The Reckoning

The Earthburst Saga, Book 8

De: Craig A. Falconer

Narrado por: Scott Aiello

I thought I'd seen it all. Talk about your all-time wake-up calls...

Earth is teeming with alien larvae.

That reality has just crashed down on us like a ton of contaminated space rocks.

Every time I close my eyes, I still see the huge spider-like monster rising up.

I killed that one just in time, but we know that more could hatch at any moment.

Even worse... we know that if any of them reach their final form, they'll be indestructible.

Now, our only hope of saving Earth from this ticking time-bomb lies on the distant world of Eden.

The problem? We have reason to think the natives engineered this stuff.

If there was any other route forward, we'd be taking it.

We wouldn't be blazing this uncharted path to potentially hostile territory.

But with one card left to play in a game we can't afford to lose, I can't keep my mind from fixating on one unshakeable question:

Are we racing towards Earth's salvation... or on a one-way trip to oblivion?

©2024 Craig A. Falconer (P)2024 Recorded Books

Adventure!!

I just love the whole series. No spoilers though. Falconer does justice to sci-fi again!

Series keeps improving on itself

This is a great series, it does not jump stories around too quickly but does not drag out a single storyline.

getting really boring

the issue here is that the story is very good but how the book is written is like trying to make last week soup last for 10 days....
really everything up to here could have been just 2 books...
so many things repeated that i am so bored by now that i will give back the entire serie !!!
Scott is amazing as usual !!!

the outlandis Magic Handwaiving just keeps getting worse with each book.

To start, Scott Aello does a great job narrating a TERRIBLE book. His vocal range and personality method acting the voices is up there with R.C. Bray, though Bray is still in a league of his own...

That's where praise for this nightmare ends.

My last two reviews of books in this series were pretty scathing. This one is no different - spoilers ahead.

The story begins with the main protagonist waking up two WEEKS after the end of the previous book, having been kept in what amounts to a medically induced coma.

The author never actually says "medically induced coma" but that's what it amounts to.

The group is 11 days into a rocket-propelled sublight speed spaceship journey to the alien group's home planet - which must be within the same solar system as Bazen - the central focus of the previous book in the series - to be THAT close, but we're never told this specific detail about the location of "Eden." We're just told that it's "closer than they imagined, only a few days away."

They avoid destruction by moving the "wings" of this ship that is large enough to be a permanent home to 8000 humans around to the front of the ship and using them as shields that collide into asteroids while still traveling at insane velocity towards "Eden."

The "wings" take the brunt of the damage and save the core of the ship, but now they have no Bazen Water - the magic bullet that kills the "sludge" larvae phase of an engineered lifeform they've been struggling with. The effort also destroyed the research lab where they were still trying to isolate what about the "Bazen Water" made this water so special and able to kill this Engineered lifeform.

Apparently real physics doesn't exist in this made-up universe, because even a pebble sized "asteroid" would have destroyed the ship at the velocity this ship is suggested to be traveling at.

When reading the below part about Eden, keep in mind this set of contradictory details:
alien space ship tech is so primitive the aliens marveled at how advanced Human spaceship tech is, but their own tech and science is so advanced the aliens understand multidimensional physics and quantum entanglement well enough to create a stable artificial wormhole, and built ships large enough that the "advanced human ship" would fit inside the hanger of the alien ship. They have also miniaturized true artificial intelligence so that it's brainpower fits inside a hummingbird sized and shaped robotic bird.

THEN, they reach the planet and magically the alien species has raise their city some untold distance into the sky above the artificially created clouds they've covered their whole planet with in a geoengineering attempt to fight the sludge (yes, they're dealing with the same problem) that has invaded their planet.

they're somehow drastically MORE advanced than humans, but also significantly LESS advanced than humans.

The contradictions in this narrative are endless. If you like SOME science in your SCIENCE fiction stories, you'll be grossly disappointed in this series. If you like consistency and coherence in the science and tech "forgetabout it"

If you like terminology realism, avoid this story like the plague. example: "Driver" the 20-something ace pilot who is a prodigy behind the controls of any sort of vehicle, has been the lead pilot and pilot trainer for the past 3+ years in the interim between books in this series. Yet, she uses terms like "lower our speed" and "turn up, down, left, right" instead of nautical terms like "reduce our velocity" vector to port, starboard, etc - as any trained pilot would. It's utterly incompetent writing on the part of the author.

I have grown to hate this story, but I am so far into the series by book 8, I can't NOT finish it.

If you like simple, human interest stories with more than their fair share of twists and turns, and endless suspense that's never very satisfactorily resolved, you'll like this.

If you are looking for QUALITY sci-fi save yourself the money, time, and stress, and avoid this series like the plague on the Sci-fi genre it is.

Spaceballs was a better sci-fi story than this, because at least with Spaceballs, you KNEW it was tongue-in-cheek parody.

This story is like someone trying to rewrite a parody as a serious story, without the interest or knowledge to write about the missing science and technology narratives the parody intentionally left out.

I'm evermore grateful that I spent less than the cost of a single credit on the whole series during a big Audible sale.