Martha Wells Audiobooks

Martha Wells, born in 1964, is an American writer of speculative fiction whose career spans science fiction and fantasy novels, young adult fiction, media tie-ins, short stories and essays on the genre, with translations into twelve languages. Behind it all sits an academic background in anthropology, which she credits for a hallmark of her work: societies imagined with complex, realistic detail – cultures that feel excavated rather than invented.

The awards shelf tells its own story. Her science fiction series The Murderbot Diaries has collected four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards and three Locus Awards – a haul very few writers in the field can rival – while fantasy readers know her equally for the Ile-Rien series and The Books of the Raksura.

Wells builds worlds a listener can stand up in: cultures with their own logic, politics and texture, which is exactly what long-form audio rewards. Our catalogue features Platform Decay, and the title alone – engineered, ominous, faintly bureaucratic – is characteristic of a writer whose futures are run by systems as much as by villains.

Her run of major awards has made her one of the essential contemporary names in science fiction, and the qualities behind the trophies – societies that hold together, characters worth following through them – are precisely what keeps a listener pressing play. For UK science fiction fans, Platform Decay is a natural way in.