Militant_Poet

Low-rent religious pseudo-philosophy for morons

Revisado: 03-25-25

If you think this book is clever, you aren’t. That’s the most honest review I can give it. It’s poorly reasoned religious nonsense that straw-mans atheism and skepticism by trying to smuggle in logical errors and egregious fallacies by putting it in a narrative. This is just the old-timey Russian version of YouTube religious apologetics… completely overacted by the narrator in entirely the wrong accents.

This book, and the people who raved about it so much that I bought it, are a shining example of why human beings individually and collectively fail to reach their potential… and should be so embarrassed that they stay at home with the lights off while they think about what they’ve done and not leave until they can do better.

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Soooo boring

Revisado: 03-25-25

Started with a somewhat unique premise, then got absolutely lost trying to be another Harry Potter but focused on all the least interesting minutiae you could imagine. Listening to it felt like being stuck in a boring day at school, in real time… only it was someone else’s boring day at school which made it worse. My wife, my 11-year-old son and I all listened to it in the car on a long road trip, and I didn’t have the option of returning it (unfortunately) so I was determined to give it every chance. Still none of us could make it more than half-way through before wanting to stab ourselves in the ears with an ice pick. We all agreed silently staring out the window would be better than hearing the rest of this book.

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Still fun

Revisado: 09-17-24

If you have already bought the others in this series and are undecided on buying this one I probably can’t help you. If you liked the others, you’ll like this one.

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Long but worth it

Revisado: 07-12-24

Slow start, and quite long, but a wonderful story exquisitely told with great characters. It’s worth it if you like very intelligent complex stories and don’t mind a lot of extra detail for added flavor

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Perfect sci-fi

Revisado: 05-27-24

I’ve never watched the movie and I never will, for fear of letting Matt Damon mess with a perfectly good sci-fi book, which are in short supply

So if you like sci-fi, just get it.

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Pointless, stupid, boring, juvenile, barely coherent

Revisado: 03-30-24

I hope the title of my review will carry most of the weight here. But just to tack on some more: It has childish, simplistic, and corny characters with no actual arcs. The world-building is internally inconsistent when it’s even explained at all. The story is pointless and dumb and takes forever to even start and then makes no sense even when it does. Books like this are the reason Audible’s return policy was invented. You will return this book unless you’re into liking bad things to be ironic.

Also, the voice acting was uninspired. He’s done way better stuff, but even he couldn’t save this mess. I’m not sure he even tried. I think he was just cashing a paycheck.

The backdrop of LA and Hollywood-centric themes and characters tells you all you need to know. This book reads like a failed C-movie script that even an Indy film company wouldn’t touch. It seems apparent that the author was a failed script writer who eventually said to himself, “Screw it, if nobody will make my terrible straight-to-dvd campy movie, then I’ll just turn it into a book and self-publish because what the hell else am I doing with my time anyway? It’s not like I’m employable or have any skills, writing included, and it would take way too long to actually develop a coherent story, 3D characters, and/or writing chops, so what the hell. My mom said she liked it.”

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Juvenile, stupid, corny, and unsatisfying

Revisado: 03-17-24

I bought this because I was looking for more sci-fi like Andy Weir and some stupid website listed this clown as similar. No. No no no. Where Andy Weir uses science and cleverness to give you the satisfaction that intelligence and rationality will win the day, this is the opposite. This is hyper-emotional soap-opera drivel with no point, no payoff, no actual cleverness, no likable characters, and no internal consistency, let alone coherence.

If you’re a sci-fi fan, do yourself a favor and move along. He will abuse science, sure. But what’s worse is he’ll make an attempt at religious apologetics and get almost all the actual science that his story is based on wrong, in infuriating fashion. Essentially, if you like your sci-fi only after it has passed through the mind of an emotional, childish, ignorant Christian, this book is for you. If not… I’ve just done you a favor.

