Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} METAtropolis Cascadia by Jay Lake METAtropolis: Cascadia by Jay Lake. METAtropolis: CASCADIA (2010) is an audiobook collection of six related stories set in Cascadia in the 2070s. The stories are: "The Bull Dancers" by Jay Lake, "Water to Wine" by Mary Robinette Kowal, "Byways" by Tobias S. Buckell, "The Confessor" by Elizabeth Bear, "Deodand" by Karl Schroeder, and "A Symmetry of Serpents and Doves" by Ken Scholes. Each is read by a different Star Trek actor. Run time is almost 13 ABT hours. It's a sequel to the original METAtropolis (2008) which worldbuilt around the post-industrial, post-national collapse of the early 21st century. That collection included the story "In the Forests of the Night" by Jay Lake that introduced the setting of Cascadiopolis, an experimental green city hidden in the forests of Mt. Hood, Oregon (it's available for free). CASCADIA picks up that story 40 years later in the opening "The Bull Dancers" (read by René Auberjonois), which explores the conspiracy behind the city's destruction by orbital missiles; the true identity of the mysterious Tyger Tyger and his connection to an ancient Minoan secret society; and how Cascadiopolis' daughter cities have, despite or perhaps because of the missile attack, gone on to thrive -- rewilding the land and building a new eco-anarchist way of life. This serves as an intro to greater Cascadia, as the following stories portray a changed and changing region in slow recovery. The post-collapse Cascadia is a transnational entity, a type of virtual overlay, composed of local economies and city-states that have gained various levels of autonomy due to a weakened US and Canada, but have to deal with complex legal issues arising from the many conflicting and overlapping jurisdictions involved (an open-source expert-system called Thicket helps navigate the mess). Government is more local, with policing done by Law Enforcement Collectives (LECs) and private law agencies under contract, particularly one called Edgewater, although older international agencies like Interpol are also active. The older cities -- Portland, Seattle, Vancouver -- are still around. Their populations are denser now that oil is scarce and no one can afford to commute. The old suburbs are being rewilded, their roads and mcmansions chewed up for resources by giant, centipede-like mobile hoppers manned by deconstruction crews hired by city planners with green ideologies. Meanwhile, new places -- like Ciudad St. Helens, one of the Cascadiopolis daughters, or Heddlebrook, a high-tech city closed to outsiders -- are increasing in influence. Different Cascadians hold different passports allowing travel to different regions (Shanghai and Hong Kong are somehow aligned with Vancouver and their citizens can travel between them). Citizenship is more often at the city level. The rural areas are home to anarchists and Luddites. Visitors without sponsorship are required to wear Nexus glasses -- augmented reality devices that tap into the Internet to overlay information on the wearer's surroundings or block views of areas they're not allowed to enter. Illegal immigrants come from Kentucky and failed Rust Belt cities looking for work. Those who have dropped out of traditional economies -- not an underclass but a parallel-class -- make their own goods with basement fabricators and use local money such as the Wino, a time-sensitive currency backed by locally produced wine (the US and Canadian Dollars are all but worthless; Euros and Yuans are the favored global currencies). Reconstructionists dream of a return to the glory days of Reagan and Palin. Both transnational corporations and green collectives live side-by-side in some sort of uneasy equilibrium. These themes and details are what unite the stories even if the plots and characters differ, although the last one, "A Symmetry of Serpents and Doves" (read by LeVar Burton), reprises the first with the character of Bashar and his book on the life of Tyger Tyger. There are two stories in particular that I want to mention, starting with the one that resulted in my learning about the collection (and that I may have influenced): "Confessor" (read by Gates McFadden) is about an investigation into a murder that leads to the discovery of an animal smuggling operation on Mt. Rainier, only instead of selling real endangered Cascadian animals to foreign collectors, they're selling genetically engineered counterfeits -- including a Pacific Tree Octopus. (If you ever want to hear Dr. Crusher talk about tree octopuses, now's your chance.) The tree octopus only makes a cameo, really, with the bulk of the story actually being about a Cascadia LEC agent's complex relationship with