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METAtropolis edited by John Scalzi

I bought this audiobook from Audible and listened to it using the Audible app on my iPhone, but it looks like Audible is no longer selling it.

METAtropolis is a collection of stories from multiple authors set in the same universe that they agreed upon before writing. It is a fine idea, but most of the stories are kind of a bore.

John Scalzi and Michael Hogan were the big draw for me, I love those guys, and they both did a fine job for their part, but the book as a whole does not pay off.

My favorite story is John Scalzi’s "Utere Nihil non Extra Quiritationem Suis" which means something like "Everything but the Squeal" which is about being a slacker and a pig farmer. The rest of the stories spend way to much time explaining everything, sometime in painful and useless detail.

From the publisher:

Five original tales set in a shared urban future—from some of the hottest young writers in modern SF

A strange man comes to an even stranger encampment…a bouncer becomes the linchpin of an unexpected urban movement…a courier on the run has to decide who to trust in a dangerous city…a slacker in a "zero-footprint" town gets a most unusual new job…and a weapons investigator uses his skills to discover a metropolis hidden right in front of his eyes.

Welcome to the future of cities. Welcome to Metatropolis.

More than an anthology, Metatropolis is the brainchild of five of science fiction’s hottest writers—Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, Karl Schroeder, and project editor John Scalzi—-who combined their talents to build a new urban future, and then wrote their own stories in this collectively-constructed world. The results are individual glimpses of a shared vision, and a reading experience unlike any you’ve had before.

I rate this book a 4 out of 10 while the one story, John Scalzi’s "Utere Nihil non Extra Quiritationem Suis", is a 9 out of 10. I recommend only if you have run out of other things to read.

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