Lenard W Havard

Perhaps the best in the series

Revisado: 07-29-24

I can’t imagine how tough it must be to continue developing characters, plots, dialogues, and an alternate universe for this many books. Many authors don’t do it well. I think Shirtaloon has nailed it with this book. It is one of the best books I have read this year.

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Great litrpg

Revisado: 05-30-24

#3 on my list behind BK’s other books. Interesting plot. Good character
Dev. Great banter

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Best dystopian novel available.

Revisado: 05-27-24

I’ve read a bunch of post-apocalyptic novels. This one has the best-developed characters I have experienced, the plot was believable, and the idea of cascading failures of a fragile system were very thought-provoking and thoughtful. The good guys aren’t all that good and the bad guys aren’t all that bad. They are all believably fallible and make mistakes and learn… or not. Great work gentlemen.

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Half a story and 2+ hours of fluff

Revisado: 10-19-23

I have read/listened to all of Jason Anspach’s books. This is the first time I was overwhelmingly disappointed. I expected a story. I got half of one. Then 2+ hours of random dialogue were tacked on to the end, making the book seem like it was longer than it really was. As a result, I was so disappointed, I decided to not listen to any more books in this series, and may not listen to any more of JA’s books.

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Clever writing, good plot. Light hearted

Revisado: 08-07-23

The dialogue in this book is really good. Plot is solid. Good mix of action, adventure, social politics, fun, horseplay, and good vs evil. Lots of discourse designed to challenge belief systems, whatever they may be. We’ll done.

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Great plots. Great dialogue. Great narration

Revisado: 06-26-23

I bought the book because it was on sale. I had never heard of the author. I listen to a lot of books, maybe 120 per year, and this was the highlight of the year.

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Ashura changed the recipe, and I can't swallow it

Revisado: 06-26-22

I have enjoyed all of the Castes and Outcastes series as well as the first two Instruments of Omens books. I eagerly anticipated this third book. With 9 hours left, I gave up on the book and returned it. The main plot drug to a screeching halt while lots of tertiary story arcs and characters were introduced. And there were so many holes in the story. My theory is that Ashura actually wrote a much longer book, but the editor said, "it can't be that long," so they just cut sections out and let the reader imagine what the other scenes were with little hints here and there. When the plot threads should be coming together... they multiplied and shot out in multiple directions that I could not/would not follow. I tried multiple times to finish it, but just got more and more frustrated each time, and finally gave up. No mas, Mr. Ashura.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

From a Weber fan: don't waste your time

Revisado: 12-03-21

I am a big fan of Weber's "Out of the Dark" series and "Prince Roger" series. This book is good. The series is incredibly frustrating - so much so that, as I am finishing the last book in the series, I am submitting this public service announcement for the betterment of all the people around you. Because this series will negatively affect your attitude.
Spoiler Alerts coming, so don't continue reading if you are committed to a frustrating waste of time listening to the rest of the series.
I love the basic plot idea, but the series moves SO amazingly slow. This is due to Weber's tendency to go into incredibly minute details about stuff that adds nothing to the plot or character development of the characters we care about. Additionally, Weber lets us hear the internal monologues and external dialogues of every character, literally. I think there are about a billion people on the planet, and at some point we get to hear the thoughts of every one of them, after we are given their history, the history of their parents, the milk man, the carpenter, their dog, the dog's parent, the person the dog bit, the squirrel that annoys the dog, the fish that watch the squirrel annoy the dog..... AAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!
Then the logical, moral, tactical, and strategic inconsistencies drive me crazy. The "good guys" have multiple unkillable battle bots with near perfect intelligence assets and stealth drones that can be equipped with rifles, bombs, nanobots that can kill or stun, etc..... And they come up with all kinds of idiotic reasons why they cannot use those assets to mitigate the war - and NONE of those reasons make sense. The only thing that makes sense is that Weber wanted to hamstring the good guys so much that the war would be dragged out. I won't be reading another book in this series, but at this point, it would take him about 3,748 books to complete the plot.
With the assets they had, there is zero reason why any enemy gunpowder, rifle, cannon, or ship should ever leave it's place of manufacture. In fact, at one point, an Army of God barge carrying tons of powder spontaneously explodes due to an accident. The bad guys can use saboteurs to destroy factories, but the good guys apparently don't have the imagination. In a world where ships disappear at sea due to weather on a fairly regular basis, there is NO reason why the good guys should ever let an enemy ship arrive at its destination.
They (the author and/or the incredibly unimaginative leaders of the good guys) killed millions and millions of people due to inconsistent, illogical application of the tools available. At one point (in book 10), they allow multiple battle ships to be destroyed by rockets they knew were on an island that they were already bombing, but they chose not to destroy those rockets because "we could not explain how we got that intelligence." AARRGGHHH! First, non one would ever realize any divine intelligence was being used. They were already bombing the island. Second, they have been getting and using mysterious intelligence throughout the series. But hey! let's kill off a few thousand men and drag this out a little longer! At one point they use nanobots to put some people to sleep. Here's an idea, use those things to put the people who are shooting the enemy cannons to sleep? Then they cannot shoot your ships. How about dropping stealth bombs on every enemy barge carrying cannons and powder and guns?
And then there's Merlin and his moral qualms about killing people. "Oh no. I cannot kill that evil person. I recognize that my unwillingness to do that will result in MILLIONS of innocent men, women, and children dying, but it's just not worth my emotional pain to do that. So, let them die."
Also, they use multiple narrators throughout the series, and no one took the time to standardize pronunciation of names or terms or cities.
There are many more complaints. But this is enough for me tonight.
MANY reviewers have discussed how this 10-book series should have been completed in about 3 books, and that's probably right.
My advice: unless you are looking for another time-consuming source of frustration in your life, don't start this series.

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If you can say it in 10 words, don't use a million

Revisado: 11-11-21

This story is far longer than it should have been for the content covered. The first 8 hours of this book were almost completely non-value-added for me. The plot was not advanced substantially. The main characters were not developed. Instead, Weber chose to go into excruciating detail of tertiary story arcs as well as the life, dialogues, and internal monologues of many characters that have not been central to the plot thus far while ignoring the characters we have already gotten to know. It got me to thinking about rules of thumb for this kind of thing. (1) There are X central characters who should be developed through description, extensive exposure to dialogue and internal monologue, etc.... I don't know what that # is, but it is probably somewhere between 10 - 20. It's ok to spend a lot of time developing their character. (2) truncate the character development of tertiary characters as much as possible. We need to know their internal motivations, but we do not need to know what their mother's midwife's father's dog did to the baker's son in another kingdom 3 decades ago, let alone what he was wearing, why he was wearing it, and how those clothes were manufactured. (3) give us a representative perspective of each group of people. We do not need to hear the same dialogues and internal monologues of the people making up each group expressed over and over and over again. I am a super-big fan of David Weber, but the pace at witch this story slogged along is hard to swallow. If I had not already invested 100 hours into the series, I would have returned this book and sworn off the series. I will give him one more shot. If the next book is the same, that's the end of this series for me.

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A great sequel - long overdue

Revisado: 01-19-21

I read “Out of the Darkness” many years ago, enjoyed it, and it stuck with me. I always wanted a sequel, and was thrilled when I saw this coming out. I loved it. Good mixture of tension and humor. Interesting evolutions of technology and exploration of biases and their effects on society. I can’t wait for the next one.

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