her former partner/husband and with an Interpol agent investigating the smugglers. Also there are two kids who are not what they seem. But the tree octopus gets the last laugh. "Deodand" (read by Jonathan Frakes) is about what happens when nature is given it's own Internet access. The birds tweet. figuratively! Originally created for research and resource tracking by a powerful Cascadian company called Museworks (think Microsoft, only with exoskeletons instead of Xboxes), the wildlife-to-Internet interface of Cascadia is made up of billions of cheap, omnipresent, smartdust sensors spread all over the place that track the position and state of pretty much everything. All that raw data is fed to the Internet, digested by cloud computing, and excreted online in meaningful form, allowing you to subscribe to a forest's RSS feed and learn if it has pine beetles or have your Nexus glasses show you the location of any nearby bears while hiking. Museworks also makes more interactive wildlife interfaces for higher organisms, such as special touch-screens that allow ravens to know the garbage truck delivery routes and blog their disapproval of construction sites. Raven bloggers aside, most of the individual plants, animals, and landscapes are unable to communicate with people directly, but their collective hopes, desires, and opinions start to be expressed through the data they produce. Eventually, thanks to the unintended consequences of granting personhood to corporations and constitutional rights to wildlife populations, the nature around Vancouver incorporates itself under the name Lions Gate Actant. The Actant becomes wealthy because of the value of the carbon-offsets created by sea otters via the coastal regeneration they cause and uses this wealth to buy out Museworks, thus taking control of its own ability to communicate and exert its will in the sphere of human affairs. This story isn't as far from the present truth as one might think. For a while now ZPi's Hominoidnet project has been providing Sasquatch with free Internet access via convenient forest kiosks. As I have learned, other wildlife have been getting into the kiosks and mucking about online. One tree octopus has even managed to post to this very blog using the kiosks' interspecies translating facilities to express her discontent about various issues important to octopuses (and no doubt using information on the Sasquatch howlboards to avoid being eaten). This raises some questions: Should dedicated Internet terminals be placed in the dwindling tree octopus habitats for them to use? Would this allow tree octopuses to become their own advocates, influencing human political debates that affect them through means both conspicuous and subtle, or perhaps, as Schroeder suggests, someday allowing them to incorporate themselves and buy out the various interests that are threatening their extinction? Or would it all just degrade into trolling Sasquatch and lolcrabs? © 2004-2020 Lyle Zapato & ZPi unless otherwise noted or implied. Showing best matches by narrator "Jay Lake" in All Categories. This sequel to the Hugo and Audie Award nominated METAtropolis features interconnected stories by today’s top writers of speculative fiction – performed by a galaxy of Star Trek stars. As the mid-20th century approaches, the Pacific Northwest has been transformed - politically, economically, and ecologically - into the new reality of Cascadia. Conspiracies and secrets threaten the tenuous threads of society. And the End of Days seems nearer than ever. METAtropolis: Cascadia (Unabridged​)​ This provocative sequel to the Hugo and Audie Award nominated METAtropolis features interconnected stories by today’s top writers of speculative fiction – performed by a galaxy of Star Trek stars. As the mid-20th century approaches, the Pacific Northwest has been transformed - politically, economically, and ecologically - into the new reality of Cascadia. Conspiracies and secrets threaten the tenuous threads of society. The End of Days seems nearer than ever. And the legend of the mysterious Tygre Tygre looms large. METAtropolis: Cascadia is the creation of Hugo and World Fantasy Award nominee Jay Lake; Mary Robinette Kowal, winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer; New York Times best-selling author Tobias S. Buckell; Hugo Award winner Elizabeth Bear; Aurora Award winner Karl Schroeder; and critically acclaimed author Ken Scholes. The team of narrators is any Star Trek fan’s dream: Rene Auberjonois (“Odo”); Kate Mulgrew (“Capt. Kathryn Janeway”); Wil Wheaton (“Wesley Crusher”); Gates McFadden (“Dr. Beverly Crusher”); Jonathan Frakes (“Cmdr. William Riker”); and LeVar Burton (“Geordi La Forge”). Jay Lake, who also served as Project