Permafrost

By: Alastair Reynolds / Narrated By: Natasha Soudek

Length: 4 hrs and 12 mins

Beautiful; simply lovely…

Life happens, ya know. Sometimes we go along, minding our own beeswax, and WHAM! Family emergencies, financial woes, change change change -AND- a week of truncated Listens (Only two, but OY!!!) that wind up in my I Want My Hours Back category cuz seriously: Spend a week grasping for Hope, and those two?!? Like I neeeeded to fritter HOURS away, ones that I’d HOPED to savor, on audiobooks that had me wishing to throttle characters, to whonk! authors upside the head for subpar writing, ridiculous choices?!

Good cow, man! And noooo!

So imagine going into an audiobook, a story, by an author I’m unfamiliar with, a genre that I gotta admit is not my usual Go-To (And m’ sinCEREst apologies to SciFi Lovers, I’m a boob…!), wondering if the enTIre week is gonna be a resounding Boooo! and -INSTEAD- coming out weeping cuz o’ how beautiful the story turned out?

HUZZAH HUZZAH HUZZAH

Permafrost by famed author Alastair Reynolds starts off with violence and bloodshed and the thickest Russian accent ever, which was AWEsome. Our unlikely heroine is Valentina, a teacher of students she very much feels for. She’s 71-years old, hobbles with a cane, and oh yeh, she’s the daughter of a famous mathematician, her mom who knew LOTS and who was an expert on the ins and outs of the mathematics of paradox. She gets recruited, goes waaaay up into frozen wastelands, and discovers that she’s part of a last ditch effort to save humanity by traveling back in time, tweaking it sliiiiiightly, coming back with Uber-genetically modified seeds that have a chance of growing.

This is NOT the run-of-the-mill time travel story where our intrepid participants go back in person. No, rather, scientists and advanced AI from before The Scouring (Four AI entities, The Brothers, named after each of The Brothers Karamazov) set things up so, saaaaay, Valentina’s consciousness can travel back and inhabit the brain of a person, taking over their body. Once thus entrenched, saaaay, Valentina! can discover the whereabouts of the special seeds and get them to the future.

Right away things start going awry, unforeseen things begin occurring such as: Tatiana. Tatiana is the young woman Valentina inhabits, but instead of all-out possession, she starts inserting herself into the activities. Valentina finds that Tatiana can override her, and Tatiana kinda sorta is freaked out about the whole thing.

A dialogue between the two develops, a relationship begins to be formed, and it becomes a drop dead gorgeous work. As everything hits the fan, as a twist is introduced, things gets fraught, things get dire.

But throughout this are SUCH human/humane components. It’s SciFi reminiscent of the character-driven works of Connie Willis (I know I know I know: Willis creates characters AFTER plot, but DANG!), but here the science is harder. I mean, to the point where I had a few: Wait, Huh? Moments, which I dismissed posthaste because things were moving so quickly. A previous reviewer wrote that there was a Beginning and then an End, but they sorely missed an unwritten Middle. I agree, to a point, as in: Bang! it starts, then BANG! we’re barreling towards a gripping denouement. But dude! what’s not to love about “breathtaking”?

As the writing begins with an almighty wham, so does Natasha Soudek’s narration. Valentina is quite Russian; Tatiana is Russian as well, and dude! Soudek manages to not only make our heroines pleasant to listen to , but she differentiates, in comPLETE keeping with their personalities, between the two. At NO point was I confused, and that’s saying a helluva LOT, esPECially considering this is two strong women in one body, vying for control, struggling with outer occurrences as they juggle a tenuous relationship, a desperately fraught NOW, and a Future that is increasingly uncertain. Brava, Soudek! Brava!

I’ve noted this in previous audiobooks/stories, in previous reviews: Best. Last. Line EVER!!!

Sobbing, it was just beautifully chosen by Reynolds, a great choice of lines, of character/story-crafting.

I spent about 25-hours with two Boooo! Listens this week.

But last night? Barely over 4-hours left me in tears, soooo very glad this was how m’ week ended.

Permafrost is a keeper; it’s a DEFinite re-Listen.

It’s a jaw-dropper, a pulse-pounder.

It’s a heartache oh sooo gratefully felt, embraced.

Amazon