METAtropolis is an original shared-world audio anthology edited by John Scalzi and containing standalone stories from Jay Lake, Tobias S. Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, Scalzi, and Karl Schroeder. (No, I don’t know why the capitalization.) It has been nominated for a Hugo in the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form category and is available free (with site signup) at Audible.com. Unfortunately, it was not a successful listening experience for me.
The first story is Lake’s “In the Forests of the Night.” This founders on an extremely predictable problem: if you create a character who is an amazingly compelling speaker with a beautiful voice, you have to both write those astonishingly-convincing words and get an audiobook reader who can voice the words in the manner described. I don’t know whether Michael Hogan can, but he doesn’t. Since I coudn’t get past the crash and burn of my suspension of disbelief, I stopped listening.
Buckell’s “Stochasti-city” caught my interest when it started with its first-person narrator getting into trouble after taking a mysterious job. Unfortunately Scott Brick doesn’t voice the first-person narrator’s thoughts any differently from his speech, at least that I could hear. The third time I couldn’t figure out whether a statement was part of a conversation or internal monologue, I hit “skip.” (Brick is a highly prolific and very well-regarded audiobook narrator; maybe it’s just me, maybe he wasn’t on his game for this.)
I didn’t listen to Bear or Scalzi’s stories, so that left Schroeder’s “To Hie from Far Cilenia,” read by Stefan Rudnick. I did get all the way through this one, but I can’t call it a successful listening experience, because nothing happened. Our protagonist is hired to track down some missing plutonium, in the company of a woman who is looking for her son (as Farah Mendlesohn notes, “Men, it seems, have motives. Women have maternal feelings.”). Based on information from a captured minor player in the smuggling (which I never really followed why they trusted), they end up looking in ARGs, alternate reality games. Much time is spent describing ARGs generally and the ones they’re in specifically, and basically none on looking for the plutonium (or the son) in any systematic sensible way: from what I heard, I can only conclude that they just wandered around hoping. I was also dubious about the ability to “ride” other people remotely, i.e., using them to communicate your words and gestures; while this is presented as a good thing for autistic persons and the young, unskilled, uneducated, and alone, I would have liked to hear much more before accepting that conclusion. But in the end, whatever the merits of this story on the page, I did not enjoy it as audio because I couldn’t skim all the exposition and worldbuilding.
(Scalzi’s introduction didn’t help it any; it promised me mind-blowing ideas, but what I got was virtual reality technology putting overlays over the physical world, Internet nations, and the aforementioned riders. I’m not that up on hard SF these days, but even I recognize those as part of the recent-ish toolbox for the genre.)
The other nominees in this category are all movies: The Dark Knight (enjoyed but not sure how well it holds up; spoilers), Hellboy II: The Golden Army (pretty but dumb; spoilers), Iron Man (boring; spoilers), and WALL-E (did not see).