The Shadows of Dust

De: Alec Hutson

Narrado por: Guy Williams

Duración: 14 h y 53 m

Resumen del Editor

The Streams bind together the vast reaches of the stellar tributary, plied by brave streamsurfers and their telepathic starbeasts. Some of these adventurers are heroes. Some are rogues. And some just want to return from the void with their bodies and minds unbroken....

Kerin thon Talisien is the heir to a legendary name. When he was a young boy, his grandfather swooped down from the stars and rescued him from the slums of his homeworld. But with the death of the infamous old streamsurfer, Kerin and his crew have fallen on hard times, exiled from the Starfarers Guild and forced to take on risky contracts in the shadowy margins of the stellar tributary. A strange encounter in a glimmer den offers a chance at redemption and glory...but the stakes are high, with the fate of the Known potentially hanging in the balance.

©2020 Alec Hutson (P)2021 Alec Hutson

Outstanding SciFi Fantasy

The world-building continues throughout the story and is excellent. The characters are well-developed and you come to love each one more and more to the final scene. The story-line is imaginative and reminiscent of Firefly but with powers that border on "magic." Alec Hutson (author), this is an outstanding piece of work. Thank you for sharing it with me. Lastly, the narration in the Audible version is excellent as it covers males and females of different species, space "creatures" and even a "broken" child.

An epic tale worth listening to

I started listening to this book and, I'll be honest, I almost stopped about an hour in. It felt like I had been dropped into the middle of a story, and I was having trouble following what was happening. Indeed I was struggling so much that I was wondering how this book could have the rating it did. But it did have a high rating, and there were many ratings raving about how great the story was, so I decided to continue, to struggle through for at least a bit longer, and see if it got better.

I'm glad I did.

It took a bit for me to really catch on to what was happening and what it meant, but once I got about 1/3 of the way in, I didn't want to stop listening.

While this book takes place in space, it's still more fantasy than science fiction. His "spaceship" is a giant turtle that swims the streams to navigate space and is bonded to Kerin, the protagonist, so they can communicate telepathically. On one trip, they pick up a passenger, Sep, who was a former slave girl serving as a pain conduit for a temple. Not only has she been fully indoctrinated into the beliefs of the temple - to the point where she couldn't see just how bad her treatment was - but she also has an artifact attached to her arm - an artifact that is growing and slowly taking over more of her body.

Joining Kerin and Sep is Nala, a battlemage who belongs to a race of cat people. When the three of them travel to Dust in search of someone who could safely remove the artifact from Sep, they attract quite a bit of attention from several different groups - many of whom are the kinds of groups it's better to avoid. And there's lots of magic. So much magic. Which is why I call it fantasy instead of science fiction.

There is so much going on in this novel that it could have been a series unto itself. But it works really well as a single novel, and I hope Hutson writes more novels in this universe. There were so many interwoven storylines within this novel - which is part of what made it difficult to get into - which made this such an epic story. And once I truly got into the story, one of the things I liked most is that while there was a lot of action, it wasn't overdone to the point of dragging. At the same time, there was enough downtime in between the various action sequences to allow for the processing of those sequences.

There were no places where the story seemed to drag, with the exception of the slow beginning. But that, I kind of liken to my experience reading Ninefox Gambit, where the reader is dropped into the middle of all the new terminology without any explanation. The story works without the explanations, but you have to let go of the need for the explanations and just go with the terminology. While Hutson didn't go quite that far in forgoing explanations, there was a lot in the beginning that I had to catch up with to be able to follow the story. And, like Ninefox Gambit, it is absolutely worth it.

As I mentioned earlier, I was listening to the audiobook, which was narrated by Guy Williams. This was the first time I had listened to a book narrated by Williams, and he did a great job with this narration. My only point of contention was the voice he used for one of the early characters. The voice had a kind of gargle to it that just set my teeth on edge. But that's entirely a me problem, and since that character was a minor one, and I didn't have to listen to him for long, I was able to continue listening. I would also choose to listen to Williams narrate another audiobook if given the option.

clever and interesting

I enjoyed the book. There's a ton of cool ideas here. It's missing a bit of world building, for what is a fascinating world.