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    Hunter’s Run
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    Hunter’s Run
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    Hunter’s Run
    Audiobook (abridged)6 hours

    Hunter’s Run

    Written by George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham

    Narrated by Kerry Shale

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    A new benchmark in modern SF. A sharp, clever, funny morality tale that answers the biggest question of all: what makes us human?

    A fight in an alley behind a bar: a visiting European is knifed by local thug Ramon Espejo and all hell breaks loose.

    The dead man was a diplomat on an important mission to São Paulo, and next day Ramon is on the run heading north in his van toward land that no one has ever explored, or even thought of exploring, land so far only glimpsed from orbit during the first colony surveys.

    There are women still alive on São Paulo who can recall the initial descent onto an untouched world. All the cities of the south have bloomed since then, like mould on a Petri dish.

    Ramon was among the second wave of colonists. He’s gone from being nothing in the hills of Mexico to being nothing on this strange alien world. His only friend Griego tells Ramon God meant him to be poor, or he wouldn’t have made him so mean. Ramon’s rage has never deserted him. It was there in the alley behind the bar, but he can’t actually remember why he killed the European.

    Leaving all the hell and shit and sorrow of Diegotown behind, Ramon’s plan is to look for minerals in the unmapped lands while the heat dies down. He’s made a bare living prospecting so far, expecting each trip to be the big one that’ll make him rich, and this one is no different. The first samples he blows out of the mountain, however, bring down the mountain upon him as well and a whole undiscovered alien race. Ramon is tethered to one of them and set to ‘perform his function’. Whatever that means, he’ll find out. And he’ll remember why he killed the European.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 1, 2007
    ISBN9780007264087
    Unavailable
    Hunter’s Run
    Author

    George R. R. Martin

    George R.R. Martin is the author of fifteen novels and novellas, including five volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire, several collections of short stories, as well as screenplays for television and feature films. Dubbed ‘the American Tolkien’, George R.R. Martin has won numerous awards including the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. He is an Executive Producer on HBO’s Emmy Award-winning Game of Thrones, which is based on his A Song of Ice and Fire series. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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    Related categories

