Scattered Suns

The Saga of Seven Suns, Book 4

By: Kevin J. Anderson

Narrated by: David Colacci

Length: 20 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

The war between the alien hydrogues and the faeros rages, reducing suns to blackened shells - including one of the fabled seven suns of the Ildiran Empire. Instead of protecting themselves, the Ildirans engage in bloody civil war and the many factions of humanity are bitterly divided. Can mankind and Ildirans overcome their own internal fighting to face a deadly new enemy that is ready to annihilate them?

Newly ascended to the Ildiran throne, Mage-Imperator Jora'h must quash the rebellion launched by his mad brother before the hydrogues destroy what is left of the empire. Assailed from all sides, Jora'h turns to his beloved half-human daughter, dispatching her on a desperate mission to make peace with the hydrogues.

Hope for humanity now rests with Jess Tamblyn, who continues to seed worlds with the watery wentals, the mortal enemies of the hydrogues. And on the ravaged planet of Theroc, home to a telepathic worldforest, a dead man is resurrected to prepare for the arrival of mysterious new allies in the fight.

But Chairman Basil Wenceslas's vendetta against the free-spirited Roamers has blinded him to danger closer to home - the soldier machines that make up the backbone of the Hansa fighting force. King Peter has long suspected that the compies, built with the help of the ancient Klikiss robots, cannot be trusted. Now the shocking proof comes when the Klikiss launch their long-planned extermination of all things flesh and blood. And in the ensuing battle, humans and Ildirans alike will face their darkest choices yet.

The saga continues: listen to more of Kevin J. Anderson's Seven Suns series.

©2005 WordFire, Inc. (P)2005 Brilliance Audio

Critic reviews

"More on-the-edge-of-your-seat SF thrills....Anderson handles a huge cast and complicated plot with élan." ( Publishers Weekly)
"David Colacci's youthful, mildly expressive voice is a plus....Lots of action here, and a fully realized universe." ( AudioFile)

Narrator spoils the story

I thoroughly enjoyed the first 3 books. This new narrator painfully mispronounces almost every name and sounds like he is horking up a hairball when he pronounces the Mage Imperator's family names...Very disappointed.

Saga of the Seven Suns #4

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Kevin J. Anderson's saga continues in this terrific audio book.If you like characters that are strongly developed and a plot that has different story lines that intertwine in interesting ways, you will enjoy the entire Saga of the Seven Suns series. Listening to this while driving on vacation this summer, I found that the miles passed quite quickly and enjoyably. I highly recommend this book and the rest of the series! Thanks, Audible.

What did you like best about this story?

Well developed characters and story lines that intertwined in fascinating ways.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

Please don't make a film of this series - - - I like the visual images I have formed in my mind.

best in the series so far

this it the best book so far in the series, full of action, with great interwoven plot twist. I'm completely use to the new narrator now.

greatly disappointed in change of narator

I have been very pleased with the character development and plot line of this series. However, in this book they changed the narrator from the first three books in the series and I was annoyed to the point of not listening to the remainder of the series. The change in name pronunciations with the guttural sound emitted at the end of each of the Ildiran name was unnecessary. Furthermore, when he pronounced the word "cadre" like "coder" it was just to much. Please bring George Guidal back.

ffs!

when you change readers halfway through a series, please make them listen thr previous recordings. the two readers pronounce almost every name differently.

Switching to David Colacci was a disappointment

I'm not a fan of Mr. Colacci's reading style. With no disrespect to this hard working narrator personally, I simply find that his reading carries the tone of someone reading to a child. I try to avoid picking books he's read when I'm shopping on Amazon.

The rest of the book was in line with the rest of the series. It's a good, interesting, story with a lot going on and tremendous creativity. Anderson's world building is thorough and detailed, and doesn't lean too heavily on old ideas. On the other hand, it's a bit late in the series to be dropping in entirely new types of players to the plot. There's a hint of deus ex machina at play when that happens.

Overall, I think four stars is about right.

No, they're not exaggerating.

Alright, look -- it's about as bad as people say it is. It isn't *universally* terrible, but it's not great; some of the changes he's made are sensible and in my opinion for the better, many others are strange, and others still are actively detrimental to the narrative.

