The Tempest

First Contact

De: Peter Cawdron

Narrado por: Kaleo Griffith, Caitlin Davies

Eighteen thousand colonists lie in suspended animation, awaiting a new life around another star.

Marc and Emma are on the graveyard shift onboard the Sycorax, an interstellar spacecraft bound for New Haven, a colony world fifty light years from Earth. For the crew of the Sycorax, interstellar flight is boring—that is, until they run into a tempest. Before long, they find themselves on a crippled spacecraft falling toward a black hole, but that's the least of their problems...

The Tempest is a tribute to Shakespeare's final play and explores similar themes while weaving some of his dialogue into the narrative. It includes references to the 1950s classic sci-fi film Forbidden Planet and Michael Crichton's Sphere, both of which were influenced by Shakespeare's work.

First Contact is a series of standalone novels that explore the social, political, religious, and scientific aspects of humanity's first interaction with extraterrestrial life. These books can be listened to in any order.

©2022 Peter Cawdron (P)2023 Podium Audio

three stars is a fair score

any sufficiently advanced technology will appear as magic. that about sums up this book. it's a short story, stretched into a medium story, it does this by skipping the whole character development thing. Forgettable.

Good read, as always, from Peter Cawdron

Some parts might be faster- too many details. The end was rushed a bit, as the writer struggled to reach the word count, and then he rushed to finish on time.

Utter garbage

Occasionally the author has several paragraphs of interesting content, but those are separated by some of the most horrifically melodramatic and flat characters I’ve ever seen. When they aren’t name dropping The Tempest ever other page, they are sniveling and uncertain only to become the perfect men of action 1 min later. So much deus x machina.

Poor attempt to synthesize a narrative out of science and fiction

The problem with authors that try to write scientifically accurate/plausible scifi, is that they tend to not be very good story tellers. The characters had corny and facile personalities, and the dialogue felt like AI generated discussions that were only included to convey knowledge of scientific concepts rather than to synthesize a narrative out of science and fiction. The aspects that were scientifically plausible were contrasted by the vague, hand-wavy mechanics of alien biology and technology. Lent to the creation of a rather bland and lukewarm world to explore.

And in case the author reads this review, it's worth pointing out that Indians don't say stuff like "Oh my Vishnu" and "Sweet Saraswathi!" in the real world.