Emergence

An Extinction Cycle Story (The Redemption Series, Book 1)

De: AJ Sikes

Narrado por: Bronson Pinchot

Duración: 5 h y 19 m

Resumen del Editor

Most will run, but the brave will fight....

A deadly virus is sweeping through America's cities, pitting the worst humanity has to offer against its best warriors and scientists in a race against extinction. The virus doesn't just kill - it transforms and creates monsters of men and women called Variants.

New York firefighter Meg Pratt is among those trapped in New York City. Together with her fellow rescue workers and the scattered elements of America's frontline military fighters, Meg fights to survive and hope to save civilians from the coming apocalypse.

Across the city, Marine Corps washout Jed Welch is on his own path to survival, and it intersects with Meg and her ragtag group of survivors. If they are lucky, they will see the help they need emerge from within, just as everything around them is coming to an end.

©2019 AJ Sikes (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

A must read!

If you have not read any of the extinction cycle books you should block out your schedule and start listening to them. I could not put this book down!

great listen

I enjoyed here about this story... an interesting concept to be sure. The narrator did an excellent job as well.

Great read

Adrian Sikes has taken a great series of books, added his own flavor. He has taken people that where in the background of Nicholas story and have them their own time to shine.

I’m not usually one that likes add on or spin off books by another author, but I will say Mr. Sikes did not disappoint he has left me wanting more with each of these books.

If you are a fan of “end of the world” action books I would highly recommend this series. Great work and can’t wait to experience more of your work.

Great background development

This was a great story to give a background of Megs journey into the Variant apocalypse, I wish it was a little bit longer but the content was great and really gave you a different feel of Jedd, Meg and Rex before the events of the core series. Looking forward to the next couple books in the series!

Meg!!

I loved Meg Pratt when she was first introduced in Nicholas Sansbury Smiths' Extinction Cycle so was delighted to see this being republished so that everyone can read it. This focuses on Meg before she is left for dead and before she meets Team Ghost.

Meg was one brave and selfless firefighter and I'm so glad that AJ Sikes was able to capture that essence as well. From the first moment we meet Meg, she is only worried about saving others, including her husband. But her husband becomes infected and she watches him kill a police officer. Her whole world is turned upside down and all Meg can think is to get to her station house and see how she can help. But the engines are all out and only 2 others are there. Their only way to survive is to fortify the station and hope for the best. But with Variants everywhere and survivours beating at the door, it will take everything Meg has to survive.

This also tells the story of Jed and how he came to meet Meg. While I already loved Meg before starting this, I didn't like Jed at all. Even upon finishing this, I'm still not 100% sure if I like him. I feel like he is only out for himself.

In all, this was a fast paced and exciting read. I'm so glad we got to read Meg's story and that the author was able to keep up with the excellence that is Smiths' Extinction Cycle. The battle scenes are intense, the monsters just as scary and the characters just as believable and fleshed out as they are in the original series. I'm excited to see where the author takes the story.

Bronson Pinchot is truly an amazing narrator. The sheer amount of tones and voices he uses astounds me at times. He also puts emotion behind the words which brings the action to life. I love his narration and highly recommend him.

Nothing scarier than smart zombies

This story moves fast. And these zombies aren’t your easily killed variety. And they take on nasty features. Didn’t like that almost nobody makes it, but an interesting read.

Another side to the plotline

The story follows the very first day of the virus outbreak and the battles fought across New York city. It introduces new new and old chacthers that had an effect on the main story of the series written by Nicholas Sunsbury Smith.

The story glossed over minor details like time for how long past between major events and there was the little things like how chacthers where over biased of something with no internal dialog for those chacthers thought process.

Then there was chacthers who said they where from outer states but there they had a suttle lack of accents to them.

Let’s Hope It Gets Better Once It’s Emerged

The story’s rationale, as such, is okay.

Meg, the main female character, though, is an inexplicable, almost schizophrenic, mess of disparate emotional turmoil. Supposedly she’s a firefighter who participates in Ironman competitions, but she’s so labile emotionally that over a course of a hours she radically swings between crying in a ball in the street to taking off with a fire ax after monsters so deadly that Marines are incapable of fighting them to being wracked with guilt over having been able to save so few people of the scores she had seen being jumped and getting their faces eaten off.

And, for someone who is not a newbie firefighter, but a veteran, she displays an incredible amount of stupidity to think that she, a chick in a mask and heavy firefighter protective clothing, is in any realistic position to help armed Marines against the monsters by running around through their fields of fire armed with an ax and chanting an empowering mantra from her grandma about not giving up, all the while stewing in existential angst about the situation and wondering if maybe it was all pointless.

The same goes for the main male character, Jed, supposedly a five year Marine veteran out on a dishonorable discharge which he engineered to get out of Iraq and back stateside. Really? It took him five years of chafing under what he considered to be pointless military bullshit that seemed, to him, to have been almost purposefully designed to isolate, alienate, and harm him? He seems to be almost the disaffected alter ego caricature of the white guy pretending to be the black guy pretending to be some other guy in Tropic Thunder. At least that character was entertaining.

Which brings us to the absolutely painful job of narration done by Bronson Pinchot. The actual quality of his voice is good. His ability to do vocal styles of the different characters in dialog is adequate to good. But I wish I could do an audio review so I could berate him unmercifully for his treatment of the intervening prose.

The copyright of this book is 2019 and I have heard him narrate other books well so there is NO excuse for this. Maybe the producer was new and inexperienced and just so jazzed at landing him for the gig that he or she was just too chicken to exercise control and tell him during the first recording session, “Bronson, baby. Just knock that shit right off. When you are reading a descriptive passage that uses the words screeching, scratching, scraping, or clicking, you just read those words—you do NOT say those words in an exaggerated screeeeeching, scraaaaaaping, scraaaaaatching, or CLICKing manner. When you read that someone dropped something with a thud, the word itself calls the experience to mind, saying “with a THUD” is not necessary. Why? Because, like the others, it doesn’t focus our minds on what’s happening in the story but on YOU being over the top in pronouncing the words—dude, the onomatopoeia lies in the nature of the words themselves, not in your pronunciation of them.

“When you’re describing something disgusting, you don’t have to do it with a tone of disgust teetering on the edge of puking. When you’re describing someone as being angry, you don’t have to narrate it an angry manner. Same for sad, puzzled, suspicious, and horny. Same for words like sucking or slurping or breathless or spraying blood.”

If the prose describes someone speaking in an agitated manner, save the agitation for the dialog, not the prose that describes the dialog.

Imagine Snidely Whiplash doing Bullwinkle doing Natasha. Now imagine that in the other sense being done at the same time—that’s how distressing his manhandling of the prose is.

Pull back, Bronson. Pull way, way back. You have a pleasant and well-modulated voice. You rarely mispronounce anything. You don’t have any annoying mannerisms like using glottal stops or smacking your lips or making declarative sentences sound like questions.

That said, I’ll still listen to the sequels because the story still interests me.

Not your normal SJW Feminist story

The character Meg was strong, brave, and dauntless. There were only two Beta Males in the story, and a while lot of Jerks to the excess actually. I could forgive it because Meg was so Rockin cool.
In regard to the marine named Jed, I understand him quite well.. If people had been treating me the way the other Marines and soldiers were treating him I would have had the same reaction.
And the writer should know that Most non commissioned officers are a whole lot nicer and more even handed with their troops than the author made this story out to be.The way the non commissioned officers were treating Jed would inspire any troop to mutiny.

Good pacing

There is never a dull moment in this story. No fillers, just good content. P