Editor, introduces this stunning sequel, written and produced exclusively for digital audio. METAtropolis: Cascadia (2010) Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Six short stories, each written by different authors, set in the same near-future pacific northwest territory which has broken away from the United States. Each story is narrated by a different actor from the Star Trek Next Generation series. The stories touch upon conservatism vs. liberalism, religion and environtalism. However, the stories meander aimlessly and are largely each uninteresting, and the connection between them seems forced. ( ) Overall Summary & Review: The universe of METAtropolis is not far away. This is the second shared-world anthology, set in the near future, a future after the energy crisis, after the economic collapse, when the emerging structures are both local and transnational, both green and technological. The stories of the original METAtropolis anthology were set throughout the United States; those in this volume are set in and around the emergent city-state of Cascadia, in what used to be the Pacific Northwest of the US and Canada. My reaction to METAtropolis was somewhat mixed; I enjoyed the world and the worldbuilding, but thought that some of the authors spent too much time on the worldbuilding and so lost the thread of just telling a good story. I thought METAtropolis: Cascadia did a much better job with this; even though I didn't love all of the stories, I did think that each one managed to strike a good balance between worldbuilding and plot. Perhaps this was because the world writ large was already established in the first volume, and the authors in this volume were just filling in? Or maybe the narrower geographic focus meant that there was less world to build? I did think the confined geography of the stories helped make them more interconnected, something else that I thought was lacking from the first volume. I did have one large problem with METAtropolis: Cascadia , however, and that was the question of date. Lake, Buckell, and Schroeder's stories are all at least loosly tied to their contributions in the original Cascadia . But while Lake's is set about 40 years afterwards (and he very specifically says in the introduction that the whole thing is meant to take place 40 years afterwards), Buckell's and Schroeder's protagonists seem to have aged no more than a few years, if that - certainly not 40. It doesn't affect any of the stories individually, but it pulled me out of the story whenever I noticed it, and it left me wondering how everything was supposed to fit together. 3.5 out of 5 stars. Individual Stories: - "The Bull Dancers" by Jay Lake (narrated by René Auberjonois) is a loose continuation of Lake's story "In the Forests of the Night" from the first METAtropolis . Forty years later, the death of the young man (visionary? saint?) Tygre Tygre and the destruction of the original Cascadiapolis winds up on the desk of a cop who specializes in cold cases. but she's not the only one seeking answers. Tygre Tygre's story was not my favorite part of the original anthology, and its followup was not my favorite part of this one. This one was better at making things less mythical and more immediate, but it still didn't entirely grab my interest. The narrators throughout the book did a uniformly nice job, but I was particularly impressed with how close of a match Auberjonois's version of Bashar was to Michael Hogan's gruff rendering in the original. - "Water to Wine" by Mary Robinette Kowal (narrated by Kate Mulgrew) was my favorite story of the bunch. It involves the daughter of a winemaker, whose father is under pressure to sell the winery from a local distributor who wants to put them out of business. Kowal got everything right with this one: the characters were great (I particularly like the protagonist's interactions with her sisters); the plot had an appropriate amount of tension and moved at a good pace; and the technology was interesting, and fit organically into the plot of the story. - "Byways" by Tobias S. Buckell (narrated by Wil Wheaton) stars a man who's become part of a demolition crew in the hopes of unmasking a conspiracy brewing inside it. but what he finds was not at all what he expected. I liked this story well enough when I was listening to it, but it didn't stick with me particularly well. Maybe because I kept getting distracted by the disparity in timing between this and "The Bull Dancers"? - "Confessor" by Elizabeth Bear (narrated by Gates McFadden) involves a cop investigating a nasty murder, an Interpol agent investigating a ring of smugglers trafficking in endangered and exotic species, and the strange things they uncover when their investigations