Titan

Mammon Series, Book 1

By: Robert Kroese

Narrated by: Jonathan Beville

Length: 13 hrs

Publisher's summary

By the year 2032, the US federal debt has surpassed $50 trillion. The American empire is on the verge of collapse.

An entrepreneur named Kade Kapur has an idea for rescuing the debt-ridden United States: The government will issue stock in a company with exclusive mining rights to an asteroid whose orbit will soon bring it near Earth. The asteroid, which contains $10 trillion in valuable minerals, is officially called 2015 RK 16 Maimonides, but it soon comes to be known by another name: Mammon.

Fortunes are made and America seems to have avoided an economic collapse. But when the plan to capture the asteroid goes awry, the sky will fall....

©2021 Robert Kroese (P)2022 Tantor

Sci-Fi PreDocumentary

Last night I finished the book. It outlines a future that is more probable than I'd like to admit. That's why I call it a "PreDocumentary."

Ambitious & fun story by Robert with rock solid delivery by Jonathan.

Looking forward to when book 2 is ready for listening.

Atlas Shrugged meets the Martian

Holy crap, what an intense car crash of hard science, bad politics, and gritty survivalism.

Could not put this book down!

Reading this book brought back memories of reading Cryptonomicon in the late 90's. Neal Stephenson did a great job touching on a possible future of online banking by the creation of cryptographic systems to protect commercial transactions, complete with an off shore bank. Titan touches on the same future possible edgy technology that could transform our world. The realism about the potential changes to our social structural about how socialism would and will break the social and monetary foundations is so real, we can see it taking place today.

The characters are so three-dimensional, the plot moves at a very fast pace. Loved this book!

Titan, an examination of a probable future

Titan is an engaging story with well developed characters that can lead the listener into emotional states, coupled with an outstanding actor who is deft enough to produce the personalities of the characters as if he had painstakingly studied them in real life!
Disclaimer, I am a huge Rex Nihilo fan so I might be slightly biased to Kroese's work, but this novel is by no means a satire. So this review is completely based on the political thriller aspect.
I found to my surprise that Kroese's opinions on the political environment mirror my own, Not that Kroese is, but I was previously a staunch republican, and now I find myself somewhere in the middle (too far left gets loony, too far right gets nuts). So In the political thriller part of the book I was like "yeah I could see that". Also it seems that maybe we share a similar library (Strange Angel).
By and large a great story that makes one want to get back to the book and see what is happening, somewhat reminiscent of "Nobody's Fool". But unfortunately Titan has quite a few exhaustive info dumps, and I have to admit, I grew a bit weary with those.
On to the voice actor, WOW and HOLY COW HE IS GOOD!!!! In my opinion his inflection is strikingly similar to Ray Porter, but the character study is decidedly better than anything I have heard from Ray Porter. Jonathon's work is so sublime and enhancing to the story without ever being over bearing, that you just don't think about his performance, It is a seamless marriage of story and acting that when pondered upon, can only be described as magical.

The Board is Set for More.

I really enjoyed this book, burning through it in just a few days. Titan straddles genres blending realistic science fiction and a political thriller in a very believable way. The characters are all exceptionally human--real believable people struggling to make it a world facing extreme versions of themes that are very recognizable in the real world today. There are no true heroes or villains here, just believable characters chasing what they believe is the best course of action. Even though the hero/main character is a tech billionaire, he comes off as a real person chasing a dream, and even though the forces working against him are portrayed as clearly being in the wrong, often chasing political motivations, they come off just as real and believable. The narration is excellent and engaging, and the narrator does a solid job of bringing the personalities of many different characters to life. My only criticism of this book (giving the story itself 4 instead of 5 stars) is some parts of the story got a little "teach-y". The character Jian who appears in the second half of the book explains a lot the economic details in explanations that could have been illustrated through action or circumstance in other ways or parts of the story. The book though engaging is a 13 hour set-up for what comes next, It doesn't exactly end with a cliffhanger leaving the listener dying to know what happens next, but rather sets the stage for Act II of this saga by putting all the pieces in place. I hope Robert Kroese can keep it up with the next book and possible beyond. I look forward to learning what happens next.

Lots of Pre-Gaming, not much Game.

I love this author. His Iron Dragon series is top notch.
This book was way too ‘prequel’ than it should have been. It’s written well, just not really sci-fi. More like dystopian future.
The author’s politics are most likely much like my own, but I felt like I was listening to a 14-hour virtue signal rather than a good fiction story.
The narrator, while blessed with a fantastic voice for audiobooks, needed a better editor. I became frustrated and distracted by his deep sighs between paragraphs, heavy breathing between sentences, and occasional swallowing *or maybe wetting his whistle* throughout.
I will read the sequel, but only because I like the characters. I really hope that the next book is more of what I expected from this one.

Great Concept, Poor Execution

The idea is great and has many interesting threads to it, the potential was there to take it in so many different directions.

I'm relatively on-board with the authors politics, but OMG I got fed up of having them shoved in my face. I want to escape US political discourse, not have it rammed into center stage at every opportunity. This really spoiled the book for me.

A real disappointment - the ingredients were all there and RK has written such great series previously (The Iron Dragon & Rex Nihilo), it feels a shame to tarnish those works with this one.

Idiotic but Good Narration

My Review: Well our hero is a pompous ass so not sure why we would pull for him. He also is potentially the biggest mass murder ever, on a planetary scale. An the government is helping with possible genocide and not even asking for data to support the risk, I mean it’s just the possibility of planetary destruction. Then someone else is going to make the meteor hit the planet and destroy it. Oh yeah the Supreme Court says the first amendment to the constitution is illegal. Hero’s friend has known him for thirty years but needs the girl that knew him in kindergarten to help.