Download Now The Alchemist And The Executioness Assembled By Paolo Bacigalupi Accessible As EReader Version

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The Alchemist and The Executioness caught my eye as soon as it went up at Audible, com. Paolo Bacigalupi and Tobias Buckell offering linked fantasy novellas that take place in a shared world Bacigalupi's story read by Jonathan Davis What could be more promising It turns out that had I been familiar with Katherine Kellgren, who read Buckell's story, I would have been even more excited about this one!

In this shared world, the use of magic causes the growth of bramble, a fastgrowing, pervasive, and deadly plant that has taken over cities, making them uninhabitable.
Crews of workers must fight back the bramble daily, burning it and collecting its seeds, Magic is forbidden and those who are found using it are executed, yet some citizens are willing to risk their lives if a bit of magic might help them.
Who cares if a patch of bramble sprouts in a stranger's garden if a magic spell might heal their only child

The

Alchemist is about a metal and glass worker who has given up all of his riches and is building an instrument which he hopes will destroy the bramble, restore his fortune, and give him the license to use magic to cure his daughter's wasting cough.
When he presents his invention to the city government, things start to go wrong,

I liked Bacigalupi's characters the focused scientist who's so taskoriented that he misses important social cues and the strong woman whose support is crucial but mostly goes unnoticed and I enjoyed the laboratory setting because it reminded me of my own frustrating days at "the bench.
" It was intriguing to explore the idea that small and secret lawbreaking, even for a good cause, can accumulate to destroy a nation or, as one of Bacigalupi's characters says: "If we grant individual mercies, we commit collective suicide.
" That got me thinking of all sorts of current political, economic, and social parallels,

With The Executioness, Tobias Buckell becomes the hero of middleaged mothers everywhere, Since I'm now one of those, I loved this story about a mom who loses her family and finds herself, Tana is a desperate woman who just does what any mother would do in the same circumstances, It's hard for me to imagine becoming a hero, but Tana's story is completely believable and after hearing it, now I wonder if maybe I could be.
. .

The Executioness was read by Katherine Kellgren, whom I'd never heard before, She was incredible and brought so much personality to Buckell's protagonist, She sounded lost, distressed, frightened, and brave at just the right times, I already adored Jonathan Davis I heard him read Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar books and I now have a new favorite in Katherine Kellgren,

I can highly recommend The Alchemist and The Executioness to fantasy lovers of all ages, I wish it had been longer, It's exclusively available on audio at Audible, com. So far, everything I've listened to by Audible Frontiers has been of the highest quality excellent sound quality, excellent narration, and a large collection of superior fantasy works.
The Alchemist is a.and the Executioness is a,.

The Executioness is if you can imagine Conan as a pissedoff, middleaged mom who's on a mission for revenge because her children were taken from her.
This was brilliant all around! Not only does the story unfold with an older female as the major character but you get a glimpse into the beginnings of great myth and the complexities of war.
Amazing speculative fiction! Two good but not great stories in a shared universe, In this universe, magic is fairly routinely used however it causes a truly awful plant called "Bramble" to sprout up everywhere, I thought The Alchemist was the stronger of the two, They are both worthy but flawed,.stars

I absolutely loved the world these two authors cocreated for these linked novellas, That there would be negative consequences to magic is a completely unique idea, in my experience of fantasy literature, Bacigalupi took the concept and ran with it, His story, The Alchemist, featured a fully realized main character and was beautifully written, only faltering slightly at the end, which seemed to not really fit the rest of the story.
The Executioness suffered in comparison, It felt onedimensional and skirted dealing headon with the essential dilemma, At the end, I was left with an unfinished feeling, as if there should have been a third story that would have solved the problem once and for all.


I listened to this as an audio book read by Jonathan Davis and Katherine Kellgren, Both did excellent jobs narrating, It seemed they coordinated their performances, deciding that the denizens of this world would speak with vaguely African sounding accents, This helped me feel like I had been transported to another realm and made the world of the book more real,
I'm not sure that audiobooks are quite right for me while running, I've finished the Alchemist, but I've also noticed that a sometimes my mind starts to wander and then I miss a few sentences and can't go back or b the traffic noise on a few streets is occasionally too loud to hear the narration.
It also bothers me that I can't easily skip around and reread sections, I guess I'm not cut out to be an audiobook listener, Thankfully, the novella was simple enough that missing sentences here and there wasn't too much of a problem,

I'll still listen to the Executioness at some point, but probably no more audiobooks after that,



I take it back, . it's back to music while running for me for now, Bacigalupi does not disappoint, the Excecutioness is a bit disappointing,

This is a Fantasy written by SiFi authors, The main gist is that an environmental problem is being presented in a fantastic setting,

My main issue with the Excecutioness is that victory comes too easy,
We are told which tactics are smart, and then shown how they work perfectly in practice, There is conflict within her soul, but she uses the recommended tactics and wins every time,
This is a naive representation of combat, Written exclusively for audio I picked this up at audible on sale for under,. They are a combo of shorter stories by authors that normally write science fiction, They have an introductory read by each at the start of this book giving their reasons for writing such a fantasy, They had been challenged to use a middle aged family woman as the hero, They had spoken about that most all women heroines of these fantasies are big breasted bad ass tough chicks who are without families and they thought, why couldn't the heroine be a middle aged mother Who else would have the drive and will to save the day if their children were taken It really was a fun story, well written two unique ideas with an interconnect theme.
Fabulous narration! The Alchemist narrated by Jonathan Davis an the Executioness narrated by Katherine Kellgren, So if you're in the mood for something quite
different I would recommend this, As this audiobook is split into to separate novellas by different authors sharing the same world, I give four to Bacigalupi's Alchemist and two to Buckell's Executioness, which averages out to three.


