Rayas Colony Legacy

De: Ginger Booth

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Young Gabe travels through time and space, reliving history in virtual reality, as he trains to lead a viable space colony.

Gabe leaves Earth to colonize last-chance planet Rayas. The space colony is funded by Mexican descendants of California’s El Grande – the Big One.

The expedition bootstraps its terraforming talent from teenagers. Their flexible minds will spend the interstellar years of stasis in a virtual reality academy.

But Gabe’s a physical guy. Cast among genius, what can he aspire to?

History captures his imagination. Unlike home, air is breathable under a clean blue sky, as he relives the Ancient Pueblo culture of New Mexico.

In this game, archaic beliefs fuel magic. Dreamer Gabe proves a natural mage.

But the game AI has an agenda.

Next, Gabe experiences El Grande itself, the California catastrophe that birthed his people. Can he lead his team to safety in Mexico? Or will the game AI and stacked realities break his mind?

Is this just a game or is it real?

I normally don't lean towards stories that feature LitRPG but I was pulled in by the synopsis and the free download of the audio book narrated by virtual voice. The story is about Gabe a 16 year old boy living in Guadalajara who was able to secure a berth on a colony space ship that will soon launch toward planet Rayas. As part of the pre-flight training he is attending AI classes at the camp in Northern Mexico. Ginger is able to integrate the LitRPG score card with the AI virtual reality scenarios without too much distraction that I have found in other LitRPG stories. Gabe "lives" in several historical events with the first big focus on an ancient Pueblo location that is experiencing a mega-drought and conflict. But since he is really going to school at the training camp he will often wake up in his dorm room and then go to classes before returning to his current virtual reality. During one of these breaks several late comers arrive at the training camp with armed guards and gunfire. The ensuring battle at the training camp causes the organizers/leaders of the space ship to move up the launch date. Gabe makes it to the space ship on one of the last shuttles to leave planet Earth. Gabe also gets into several other AI virtual reality scenes after classes start up on the space ship while still in Earth orbit. The last major AI scene deals with how Southern California gets clobbered by a gigantic earthquake and Gabe and his classmates have to escape the destruction and decide to go south to Mexico. But the way the story goes maybe, just maybe even the space ship going to Rayas is just another AI scenario!

The virtual voice narration is good, just a few weird pronunciations. I got used to the VV "accent" quickly. The word multiply is one example that VV had difficulty with.

Ginger has done well in world building each of the virtual reality scenarios that Gabe and his friends encounter. She helps you feel the heat and smoke of fire, the intense physical interaction of battle as well as the magic of the inventory bag of the LitRPG. The character Gabe grows in experience and power as the story progresses and he strives to better himself and his LitRPG scores in many categories. This is the first book of a trilogy and most of it is not about Rayas Colony. Hope to read more about Rayas in the next book, Rayas Colony Stone.