Shooting the Rift

By: Alex Stewart

Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon

DISOWNED IN A HARSH GALAXY

Cast out by his family and exiled from the Rimward Commonwealth, Simon Forrester must make a new life for himself as an apprentice to the powerful Commerce Guild. But others aboard the merchant vessel Stacked Deck have a hidden agenda that might lead directly to interstellar war. Now with rising tensions between the Commonwealth and the neighboring League of Democracies threatens to erupt into open war, Simon finds himself forced to choose between old and new loyalties, with the fate of an empire at stake!

©2016 Alex Stewart (P)2020 Tantor

A nice little space opera

This story is a fun little space opera. It has some nice world building, characters that have at least some depth to them and is fairly well written. If a sequel were written I would read it.

The narration is decent quality neither flat monotone nor over the top hammy, Although the narrator does mispronounce some more esoteric words and in some places the editing is not the best. 3-4 times the editor messed up the splicing so the narrator repeats the last 15-20 seconds of the book. That knocked off a point of the performance.

The only story element that may put off some readers/listeners is that the MC comes from a culture that is basically Georgian era England in space with reversed gender roles. Example, the male MC complains that his mother keeps trying to marry him off to improve his family's social and political connections. She also forced him out of a STEM major into estate planning.