overlap. This story had some interesting ideas, and some nice moments, although there were one or two threads that were not worked in as well as they might have been. - "Deodand" by Karl Schroeder (narrated by Jonathan Frakes) features the same investigator from "To Hie from Far Cilenia", who has washed up in Cascadia with some immigration problems, and gets caught up with a company whose automatons have developed an interesting - and troubling - sense of morality. This story was the most guilty of letting the worldbuilding get in the way of the storytelling. or more to the point, letting the worldbuilding *be* the storytelling. However, I found that in this case, I didn't mind, mainly because the world presented in this story is so fascinating, and one that I think I would actually like to see come about, both as a scientist and as a human being. - "A Symmetry of Serpents and Doves" by Ken Scholes (narrated by LeVar Burton) is a look at the nature of religion, and of religious terrorism, in the world of METAtropolis. When a bombing kills four new members of a pastor's church, and a senator's son is somehow caught in the midst, the pastor must visit his old friend. an old friend who is starting a movement of his own, with questionable ends. There was a lot going on in this story - maybe too much; it might have benefitted from somewhat of a tighter focus - but I found it all very compelling. Recommendation: Overall, an improvement on its predecessor in several respects, although it still didn't blow me away. It could pretty easily be read independently, since Lake's is the only story that directly builds on the first volume. ( ) METAtropolis: Cascadia. It’s the 2070s. The United States is no longer united, and the breakaway territory of Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest has created its own myths and realities. In this sequel to the first METATROPOLIS anthology (2008), six award-winning science fiction writers share a brash, finely detailed world. Each narrator is a recognizable Star Trek series alumnus. This is a bonus, especially in the cases of Wil Wheaton’s reading of "Byways" by Tobias Buckell and Gates McFadden’s reading of "Confessor" by Elizabeth Bear. Their voices are so familiar that they envelop the listener in the fascinating unfamiliar territory. It’s like listening to old friends tell new tales. These are well-crafted novellas about a brave, new near-future. Publisher's Summary. This provocative sequel to the Hugo and Audie Award nominated METAtropolis features interconnected stories by today’s top writers of speculative fiction – performed by a galaxy of Star Trek stars. As the mid-20th century approaches, the Pacific Northwest has been transformed - politically, economically, and ecologically - into the new reality of Cascadia. Conspiracies and secrets threaten the tenuous threads of society. The End of Days seems nearer than ever. And the legend of the mysterious Tygre Tygre looms large. METAtropolis: Cascadia is the creation of Hugo and World Fantasy Award nominee Jay Lake; Mary Robinette Kowal, winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer; New York Times best-selling author Tobias S. Buckell; Hugo Award winner Elizabeth Bear; Aurora Award winner Karl Schroeder; and critically acclaimed author Ken Scholes. The team of narrators is any Star Trek fan’s dream: Rene Auberjonois (“Odo”); Kate Mulgrew (“Capt. Kathryn Janeway”); Wil Wheaton (“Wesley Crusher”); Gates McFadden (“Dr. Beverly Crusher”); Jonathan Frakes (“Cmdr. William Riker”); and LeVar Burton (“Geordi La Forge”). Jay Lake, who also served as Project Editor, introduces this stunning sequel, written and produced exclusively for digital audio. Critic Reviews. Audie Award Winner, Original Work, 2012. More from the same. Author. Mainspring They Are Forgotten Until They Come Again Her Fingers Like Whips, Her Eyes Like Razors. Narrator. The Wheel of Darkness Still Life with Crows Extraction. What listeners say about METAtropolis: Cascadia. Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews. Audible.in reviews. Audible.com reviews. Audible.co.uk reviews. Amazon Reviews. Stephen 21-11-10. Some good, some bad. When I saw that Audible did a follow up to the original METATropolis, I was interested to see what they had done to one of my favorite programs. "The Bull Dancers": Extension of "Forests of the Night" the original leadoff. Pretty decent story other than the fact that it went on for much too long (3 hrs). Rene Auberjonois was decent, however most of his characters sound like Odo from Star Trek. "Water to Wine": A wonderful tale that fits well in the Cascadia cycle. Definiteley a good choice of narrator. "Byways": Extension of "Stochasti-city". Didn't work as well as the other stories, but Wil Wheaton definiteley got the same rhythm/pacing that the original had. "Confessor": Right length, however all the characters (male and female) all sounded the same, so identifying which story line we were on is difficult. "Deonand": The Bad of the book. While the text is spot on, Frakes is not the right person to be narrating this segment. His butchering of Gennady (pronounced Go-Knot-ee) Malianov is so disjointed as compared to "To Hie from Far Cilenia" In short I can tell which narrators had gone over the previous work (if there was one) and which did not. Audible, If you care about this book and the series please bring Stefan Rudniki in and re-record Deonand. 