The Lives of Tao

By: Wesley Chu

Narrated by: Mikael Naramore

When out-of-shape IT technician Roen wakes up and starts hearing voices in his head, he naturally assumes he’s losing it.

He isn’t.

As of last night, he has a passenger in his brain - an ancient alien life-form called Tao, whose race crash-landed on Earth before the first fish crawled out of the oceans. Over the millennia his people have trained human heroes to be great leaders, to advance our species at a rate far beyond what it would have achieved on its own. Split into two opposing factions - the peace-loving, but under-represented Prophus, and the savage, powerful Genjix - the aliens have been in a state of civil war for centuries. Both sides are searching for a way off-planet… and the Genjix will sacrifice the entire human race, if that’s what it takes.

So now Roen must train to be a hero worthy of his unwanted companion. Like that’s going to end up well.…

©2013 Wesley Chu (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Wesley Chu is my hero.… He has to be the coolest science fiction writer in the world." (Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Osama)

Voice acting...

I felt that although the voice acting was good as the MC matured he still was voiced with a winey voice until the end. Even in passages when he was described as grunting out military commands it sounded as if he was a child wineying or complaining to get his way. The voice acting did not make sense for the context of the story at that point and really killed the end of this book for me.

An underrated listen !

I urge to listen to this story...if... you like action, sci-fi . Those are not uncommon combinations. However, I find that many times the action overwhelms the characters in a story. This is not the case with "The lives of Tao". Wesley Chu takes the time to develop his main characters and we care about them. We also feel the conflict he is dragged into. This story works on many levels. The reader added to the pleasure by making sure we knew who was involved when and giving them their voice. I was sad when we got to the end and am looking forward to book 2.

Sentient Parasite Lit

So we have the Trills from Deep Space Nine, the Goa'uld from Star Gate, the Souls from The Host, and a ton of others in a wide range of video games. And now we have the Prophus/Genjix in this story. For the most part I enjoy these stories, in particular in book form because we get to hear the sentient parasite converse with the protagonist..

Overall I greatly enjoyed this opening entry in the series and will be going forward with the story. But my goodness, the protagonist is making mistakes in this story like he was born in another era. And when he would make these mistakes, in my mind I kept on saying . . . . Oh Come ON!!!!!. Just a continuous number of poor judgement calls that continually kept throwing me out of the story.

It kinda felt like it was fake drama introduced into the story to create additional conflict. And by how Chu writes and tells his story, I can tell he was just being lazy. Because he is a good story teller. Our protagonist should not be making the same type of mistakes further in this series simply because the conditions in book 1, will no longer exist.

Starts off slow, but patience will be rewarded

The first chapter or two were confusing and jumped around with names and characters enough for me to almost move to a new book. But, once I caught up to where the author was trying to get me, the book was a 5 star book! Funny, action packed, and a bit of drama. Not a bad book at all.

An Action/Comedy book is hard to find.

What made the experience of listening to The Lives of Tao the most enjoyable?

Good Action/Comedy books are few, and far between, until Wesley Chu brought Tao into the picture. The witty banter and unique story makes this book fantastic!

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Lives of Tao?

The snappy comments back and forth between Roan and Tao. Constantly hilarious, and sometimes insightful.

Have you listened to any of Mikael Naramore’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Not sure. But the narrations were great and made it easy to distinguish between characters in the story.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Laugh mostly, cringe sometimes (in a good way).