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    Falling Torch
    Falling Torch
    Falling Torch
    Audiobook6 hours

    Falling Torch

    Written by Algis Budrys

    Narrated by Jerry Sciarrio

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    How could he save Earth, when Earth no longer cared? In this sci-fi classic, distant archaic Earth has been occupied by aliens for several decades, while Earth's government-in-exile has resided in the advanced Centaurian system. Finally, this aging, tired group find they are about to receive help - financial aid and weaponry to recover their lost planet. But do they want to give up their lives for a world long left behind? Michael Wireman, the son of the exiled President, is the only one willing to take on the challenge. Filled with dreams of the Earth he never knew, it doesn't take long for the unlikely hero to become disillusioned. Wireman came back to a vanquished Earth on a mission to save it. He learns the guerillas are corrupt, and the average citizen would just as soon be left alone. Betrayed by those he trusted, and unsure of who the real enemy is, Michael Wireman must struggle to find the hero in himself if Earth is to ever have any hope of again being free.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBooks in Motion
    Release dateMay 15, 2002
    ISBN9781581166842
    Author

    Algis Budrys

    Algis Budrys (1931–2008) was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, where his father served in the Lithuanian diplomatic corps. The family came to the United States when Budrys was five years old. A Renaissance man, he wrote stories and novels, and was an editor, critic, and reviewer, a teacher of aspiring writers, and a publisher. In the 1960s Budrys worked in public relations, advertising products such as pickles, tuna fish, and four-wheel-drive vehicles. His science fiction novels include Rogue Moon, Hard Landing, Falling Torch, and many others. His Cold War science fiction thriller Who? was adapted for the screen, and he received many award nominations for his work. Budrys was married to his wife, Edna, for almost fifty-four years.  

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    • 4/5
      This is the only book I can ever remember reading which, immediately after finishing it, I felt the need to go back and reread the book from page one. Budrys gives us a story which includes much more psychological rumination than action sequence, a book filled with surprises (despite the fact that the prologue more or less tells us how it's going to end), a book in which each chapter seems to head off in a completely new direction. I can see that The Falling Torch wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I liked it quite a bit. At first glance the novel seems to promise straightforward adolescent wish fulfillment (along the lines of “Earth has been conquered by evil aliens, and it’s time for heroic young freedom fighters to kick some alien butt”), but we almost immediately begin to run up against evidence that life is not so simple, that the bad guys are not so bad and the good guys are not so good. Our protagonist ends up spending much of the book trying to come to grips with the apparent reality that the simple moral code of right and wrong which he has previously accepted at face value is neither true nor perhaps more importantly particularly practical. In the end we’re given a not particularly comforting view of the world, and the sense that it’s up to each of us to make of it what we will.