The Penultimate Truth

In this audio edition of Dick’s futuristic dystopian novel, narrator Nick Podehl demonstrates his impressive range and turns in a compelling performance. The story wastes no time imparting pessimism—with descriptions of an inner “fog of loneliness” to match the low-hanging clouds and landscape of dead trees “in the former city of San Francisco”—before presenting listeners with a post-WWIII United States in which survivors live in underground “ant tanks.” Podehl takes his time with such descriptive passages, allowing the author’s prose to truly have an impact on listeners. Podehl also deftly imparts a patrician accent to an addictive computer assistant for writers called a “rhetorizor,” and employs staccato, machine-like tones for the leadies, robots that did most of the fighting during the war. The narrator is no less skillful with his rendition of the book’s lead character, Joseph Adams, using tentativeness to convey the propagandist’s inner conflict at purveying lies. (Jan.)