49 people found this helpful. Julie W. Capell 10-03-14. Outstanding narration carries the day here. This is the second anthology in a series that began with METAtropolis: the Dawn of Uncivilization. This collection riffs off the first story in that anthology, taking place in a transnational entity that includes the geographical areas formerly known as British Columbia, Washington and Orgeon states. The stories are set around the year 2070 in post-industrial, post-capitalist, post-national world and are all read by actors from various incarnations of Star Trek. The first story, written by Jay Lake and read by Rene Auberjonois (immediately recognizable as Odo from Deep Space Nine) details a very old, very rich man’s final days as he searches for the answers to an event that occurred forty years earlier. I really enjoyed this story and the chance to revisit some of the characters from the original METAtropolis. The second story was written by Mary Robinette Kowal and narrated by Kate Mulgrew (Captain Kathryn Janeway of Voyager). This was probably my least favorite of all the stories so far. It was mostly a love letter to the art of wine making that could have been set in any era and lacked a clear connection to the rest of the stories in these anthologies. For instance, as soon as I realized it was going to be about wine, I anticipated an explanation of a concept that has come up in a few of the other stories, where instead of money, some people have currency called ”winos.” But the term never even gets mentioned in this story . . . did Ms. Kowal miss the world-building sessions?? The third story was written by Tobias S. Buckell and read by Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher of The Next Generation). The setting for this story presented another cool idea that was new to me. The main character is part of a crew whose job it is to de-construct expressways and empty suburban housing tracts. Having grown up in one of these anonymous suburbs (and escaped as soon as I could to a densely populated downtown neighborhood) I have to admit that I loved the scenes where the bulldozers crashed through the paperboard houses. If that’s not a big enough hint, other parts of the narrative extoll the virtues of cities, such as that more patents are produced by city-dwellers and city dwellers use less energy, particularly if you can figure out a way to grow food nearby. Like the stories in the first METAtropolis, this one has an extremely positive view of the future of cities, which is not all that common in post-apocalyptic literature. The next story was by Elizabeth Bear and read by Gates McFadden (Dr. Crusher in The Next Generation). This is a bit of a more conventional scifi story involving genetic engineering, combined with a murder mystery plot. The twist at the end is foreshadowed pretty heavily and so was really no shock. Karl Schroeder once again takes the prize for most cool ideas in one story with his entry here, read by Jonathan Frakes (Comander Riker of The Next Generation). It begins with the protagonist wearing something like Google Glasses. Since he is a visitor to Cascadia without proper paperwork, he is mandated to wear them whenever he is out in public, and the glasses are programmed by the authorities to restrict what he sees. It’s a frightening vision of how state censorship could be implemented on a person-by-person basis in the future, just by using technology. And that’s just a side thought. The overall plot asks how will we recognize when computers and machines become self-aware, and mixes in questions about the rights of corporations . . . and others . . . to be treated as individuals in certain situations. It’s a complex plot that only a master like Schroeder can pull off. The final story in this collection was by Ken Scholes and narrated by LeVar Burton (Geordi LaForge of The Next Generation). This one takes on home-grown terrorism, religious fanatics, and questions of faith in a post-apocalyptic era. A mediocre story that was significantly uplifted by Burton’s fantastic reading.