June Is National Audiobook Month, and to celebrate Tantor Audio are running an audiobook special offer through the month. Throughout June, The Knowledge audiobook will be discounted 50% on their website. The audiobook is unabridged and available as either audio CDs or MP3s. It is narrated by the remarkable John Lee, who has also narrated some of my favourite novels by Alistair Reynolds and Peter F. Hamilton. You can listen to a free sample of the audiobook here.

A wake-up call, encouraging us to leave our comfort zone and learn the basics of caring for ourselves in a disaster and it’s aftermath.
— Mixed Media Reviews

Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

The epigraph introducing the whole book is a line from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

(although see the unfortunate typo that appeared in one of the early drafts of the book…)

The Waste Land is a very powerful poem, and is commonly quoted. For example, lines from Section IV have been borrowed for two book titles by one of my favourite authors, Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward; and the opening line of the poem, ‘April is the cruellest month’ has been adopted as a lyric by electronic music band Hot Chip. It is an absolute joy to hear the poem read aloud with the due rhythm and performance. I would, therefore, heartily recommend The Waste Land app released by the publishers Faber. It offers recordings of the poem read in its entirety by Eliot himself, as well as Ted Hughs and Viggo Mortensen (who of course plays the father in the film adaptation of The Road), alongside reproductions of Eliot’s edited manuscript and a filmed performance by Fiona Shaw.

Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.

The themes of doomsday, surviving in a post-apocalyptic world and rebuilding from rudimentary means have been common tropes throughout the history of literature (it’s by no means a recent trend in sci-fi) – as explored in the article on recommended novels.  Many of these older publications have fallen out of copyright restrictions and so are now with the public domain, available as free audio downloads. There is also a fantastic body of audio recordings that are free to download. I’ve collected together my recommended list of essential listening, pulling together the very best short stories and full novels. There are also a few poems here, such as Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’ and Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ that feature as chapter epigraphs in The Knowledge.

• Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Liebowitz
• Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy (dramatisation)
• Arthur C. Clarke, Hammer of God
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness 
• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
• T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
• E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias of Egypt
• Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (read by the author)
• H.G. Wells, Time Machine
• Johann David Wyss, The Swiss Family Robinson

(see OpenCulture for a full listing of all available short stories, novels and poems)

Want to read more about the behind-the-scenes fundamentals of how our modern world works, and how you could reboot civilisation if you ever needed to...? Check out The Knowledge - available now in paperback, Kindle and audiobook.