THE PRECIPICE

Stefan Rudnicki, producer and one of the performers, has picked his readers well. In fact, he is himself one of the best of them. Each scene generally concentrates on one of the lead characters, so Rudnicki assigns a particular reader to a particular character throughout the book. The technique works. The listener has no difficulty picturing the scenes and character interactions as the book wanders across a landscape divided among an ecologically ravaged Earth, spaceships, the moon, space stations, and an few asteroids out in the Belt. Bova has written better books, but the performances here enhance the work indeed. D.R.W. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/SEP 02]