A few people have justifiably defended the new narrator. He's fine. He's not fantastic, but he's not bad. It really made me appreciate the original narrator, though. I’ve literally never thought this about any narrator before, but more than a handful of times in the earlier books, I had to pause it and marvel somewhat about how *convincing* he was. I’d just have these moments where I remembered all of a sudden that all of these distinct characters were being voiced by the same person, and had to take a moment to appreciate that level of talent. And I’m not even a person who generally pays attention to narration unless it’s exceptionally bad.

One of the unfortunate consequences of this is that it feels a bit like those sitcoms in which a role is recast with an entirely different actor/actress, and we’re just supposed to ignore it. Except here, *every* character has been recast all at once, and unlike the original narrator, the new one cannot make so many distinct voices, so all the characters begin to blur together. I strongly suspect this is why the decision to give people accents and voice filters was necessary — it’d be genuinely difficult to tell the difference otherwise. A few points that stood out for me:

-I personally thought that his pronunciation of Ildirin names was a change for the better. There’s something interesting about the structure and format of their names, and it always seemed like kind of a waste that they were generally read as though they ended at the apostrophe. Another reviewer mentioned the new narrator sounding like he was coughing up a hairball when he said it, and that’s not entirely inaccurate, but I think it adds character. My opinion on the British accents is mixed, but again, he doesn’t have the range as the previous narrator, so fair enough.
-In general, some of the changes in pronunciation were preferable to me, but I also acknowledge that it was a jarring transition. I eventually got used to it.
-I think he handled the altered characters, e.g., Jess, Beneto, etc. pretty well, and that the voice filter helped impart a sense of strangeness.
-It actually makes sense to me that the Roamers would have Western — they don’t read as Southern to me — accents. It’s not as if they don’t already have Midwestern accents anyway — we just don’t notice it. I know they’re characterized as “space Gypsies” and that the name evokes the Romani, but between the scavenging and the making due on the frontier of space and the desire to be left the Hell alone by the big central government, they seem more like characters out of the Wild West than anything else. That genre being transposed into space isn’t without precedent; space westerns are popular, and the characters in Firefly spoke with Western drawls and that worked just fine. It’s a jarring transition though and having gotten used to things as they were, I’m not sure I prefer it, even if I think it makes sense.
-It is genuinely difficult to tell people apart now. Basil lost his distinct, clipped cadence; Peter mostly lost his restrained but perceptive bearing; Sarein sounds like nobody, really, and for the most part the women’s voices run together unless they have specific accents. Like I said, they really needed the accents and voice filters to make it work.
By far my biggest beef was with Rlinda being recast with a Brooklyn accent. She’s an interesting and original character for a space opera — a large black woman who loves to cook and is perfectly happy with her figure, who is *also* a shrewd negotiator and a good enough pilot to float to the top as a trader, *and* for all that shrewdness is still a believable character who seems interested in the people around her. For me, recasting her as a New Yorker takes a lot of those traits that I think made her kind of difficult to pigeonhole and jams them all into a New Yorker trope of the “I’m *walkin’* here!” variety. She’s a big, bold city girl who doesn’t take crap from anyone, knows a good deal when she sees it, but has a heart of gold. It technically works, but I found it far less interesting when they didn’t need to anchor it to an archetype. It was a real bummer.

So yeah, it’s generally quite bad by comparison to the earlier entries, but it’s perfectly average by the standards of audiobooks in general. A lot of the versatility and range of the first narrator was necessarily replaced with filters, accents, and other changes that were necessary for it not to feel like someone was just reading a book, and for the most part, I think the changes were detrimental to both the plot and characters.

Re: the book itself -- I enjoyed it, and will read the next one because the suspense is fairly compelling to me, but it's the weakest one in the series thus far and can often feel like it's simply meandering through its plot. Having finished it, I'm inclined to agree with others who have read the series in its entirety that seven decently long books is too many for what Anderson's working with here.

A new narrator should listen to the previous book

The narration isn't bad, it's quite good, but a new narrator reading the 4th book in a series should at least listen to the previous book so he can get the pronunciations of characters names and places at least close to the same as the first 3 books. It disturbed the continuity and continued to annoy me throughout. It's not reason to skip the remaining story, but almost made me want to buy the books and read them myself.

Redundant

Not a fan of the way the narrator pronounces names. This book repeats itself over and over again.

Good book, HORRIBLE narration!

Add my husband and I to the list of people who found the narration of this book both horrendous and frustrating to listen to. Not only did he change the way several of the character names are pronounced compared to the previous narrator but he also gave them bad, and in our opinion, "just plain wrong" accents. He managed to ruin the book. The story itself is good, if you can get past the horrible narration.