The Seed Garden

By: D. B. Reynolds-Moreton

Narrated by: Christopher Kendrick

Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

The prospect looked grim for Jed. Alone, his escape pod crashed on an uncharted planet with no hope of rescue. But after he died a painful grizzly death in the dry desert, things began to look up. The lifeless planet that Jed now roams turns out to hold a secret vital to the existence of life itself.

D. B. Moreton-Reynolds takes us on a journey of discovery through strange and hostile landscapes, and into the depths of a machine so staggeringly vast and at the same time utterly believable. Whether you see the twist at the end coming or not, you'll be completely drawn in.

©1998, 2016 sci-fi-cafe.com (P)2020 sci-fi-cafe.com

Interesting but lacking.

I had a hard time with this story, at the beginning, parts in the middle, and parts in the end. I wanted to stop several times but didn’t. There were some interesting parts like after the protagonist dies (before that was boring and dragged, in my opinion), and his interactions with Tree. The idea that he landed on a planet that held all the creatures, plants, and whatnot of… the universe? was different.

The narrator did a great job, although I’d be curious to hear him do other voices. The sound effects were nice but that music at the beginning of the chapters wasn’t always consistent with each chapter. For example, there was no music for chapter 4 and the music didn’t last as long for chapter 5. I’m not sure how that was missed.

Questions/Comments:

I’m really not a fan of redundancy, for example, "It closed shut." One example that was used multiple times in the story was “mental image pictures.” Images and pictures are the same things. Either it’s mental images or mental pictures. Pick one.

Or there was this strange line: “he was aware of being aware.” I believe that was used at least twice. What does it mean? Wouldn’t it just be “he was aware [period]”?

Or there was the repeated use of the protagonist talking out loud and the dialogue tag being something along the lines of him having said it out loud to hear something, to hear a sound. Using it once or, maybe, twice is fine, but it was used several times.

I’ve never heard someone think about going to the bathroom as “void your body of its toxic waste.” I imagine the author was looking for a fancier way of saying use the toilet and this is what they came up with just to add to the science fiction aspect of the story.


I received a free audiobook code in exchange for an honest review.

Need more back story on Jed

I wanted to love it. It would be an awesome twilight zone episode. It was interesting and the pace was good.....but I felt something was lacking. I did enjoy it though.
Christopher Kendrick was a good narrator for this story.
I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.