Neil H

New Rob Dircks book? Say no more - take my credit!

Revisado: 04-15-25

I saw this Saturday and didn't even bother reading the description or listening to the preview - I hit the by button. I downloaded Listen to the Signal as individuals and as the collection on Audible. I've been a fan since The Wrong Unit was released, and whenever I see that Rob has a new audiobook I buy it without a second thought. Still, I'll try to be objective.
Like most of Rob's stuff this is a story about the people. I'm used to his unique sense of humor but was still caught unprepared and laughed out loud quite a few times. OK, enough gushing.

Objectively speaking the story flowed really well. No drawn-out character introductions or backstory. The tech isn't over-explained or handwaved away either. There's just enough of each to move the story, which a bit of a reluctant-hero, coming-of-age, boy-meets-girl, alien-first-contact, good-vs-evil, intermittant-swashbuckling sort of story. And dead-cat jokes.

I genuinely hope that there are sequels, or at least more stories in this universe. I'd like to hear how the aliens get along at their next stop and find out what their names will be then.
Oh, and Urban Curmudgeon really needs to be made into a real game.

The only thing that could have improved this is a puff screen for Rob's mic. That's it.

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A good mix of the usual and the unusual

Revisado: 12-04-24

This almost entirely subjective, but here goes... What I mean with my title is that while the basic framework is not exactly unique, how Julia Huni fills in the framework is. The main character has an inexplicable tendency to fall into convoluted situations, and has to use her wits, available resources and friends to get out, which of course, she always does. Along the way the character introduction and development feels natural.

I'd bought the first two books a year or so ago and thought they were great. I didn't get any more until I got this book. If you go into the third book expecting Kaitlin Bellamy hearing Rachel Music may seem distracting, but don't give up. Kaitlin and Rachel are quite different, and they both did a fantastic job bringing the characters to life in their own style. Rachel in particular is an example of narrators who use enough accent to both get the feeling that the character really has that accent, but not enough make to clearly understand the dialog an issue. She seemed to be getting into a groove (not rut!) with each book. The later books had the sort of feel that books read by the author have. Maybe Julia wrote more for Rachel's style. Maybe Rachel was having fun. Either way, it's a fun series. A bit of action, a bit of mystery, a lot of nerdy humor, and no suspension of disbelief is required.

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Someone get Graham a pop filter!

Revisado: 10-01-24

The only real complaint I have is that the narrator very desperately needs a pop filter. His cadence, inflections and characterizations were really good, even when the accents weren't.
A sight tangent is needed to explain this. Some narrators can do some accents really well. Some can't, and that's fine except when the narrator tries anyhow and completely botches the job. Some use just enough of an accent to make it clear that the person has an accent. That's what Graham does for the most part.
The story itself is a mix of a unique machine-intelligence component and the standard good VS evil plot wearing a military overcoat. It's not a fast-moving story, and there are some scenes that could have been been abbreviated without losing anything, but the pacing seems deliberate, as if it were part of the narrative. There's a lot of detail that isn't explained outright, but way the story is told these details emerge anyhow.

I'm not even finished with this one but have already decided that if there comes a sequel I'll get it, and I hope that Graham narrates it as well - just with a pop filter.

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A really good collection.

Revisado: 09-22-24

Since Audible, for some inexplicable reason, does not list the stories and authors for any collection, I'll start with giving that:
– David VanDyke – “As the Sparks Fly Upward”
– Ann Christy – “Peace Force”
– Felix R. Savage – “Scrapyard Ship”
– Lindsay Buroker – “Here Be Dragons”
– Chris Dietzel – “The Gordian Asteroid”
– Craig Martelle – “The Trenches of Centauri Prime”
– Josi Russell – “Broken One”
– Chris Pourteau – “The Erkennen Job”
– Daniel Arenson – “The Firebug and the Pharaoh”
– Rhett C. Bruno – “Interview for the End of the World”
– Steve Beaulieu – “Night Shift”
– Lucas Bale – “A Friend to Man”
– Jason Anspach – “…Space Pirates”
– Will McIntosh – “Drive”
– Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff – “Water Babies”
– David Bruns – “Take Only Memories”
– Patty Jansen – “This Deceitful State of Truth”

Some of the stories are good. Some are really good. Some are great. The very first one was so engaging that I forgot that it was a short story and was genuinely disappointed that it ended. I had that reaction with most of the other stories as well. Only a few of the stories were from authors I had read before, which is really the point of this anthology. I look forward to getting more of them. I looked up the lost above so that I can look for more from those stories that really got me.
Both narrators did great jobs with some of the stories, but there were some that didn't mesh with their talents. This isn't a comment on them. Every narrator has a style, and when the story doesn't fit that style it just doesn't work as well. Still good - just not awesome.

