A Warship Named Sky

A Hero's Story

By: Saxon Andrew

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

From bestselling author Saxon Andrew comes a story about all the things that make us human. Angle Barrett decides to buy a broken spaceship as a monument to his deceased wife. He had no idea that purchase would lead to repercussions that would shake the foundations of all the civilizations in the galaxy. All he wanted was to live in peace until he joined his wife. Instead, he is targeted by the most powerful civilization in the galaxy, and they will do anything to prevent a secret from coming out, even if it means destroying Earth in the process.

A Warship Named Sky-A Hero's Story is a story you won't forget. The twists and turns will catch you off guard and you'll be left wondering what is going to happen next.

Excerpt: A Warship Named Sky;

Whoever was there wasn’t speaking a language he ever heard. He stuck his head around the edge of the door and saw an alien waving their arms at the front of the ship as it talked loudly. He looked closer and saw that the alien was the same species as the one that came to look at his ship earlier, only this one was a female; That repairman must have contacted her immediately after he left. He thought about what to do and finally decided that he couldn’t just do nothing. He stepped inside the door and cleared his throat. The female alien whipped around holding something in her hand. He held both hands up as she lifted her arm and pointed some kind of device at him. He suddenly felt a presence in his thoughts as she smiled and pressed a button on the device that he could now clearly see was a weapon.

Short, sweet and to the point.

I speeded up the narrative a little and it flowed better. The story caught my interest from the first and kept it to the very end.
The Author kept the pace of the story complete and concise. (Spoiler alert) I cried when the hero died but the story concluded satisfactorily. I am going to recommend this story to my space fantasy friends to read. A definite keeper.

Appropriate narration

This title is, in part, about a computer on a spaceship. The virtual narration fits the story perfectly.

I wouldn’t want this tour of narration for every title, not for every genre. But it fit well here.

Great feel good story

It would be perfect, if the computer generated voice could change the tone and gender of the narration to match that of the characters.

story progressed to fast

story was good but wanted more explanation of what was going on within the story ark

Good-Hearted but bland

Without being certain, I have to speculate that this ‘hidden treasure’ variant of the space opera was written by as well as narrated by an AI. The main character, whom we eventually discover was named ‘Engle’ due to a typo but was supposed to be ‘Angel’ is an Asamov-like protagonist that outthinks rather than outshoots his foes. I have to respect that, but the author, AI or not, seemed to have a hard time finding a villain to play off his grieving widower, although that has a bit of nuance: there are no real villains in the story, just intrinsically good people who are really bad at problem-solving.

The AI narrator added to the lack of bad guys we love to hate by delivering the audio in a not-unpleasant, but utterly undifferentiated and emotionless tone whether the speakers were falling in love or threatening one another’s civilizations. Also, apparently the physiognomy of the various aliens differs primarily in their skin color: light blue, gold, or whatever we are.

Space operas are not normally much involved with real science other than touting various technologies that more or less ignore most known laws of physics, but the lit tech used herein was both implausible and vaguely 1950ish in concept. In all, I’d have to say the story had a good heart, but not a lot of meat in its bones.

At bottom, I have to think it was AI generated, but then it was without extra cost, so one gets what one paid for.