Liminal Marches

Hull Scrappers, Volume 2

De: Andrew Seiple

Narrado por: Ryan Burke

It's a big galaxy, but sometimes you have to run a long way to leave trouble behind you.

Kril Granger has gathered a good crew and managed to finish a profitable job. But things are a little too hot in their usual regions, so it's time to pick up stakes and head coreward.

Along the way, they'll be passing through the dark spaces of the galaxy and turning up threats ranging from overprotective AIs to invasive nano-using overlords. All this while dealing with a mixed, quarrelsome crew that would rather die than give up their secrets.

It's a hard life being a scrapper. It's a harder death if they get it wrong...

©2023 Andrew Seiple (P)2024 Podium Audio

Great fun.

another great offering in the series. it's good enough that it works as a standalone novel, but it highly recommend you start the series at the beginning and work up to this one. The pacing is excellent, and it smacks family of Firefly! Good luck, and recommended.

Another strong addition to a strong series though lacking the knock out punch of the first one.

My review for this series so far is simple. If you don’t like Hull Scrappers, then you can frag off!

If you know; you know. All joking aside the “Liminal Marches” is another great addition to an already strong series that started with “Shattered Diaspora.” In that novel, which I reviewed separately, we were introduced to Captain Kril Grainger, a sort of space cowboy vigilante with a bleeding heart. That rather empathetic lad is beaming around the galaxy with his augmented cyborg-sister Trin, and, together, they are out to save the galaxy doing a job labelled as scrapping. Although they are essentially mercenaries, it is pretty apparent that they have an agenda that is stewed in good intentions, and at times I think Kril and Trin hide the truth from not only the galaxy but themselves. Without giving away the plot or spoiling the story of that novel or this one let’s just leave it at this: It was phenomenal! We met some very strong and well-rounded characters to round out Captain Kril’s crew, and along the way we had a lot of fun.

To get to the meat of “Liminal Marches” let’s start with the, as they like to proclaim—maybe too often— the bad news. There are some storytelling elements the writer repeats quite often like the one I alluded to above. This might pull you out of the story like it did for me, but it wasn’t necessarily egregious. My other critique would be one that is admittedly rather subjective. So, take it with a grain of salt. In this book, we are given 1st person POV’s of each member of Captain Kril’s crew, whereas in the previous book it was told entirely, or mostly, in 3rd person limited perspective from Kril’s POV. This shifting of POV’s was rather abrasive to the story in my opinion, and though I can applaud what the writer was going for, I don’t think it did them any favors. Maybe if it were static in a third person POV but still switched whose POV it wouldn’t be so abrupt, but as it stands it is the weakest part of this work.

Now the good news! The story was fun and easy to follow. Andrew Seiple does a great job crafting the imaginary space of Hull Scrappers and I found myself following along in my mind’s eye full of vivid details. Truly, it’s delightful to read Seiple’s writing. I also love, and I mean, I LOVE some of the twists and…shall we say…references that are used within this novel. There is one in particular that had me clapping—that is not a joke I physically stopped what I was doing in order to applaud—aloud at the sheer beauty of it. I won’t give it away but let’s just say that fans of the classics will get a kick out of it.

I also was enthralled by some of the characters within the story, though, as I mentioned earlier, I am not sure that diving into their heads in the first-person scenes helped that. Lysanda, a rat-laden doctor, is an extremely strong and well-developed character that rocked the first book. If you were like me and craved more of Lysanda’s particular brand of person, then you will not be disappointed here! They are still just as weird, and just as awesome, as they ever were.

Some other stand outs are Bosque—at least I think that’s how his name is spelled—who is the self-proclaimed a**hole of the crew and boy does he deliver! But not in the way that I find to be off-putting. No, it’s more in the grouchy old man that warms up to the sassy granddaughter from the city that wants to learn how to disassemble an engine kind of way.
Since I did listen to this via AudioBook, I will need to address the performance and production of that as well. The voice actor Ryan Burke did an excellent job, and I was able to know exactly who was talking just by the varying voices he gave the characters. I think that, although they lean towards stereotypes, the voices for everyone are unique and fit with the personality that Seiple intended. My only complaint about the AudioBook was more on the production side. There were some moments in which the audio got very quiet. I think they didn’t equalize the volume for when Burke was trying to whisper or affect a quieter tone for dramatic effect. With that said, there were times I had to rewind and crank up the volume to hear it. Other than that, it was a good performance and a solid All told, I am very glad I picked up the Hull Scrappers series and I can’t wait to read the next installment. Especially since it was left on one hell of a cliffhanger­—damn you Seiple!

Different

I like the variability of the storyline which is really fun.
Sometimes the narrator volume gets a bit soft

Telling This Story So We Can Tell You the Next One

Pretty much what it says on the title. Lots of fleshing out of character for the crew, but it felt very much like a interim to lead us into a better version the next novel in the series. Lots of Firefly-esque space opera adventure, it was quite enjoyable. My only gripes were the cliffhanger(s?) and the oddly frequent variations of the narrator's volume. For whatever reason he was often quiet-loud-quiet-loud, but excellent otherwise. Might have been a technical issue, not sure.

A filler book attempting to define a purpose

Andrew Seiple couldn't seem to find an achievable goal, other then wandering through galaxy looking to save hostages and look for the bad guys. This led to an unfocused approach to to the primary story arc. While they did acquire a new character late in the book, the character was so cliched that it was disappointing. I almost would have been less disappointed if the new character was a unicorn. The ending cliff hanger was, well, utterly predictable and terribly uninteresting.

Ryan Burke's performance was fine but struggled a bit with distinguishing the gender voices.

I'll not be continuing the series.

A quirk too far.

The author chose to have a character that refers to itself in the third person and another who is addressed in plural. As a result the dialogue gets very confusing.