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Unique plot, but the rest was solid meh.

Revisado: 08-19-24

This is one of those books that you have to give a lot of attention, but not for a good reason.

Let me start by saying that Ray Porter is one of my favorite readers. There have been several books I bought because he was the narrator. However, it seemed like he wasn't interested in this story, and that comes through in the performance. In his defense, there wasn't much he could do with this one. His Michael J Fox/Peter Falk style is better for the dialog-driven stories, which this is not.
I slogged through it because the story concept is just good enough that I wanted to see how it ended. Of course, being part of a planned series of sequels it didn't end so much as just stop.

Here are the problems I have with it, in no particular order:

The characters are described one way, with specific and distinct traits and motivations, but behave differently throughout the story. Not in the character development sense, but in the oops-I-wrote-the-wrong-thing incongruity sense. Now that I think about it, the characters seem like they were developed with the hat method - one hat has the names, another has the backstories, another has the personalities, and so on. Pull one from each hat and you have your characters.

The story progresses in fits and starts - one entire scene will be dedicated to something that isn't relevant while events and revelations that are relevant are minimized or skipped. For example (mild spoiler alert), a lot of times was spent on injuries one character received and to the treatment of those injuries, then later half a sentence was used to describe his death.

There are descriptions of injury and gore in the sort of detail you'd expect in a pathology report, then others in almost no detail at all. For example (not a spoiler), something like "character 1's left pinky was smashed with such force that even the smallest blood vessels were opened, leaking their red contents into character 1's glove, soaking it to the point that it was as red as the contents the once coursed through the pinky", then "character 7's whole right arm was sliced off somewhere near the shoulder. Moving right along...".

Plot developments, revelations and secrets were presented as giant factors in the plot and/or character reactions once they learn of that development. Some started out with the promised result, but they all sort of fizzled out into "umm, yeah, OK".

The dual story arc idea is often a great way to tell one story by also telling another. It was used well here, but neither arc nor its characters are compelling in any way. The only character I wanted to hear more from was the Vietnamese junk shop owner. He was more interesting than all of the others.

Whole sections of narrative, explanation or story are just missing. Things that should be described are merely mentioned. Things aren't even mentioned except long after they passed by.

I will not be continuing this series.

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Clever storyline & arc, excellent dialog

Revisado: 08-13-24

This review is for the entire Paradigm 2045 series because the three books are one continuous story, rather than sequels/prequels.
First, the picked nits.
It's inertial dampers, not dampeners. You're checking or limiting the effects of inertia - not making the inertia wet or moist.
Another is that the logic title and primary plot of Trinity's Children is based doesn't make sense -unbeknownst to humanity, an alien hegemony gave Earth a 100-year deadline to achieve FTL capability starting the year of the Trinity nuclear bomb test. Why would aliens use a measure of time invented by humans and based on the Earth's orbit around its sun? I'd think that they'd count down to the deadline based on their own timekeeping.

With that out of the way, there's a lot of handwavium over the science and technology, but even the stuff cut out of whole cloth is presented in a way that sounds plausible enough to suspend disbelief. Don't try to parse it all beyond what is needed to follow the scene. This is not hard sci-fi - the real story is in the character development and relationships. That is where these books shine, IMHO. There's a very heavy religion component, but it is the characters' religions, so doesn't seem too preachy. A bit cringy at times, but not break-the-fourth-wall preachy.

This series is my first with Robert W Ross and Nick Podehl, so I had no expectations, but color me impressed. Robert's attention to detail is pretty sharp. There were a bunch of times that I mentally noted flaws in the logic and continuity errors only for them to be resolved soon after, usually in tidy way.
Nick didn't read the books - he performed them. You won't need to be told who is speaking because each are clear and distinct. This is especially impressive since the number of character increased all the way to the end. There were a few in the last book that sounded similar, but that's only because he imparted such distinctiveness to the characters not just with accents, but mannerisms, and they were basically NPCs anyhow. There are very few voiceover artists who could pull off an ensemble cast this well.

Fantasy doesn't spin my windmill, but if you dig it you'll get more of an understanding of the characters and references in this series by also listening to the Sentinels of Creation series. This is a hint, not a spoiler.

The author notes at the end of each book is a rare treat for nerds like me. A conversation between Robert and Nick talking about how the characters went from words to voices would be great.

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These are the best people for the job?

Revisado: 05-22-24

I couldn’t get past the 2nd episode. Great plot concept, but the characters are like the people in horror films who run upstairs and hide in a closet while screaming when bing chased by a killer who clomps along at the speed of a sloth - not only so they not use the basic common sense of a lay person (these are all credentialed scientists) when in danger they actively pursue the danger, then are surprised that they find themselves in danger.
They are leopards-ate-my-face people.