**SPOILER ALERT***
Lastly, he’s an incompetent author. He gives away the whole ‘big twist’ so early and ham-handedly that all the suspense and drama is gone but the rest of the book is just a slog to getting to what you already knew. The characters and their motives are completely unbelievable and unlikeable. The ‘romance’ is corny and juvenile. And like all untalented writers, he always hammers on the most dramatic and emotional things any chance he gets, because the story is so boring there is no organic tension. And then he just keeps revisiting it, literally. The stupid author’s mantra: “when in doubt kill a child and make your audience soak in it for a while. That’ll generate some emotion!” Fuxking terrible.

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Just corny

Revisado: 03-08-24

You know what you get when a silly premise meets an author’s inability to be convincing and internally consistent enough to activate your suspension of disbelief? You get a corny, corny story. The voice of the genie was perfect though.

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Where’s the rest of the book?!

Revisado: 12-28-23

I was left with the overwhelming feeling that someone… some villain!… snuck into the middle of my copy of the audiobook and stole the middle 30 chapters. You know, the part where the hero actually does something, overcomes some challenge, has a little character development, possibly forms a love interest… ANYTHING. Because in my copy, all of that was gone. If any of the rest of you had any of that in your copies, send it to me and I’d like to give it a listen, because the premise for the story was good, but a premise and a conclusion is all there was to this book.

I haven’t seen a potential so unfulfilled since Kurt Cobain.

Spoiler alert: nothing actually happens and the interesting premise turns out to be a total lie and the hero accomplishes nothing and has no greater dreams or goals at the end of the book than he does on the first page. Literally the only thing that actually changed for the protagonist is he lives in a different house a few houses away and he inherited some money he did nothing to earn. Wow. So exciting!

Personally, I hate dream sequences in books or movies because the authors typically get you interested in an alternate version of their story and then jerk the rug out from you. It’s practically an admission that they know their story is lame and they had a better idea but they couldn’t find a way to make it work so they gave up on it. This whole book was that device. Turns out the whole premise that he inherited a villain empire was a lie… that’s the only hook, and nothing about that sentence was even true. Normally I’d never put a spoiler in a review, but this one is so bad, you deserve to know.

Also, as a bit of free advice for the author: you should work on yourself… you have intimacy issues. When the main character has no love life, no kids, makes no effort and never even shows an interest in one, and their greatest aspiration in life is to be a bartender where a bunch of strangers act friendly to him because he brings them drinks but never actually form any meaningful bidirectional friendships… it says something about him. You. Him. What’s the difference? Also, apparently your fantasy is that you will suddenly get rich through no accomplishment of your own and live alone where your cats can talk and take care of you instead of the other way around. Dude. You have the emotional range of a wet dishrag. Get some help. The fact that the first thing you do in the afterword is make excuses and blame Covid for your inability to even finish an as-yet unfinished novel shows you who you are.

Also, why would the main character have everything he was told he was in charge of taken away from him without ever even verifying it was true? For all we know, his two assistants scammed him out of a trillion dollar empire and paid him off with a house in the suburbs and a dive bar. Even as a journalist the main character is terrible which is no doubt why he’s substitute teaching. I’m going to bet you’re telling on yourself more than a little.

Summary: you had an interesting idea but you lack the emotional and intellectual capacity to make the protagonist anything but a chump, and consequently never wrote an actual story. You then hit permanent writers block when you reached the limit of your abilities… dragged your feet to the last minute… wrote a conclusion on a deadline. You’re not a writer. Go do something else with your life. It’s the best advice I can offer.

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Just mailing it in now

Revisado: 10-27-23

Steady decline in quality in this series. Author just repeating the same 5 phrases (can’t really call them jokes anymore). Narrator sounds like he’s doing it in one take because he’s too bored of the same old material to bother reading ahead so he can voice-act the lines in the way they were written. Plot is so repetitive at this point that I use these books to put me to sleep now. (No lie. They are my sleepy time medicine. I set audible to a 15 min timer while I’m laying in bed and I never make it to the end.). Why do I keep using my credits for them you might be wondering? *sigh* not completely sure. They’re not terrible I guess. I obviously liked the series early on… maybe an unending optimism? Maybe OCD? Maybe I just haven’t found anything else as effective at putting me to sleep?

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