen Dula is leaving her Florida home to go live on Mars for a few years with her family. By the end of the book, she is a 'Martian', quarantined away from her home planet, and now facing a mission to another star system to try and deal with a vastly superior alien threat.#2 - StarboundA solid middle volume. The pace slackens a bit from the first novel but, considering it's mostly about a team of human emissaries traveling to another star system, it cruises along pretty well. There is some weird pseudo-science stuff that is essentially explained away using Clarke's Axiom; "Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic". Apart from that, the rest of the science in the book seems pretty solid while not getting in the way of keeping things moving forward, (note: I am not a rocket scientist so please don't lambaste me if the science is actually completely wonky).Overall, this is a good book that carries the reader nicely from the end of Marsbound into the beginning of Earthbound.#3 - EarthboundThe third book in the trilogy is a solid closing volume. The team has now returned from their trip to meet with The Others to find that the Earthly quarantine has been lifted. In this book therefore, most of the action takes place back on Terra. And there is a good amount of action. Haldeman paints a brutal and, to my mind, realistic picture of how things might progress should a scenario like this ever come to pass. Despite the grim narrative, the novel does end on a hopeful note.The Trilogy (spoiler warning!)A word about the entire trilogy: Haldeman takes the first-contact trope and stands it a bit on its' ear; Instead of humanity being initially out-classed by a vastly superior race and then somehow figuring a way to triumph through, y'know, "good old-fashioned human ingenuity & stuff", Haldeman imagines a scenario where humanity is not up to the task of overcoming the stacked odds. I've read many negative reviews of this series and, frankly, I don't get it. Does everyone want a happy ending all the time? The writing is smart, the characters are fairly well-developed - especially the protagonist, and the plot moves well throughout all three books. The situation is, quite honestly, about the most likely thing that we would face if another species happened to be keeping an eye on us. Think about it; A race of beings that have the ability to travel through interstellar space would realistically be so technologically advanced compared to us that, if they wanted to wipe us out, and we tried to fight back, it would be like a pack of squirrels trying to stop a bulldozer.I give books #1 and #3 four solid stars each. Book #2 gets 3.25 stars and I average the trilogy at 3.75 overall.
    • 2/5
      Starbound is the second book in Haldeman’s Marsbound series. As with Marsbound, the tech in this book is believable and the aliens are truly strange. They are powerful, seemingly amoral (at least from a human perspective), possibly sadistic, and almost certainly paranoid.
      In this book, seven humans and two ‘Martians’ are sent to bring them a message of peace (please don’t kill us), and it is the mystery of what the delegation from our solar system will find out about the aliens -- what they are, what they want, and what they will do -- that kept me reading.
      But that was about it. The characters are not especially likeable. The humans struck me as immature, unimaginative, sex obsessed, and not especially bright -- in short, distressingly average. If humanity ever does send ambassadors to speak with aliens, I hope they can do better that these guys. They are far from the best and the brightest.
      As with Marsbound, this novel is told in first person, but in this case, not the same first person. It switches the point of view character between chapters. Many are written as personal journal entries. This is done well enough so it is not terribly confusing. After a few sentences, you can tell which “I” character is speaking, but it is still a bit annoying.
      The multiple points of view did not bother me. In fact, I tend to prefer novels written from multiple POV because they can provide a deeper understanding of motivations, perspectives, and story plot, but I personally find that this works best as third person, limited omniscient. First person multiple POV is clumsy to read because the person meant by “I” keeps changing. Still, this might have worked here if the characters had more personality.
      Without giving away any details about the ending, I can mention one other thing I found dissatisfying about this novel. The aliens are so powerful that nothing the humans do has any hope of affecting them. The humans are pretty much reduced to ants pleading with a gardener not to spray any more insecticide. It’s not a fun read.
    • 3/5
      I read "Marsbound" a few years ago and had some problems with it, so would not have read this book except I was in the mood for hard SF and I found this at a dollar store.As with the first book, I had some problems with this one, although I certainly wanted to read to the end to find out what happened. This book alternates between first person narration by Carmen from the first book (who as a teen discovered the "Martians"); Namir, a 50-something Israeli spy who no longer has a country; and Fly-in-Amber, one of the Martian species created by the "Others" to keep tabs on humanity. This was problematic, because there was no indication at the start of each chapter as to who was speaking. It is perfectly acceptable, and preferable, to head the chapters with the name of the character; I've seen it in lots of other books and it is helpful. Instead, I sometimes had to go more than a full page before I realized who was speaking or found that I had assumed the wrong character. In other cases, a clumsy reference was slipped in, seemingly as an afterthought, to signal who was narrating.I also had a problem with characterization. At some point in her life Carmen became a xenobiologist with a Ph.D., but I had no sense of her as other than the teenage girl from the first book, either emotionally or intellectually. Her relationship with her husband Paul is one big blank canvas, with no actual emotion. Their marriage isn't monogamous and Carmen admits that she prefers masturbation to sleeping with her husband, but we're supposed to believe that she is unsettled by another female crew member's promiscuity in case that woman has designs on Paul. I didn't get the sense that Carmen is even overly fond of Paul, let alone passionate enough to be able to produce a spark of jealousy.The ending is abrupt and suffers from middle book syndrome -- it's a cliffhanger, more or less. I'm not inclined to read the third book.