Alt System

Natural Laws Apocalypse Series, Book 5

By: Tom Larcombe

Narrated by: Derek Shoales

Length: 13 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

With Earth's acclimatization year ticking away, Marc and his party share the desire to grow stronger. Based on their previous experiences, they theorize where they might find spawns that would be powerful enough to give them good experience, then head out to prove their theory. Along the way they discover another fairly large Safe Zone with a population of hundreds of people.

On their return to their home Safe Zone, Marc finds that he's received messages from powerful, potential allies from off world. Allies who are aware of the satellite and what it's been doing. These potential allies claim that they have a way to travel to Earth before the acclimatization period is over. All Marc has to do to allow this is get his Safe Zone to a certain threshold.

When Marc achieves the goal for Any Port and the allies arrive, they set to work on a plan that, for now at least, goes hand in hand with Marc's own desires. Once the Safe Zone Network manages to get into the Computer Age, that frees them up to use the spaceship they found with the satellite, at least for atmospheric flights. Marc and his group are then sent halfway around the world on a quest for his allies.

©2022 Thomas Larcombe (P)2023 Tantor

It's Ok

World lore is deepened. Still not overly enthused by the Mark / Jeff dynamic where every time Jeff lashes out at Mark it is childish and completely unprovoked. Yet Mark's acts toward Jeff are always presented as wholly rational since we're in his head and he never recognizes his own harm.

Love it

Good read and pace it is starting to get really good I can’t wait until the best one

a very interesting twist

I enjoy reading this book series and the fifth one was just as good as the rest of the series can't wait till book 6

Great continuation

This book 5 is a great continuation of the story arc. This one filled the main characters as they forge out around their new world

Seems lazy and repetitive

The first few books weren't bad but at this point something more needs to happen. I don't care about the psycho-babble BS or the main characters love life. He keeps mentioning going to bed with his GF and it's kinda getting old. We get it already.

Astounded

In order to make the MC smart he made all other characters complete idiots. It’s possible only idiots survived I guess. But unlikely. But the lack of curiosity and investigation by others makes the story unbelievable. The MC is the only person capable of making inferences and hypotheses. Finally the ‘oh, hi mark’s makes me wonder if the author hates the readers and is making fun of us.

No not me Mark just too much to handle

The main character Mark is all over the place with his personality acts like a lazy 20 something year old Man child. Crying I’m bored I don’t want to do that. He only does the things that he wants to do except when forced because there’s no other choice. Instead of nipping the problems in the bud. He procrastinates and complains constantly even if most of the time it is internal monologue which makes for terrible listening.
I guess what I can’t stand about Mark is hypocrisy that he is. The low level narcissism oh don’t look at me but look at me, only I can save you but don’t count on me. The constant abuse he serves out to Jeff. Honestly from my perspective if Jeff had higher self-esteem and Mark wasn’t constantly beating him down he would do a better job running the whole show than Mark is.
I won’t be continuing the series I found it hard to finish the last four hours just too many inconsistencies in the plot and the cringe worthy narcissistic and hypocritical Mark.

Unfair/unbalanced

Its not that great. Probably won’t continue on the story from here.

Issue 1) the narrator. I find it impossible to even listen on anything below 1.5 speed because the narrator speaks so slowly and pauses so long between each word/sentence. Even at 1.5 times speed there are absurd pauses throughout. Its almost like padding the time count, you know, like passing word count only for audio books.

Issue 2) Jeff and Mark: the hypocrisy drives me nuts. Anything Jeff does is treated like he is a horrible human being, no one could ever conceive of doing such things, etc., when in reality, not that bad at all other than Mark saying they are. Meanwhile, everything Mark does is saintly, and don’t realize how hypocritical his treatment of Jeff is. It is justified because he is the protagonist of the story.

Issue 3) the author cannot make things “funny” just by saying people laughed at it. I didn’t laugh once in five books. I don’t think I even cracked the beginnings of a smile.

It was a story, I listened at 2.5x speed plus to get through the whole series quicker to try to find something more entertaining.

a cliff hanger is different than no ending

enjoyed the book until out of no where it just ended. I understand a cliff hanger to continue a series but this just ends before what should be the final piece in this book of the story