    Reviews for Hunter’s Run

    3.5/5

    170 ratings16 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      A beautiful, intense jungle adventure in the far reaches of space which darkly explores identity, humanity and morality without ever taking a break from the intensity of its action thriller core. Highly recommended for any fan of ground-level, gritty science fiction, or even just of good adventures in general.
    • 4/5
      Interesting SF novel, born out of a script written in the late 70s as novella. Gardner Dozois started the project, and it was handed onto GRRM during a writing class. He in turn didn't finish it either and passed it on to the new talent Daniel Abraham in the early 2000s. Although he's got a long way to go to make the impression GRRM has, due to the years it's spent in various drawers, his input is actually at a similar point in his career as their's were. You can't easily tell which parts were written by which author.The setting (mostly Gardner) is a well imagined world, a far flung colony of Earth's, with humanity used as the expeditionary forces for a less vigourous alien race. All such frontier worlds are fairly rough places, and our hero Ramon feels little remorse when a bar fight gets out of hand and he stabs some foreigner. However it turns out this wasn't just some guy, but an ambassador, and so Ramon decides it might be time for one his periodic prospecting trips out into the wilderness until the heat's died down. The book opens with Ramon emerging from a period of prolonged darkness/unconsciousness quite unsure what has happened to him. He slowly starts piercing back some memories but before he can account for his predicament he' summoned (dragged) before an alien species he's never seen before. With little in the way of preliminaries they inform him, his purpose in existing (a concept Ramon's never previously considered) is to help them find a human who's witnessed their hiding place. They coerce Ramon's help through the application of intense pain, and appoint one of their own to tag along with him in this hunt. Obviously Ramon's initial plans are all about how to escape from his captors, however he soon realises as more memories return to him, that it isn't quite as simple as he's first though, and slowly the prospect of a future starts to loom in his mind and actions.Owing it's inspiration to Mark Twain, and GRRM's own Fevere dream (worth reading) this is not the story you expect it to be, with considerably deeper undercurrents as all good SF has. There is surprisingly little technology at all, and no exposition, just simple telling of experiences and impressions. The pacing works well, with careful accounting of details, and describing of unusual features but not sufficiently to slow down any of the action. But despite all that it's not exactly gripping, you never quite get a sense of peril or empathy for Ramon, and care little whether or not he will survive or ever catch his quarry. As Ramon knows a bit about the dominant alien species there's little explanation of their motivations or culture, and his interactions with the new ones are very limited. The afterword describing the writing process is more interesting than is often the case.Worth reading
    • 5/5
      A beautiful, intense jungle adventure in the far reaches of space which darkly explores identity, humanity and morality without ever taking a break from the intensity of its action thriller core. Highly recommended for any fan of ground-level, gritty science fiction, or even just of good adventures in general.
    • 4/5
      This is an expansion of an earlier novella, and the expansion was helpful. Ramón Espejo is a brutal man, a prospector on a colony world, who begins the novel running to the wild to hide from the cops over a man he killed. But when aliens capture him and sets him to hunt another man in order to hide the aliens’ presence, things get much worse. The twist is pretty visible but also well executed; these guys do not lack for storytelling chops, and Ramón even grows as a person (in spoilery ways). At its best, they have real fun with the tough-guy genre: “‘The pistol guard ripped his finger off?” Ramón asked. “You mean that pendejo’s done all this without his trigger finger?’ Maneck blinked, the red eye’s lid not entirely closing. ‘Is this significant?’ Maneck asked. ‘No. It’s just kind of impressive.’”
    • 4/5
      Hunter's Run has an engaging main character, who learns about himself through the book, and an interesting plot that kept me reading. I enjoy wilderness survival stories and this book gave me a hint of that and was exciting enough to keep me reading.
    • 5/5
      Very effective, yet fairly simple, story with an interesting takes on aliens and also on how we see ourselves. It leaves me wanting to know more about this universe.
    • 4/5
      Set on a colony planet with a mainly Hispanic population, from an Earth which is a very junior partner in alliance with various alien races, so that humans do the hack work settling new planets. Ramon is a prospector who leaves town hastily after a knife fight and finds something unexpected in the mountains to the north. Then a man wakes up in a tank of fluid and gradually pieces together an identity as Ramon and a purpose that he is reluctant to fulfil.I didn't see the plot developments coming, and I enjoyed its unfolding. It plays with identity, loyalty, the difficulty of cross-cultural communication, and the morality of decision-making, all within a racy adventure story.MB 16-ii-2012
    • 2/5
      I picked this up to see what Martin might be doing outside of A Game of Thrones and Daniel Abraham outside of The Long Price Quartet (both of which I enjoy). It wasn't worth it.The plot just didn't have any meat to it. There were many good ideas but the author trio never put enough effort into fleshing out a single one of them. I was particularly disappointed in how they just tossed away the whys, wherefores and consequences of the whole conflict between the aliens and humanity's questionable role in that struggle. It ended up being a tepid adventure story when it could have been a lot more.The protagonist is pretty much unlikable until the end of the book. He's not an anti-hero where you have some reluctant interest; he's just a sociopathic jerk. Only at the end do we come to have some kind of regard for him, and then we have to struggle with a rather clumsy "monster within" metaphor. Most of the other characters are two dimensional though, to be fair, they don't figure in the plot line very much so we shouldn't expect to know them well.The science left me unconvinced. "We can take a tissue sample from your finger and recreate your body, including scars and memories"...huh? A little too much of Clarke's dictum is in place here—i.e., we'd have to believe in magic.It felt like a novella that was drawn out too long. It would have worked better at that length—either as a standalone or as the preface to a series.
    • 4/5
