Empire Builders

This is the second book about Dan Randolph even if it was writte well before Powersat.

The earth is heading towards a greenhouse cliff, a sudden climate change that will destroy much of the planet in ten years if something isn't done soon. The ice caps will melt. Cities will be flooded. Millions will die. When Randolph tries to let people know what's going on and try to help orchestrate a plan to avoid this catastrophe, government officials from the Global Economic Council (the GEC) confiscate his company, imprison him, and silence his scientific team.

The story continues and as usual it quite good and i find the book hard to put down, or stop listen to if you, like me listen to the audio book.

Stefan Rudnicki does an very excellent job adjusting his voice to each of the characters so you get a god idea of who speach. Speech tags become redundant. He captures a variety of accents well, and the voices match the personalities. He tries hard to get the Japanese right, but it doesn't roll off his tongue well.

Its even a bit scary to think that this book was written back in 1993 and quite well talks about some of the problems we have been facing today. The tsunamis in Indonesia and the flooding of New Orleans.

THis "enviromentality" really shows in this one. A little naïve and over steps the climate change logic here. But it does set the stage for his grand tour. Listen only for background information after listening to Powersat and continue on with the Grand Tour books. Stefan Rudnicki preforms this and does it very well.

Yes, I would listens again, I enjoyed this book

I think I could compare this title to the Orion series, there is a lot of space travel and exploration in both

I like Stefan Rudnicki, he is a very good narrator for truck drivers because he keeps his voice at a fairly constant volume, which is nice because I don't have to keep fooling with the volume control while I'm driving

No, I'm generally not an emotional person

Stephan Rudnicki is one of my favorite narrators, and he did his usual excellent narration here. Easy to listen to, easy to distinguish different characters, just the right amount of tension. The story itself drags a bit at times; too many meetings! I did enjoy how Dan managed to get out if situations that did not seem to be survivable so many times! An interesting story, with a definite environmental theme.

I think what I can say is that Bova sees to lack some imagination. This was already evident in Powersat (a book he wrote more than a decade later). The idea of a watch sized wrist computer is very.... 1980s?

This was my second book (see Powersat) and I pretty much have the same complaint, that at the end of the day Bova doesn't seem to be very imaginative. A lot of the technology in the books comes across as horribly antiquated.

I think he captured the personalities of the characters well, it definitely helped me create the images in my mind.

I could see it as a SyFy movie of the week.

Yeah, I had planned to read / listen to all of the "Grand Tour", the concept sounded interesting. After two books though I have decided not to continue, the lack of technological "dreaming" is just way too distracting for me.

I just got so wound up in Dan's situations I couldn't stop listening. Stefan Rudnicki did his usual job of using different voices with each character.....outstanding!