Catching up on Enjoyable Audiobooks (mostly SF)

My wife and I got to see some old friends today for the first time in much too long and we got to talking about books ... and I realized I hadn't posted my recent favorites here for a while. So:

This is another Nebula Award winner (among other awards it won). The plot is very complicated (Wikipedia has a synopsis), with a spacefaring civilization set 1000 years in the future that uses AIs in reused human bodies (Ancillaries) for some functions and one of the ancillaries trying to track down and get revenge on the civilization's tyrant, Anaander Mianaai ... I found the whole series (sequels are Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy) very satisfying. Five Stars!

And I just finished the latest from the author of The Martian, Andy Weir:

Artemis is the first city on the Moon, and the protagonist is a brilliant petty criminal and smuggler named Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara ... Jazz is involved in an episode of industrial sabotage that leads into murder and intrigue ... there's a little too much plumbing and welding detail, but overall big fun. Four stars.

Another far-future story, with humans behaving even worse than normal:

Earth's ecosphere is collapsing, so various ships are sent out to various suitable-looking worlds that will be bombarded with an intelligence-enhancing nanovirus to speed up evolution on the earthlike fauna that have been seeded there.

But a saboteur in an "earth only" movement messes up the ship doing the seeding and the nanovirus misses the intended monkeys and helps the intelligence of a bunch of ... spiders ...

Complications ensue over millenia ... but there's a remarkably upbeat ending ... Four stars!

And for some reason I got this one free from Audible:

The reader only gradually learns that this is a post-collapse story ... that there is some terrible virus going around that infects humans and makes them "hungries" which will eat uninfected humans and whose bite will transmit the virus to those humans.

We only gradually realize this because the protagonist is a bright elementary student named Melanie and we wonder why she's locked up and wheeled in shackled to her classroom ...

I quite appreciate the way the author brought all this out gradually ... this one doesn't really have that much an upbeat ending, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. Five stars.

And finally, one from Lee Child's Jack Reacher series that was excellent as usual but thematically relevant to a societal problem that's huge right now: the opioid crisis:

Five stars!

Happy reading ... or audiobooking!