Dreambitten

Red Dwarf Post Apocalypse

Reviewed: 10-25-22

The title really captures it. This one is a fun radio theater style sci fi sitcom that holds tone, structure, and humor in common with the adventures of David Lister and the other Boys from the Dwarf. (Fans of the Fallout Universe and things Justin Roiland makes will appreciate the themes and setting, but the RD and Hitchhiker vibes predominate.) The voice acting is very well done (though the narrator at the beginning and end of each episode feels a little jarring, since her accent is distinctly American and no one else’s is. That’s a vanishingly small concern, however) and blends well with a consistent attention to ambience-creating backdrop sound.

It’s worth noting that the audience isn’t really children. Much is implied, but the violence of a cannibalistic slave-holding, mutant-travelled wasteland ought to warn off anyone unprepared for it before the knowledge that the mutant is experiencing a reproductive season does.

Can’t tell how long this is - episode six ends like any sitcom does, but there’s plenty of room for them to continue and I really hope they do. Absolutely try this one out!

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Ugh. Points for Reader

Reviewed: 06-25-21

Excellent performance with terrible material. Your typical corporate futurescape staple of sci-fi, but if capitalism were playing the hero instead of the villain. MB’s bond company could not have scripted any better. I usually love lampshades of genre fiction but this one’s barely kidding. The humor helps, but doesn’t make up for the stuff that’s clearly not a joke.

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Interesting if Unwieldy

Reviewed: 03-16-21

This book wasn’t bad. It was certainly a fun journey, but she REALLY made a meal of this one for reasons that I still find unclear. I feel like she did a good job adding an engaging and unusual twist to a fairly easy to recognize fairy tale, but overall the book needed an editor willing to tell its author that the story was all over the place. The introduction of a new kind of magical creature that doesn’t directly affect the plot in any way felt forced and gratuitous and I don’t think she realizes that she’s losing balance and coherence trying to pursue so many unresolved threads at once.

Now with the bad part out of the way: there are a lot of really great things about this one. The villain was unusually scary (I have some opinions about deployment and the resolution, that felt like it turned a genuinely scary thing into a kerfuffle) and she is really going hard for the witches in ways that I really find interesting. But the best thing is how Leah really comes to be a whole person in this one, and in an opposite manner that I won’t spoil, so does Bran. The character development was good, but the plot kind of got (super got) out of hand for the third act.

I love this series, but she’s been building to big scary bad witch family/government threat/fae war/ vampire exposure across two series for like seven books. It’s getting Marvel-Universe unwieldy.

Well, I think that’s all I can say without spoiling anything. It’s better than Smoke Bitten, but the story’s not trending upward overall. :(

(And just while I’m at it, I don’t know how much more often we need to join A+C in their bed. Certainly less often in one book. It’s getting pretty old given that there’s no reason for us to doubt their relationship, love, or attraction.)

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37 people found this helpful

Good story, wrong narrator

Reviewed: 03-11-21

The story was an interesting and successful adaptation - the parts of the simple fairy tale are there, and the updates made the experience of such a familiar story: wicked, predatory stepparent, duped other parent, kids who turn the tables, even mysterious woods.

BUT. The narrator was not the right choice for this story. She seems oddly uncomfortable with the dialogue, especially (strange given she’s a voice actor) - the text clearly gives the characters aspects of speech that she avoids conveying, as if she were reading a transcript and not a story. It took me out of the story so much that I had to stop about 1/3 through and switch to the text.

I don’t mean to say that the reader is not skilled, but this was not a good fit as read, and something that more attentive direction might have helped, perhaps.

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Better

Reviewed: 09-13-20

Still not up to his usual par, but way better than the first one. Langdon the cop is still pretty much a prop (the new cop had more of a personality, tbh) and the world is better fleshed out. I think this would have been better as one whole book instead of what feels more like two separated parts. Very good voice performance.

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Well

Reviewed: 09-11-20

So he broke out of the “he said” “she said” they said” habit, which is great bc it’s mind-destroying to listen to, but the story is not as interesting or well thought out as some of his others I’ve read. Well worth the listen, but considerably below expectations given how much I’ve enjoyed Scalzi’s other work. The most frustrating thing was that the black female cop and supposed secondary character was so obviously a prop. Her whole purpose was to ask stupid questions that made her seem incompetent or foolish so that the main character had a reason to explain things. So interesting concept, clumsy deployment, and the reader did a decent job with what he was given.

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This book did the impossible

Reviewed: 09-04-20

... it got me to be CHARMED BY NYC.

It’s not just that the story was great, or that Jemisin was able to evoke so much visceral emotion, or that Robin Miles blew the roof off of this performance. Rather, like the boroughs of New York this book manages to be uniquely successful in all these ways while still managing in concert, to top any one aspect.

I loved it, basically, and can’t wait to see more. This is my first Jemisin novel and I look forward eagerly to reading further.

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The one star is for the reader

Reviewed: 07-02-20

- who did a great job with terrible material. This book was frustrating to read because the writer clearly had skill with language but his characters are cardboard cutouts and not even interesting cardboard cutouts. Without getting to spoilers, I’ll say that the twist was visible from ORBIT and the overall impression is of a self-indulgent fantasy of a guy with eternity to craft his ideal romantic companion: a super smart woman who is smart enough to keep him out of trouble but willing to mask it so he doesn’t have to feel stupid, and one who will never leave, dislike, or betray him bc she literally can’t.

This book is about a programming obsessed incel who is granted the chance to choose his own eternity. Save yourself.

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6 people found this helpful

::sigh::

Reviewed: 06-29-20

Nothing wrong with the reading - the reader in fact did a great job bringing life to this mess.

I say “mess” charitably, since it’s doubtful that any amount of tidying could remedy the situation. I liked Annihilation and I wanted to see more of what he writes, but this reads like he took a stenographer along to record the result of an acid trip.

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Decent story, terrible reader choices

Reviewed: 06-29-20

The first two books are by far the best, while the third limps along toward the expected but unjustifiably delayed conclusion. Worth a read, but the author seems to have been at a loss of where to source drama and by the third book falls mainly on puffed up lovers’ spats, unbelievable coincidences, and literal exposition-by-Oracle. Alas.

Much more so than those disappointments though, the narration for this books really takes away from the rich world Lackey has managed to build. The man has three accents he can muster, and all of them are cartoonishly exaggerated Britons. As jarring (read distractingly inappropriate) as it was to see those accents deployed in ancient Egypt, what made it worse was the entire lack of consistency. There were two main nations and he could not even decide which would be mostly English and which mostly Scottish. Instead he seems to have assigned accents roughly by class instead of region/nation and then went - bizarrely - for full blown Shrek for the one ancient Grecian analog living in Alta. More upsetting is how he ignores (in real time) any clues about narration/ dialogue delivery from the text, as though he’s never read any of this before the recording. Finally, he’s not even consistent by character. It’s one thing to have accents assigned regardless of place. It’s quite another to then have those random accents BE all over the place. Honestly, I think I blame the director, who should have told him to make other choices, to actually read the book, etc.

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3 people found this helpful