Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: This Crowded Earth
Author: Robert Bloch
Narrator: Frank Harrison
Format: Unabridged
Length: 3 hrs and 31 mins
Language: English
Release date: 12-21-17
Publisher: Audioliterature
Genres: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Sci-Fi: Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
"This Crowded Earth" (1958) is a science fiction novel by Robert Bloch.
Excerpt:
The telescreen lit up promptly at eight a.m. Smiling Brad came on with his usual greeting. "Good morning - it's a beautiful day in Chicagee!" Harry Collins rolled over and twitched off the receiver. "This I doubt," he muttered. He sat up and reached into the closet for his clothing. Visitors - particularly feminine ones - were always exclaiming over the advantages of Harry's apartment. "So convenient," they would say. "Everything handy, right within reach. And think of all the extra steps you save!" Of course most of them were just being polite and trying to cheer Harry up. They knew damned well that he wasn't living in one room through any choice of his own. The Housing Act was something you just couldn't get around; not in Chicagee these days. What was the population in New Philly now? Something like 63,000,000, wasn't it? Chicagee was much smaller-only 38,000,000, this year.
Artist Bio Author: Robert Bloch (1917-1994) was an American fiction writer of crime, horror, fantasy and science fiction. He is best known as the writer of "Psycho", the basis for the film by Alfred Hitchcock.
©2017 Audioliterature (P)2017 Audioliterature
Members Reviews:
A lesser work by a better writer.
This review originally published in www.lookingforagoodbook.com. Rated 2.0 of 5
In 1958, when this was written, the idea of over-crowding and population explosion were still only just being considered, but were not hot topics. But like many science fiction authors, Robert Bloch was ahead of the curve on this one.
The story is about Harry Collins and we start in that distant future, 1997. Harry, like a number of others, can't stand the over-crowding and spartan conditions in which he is forced to lived. He could upgrade to a larger space, but he would have to marry to do so, and moving up would also necessitate a much longer (five-hour) commute.
His desire to see change becomes an obsession and drives him over the edge (literally?) and he is sent to a hospital in the country. There he has an affair with a nurse. Except the nurse is not a nurse, but another patient who's been ordered to have the affair with Harry. In fact, the entire hospital is an experiment that the doctor is carrying out.
The story (novelette? novella?) covers most of Harry's lifetime, as man's reasoning and attempts to correct some of the problems created by mankind, backfire or point out just how ridiculous our decisions can be if we don't address the issue (the attempt to solve the problem of over-crowding was to midget-ize the human race ... to create smaller humans who don't take up so much space).
Given my tastes in fiction, my preference for sci-fi, and the fact that I have typically really liked Robert Bloch books and stories, I really expected to like this story. Unfortunately, I didn't.
I thought that the characters were dull and the solutions comical. Because Harry Collins did nothing for me, following him over the course of 60+ years felt more like torture than a pleasant read. What got me through it was Bloch's writing style. The characters and the plot didn't get me, but his story-telling does.