In the forward, Buckell tells how he conceived of the Executioness as a way to subvert a common fantasy trope by letting a middleaged mother take on the title role.
Despite his worthy attempt, I found Bacigalupi's singlefather Alchemist a much more interesting, complex, morally conflicted character than the supposedly reluctant warrior Executioness, More on her later.

There's a reason Bacigalupi's story comes first, He does a fantastic job laying out and explaining this alternate fantasy world where the use of magic has caused a monstrous bramble think sleeping beauty to encroach on and strangle an entire kingdom.
The titular Alchemist has slowly impoverished his family over the years as he seeks to develop a contraption that can kill bramble without using magic on which the Bramble feeds, only to get caught up in the politics of the tyrannical regime.
Bacigalupi's background as a scifi writer lends itself well here to creating a believable world with its own set of complexities, asking questions about sacrificing the needs of the few for the wellbeing of society if anything, some of the world building may be too extensive for such a brief story, so some may find the exposition lengthy.
He also manages to subvert welltread fantasy clicheslosing one's family, freeing the character up to go adventuring or take revenge, for example, Despite the complex world politics, this story is really a small, even touching, characterdriven one about a father trying to save his child,

I enjoyed Bacigalupi's story so much that I worried The Executioness wouldn't live up to it, I was right. Buckell made a big deal in the intro about making the Executioness character a middleage women with children, but ultimately I found her rather bland and unknowable, her motives muddy and inconsistent.
If the author didn't routinely TELL us that she's a mother and middleaged, she might as well have been ayear old orphan out to save and revenge her brothers instead of sons.
I had hoped for another characterdriven "small" story about a woman forced to become an executioner to keep her family alive, and her "small" internal struggles.
Instead, Buckell embraces that aforementioned and overused fantasy cliche, killing off Tana's family and sending her on an adventure in which, thanks to lucky coincidence akin to the "Brave Little Tailor" "seven in one blow" she develops an unearned reputation as a fearsome fighter.
Most of her success comes from luck: a caravan saves her, it's leader takes her under his wing for some reason, she uncharacteristically asks to be trained with weapons instead of helping the caravan using skills she already has she was a farmer's wife and ran a large household singlehandedly, and suddenly after a week of training she's this master buttkicking strategic genius.
umm how I had hoped there would be more overlap between the two stories, but I started to get the feeling that the two authors had some disagreements over the world mechanics.
Why does Buckell take us out of the kingdom Why does no one use magic to fight the raiders I'd think a little bramble here and there would be worth NOT being slaughtered by war elephants, and I won't start on the problems of using slowloading arquebuses instead of crossbows.
. . I digress. After a while my husband and I we listened to it on a roadtrip just wanted it to end,

Bottom line, The Alchemist is definitely worth a listen, although The Executioness suffers from having to follow it, as well as from numerous fantasy cliches.
Currently available only as an audiobook, this novella consists of two short stories set in the same world, It's very good, set in a world that is late Middle Ages or early Renaissance technologically, but resembling India or Southeast Asia culturally, In this world, magic is a powerful tool that anyone can use, but every use causes Brambles to grow in the area, Brambles are a deadly, magical weed that poisons and kills anyone who touches it, and they are slowly choking the entire continent empires have fallen to the Brambles.
The only solution has been to make magic a capital crime,

The parallels to our world are obvious, and echo familiar themes in Bacigalupi's other works the ease of using powerful tools to make life easier, at the expense of the environment, with mostly the common people suffering the consequences.
Both stories "The Alchemist" and "The Executioness" are about ordinary people forced to take on the powers that be for the sake of their families.
The characters heroes and villains alike are all interesting and threedimensional, and there are no easy resolutions, If you like audiobooks, this is a great pair of contemporary fantasy short stories, This book contains two slightlyconnected stories set in the same vaguely Near Eastern fantasy world,

Bacigalupi's piece, "The Alchemist", is the real gem of the pair, an eloquent parable on what has to be sacrificed to deal with an environmental catastrophe caused by human shortsightedness.
The story is readable for its dark twist and the moral question at its heart, as well as its evenhanded, credible character voice,

Buckell's piece, "The Executioness", a story about a middleaged woman who discovers her inner hero, treads standard fantasy ground, I found it enjoyable enough to justify the purchase, but not especially memorable, This is a collection of two short stories set in the same fantasy world that is available exclusively on Audible, for reasons I'm not clear on.
Since they are by different authors, I will review them separately,

The Alchemist, by Paulo Baciagalupi

The pace was slow and tedious at times, but the story had well drawn characters and a very satisfying conclusion.
Three for this story,

The Executioness, by Tobias Buckell

This story did not grip me enough to even bother finishing it,

.stars. This is an “audio” only doublefeature containing two separate novellas, The Alchemist by Paolo Bacigalupi and The Executioness by Tobias Buckell, I recently reviewed both of those books individually and you can see their individual reviews here:

sitelink goodreads. com/book/show/

and

sitelink goodreads. com/review/edit/

so this review is really designed just to give some feedback on the quality of the narration for those of you like me that listen to audio books.
The.above is my combined average rating for the two individual novellas and I will rate the quality of the audio below separately,

THE ALCHEMIST
 
The Alchemist is read by Jonathan Davis who also did the narration for Paolos novel, sitelinkThe Windup Girl.
Mr. Davis narration was in a word, AWESOME and seems to fit Bacigalupis writing style very, very well,.for the narration.

THE EXECUTIONESS
 
The Executioness is read by Katherine Kellgren, This was my first time listening to a narration by Ms, Kellgren but I thought she was absolutely outstanding and will certainly be more inclined to listen to an audio book if she is doing the narration.
.for her as well, .