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I expected to hate it, but didn't...

Revisado: 01-04-24

My only other exposure to Eoin Culfer is "And Another Thing..", which was one of the most offensively bad books I've ever read, not just because it soiled the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy legacy - it read like it was written by a 13-year-old neckbeard who wanted to write romance pron fanfiction set in the H2G2 Universe.
This is not a review of that book, but I had to lay the groundwork.
Highfire has the same heavy use of foul language as And Another Thing..., but in this setting, for these characters, and especially with this narrator, it kinda worked. I can do with or without coarse language - sometimes it's necessary to tell the story, and sometimes it sounds like a teenager trying to sound cool and edgy. This book has both. If I were reading it myself as I did And Another Thing.. (on actual paper!) I probably would have decided that foul language was overused, but Johnny Heller has a way of metering the performance in a way that makes it work.
In fact, he is the reason that I took a chance on this one. I'd listened to him narrate the Christopher Moore books Noir and Razmatazz (if you want to know how to use foul language effectively, listen to these books), and was eager to hear more of his work. He does the grim noir style wonderfully, and he brought that well-worn, DGAF characterization to this book for Vern. He has too distinctive of a voice to forget that he's the person voicing all of the characters, but it is obvious through accent, volume, tone and cadence which character is speaking without narrative labeling.
Of course the story is full of well-trodden tropes, but they're generic good guy/bad guy/dumb guy tropes wrapped in various regional stereotypes, and you can't have a good VS evil story without them, so it works. You can't expect a story about dragons and magic to reflect real life in any meaningful way.

TL/DR: Author is good with dialog and wolrd building, but writes adult fiction like a pre-teen on reddit. The narrator's performance makes it seem like he's telling a story he lived through, rather than read.

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I liked this a lot more than I expected I would

Revisado: 07-31-23

I had never heard of the author or the narrator, so had no frame of reference. I like sci-fi and I like humor, and the sample had both, so I gave it a shot. If you're expecting a thought-provoking book with believable characters and rational story lines you might feel disappointed. On the other hand, if, like me, you expected story lines and characters that seem to intentionally not encourage suspension of disbelief, you might enjoy it. Think of it as a palate cleanser. When you need something that isn't too serious, but not childish or silly.
It's similar to the Space Team series in that seems like a mashup of well-worn tropes from sci-fi, fantasy and pop culture, with enough sci-fi and humor to glue it all together. It's less comical than Space Team, verging on a more YA audience maybe.
It did not seem like it lasted over 8 hours to me. Things zoomed along pretty well. The narrator was possibly more responsible for this than the author. It was easy to tell who was talking just by cadence and accent even when the voice didn't make it obvious.

If I had one nit to pick, it would be that title the main character Simon is more of an inter-dimensional delivery boy than a cosmic one.

I'm looking forward to more of this series.

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Meh.

Revisado: 05-23-23

The story has an intriguing, if not well-worn , but that's it. It reads like an attempt at writing in the style of the OG writers from the 40s and 50s, but it fails at that. The main character is an unobservant dolt. Every other character is portrayed as an NPC. Everything about them other than their names and ranks changes throughout the story. Each makes decisions and statements that are incongruent at best, contradictory at worst. The story line jumps around erratically.
Here lie spoilers...

The crux of the story is about this mysterious ancient ship that is so advance and superior that it not only defeated some allegedly mighty foe 6000 years ago, but destroyed tens of thousands of ships since then simply for being in the same region of space. It is so large that it can house hundreds of smaller ships, can jump to hyperspace, shoot every possible manner of beam weapon, make its own gravity, yadda yadda, but does not possess even rudimentary repair facilities or spare parts storage?
The Terrans are brilliant enough to manipulate the AI at will, but didn't think to rummage the landing bays for materials to repair the ship? WTF.

I couldn't listen to more than 2 hours at a time. I kept getting turned off by the cringe-inducing accents and mannerisms.
The narrator may by great at documentaries or school films, but should probably avoid gigs that require more than one voice or accent. The female characters all sound like they are either Jessica Rabbit stand-ins or an angsty teen, and the male characters aside from the captain and the pilot sound like the same guy at different points in his life. The pilot he sounds more vaguely middle-Eastern, Slavic and oddly Canadian. The one thing this Scotsman does not sound like is Scottish.

The only other Vaughn Heppner book I have is Artifact, and it was worth a credit - decent story, great narration. Sometimes you have to try more than one from an author to really get a feel for their work. Not sure whether I'll try a third.

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