Banishment

The Forgotten Empire, Book 1

By: Raymond L. Weil

Narrated by: Liam Owen

Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

From USA Today best-selling Author Raymond L. Weil comes the first book in a new military science fiction series.

Can Earth save the Human Empire?

The Confederation consists of the seven oldest races in known space. They control a vast section of the galaxy. All races in that part of the galaxy are subjects of the Confederation and forced to obey the Confederation’s laws.

The Human Empire is well aware of the Confederation and has been careful not to intrude upon Confederation space. However, now the Confederation has decided the Human Empire has grown too large and needs to be brought under control of the seven races.

Warfleets are dispatched, and soon massive space battles erupt throughout the Empire. Can the Humans survive or is the time of the Empire over?

©2020 Raymond L. Weil (P)2020 Raymond L. Weil

Good Story/Bad Narration

It's a great Book, however the Narrator seems to think he's reading to a Kindergarten Class. Plus he didn't know how to Say "Kyper" Belt mis-pronouncing it as The "Kipper" Belt over & over which was annoying. The story however is good enough that eventually one can get past all of that & enjoy a good story.

The plot held promise

The first thing that hit me was the performance.. the constant referring to the Kuiper belt as the Kipper Belt was Jarring! to say the least not to mention imagining a space ship hurtling towards a British smoked fish nomaly eaten for breakfast!! Its so easy to just google Kuiper Belt and it will give you the correct pronunciation but instead we have to listen to Kipper Belt endlessly repeated, which leads me to the repetitive dialogue did the Author forget he had already described an event on the previous page of was this an effort to pad out the word count to come up to the publishers requirements, one could easily have shaved a couple of hours off the book just be deleting the repetition. The plot did hold promise but the performance appeared too simplistic and the story fell short to the point you had fleets engaged in combat for the defence of a homeworld but no mention of any preplanning or Wargaming was in evidence beyond one fleet being in a cone formation and the other a globe ( straight out of EE Doc Smiths "Triplanetary" ) so Military Sci Fi fans will be disappointed here.

Fine start to a mil scifi series

The very beginning of the book was a bit awkward, but it got better quickly. Nothing particularly new or exciting as far as military science fiction goes in general, but the premise is reasonably interesting and should easily lend itself to future books without becoming boring (at least for a few books!)

I have hope this author will emulate BV Larson in rapidly improving as a writer and injecting more character into his, well, characters. Worth a listen for fans of the genre though the field is getting pretty crowded nowadays and there are far better books out there. (Unfortunately I've already listened to almost everything I could find, but I'm quite happy with more of the same)

Good Story, Terrible Narrator

Unfortunately the horrible narrator ruined this for me. I would like to see how the series progresses, but I see the next book in the series is narrated by the same person, so its a no for me. If you have a different narration experience then me, give the series a shot. It might be worth it.

How bad could it be?

Wow! It was bad, the narrator was terrible. The story is good and I look forward to reading the series. I only hope that the awful narration doesn't stick in my head as I do.

neet

A little confusing at the start. However turned around really well. I am looking forward to reading more.

It’s pronounced keye-per not kipper (the English fish breakfast)

The narrator is terrible. He should just stay with his normal voice. His various character voices are really bad. From terrible pompous quasi British accents to bad dork voices. He also uses the wrong inflection on words and sentences. Oh yeah I’m sure Earth governments will just fall in line with a monarchy from the stars - yeah right.

Mixed bag but mostly a bit flat.

I listened to the entire book because I wanted yo know how it finished. I was however irritated almost all the way through. The speakers voice was bland and unenthusiastic. The sound editing is amateurish. But sadly the worst thing is the lack of detail in the story. The story is very linear and frankly seems to discount human psychology entirely. Possible major plot twists are simply ignored by method of "and everything worked out fine."
I am vaguely dissapointed.

Don’t want your time

Couldn’t make it past the 4th chapter. I found the most boring history book I had, to be more entertaining than this.

Story line to predictable, character’s are dull, your glad where there killed off.

Performance is just bad, just had to stop.

Couldn't get past the Narration of this book

The story seems ok, but kinda jumps around a bit. At one point, a character is in one place, and the next, he's with his son and explains a secret plan in front of the enemy captors. The narration.... well..... can use a bit of work.