Nathan Van Coops Audiobooks

In Times Like These: a marathon science fiction box set read by Neil Hellegers

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.5/5 average

295 listener ratings

Who is Nathan Van Coops?

Sixty-one hours in a single listing is a statement in itself. Nathan Van Coops arrives in our catalogue with In Times Like These gathered into one enormous set, and a run of that size only exists because a readership kept coming back for whatever came next. Bundles like this are assembled for people who have already been persuaded.

The work sits across our science fiction and fantasy shelves with general fiction alongside, and the science fiction filing is the one to trust: this is genre writing built on an idea rather than a landscape, the sort of long-running sequence that establishes a premise early and then spends thousands of pages testing what it can be made to do. Consistency at that scale is difficult, and the length of the set is evidence somebody managed it.

Nathan Van Coops in audiobooks

Neil Hellegers reads the collected instalments, which is a considerable undertaking: a voice you will be living with for the equivalent of a fortnight of commutes, holding a cast steady across a run most narrators would split into separate contracts.

Nearly three hundred listeners have rated the set and left it comfortably above four stars, which for a bundle of this size counts for a good deal, since these tend to be chosen by people who already know what they are getting. The set is the sensible entry point precisely because of its shape: everything in order, nothing to hunt down, no pauses of the kind serialised listening usually forces on you. Approach it as a season rather than an evening. Details and the current rating are set out below.