      The premise: after a really, REALLY bad night at the bar, Ramón Espejo has to flee into the wilderness of the planet São Paulo. He hopes he can spend a few months in peace while prospecting the landscape for a lucky strike, but everything turns into a nightmare when his blast reveals a group of aliens in hiding, aliens that will stop at nothing to keep their presence on this planet a secret. My RatingWorth the Cash: for a book written by three people, it's pretty seamless, and the Afterword and Author Q&A sections at the end are a must, because they really shed light on the process it took to get this book written, as well as the motivations of the authors and what each author brought to the table. The story itself is solid and stand-alone, and if you're a fan of anti-heroes, you're gonna like Ramón Espejo in spite of everything he does to convince you otherwise. I love how this book is populated by colonists from Mexican and South America, and how the aliens are truly alien, almost to the point you wish they were a little more human so you could understand them better. But in the end, this story is a journey story: a outer one, in which Ramón is on a manhunt and fighting for his very survival, and an inner one, in which Ramón is forced to examine who and what he is and come to grips with himself in ways that most characters in most books don't have to do. It's a satisfying read, and I'm glad I took a chance on it.Review style: once again, I'll divide the review into what I liked and what I didn't. PLEASE NOTE: the "what I like" section will contain NO spoilers, whereas the "what I didn't like" section WILL contain spoilers. The full review may be found in my LJ. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome.REVIEW: HUNTER'S RUN by George R.R. Martin, Gardner Dozois, and Daniel AbrahamHappy Reading!
    • 3/5
      If only I could cut out the middle.There is a lot of swearing/adult content (i.e. domestic violence is normalized) which makes it unsuitable for younger people, but the lack of sophistication through the middle part of the story makes it too young for most adult readers (i.e. any reasonable adult would not keep trying to solve every problem with violence).If you've read C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet you'll definitely see in the middle part of the story where at least one of these authors was influenced by that with his "describe the alien and every event in which it is involved with the highest conceivable level of detail." In this segment, the descriptions of urination, laughter, or "being a man" is excessive and makes for very tedious reading.The first 1/3 and the last 1/3 show there is a decent story line in here with some surprises and an interesting premise. Excluding the middle part, it has a tone similar to Richard Morgan's Market Forces or Thirteen.If it had consisted of only the first and last parts, I'd have given this story a 4 or 4.5.
    • 4/5
      At the beginning the story is not an atractive one. The main character is a drunkard mexican who kills with a knife an unarmed ambassador in a bar brawl. The vocabulary is full of strong words in english and spanish. But the authors manage to focus the reader's interest on the character and the story that thickens page after page. At the end of the book the reader sympathizes with the main character that's been by then much developed. The aliens are present, and play a role in the story. But the story is about Ramón Espejo and his nature, and his struggle to become a better one. I really liked the book.This edition is not a luxury edition but it has a good quality hardcover, paper, printing and two excelent full color illustrations. And it's signed by the three authors.
    • 4/5
      Thought-provoking story. Some spoilers follow in comments.This story does an effective job of painting a mostly unsympathetic protagonist, and his subtle transition into a place of having scruples, ethics, and working towards a higher purpose than just his own self-interest. This is put into stark relief when the (cloned) character has to interact with his original, who is still a mean-spirited murderous low-life. The interactions the clone has had, and his reactions which awaken him to a sense of conscience, are so delicately interwoven that it is impossible to pin down the moment when this shift in character happens. This metamorphosis is very delicately handled by the authors, who use interactions with aliens and the colonization of a new world to explore the issues of how one lives one's experience and what one gets out of it. It also does a great job of evoking truly alien cultures and thought processes. There are many layers of meaning tucked away in this story - I find it mildly haunting, in the way a good book is that provokes one to think long after you've put the book down. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Hunter's Run is the story of Ramon Espejo, a rough and tumble prospector working on the colonized planet Sao Paulo. A planet where the Brazilian aristocracy (called the Portuguese because of their language) rule over the Hispanic lower caste. Life became a whole lot more heated for Ramon after he foolishly kills a European ambassador in a knife fight at a local bar. He is forced to flee into the rocky, mountainous wilderness until things have calmed down in town. This is where things go from bad to worse as he stumbles upon something that doesn’t want to be found.Hunter’s run is a good adventure and still touches on classic science fiction topics. One of the main philosophical themes involves the question of when is it acceptable to kill. And this conundrum gets played from some very convincing counterviews. The second spanning theme is classical Roman (or is it Greek) “know thyself.” Through Ramon’s harrowing adventures he is forced to ask himself some very hard questions about who he really is and why he behaves the way he does.It’s not the most deep science fiction story out there but it does put up some questions and makes the reader think. It’s also an entertaining read and one that you won’t be disappointed doing. It’s also relatively short, so the time investment is small.
    • 4/5
      I picked this up because I am a big fan of GRRMartin. I was not disappointed. Though this book is a long way from his fantasy books (especially since it is a Sci-Fi novel) the character centered story is still there. This book is about Ramon Espejo, a flawed man trying to make a living as a prospector on a distant planet. He lives a hard life but he manages to scrape along, until he has a run in with an alien race. After that point he must make a journey that involves getting to know himself, and his flaws, more than getting to know the alien race. His journey teaches him about who he is and what it means to be free. Hunter’s Run is a quick and enjoyable read about a human in a colony in a briefly sketched, but well imagined, future universe.
    • 4/5
      This book seems like a tag team effort to find a twist on the plot then send it off to the next author. It features a brutal and macho hero cloned by aliens and sent off to find "himself" to be killed to prevent the discovery of the aliens. Richard K. Morgan also has brutal and macho heroes, but somehow they seem much more sympathetic than Ramon, the hero of this novel. I found Ramon so unpleasant that I couldn't even applaud his partial rehabilitation. It's not a bad action novel, but is it something that I probably won't even remember a month from now.
    • 5/5
      Very readable and well-told story of Ramon Espejo on a planet called Sao Paolo. He is a prospector with a volatile personality who claws his way through life and love, but seems to have gone too far when he wakes up in an alien vat. Like most really good sci-fi, it's more about us (as humans) than it is about aliens.