Patrick

Poor Teela Brown

Louie Wu. Because he can always count on out-maneuvering those who would control him.

Just about everything, his alliteration, tonal infliction, &c

Tribes of Ringworld

I was somewhat dismayed that Teela's luck finally ran out on her and would have preferred a more storybook ending for her.

I'll not be purchasing the follow-on Beyond the Frontier series, the last 2 and a half books of this series killed it for me.

Zipping through the universe at sub-light speeds, trudging through the story arch at a glacial pace. More of the same repetitiveness, constant word-stuffing references seemingly only to achieve the publisher's demand to reach 90,000 words and his relationship with Captain Tanya Desjani has ruined the dynamic between them. She is beginning to nag him (her superior) over his tendencies to continually get into a funk and he is beginning to show all the traits of a hen-pecked husband without even to joys of a sexual relationship.

Too much repetitiveness and constant paragraph stuffing with refer-backs to conditions on the Fleet's ethics and cowboyism from when he first entered the scene. While I had enjoyed the relationship plot arc between him,Victoria Rione and Captain Tanya Desjani in priors books, it's now becoming tedious and over-wrought.

While the saga progresses, the star system encounters are becoming repetitive. Geary is becoming less assure of his role and his relationship with Captain Tanya Desjani is losing its appeal.

When it was discovered that Brennan was the protagonist and not Phssthpok the Pak.

Yes, as were all of Larry Nivens Ringworld and Ringworld Prequel novels.

While not anything to do with the narrator, but his continued need to pronounce Phssthpok's name was somewhat disconcerting.

Yes. Great narration and interesting plot.

The congressman and his neurotic female companion. His steadfast belief that a compromise could be reached and the slowly evolving interplay between her and him was unforeseen and interesting when it finally started to show itself.

The climax where the president was overridden and the congressman played his cards very close to the vest.

The Herding of Humanity

I could really never get my head around miniature elephants being able to bring humanity to the brink of destruction.

Yes, the simplistic idea that the world collapsed because of capitalism, oil and evil industrialists and that open source genomes, bicycles, eco-terror and husbanding gazillions of pigs is where sustainable living answers exist.

I've purchased 5 other Scalzi novels and after finishing METAtropolis as the first, I'm strongly questioning the wisdom of my other purchases.

Absolutely, the narrations were well performed.

I would avoid it like a foreboding superstition.

Probably not but possibly.

Matt Egan as the main protagonist

Matt Egan

Watch Me!

As expected, Holter Graham does an excellent job in narrating an interesting story.

Somewhere in the upper category

The section where the main protagonist plots and hacks into the evil IOI facility

As with any good narrator, Wil's recital of the story gave the characters much more depth and made them more appealing than if I would have conjured up myself from reading the novel. His imitation of Sean Connery's Highlander character, Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez, was especially well done, for example.

No extreme reaction but it was never dull and, best of all, didn't have too many predictable outcomes.

While the story was entertaining, at times it seemed like some of the retro video game descriptions came off too scripted and made it less convincing that the author had first hand knowledge of those games. This is certainly understandable considering the number of games involved in the story but, nonetheless, it was a bit of a disappointment the few times it occurred.Also, the co-creator of the virtual game came of a little bit like Peter Hamilton's, Nigel Sheldon, character in Pandora's Star. It would be interesting to know if this was a subtle hat-tip reference to him and his novel?