Bikram Agarwal

Complete trash

Revisado: 11-16-20

Don't know why this book exists. The story is total trash. There's no intrigue and I didn't care for the ending. The "twists" were expected. Glad that I didn't pay for this.

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Good story that kept me hooked.

Revisado: 11-16-20

This second book in the series works well as a standalone story.
It's NOT fast-paced, but doesn't get dull.
I listened to it end-to-end in a single sitting and enjoyed it.

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Poor story, poor narration.

Revisado: 06-12-19

One word review - Meh.

More words -
"Zombies" don't excite me anymore. The tiny difference of "smart" zombies wasn't enough to make me interested in it. And the "space whale" too got boring after a while. And the climax had flaw similar to the movie Signs. <SPOILER>It was smart/resourceful enough to land on moon but couldn't go to Earth because it doesn't have a thumb?</SPOILER> As dumb as it gets.

And there were multiple chapters dedicated solely on minutest details of how tens of different zombies were killed by the team. Those chapters were waste of time, if you ask me.

The last line of the book sounded like an "open ended" thing that some authors try to do. That attempt too was pretty weak.

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Overhyped

Revisado: 04-09-19

This book again starts with the "rocket launch" innuendo. Does the author not know any other way of referring to that? I was irritated by repeat of this from the beginning.

Characterizations in this book felt quite weird to me. Elma was trying to be portrayed as holier than thou, but at several places she came off as self-centered jerk. And why the hell was the author hell bent on redeeming Parker. That guy was sexual predator, as the author clarified at several places during the two books. Yet, it looked like this book's mission is to establish that "aww... he's not that bad after-all." Just no. Once you are sexually exploiting people at your workplace, you have no redeeming qualities. Period.

Moreover, it looked like the story was heading towards Elma getting a crush on Parker. ffs.

Apart from all these, the story itself wasn't anything unique. First expedition to mars. Few critical issues during the voyage. <spoiler>Few people die. But they finally reach the destination.</spoiler> Meh.

And still a poor narration. Only Elma's voice was unique. All other females have one voice. All other males have one voice.

To me it sounds like this series is hyped just because "yayy... women."

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Implausible ending. Still liked book as a whole.

Revisado: 03-26-19

Warning - This review contains some spoilers.

First, the good stuff. It's an entertaining read, with a good and inspiring story. It didn't drag in any chapter and every part of the story was essential. The fact that this fiction has actual historical events / elements mixed in, makes it all that more interesting. I will be starting the second book tomorrow.

What I didn't like in this book are -

1) the "rocket launch" innuendo. It was funny the first time, and maybe the second time. But the same innuendo being used every time got very irritating.

2) the part about <SPOILER>they sending a total rookie, who has never been to space, to the very first moon mission.. that's not at all believable. That ending felt rushed too much. She should've been given some minor space missions beforehand and then should've got the moon mission. But nope, directly got the moon mission</SPOILER>. Unbelievable.

Narration wise, I didn't find much variation in the narrator's voice. All male voice renditions sounded the same.

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Story ends like there's gonna be a sequel.

Revisado: 03-09-19

It was a little slow to start. The "post apocalypse" world rebuilding process wasn't quite interesting. Quite a few things aren't explained well; like "fakes" and "plague babies", "fat babies"... which I kinda understood after covering ~ half of the book. And each chapter has a "opener" para, which doesn't make any sense at first.

It gets interesting only after the actual time travel mission starts. It felt somewhat similar to the Bob's story-arc in Bobiverse and I mean that in a good way. The concept of ancient people encountering modern people and thinking of them as gods always fascinates me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Both Minh and Kiki do dumb things, which don't make sense. Guess the author just needed those to make the next things happen. And the end felt anti-climactic. I wish there was a sequel to it, so that there's some sort of "conclusion", because the current one doesn't feel like it.

The narration was pretty bad in places. It sounded like a bad text-to-speech engine is narrating the book. Kiki's voice was endearing though.

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Not for me

Revisado: 03-03-19

I bought this because this book got a nebula nomination. But after tolerating it for an hour, I couldn't continue. The story wasn't making much sense. The writing style and the narration accent requires you to pay undivided attention to it, and even then I missed what was happening. I read the ebook along with it and even then it was extremely boring. Abandoning it.

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Good finish to a great story.

Revisado: 11-12-18

I had read the first book of this series back in February and since then, I've been collecting rest of the series as they became available. I didn't read them immediately though as I wanted to binge them all together. And after this final book became available, I did just that - read the whole story back to back. And what a story it is.

I love the media-loving, sarcastic murderbot who saves his clients even when he's not bound to. His character is so endearing that you can't not love him. His snark kept me entertained. I wish other characters were more fleshed out though. The entire series mostly looks like a one-man show.

Narration wise, it was alright. I'm glad that Kevin R. Free narrated all four books. A sudden change of voice in middle of a series would've been jarring.

#NearFuture #Witty #GoodGuyRobot #tagsgiving #sweepstakes

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Heartbreaking story of suffering.

Revisado: 09-05-18

I, like many other people, had heard about inhumane conditions in North Korea earlier. But reading the first hand account of a survivor was a gut wrenching and heartbreaking experience. Makes you realize that no matter how bad we feel about our own life, those people are living a life way worse than that. It feels like a moral responsibility of the world to do something about them.

I did have a few issues with the content of the book though. The author kept saying that his father and other "returnees" didn't know any better because they haven't seen any other form of governance. But the author himself keeps acting as if he was the only enlightened one even at that age, even though he himself too hadn't been outside Japan or North Korea at that point...!!

And there are some timeline discrepancies in the epilogue of the book, where he mentions the dates of last letters.

Narration was pretty flat. Didn't convey the powerful emotions of the book.

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All 3 books are almost same. Why bother?

Revisado: 08-22-18

I dunno why I keep buying books of this series. All 3 books (audible dramatizations) sound exactly same as the other. Just that the books reference events in the earlier book, only to repeat the same event. If you've read one book, you've read all of them.

And the gunfire sound in this series is the worst I've heard ever.

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